Archive for October, 2010
Quick Link: Sterilization in Puerto Rico
7:42 am By la Macha · Puerto Rico|Women · 2 Comments
18 Oct 2010I’ve been seeing this link all over my facebook feed–thought I’d pass it on here. It’s an incredibly important and devastating article about the sterilization program in Puerto Rico that the US funded and the Puerto Rican government supported.
Eugenics is defined as the study of hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding. Puerto Rico has the highest rate of female sterilization in the world. By 1965, thirty-five percent of Puerto Rican women ages 20-49 had been coerced into irreversible sterilization as part of a government campaign to control the growing number of the islands poor and working class population. This mass eugenics program was funded by the U.S. and fully supported by the Puerto Rican government from the 1930s through the late 1970s. Government propaganda made the procedure so common place that it became known simply as “la operacion.”
The original link comes with video testimonios of survivors.
VL At The Cine: Ilegales
7:33 pm By BiancaLaureano · Arts|Immigration|mexico|Movies · 3 Comments
17 Oct 2010
I have a love/hate relationship with the New York International Latino Film Festival. It’s a long deep love/hate where the hate is active and more recent then I’d care to admit. Perhaps it had to do with the corporatization of the Festival, perhaps knowing past (and maybe still present) organizers ripped ideas from other media makers I know and claimed them as their own. Or maybe it’s because the caliber of the films, the opportunity to host and represent Latin@ film and media makers seems lost at times. I often struggle each year with attending. This year was no different.
Due to a family emergency that took me out of the country during the Festival, I was not able to attend. So I was very happy when the VL team got a note to review the film Ilegales. We were sent a screener, so I could enjoy the film in my own home and watch as often as I’d like. The film in Spanish, with English subtitles, reminds me of a modernized El Norte (sans the indigenous storyline), or at least it is in the same spirit of sharing the narrative of people who seek to migrate from Central America to the US and the struggles and reality of that journey.
National Latino AIDS Awareness Day (NLAAD)
3:15 pm By Maegan La Mala · Health · 2 Comments
15 Oct 2010
Today marks the last official day of Hispanic/Latino Heritage Month. It also is National Latino AIDS Awareness Day (NLAAD), a day that seeks to draw attention of the impact of AIDS within the Latino community, information sharing, and prevention. This year’s theme, “Save A Life; It May Be Your Own,” urges Hispanics/Latinos to get tested for HIV.
According to the Center for Disease Control, the issue of why AIDS impacts the Latino community in very specific ways has nothing to do with being Latino but rather has to do with the barriers linked to our identities, including poverty and migration status. In other words, yes institutional racism. I would also add that the specific ways that structural racism works in our communities impacts our access to health services.
According to the CDC :
While Hispanics/Latinos represented approximately 15% of the United States population in 2008, they accounted for 19% of people diagnosed with HIV infection in the 37 states and 5 dependent areas with long-term confidential name-based infection reporting*. From 2005-2008, the number of diagnoses of HIV infection increased in Hispanics/Latinos. The increase in the number of diagnoses may be due to increased HIV testing and other outreach efforts.
* 2008 is the latest year for which surveillance information is available.
Lawsuit filed Against U.S. for Wrongfully Deporting U.S. Citizen
12:37 pm By Maegan La Mala · Immigration|Justice|North Carolina · 7 Comments
14 Oct 2010Yesterday the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the United States, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, and a number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E) officers over the wrongful deportation of 33 year old Mark Lytlle, a U.S. citizen of Puerto Rican background who has mental disabilities.
According to the complaint( PDF File), in the fall of 2008, Lyttle was detained by I.C.E. in North Carolina, identified as a Mexican national and subsequently deported to Mexico. Lyttle had no ties to Mexico and spoke no Spanish. For four months he lived on the streets and in the shelters and prisons of Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala.
From the ACLU :
Lyttle’s entanglement with immigration authorities began when he was about to be released from a North Carolina jail where he was serving a short sentence for inappropriately touching a worker’s backside in a halfway house that serves individuals with mental disorders. Despite having ample evidence that Lyttle was a U.S. citizen – including his social security number, the names of his parents, his sworn statements that he was born in the United States and criminal record checks – officials from the North Carolina Department of Correction referred him to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as an undocumented immigrant whose country of birth was Mexico. Lyttle had never been to Mexico, shared no Mexican heritage, spoke no Spanish and did not claim to be from Mexico.
NYC : Make/shift recLAmation tour Barnard Tonite
8:12 am By Maegan La Mala · Events|media justice|Movies|New York City|Women · 1 Comment
14 Oct 2010
I am beyond honored and excited to be participating in the NYC leg of the Make/shift recLAmation tour, tonight at Barnard Hall, 6:30 pm, James Room, 4th Floor.
I will be sharing space with Adele Nieves, Hilary Goldberg, Jessica Hoffmann, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, y Mariana Ruiz
And don’t stress if you can’t come tonight…we’re doing it all over again on Saturday at Bluestockings.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Jail
6:38 am By Maegan La Mala · arizona|Phoenix · 4 Comments
14 Oct 2010
Maricopa Country Sheriff Joe Arpaio (yup he’s still around) was trying to not fix the inhumane conditions inside the jails within his jurisdiction as ordered by a lower court’s ruling. The court ruled that jails in Maricopa County do not meet constitutional minimums when it comes to food quality and housing conditions for inmates on psychotropic drugs. Yesterday, The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s appeal of the 2008 U.S. District Court Judge Neil V. Wake’s decision.
