Pssstt…. wanna buy a bridge?
From Sunday’s San Antonio Express-News:
Here’s one for the “Coincidence … or not?” file.
On June 4, the New Haven, Conn., Board of Aldermen voted 25-1 to allow the city to issue identification cards to, among others, undocumented immigrants.
The $10 card allows the bearer to open a bank account and access city services. The city is the first in the country to implement a program of such scope.
Two days after the ordinance was passed, federal authorities conducted an early morning sting, and more than 30 undocumented immigrants had been arrested as of last week, a spokeswoman for Mayor John DeStefano Jr. told the Express-News.
Officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the arrests were routine and not politically driven…
Why, sure… why wouldn’t we belive that?
The (W)right numbers on illegal immigrants
Other than chairing the convention that nominated Michael Dukakas for President of the United States in 1988, no one has ever called Jim Wright a fool. A guy who served 34 years in Congress, was House Majority Leader and Speaker of the House at least knows how to count.
Nobody knows exactly how many legally unauthorized immigrants are in our country today. The most commonly cited estimate is 12 million. That’s about 4 percent of all the people living within our borders.
The sheer immensity of the job of locating and dislodging this many individuals scattered in thousands of communities would stagger the most elastic imagination. Attempts at a task of such magnitude (catching and deporting 12 million people) would dwarf history’s best-known efforts at ethnocentric purging.
Last year, enforcement agents apprehended and U.S. courts ordered deported almost one-quarter million illegal aliens. Attempting to expel 12 million would be a task more than 48 times greater and 48 times more costly.
“We’re so sorry…”
Yeah, I’ve been listening to los Beatles…
A sombrero tip to the mysterious poster on Mexican travel sites, “Pedro Parodia,” for this from the AP:
The government of the southern state of Oaxaca apologized for the first time Friday for a police raid on protesters last year that led to the country’s worst political unrest in years.
Oaxaca Interior Secretary Manuel Garcia Corpus said he lamented the results of the June 14, 2006 raid aimed at clearing striking teachers from a protest camp they had set up weeks earlier in Oaxaca City’s main square.
He said he was speaking on behalf of Gov. Ulises Ruiz, whose refusal to negotiate with protesters sparked a five-month takeover of the capital city by teachers and leftist activists angered by what they claimed was police brutality and corruption.
“The government of Ulises Ruiz gives the people of Oaxaca a public apology for the events that arose after the 14th (of June),” Garcia Corpus told the government news agency Notimex. Garcia Corpus’ office confirmed the remarks.
Something is definitely going on. Erik Sosa was released, suggesting that the judiciary is not accepting the official excuses for detaining (i.e. disappearing) dissidents and their families, and the teachers are back on the Zocalo in Oaxaca. Friday, there were major protest marches in the State’s capital city again.
My guess is that two or three things are coming together. The “powers that be” are realizing that it’s better to coopt the opposition and deal with the worst abuses; that the previous attempts (like the phony “new” teachers’ union) didn’t fool anyone; that the tourism industry doesn’t want any more protests in the city (an wants the State to settle with the dissidents); and the PRI is starting to realize that their Oaxaca party leadership is a drag on their own reconstruction, and are quietly trying to cut Ulises Ruiz loose.
It’s hard to find what’s going on in rural Oaxaca, so anyone in the area with information, please let me know.
Baby, you can drive my (Chinese) car…
This is the second story I’ve seen in the last few days about an “emerging economy” investing in Mexico. The Indians have been coming in under the radar, investing in Mexico for two reasons. Their businesses grew tremendously simply because there are a lot of Indians, but without a good educational system or social infrastructure, they’re running up a limited middle class market. Mexico has a well-educated workforce, a strong middle-class and… best of all for the Indians… is a NAFTA partner, with access to the very wealthy U.S. and Canadian markets.
The Chinese are in a bind. Other than cheap labor and a huge military-industrial complex, they don’t have much to offer. I half-suspect that the Chinese-U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s selection of Prescott Bush II (brother of former U.S. Ambassador to China) George H.W. Bush and the Bush family’s long ties to China (Barbara Bush’s family fortune came from the 19th century opium trade) is partially responsible for China’s present good relations with the U.S.
