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Latin@ Citywide Panel To Focus On Latino Community & Response To Homophobic Hate Crimes

21 Oct 2010

Many of our NY area readers may have already heard of the brutal and violent crimes against three gay Bronx Latino men (two who were 17 years-old) who were allegedly sodomized and tortured by several youth and adults involved with a gang. Eight men have been arraigned for gang assault, sexual abuse and unlawful imprisonment and a total of eleven men have been arrested.

In response to these acts of violence Latin@ Citywide has invited me to sit on a panel to discuss ways we can respond to such acts of violence, homophobia, and misogyny among our community. This is not the first conversation to occur in the LGBTQI community in The Bronx since these attacks, but it may be the first one to be led and centered in the Latino community.

I’ll be sharing this opportunity with Rev. Carmen Hernanded, Founder / President of NYC LGBT Chamber of Commerce who I met earlier this year at the 2010 El Diario Mujeres Destacadas Awards ceremony as we were both recipients this year. Also in attendence wtill be Andrés Duque, Blabbeando Blogger and LGBT Activist, and Ephraim Cruz, Co- Founder of Bronx for Change.

I’m happy to have been invited to speak at this space, it represents an attempt to expand this conversation in ways that are often ignored. As many VL readers know, my ideas on gang involvement and affiliation as well as sexuality education and access for youth of Color, are not very popular; and I’ll be speaking from this space. Because there is no press or elected officials allowed I will be speaking as Bianca the sexologist, professor, educator and activist.

This event is open to the public and I do hope that if you are in NYC and are able to attend that you please do so. I’d love to meet some of our readers in 3-D and have this conversation and action plan moved in a way that is productive and inclusive! If you are interested in attending please RSVP via email by October 22, 2010 to: jcartagena@CSSNY.ORG

The original email invitation is below with full details. Read more…

Losing Another Angie

9:04 am By Maegan la Mamita Mala · crime|GLBT|Immigration|Puerto Rico · 3 Comments

26 May 2010

Otra hermana perdida, another sister lost to violence in Puerto Rico.

Angie González Oquendo was found killed in her apartment in Caguas, Puerto Rico. The 37 year old was last seen on Friday by her father. Eyes are looking at a man Angie was in a relationship with as a suspect. Puerto Rican Police are investigating Angie’s death as a hate crime.

I find it interesting how Primera Hora felt the need to publish Angie’s “real” name, as if her identity as Angie wasn’t legit, as if the fact that throughout the article Angie’s father talks about his daughter is meaningless.

Sunday School Teacher That Killed 8-year-old Pleads Guilty

2:53 pm By la Macha · children|crime|Violence · 12 Comments

10 May 2010

Vivir Latino has long covered the story of Sandra Cantu–the little girl brutally raped and murdered by a Sunday school teacher who happens to be white.

Well, I just found out that the woman who killed Sandra has made a plea.

A Sunday school teacher accused of kidnapping, raping and killing 8-year-old Sandra Cantu entered a surprise guilty plea to first-degree murder on Monday, sparing her the death penalty.

Melissa Huckaby of Tracy is expected to be sentenced to life in prison. As part of her plea in a Stockton court, all other charges – including rape, lewd acts with a child and poisoning another child and a man – have been dropped.

This made me sick to read. Because the sexual violence Sandra experienced–sexual violence directed at her by a white woman, was not considered important in the plea. The charges were dropped.

Which, in essence, says sexual violence against little baby Latinas, is ok. Not that bad.

Sure, Huckaby got life–but that doesn’t mean anything. Usually in 20 years, lifer’s come eligible for parole. And that parole board will no look at her record of sexual assault and pedophilia when making the decision to let her go or not.

They will only see a white woman who was a Sunday School teacher who killed a little girl nobody wanted any damn way.

And that makes me sick.

Thoughts Post the Conviction of Jeffrey Conroy, Marcelo Lucero’s Killer

8:48 am By Maegan la Mamita Mala · crime|Immigration|Justice|Violence · 3 Comments

20 Apr 2010

We don’t have to call Jeffrey Conroy, the young man who killed Marcelo Lucero, alleged killer anymore but legally we can’t call him a murderer. Yesterday’s convictions of Conroy on hate crime manslaughter and gang assault mean that his actions were criminal and filled with bias and hate towards immigrants, especially “Mexicans” even if Lucero was Ecuadorian but the jury choosing manslaughter over murder, which was also on the table, means that the jury thought that Conroy didn’t mean to kill Lucero.