Now Arpaio must end severe overcrowding and ensure all detainees receive necessary medical and mental health care, be given uninterrupted access to all medications prescribed by correctional medical staff, be given access to exercise and to sinks, toilets, toilet paper and soap and be served food that meets or exceeds the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s dietary guidelines. Basically, the judge ordered that yes Sheriff Joe, the incarcerated are humans and need to be treated as such.
The ACLU proved at the 2008 trial that the sheriff routinely abused pre-trial detainees at Maricopa County Jail by feeding them moldy bread, rotten fruit and other contaminated food, housing them in cells so hot as to endanger their health, denying them care for serious medical and mental health needs and keeping them packed as tightly as sardines in holding cells for days at a time during intake.
Via / AZ Central and the ACLU
Image Via / SPLC
Watching the Chilean Miner Rescue
9:27 am By Maegan La Mala · Chile|Labor · 3 Comments
13 Oct 2010If you follow us on twitter (more than 3,000 peeps already do, why not you?), you know that I was up till past 3 am EST along with millions of others, watching, live tweeting, and adding some context and perspective to the milagro that is the the rescue of the 33 Chilean miners who had been been trapped inside the Mina San Jose in Copiapo, Northern Chile for about 70 days.
As a non-Chilena, as a Latina who lived in Chile, studied it’s history and politics, and as a mother to two ChileRicans, my entire family and I were glued to the television watching, one by one as the first 5 miners emerged from the tiny rescue capsule named Fenix 2, like the Phoenix bird that rises from the ashes, this Phoenix rose from what felt like the center of the earth, reuniting husbands, sons, and fathers into the arms of their familia. In fact, walking to Casa Mala, every restaurant, every laundromat, every bar in the Mala’hood was tuned into the rescue. How could you not cry, scream, and cheer after witnessing the first first miner, Florencio Avales emerge to the sobs of his son?
Happy Birthday To Us!!!
3:28 pm By Maegan La Mala · VivirLatino · 10 Comments
12 Oct 2010
Columbus Day Observed
9:14 am By Maegan La Mala · history|Poetry · 7 Comments
11 Oct 2010Today is not a celebration, except of our survival, our resistance. It is not a day to claim national pride on the corpses of others. It is not a day off, it is a day on. A day on which to learn & teach. It is day to connect with your ancestors and pass that knowledge onto your children, because so many years later, we are still here, fighting.
Columbus Day Observed
Copyright 2006, Maegan la Mamita Mala OrtizI wanted to sleep in today,
Warm beneath my sheets,
Warm inside my house,
Leaving the early crisp October chill just beyond my comprehension,
Behind barred and shaded windows
That keep me and the public shielded from reality
But the sound of US sponsored bullets
Ricocheting off of innocent Iraqi skin
Shook me from my sleep and pulled me out of bed
A screaming reminder me that no matter what the calendar says
It’s still the same colonization invasion game going down
On this so called U S of A holiday.
I wanted to mourn today
Stay home and dress in black for the Palestinians and Lebanese killed by Israeli soldiers today.
I wanted to light candles for Afghanistan
Burn incense for the first nations
And cry my eyes out for Filiberto y Puerto Rico.
The 500 plus years old wounds bleed fresh
Spilling raped, mixed blood.
And I wanted to fast today
Deny my body the comfort
Of first world fast food disposable genitically modified drugs
But my children,
Born and yet to be born
Demanded to be fed
Demanded answers for their homework from the halls of miseducation.
Because she has off today
to celebrate her so called discovery
And I am left nervous
Wondering if when I remind her of the truth
She’ll agree that we were better left uncivilized.
I wanted to celebrate today,
By torching court houses and tearing down prison walls,
bombing national monuments
And taking back every last thing that has been stolen from me and those before me
From us.
I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs a huge
“FUCK YOU y VETE PA’L CARAJO”
to the spirit of Columbus marching down Fifth Avenue
and the Italianos using genocide as costume for their pride
But I was too busy struggling to survive today.
I was too busy working today.
I was too busy counting change to get onto the under constant terror alert subway today,
With its cops with machine guns standing in front of NYPD recruitment ads
the ones with the White cop hugging a Latina viejita?
I had to get to my job
as a 12 dollar an hour corporate whore for hire
Watching billions of bloody dollars
Being robbed from the third world and the third world within.
Finally when the day comes to a close
And I return
Defeated by another day
I can drown my sorrows in the made for t.v. scripted news
Falling asleep to the drone of lies we’ve gotten too used to.
In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue
And got lost
But not lost enough.
NJ 2010 Hispanic Heritage Celebration: LatinaVoices and Visions Latinas Out Loud: Epistles
9:46 am By Maegan La Mala · Arts|Culture|Events|Linking Latinos|Lo Que Hay|New Jersey · 1 Comment
9 Oct 2010
While we here at VivirLatino and in our respective communities and circles may debate the merits of Hispanic/Latino Heritage Month, we must support our artists and cultural activists who represent and reflect our realities through words, theater, performance and art.
I wanted to draw your attention to an event happening next weekend at the Newark Public Library in New Jersey. Check it out and if you are in the area support if you can. Note that it features friend to VivirLatino, Adele Nieves.
2010 Hispanic Heritage Celebration: LatinaVoices and Visions
Latinas Out Loud: Epistles
Saturday, October 16, 2010, 2:00 pm
Main Library, Centennial Hall, Second Floor
SPECIAL FEATURED GUEST: Sandra Maria EstevezTHIS IS A KID FRIENDLY EVENT!
Latino Flavored Productions brings to New Jersey a dynamic and compelling new show that features Latina performers—as well as regular, everyday, non-performers—exploring personal, social, or political issues through the art of letter writing. This ensemble production presents twenty Latinas reading their own short, funny, dramatic, evocative, and/or often poetic letters to their addressee of choice.
Directions and more info after the jump
Hola!
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