That will change. The Chinese haven’t survived for 3000 years by thinking short-range. Their dependence on a military buildup can’t go on forever, no more than it could in the Soviet Union (remember them?) or in the United States. The Chinese people themselves may get fed up with the present system (and there’s plenty of signs buried in the media that China is not as stable a country as we think).
Mexico has also been around for the last 3000 years, mostly by adapting to new situations. And, for the last 150 years, that meant doing business with the United States. That’s not going to change any time soon, though the close U.S.-China ties (depending on a captive labor market with no rights) will. So… being above all things, not stupid, this is a no-brainer.
Tijuana is probably not where I’d think of putting up a new plant, but then, Hu Jintao lived in Tijuana for a couple of years (I’ll try and find the source for that, but it’s true… he was studying Tijuana’s economic system to figure out what do about Chinese cities bordering wealthy Hong Kong).
China’s Zhongxing Automobile will start churning out sport utility vehicles and pickups in 2009 at the assembly plant in Tijuana, the company’s US partner in the venture, Chamco Auto, said late on Thursday.
Zhongxing plans to export 25 per cent of the Tijuana-assembled vehicles to the United States, building off another venture to export 50,000 vehicles duty-free to Mexico.
Those models are expected to hit Mexican showrooms this year. The Tijuana plant will have a capacity of 150,000 vehicles per year, Chamco said.
On Tuesday, Chamco Auto said it had reached a deal to import the trucks and establish a plant, but did not give figures.
Assembling the Zhongxing vehicles in Tijuana will make them Mexican under North American free trade rules, so they can be exported to the United States duty free, the company says.
They will be similar to popular models made by US and international automakers and will be cheaper, Chamco said.
“We want to bring this type of project to Mexico because we see a real future in them,” Oscar Margain, head of Chamco’s Mexican operations, told Reuters.
China’s domestic car industry is heating up and is looking to break into the lucrative North American market.
Mexico is already a major auto manufacturer, with Nissan Motor Co Ltd, Ford Motor Co, Volkswagen AG and other big names exporting a combined 1.5 million cars and trucks to mostly US consumers last year.
Something else worth noting. Mexican workers (even if they’re working for the Chinese) are going to be in Mexico, not the U.S. Yeah, the profits will still be going to a military threat to the U.S., but given that China has been “stealing” Mexican jobs for years (WalMart destroyed a lot of Mexican manufacturing, and bears some of the responsiblity for the huge “illegal alien problem”), this is a half-way step to resolving the contradiction between NAFTA (favoring a democratic friendly neighbor) and giving “most favored nation” trading concessions to an anti-democratic, off-shore military threat.
Cheap labor ain’t everything.
As long as he has a passport…
This is actually an “old” video (from September 2005), but still fun. The border-crosser was Dave Smith, Sr., who holds a world record in his particular form of locomotion. The idea was conceived by Venezuelan artist Javier Tellez and just nuts enough to have been planned and carried out by patients at Mexicali mental hospital.
Dumkoff!
AY-nol’ should read more.
(06-14) 16:29 PDT San Jose, Calif. (AP) —
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told a gathering of Hispanic journalists that immigrants should avoid Spanish-language media if they want to learn English quickly.
“You’ve got to turn off the Spanish television set” and avoid Spanish-language television, books and newspapers, the Republican governor said Wednesday night at the annual convention of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
“You’re just forced to speak English, and that just makes you learn the language faster,” Schwarzenegger said.
“I know this sounds odd and this is the politically incorrect thing to say, and I’m going to get myself in trouble,” he said, noting that he rarely spoke German and was forced to learn English when he emigrated from Austria.
Schwarzenegger was responding to a question about how Hispanic students can improve academically. Many journalists for Spanish-language organizations in the audience were surprised by the remarks.
What a sissy-man. He should learn some manners.