I have written over and over again some of the problems with the hate crimes context being expected to solve everything especially given the growing prison industrial complex that has historically used people of color as human fodder and most recently is looking to expand using Latino immigrants. Macha has written on the double edge sword in seeking justice when our killers look like us or are a part of us.

I have read and heard people saying that the verdict yesterday means justice has been served. Others have said that the lack of a conviction on the murder charge shows that there is still a disconnect in terms of how critical the situation is for Latinos when it comes to the way the anti-immigrant rhetoric has turned into a cry for action to many.

For Marcelo’s family, justice will never be fully served as no charge or years in prison can bring him back. And i will admit to a deep gut desire to wanting a murder conviction for Conroy, to wanting a life sentence. No it’s not radical, pero after years of seeing so many mothers weeping at the site of their child’s death, a grief-stricken part wants to sit smugly and watch someone go to jail for a long time for killing parts of our community, an eye for an eye justice as someone said in the comments yesterday.

Pero as people were talking about the Lucero verdict yesterday (although not enough people in my opinion were talking about it), I received an email from an amiga of Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar who is planning a memorial service and vigil. This morning I read about another mujer, Ashley Santiago, who was killed in Puerto Rico. I was thinking of all the vigils and rallies I have gone to, not just in this last year pero over my 15 some odd years in the “movements”. Finally I was thinking about how last month I had to explain to my 3 year old why Altagracia Mayi was crying and why we were marching.

Our communities are far from finding justice and I think part of it is that we are looking for it or expecting it from all the wrong places.

Guess Who Gets Stopped and Frisked the Most in NYC?

7:39 am By Maegan la Mamita Mala · crime|New York City|race|Violence · 2 Comments

18 Feb 2010

Despite crime being at an all-time low in the Big Apple, stop and frisks are at an all time high & guess who gets stopped and frisked the most?

A total of 575,304 people were stopped and questioned in 2009 – an 8% increase over the previous high of 531,159 in 2008, the NYPD said Tuesday…
The NYPD was required under a 2001 law to report data on those stopped, questioned and frisked.

Of those stopped in 2009, roughly 57% were frisked, 6% were arrested, and another 6.2% received summonses. Blacks and Latinos were the subject of roughly 87% of the stops in 2009.

Reconsidering the “bad” immigrant

12:57 pm By la Macha · crime|Drugs|Health|Immigration · 6 Comments

15 Feb 2010

Often, the narrative of the Latin@ immigrant is one of “good” immigrant versus “bad” immigrant. That is, there is the “good” hardworking, family centered, grateful, unquestioningly US loving immigrant and the “bad” fuck ups who are every other immigrant (queers, those who won’t/don’t learn English, women who are pregnant, drug addicts, etc). Vivir Latino has investigated this good/bad dichotomy for a very long time–and tried to complicate it. Which is why I found the following article about a drug dealer from Mexico to be very compelling and interesting.

Esteban Avila–an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, lived a life of extreme poverty and surrounded by violence until he found a way out. He was recruited to sell black tar, or heroin, in the US. Life improved considerably for him and his family (and oddly enough, even for his community), but came at the expense of the people in the US who he sold drugs to:

When he was a boy, the village of Emiliano Zapata was poor and notorious for its violence. In The Toad, where Avila’s family lived, roofs leaked and the hills were the bathroom. When Avila and his friends went to the village basketball court, other boys ran them off with rocks and insults.

Later, Avila wanted to join the Mexican Navy or highway patrol, but only sons of well-connected fathers were admitted, he said.

“In the United States, there’s no need to be a criminal to live well,” he said. “But in Mexico, they throw you into a dead end.”

At 14, Avila traveled to Tijuana, then slipped across the border and made his way to the San Fernando Valley.

“I wanted to look for some new way to live, something with a future,” he said. “I wasn’t going to find it in the village.”

But he didn’t want to go to school and he was too young to work. So he returned to Emiliano Zapata and bided his time working in the sugar cane fields.

In the mid-1990s, men from Xalisco began selling black-tar heroin across America. A friend who ran a heroin network recruited Avila to work as a driver in Phoenix.

Avila, then 19, accepted. Every day, he drove around the city, his mouth full of tiny, uninflated balloons, each filled with a tenth of a gram of heroin. Addicts phoned in orders. A dispatcher relayed them to Avila, who delivered the drugs to customers and collected payment.

Five months later, he took a bus back to Xalisco with $15,000 in his pocket. He was wearing new Levi’s 501s — a prized garment in many Mexican villages.

“That night was the first time we had more than enough to eat,” Avila said.

There were a few points in this article that made me uneasy. Namely that Avila feels no compunction at all about his drug selling. Coming from a community that has been devastated by drugs, I know that the people he was selling to were not top of the line drug users, but my next door neighbors (if that makes sense).

Also, I have a really hard time with sellers that display their drug wealth through clothes and extravagant lifestyle choices. Again, as somebody from a community that has been devastated by drugs, the jeans and thick gold chains and flashy cars are like a slap in the face to community members struggling to deal with the violence, addiction and even deaths of loved ones.

And yet, in Avila’s testimony, there remains the unequivical truth. Selling drugs made it so that his family could eat without worrying about where the food was coming from or how much if it there was for the first time. As somebody who has lived with poverty on and off throughout the years, I understand how desperate hunger can make a person–and how hunger in a loved one can send you over the edge. How it can harden you to the point you don’t care about anybody anymore–just the food. Getting the food so that you don’t have to hurt.

What it shows is that even in the cases of “bad” immigrants, what we are talking about is a complicated twisting of capitalism, a free market economy and human rights. In other words, what is the difference between “go getters” like Joe Kennedy (of John, Robert and Edward Kennedy fame) and Avila?
What is the difference, really, between Avila and a “good” immigrant that just wants what’s best for her family? Avila is more broken (or is he?) than what we think of as “good” immigrants–but at the base level, he wants what’s best for his family. He wants his family to not be hungry.

SO what do we do here, with this “bad” immigrant? Will punitive actions stop Avila’s from coming into the US–or from contributing to addiction (and all the government violence directed toward ending addiction in the US) in the US? What would happen if we stopped looking for punitive ways to end drug violence in the US–and assume that sellers (as WELL as users) are people acting from a place of humanity? That they want what’s best for their families, just like “good” people do? Or, by way of compromise, if we put drug pushers in jail AND work on ways to end poverty in the various communities that are sending their sons into such dangerous work?

Is there a way to complicate not just the good/bad immigrant dichotomy, but to also complicate the *responses* to “good” and “bad” immigrants?

Bay Area Community Members to Hold Vigil and Release Statement about Murders in Maryland and Puerto Rico

20 Nov 2009

PRESS RELEASE

TIME: Sunday, November 22, 3:30pm
LOCATION: Mac Arthur and Grand Ave. at Lake Merritt

CONTACT: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Liz Latty
PHONE: (510) 282-5223
EMAIL: morethanavigil@gmail.com

BAY AREA COMMUNITY MEMBERS TO HOLD VIGIL FOR QUEER/TRANS TEENS MURDERED IN MARYLAND AND PUERTO RICO

OAKLAND, CA – Outraged at the murders of two queer and trans teenagers last week, Bay Area queers and allies will gather at Lake Merritt this Sunday for a candlelight vigil and open mic to mourn and brainstorm ways to keep their community safer from violence.

Last Friday, 19-year-old Jorge Steven López-Mercado got into a car with Juan Martinez-Matos, 26, who later said he had been “searching for a prostitute.” Martinez-Matos murdered, beheaded and dismembered López-Mercado after, he said, he discovered that López-Mercado had male genitalia and was wearing feminine clothing. Martinez-Matos then set fire to Lopez-Mercado’s remains and left them on the side of a road. Martinez -Matos is now in custody and has confessed to the murder. His bail is set at $4 million.

The same week, in Baltimore, Maryland, queer fifteen-year-old Jason Mattison, Jr., was raped and stabbed to death in his aunt’s home by an adult male, a family friend with whom, according to a Baltimore police spokesperson, Mattison allegedly had a “forced sexual relationship.”