Frida FINALLY draws the masses… sorta
(Photo: Marco Peláez, Jornada)
See… I told you all Mexicans aren’t Frida Kahlo fans. This is the scene outside the Palacio de Bellas Artes at the opening of the Kahlo exhibit. Of course, SOME of the protests may have had a bit to do with Felipe Calderón (FeCAL)’s appearance (he had to be hustled in by a side door). The press was “disinvited” to what was originally supposed to be a public Presidential appearance.
School teachers, the APPO, the PRD and the supporters of the Alternative Presidency (yup, they didn’t just dry up and disappear) all showed up (and, el Universal reports, and had some strong words for the invited guests (movie actresses, business leaders and the like): “pendejos” being one of the milder ones.
There’s something a little more than a bit ironic in all this. Kahlo’s wake was to have been held at the Palacio back in 1954 but the then “leftist” PRI government refused to allow the Communist Kahlo to be so honored…so, now that she’s hip (for things having to do with clothing style, or her physical problems or… well, everything BUT her art) , she’s in with the right-wing present administration. And, again, locks out the people from the people’s art palace.
With no press coverage of the “official” event, who do you think got the good coverage this morning?
¡Salud! Here and there
Journalist Rhonda Kaysen is having an anchor baby…
When I tell my friends in America that I’m having a baby in Mexico City, they often gasp with contained horror. …
I visited a doctor once in the U.S. during my pregnancy. I never saw the doctor, only a nervous resident who forgot to tell me my due date and asked me twice if I was trying to get pregnant, despite having just thrown up in his office bathroom. Meanwhile, back in Mexico, my septuagenarian physician, flanked by a giant wooden crucifix, spoke with me for an hour and gave me his home phone number.
Most agree that the U.S. health care system is broken. What few may realize is that just to our south, in a country where we’re building a wall to keep our neighbors out, they’ve got a much more functional system in place. The right to health care is written into the constitution. And under new legislation, all Mexican babies born since December are guaranteed medical care.
This is not to say that there are not problems here. For those who depend on the public system, care is often inadequate, especially in poor, rural areas. However, for Mexicans with the means to afford private doctors and private hospitals, the options are staggering.
I’m not wealthy by U.S. standards. My husband and I are freelance journalists. But medical costs in Mexico haven’t spiraled out of control like they have in the U.S. — a typical office visit costs around $40 out of pocket here. In the U.S., that was my co-pay, after my $200 monthly premium.
In the U.S., I spend hours waiting in overcrowded waiting rooms for a five-minute checkup. Here doctors give me their home phone number, cell phone, e-mail and pager. My doctor will deliver my baby, regardless of the time of day. Some even make house calls.
I wasn’t seeing an ob/gyn, but I’ve paid as little as 20 PESOS for a private doctor’s visit, at one of the clinicas attached to the chain farmacias. And I don’t think the public health facilities were all that bad, at least in Mexico City… not compared with public facilities in the U.S. Where I live now, we cross into Mexico for affordable health care, even with the higher border-town rates commanded by private doctors and dentists.
So?
It’s Frida Kahlo’s 100th birthday this year… I don’t think she was a very good artist, and certainly not a particularly Mexican one… but the tourists love her. I don’t think its the art:
The wife of muralist Diego Rivera, Kahlo is known as much for her outspoken style as for her intensely personal paintings. Her life has inspired several plays and films, including the 2002 movie “Frida,” starring Salma Hayek.Born in 1907, Kahlo was disabled in a bus crash and had polio as a child. She was openly bisexual and had an affair with Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Kahlo used her self-portraits to deal with the accident, her tumultuous marriage and her inability to have children.
To mark the anniversary, the Blue House, Kahlo’s Mexico City family home-turned-museum, will display nearly 300 pieces of clothing found more than two ago in a trunk in an unused bathroom.
I’ve always thought that art was independent of the artist’s biography. I appreciated José Clemente Orozco long before I knew the first thing about his life. Same with the other 20th century Mexican artists : O’Gorman and Siquieros … and even O’Higgins. Even the egomaniacal Diego Rivera only seldom dwelled on himself (and then, often as a joke). Post-Revolutionary Mexican art was a personal meditation on Mexico, not an exhibition of one’s personality.
Many of the best artists were political, but their politics wasn’t — like Kahlo’s — just painting a Hammer and Sickle on a canvas. If they were one with the masses (or, like Orozco, ambivalent about the masses), it was the masses they depicted. It was not themselves. Kahlo seemed to paint nothing but. If she was a Communist, she didn’t seem to know any of the masses (a friend of mine’s mother grew up next door to Rivera and Kahlo. As a kid, she remembers thinking Kahlo was a terrible snob and a mean lady… ok, Kahlo was handicapped, and had problems getting around… still, she wasn’t exactly one with the masses… or even the neighbors in bourgeois Coyoacán).
Ah well, why be churlish? Here’s to the birthday girl, and her forgotten laundry. There’s an exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, which has some very fine REAL artists’ works on the walls.
What do we think happens?
Mexico’s Defense Department says it will put 19 soldiers on trial for the killing of three children and two women whose vehicle failed to stop at an army checkpoint.
The Department says a military court will try three officers and 16 soldiers for their alleged involvement in the June 1 shooting in the northern Sinaloa state. Three of the car’s occupants survived.
Last month, opposition lawmakers and the human rights group Amnesty International urged the Mexican government not to use soldiers to perform policing tasks. They said troops lack the training to handle civilian functions and are, therefore, prone to abusing human rights. (source: Voice of America)
Some of us say the same thing on this side of the border…
Orale a day…
I’m starting to speak a lot more Spanish lately… mostly because Tristan downstairs keeps going back and forth between English and Spanish. It depends on whether he spent the day at Granny’s or Abuela’s … and, as a three-year old, he’s somewhat tolerant of my verbal gaffes.
At least as a “visible gringo”, most Mexicans are happy that I can at least roll my “rrrr-s” and say a few coherent phrases in the present tense. Poor Al Carlos Hernadez — he’s one of “those” Latinos… that is a native of the United States. Like anyone else educated in gringolandia, he is essentially monolingual. But, he’s learning:
I have mastered a technique that has proven useful when I find myself in the position of listening to a person who is talking to me in Spanish; the rules are simple. First of all they want to talk and really don’t care of what you have to say because as a Pocho, you are somehow genetically inferior. So, all you have to do is smile at the appropriate times, and shake your head in dismay during the ay, yi, yi’s…
A well timed “Orale” after a happy phrase, or a strategic “Hijole”, after a distressing paragraph can go a long way, and may win you a free beverage. When you need to end a conversation, a “Bueno Pues”, in concert with some I have to go to the bano body language can usually extricate you from a one way conversation. Be careful, if you overstate your case they may go the bathroom with you.
I really wish I could converse in Spanish but there is too much pressure. If you take an adult class as a Latino they will expect straight A’s and think that you are there to pick up women. You can’t practice on native speakers because they will clown you and player hate you because you drive a German luxury car.
Recently, I’ve realized that I have reached a point in my social career where I can understand about 70% of what someone is saying to me in the mother tongue, if I can watch their lips, and since many Latino’s have big lips, this has made my job easier. I have been able to layout several sentences together and have received in-kind reciprocal response.
They just now think I am shy.
What ye do to the least of my brothers…”
By Kemp Powers
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The American Civil Liberties Union sued the U.S. government on Monday over what the rights group said was the wrongful deportation of a developmentally disabled U.S. citizen who is now missing in Mexico.
ACLU spokesman Michael Soller said 29-year-old Pedro Guzman was serving a 120-day sentence in a Los Angeles jail for trespassing when he was deported to Tijuana, Mexico, on May 10 or May 11 for an alleged immigration violation.
The group’s suit filed in U.S. District Court seeks to have the deportation order suspended and for the U.S. government to help locate Guzman.
Guzman, who was born in Los Angeles and lived about 70 miles north in Lancaster with his mother, could barely read and write, Soller said. He did not know his phone number and kept his brother’s telephone number on a piece of paper.
…
“This is a recurring nightmare for every person of color of immigrant roots,” Mark Rosenbaum, the legal director of the ACLU in southern California, said in a statement.
ICE, naturally, said they were just following procedure.
mexfiles.net 