Queer activists say they worry that López-Mercado’s murderer will successfully invoke the defense of “gay or trans-panic” to justify the brutal killing. “The fact that Martinez -Matos is saying that López-Mercado was ‘wearing women’s clothing’ indicates that he might try to say he was ‘fooled’ and therefore ‘forced’ to kill López-Mercado for their gender identity,” Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, one of the organizers of the Oakland vigil said.

“This is completely inexcusable,” Liz Latty, another organizer of the rally this Sunday, said. “It’s blaming the victim. We unequivocally denounce the way that the lives of queer and transgendered people, sex workers, people of color, women and low-income people are devalued and seen as disposable. We especially denounce the ways in which femme-presenting sex workers of color are incredibly targetted for violence.”

Referring to López-Mercado’s murder, police investigator Ángel Rodríguez Colón told Univisión, “These types of people, when they enter this lifestyle and go out into the streets, know that this could happen.”

“We are outraged at the murders of López-Mercado and Mattison,” Oakland vigil organizer Latty said. “We, queer and transgendered people in Oakland, are mourning these senseless deaths. Yet we are also a resilient community. We wish to stand in solidarity with those in Puerto Rico and Baltimore who are surviving despite this invisibility and injustice.”

Bay Area organizers of the vigil have been in contact with friends of López-Mercado and are hoping to coordinate memorial events and future actions with the Puerto Rican and Baltimore queer communities.

Harry Rodriguez, a spokesperson for the FBI in Puetro Rico, said that the agency will monitor the investigation since federal statutes regarding hate crimes are implicated. Puerto Rican lawmaker, Charlie Hernandez, who authored the Hate Crimes Act of 2002, has been asking officials to consider charging Matos under that law. It would be the first time in Puerto Rico that a murder would be classified as a hate crime. According to the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force, López-Mercado is the tenth murder victim of a hate crime in Puerto Rico in the last seven years.

But Oakland vigil organizers say they want a different kind of justice that doesn’t rely on increased policing or punishment. They say that the prison system has not made life safer for victims of violence, especially those who are queer and transgendered people of color. Organizers say that violence against queer youth of color is only exacerbated by increased police enforcement, which disproportionally targets and locks up low-income people, people of color, sex workers, and gender non-conforming people.

“Hate crimes legislation and more police patrols would not make our communities safer. It would not have prevented the murders, and no punishment will bring these two men back,” organizer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha said. “Systemic homophobia and transphobia killed López-Mercado and Mattison, who like other queer or gender non-comforming youth of color, faced barriers like street harassment and discrimination in every facet of life. What could’ve actually saved the two young men are things like free or affordable public transportation, an end to housing and employment discrimination against people of color, queer and trans folks, and the decriminalization of sex work.”

“We don’t know how Lopez-Mercado identified, gender-wise, right now,” added Piepzna-Samarasinha. ” What we do know is that transphobia is a huge part of why they were murdered. As we continue to receive information from Lopez-Mercado’s friends and family members about how Lopez-Mercado saw their gender, we will change their pronouns to the ones they preferred. We want to work to create a world where all people are free to live in safety with any gender expression they desire.”

Vigils mourning López-Mercado and Mattison will also take place this Sunday in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Amherst, MA, Tara Haute, Abilene, TX, Atlanta, and Durham.

Update : Arrest Made in Murder of 19 Year Old Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado

9:54 am By Maegan la Mamita Mala · crime|GLBT|Puerto Rico|Violence|youth · 7 Comments

17 Nov 2009

georgestevenmercado Just read this off of Pam’s House Blend and then read the original article off of Primera Hora.

A man was arrested in the early morning hours in Cayay, suspected in the death of 19 year old Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado…an apparent homophobic hate crime…Sources say that the 28 year old man may have offered Lopez Mercado money for sex.

This case needs to be closely monitored for what may be the double victimization of Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado. There may be an attempt to paint this as a crime of passion, “gay panic”, and/or “prostitution gone bad” instead of the horrific act of hateful violence it was.

Gay Rican Teen found brutally murdered

2:45 pm By la Macha · crime|Puerto Rico|Violence|youth · 7 Comments

16 Nov 2009

This news is just so sad and horrific and enraging.

ricanfoundmurdered

“On November 14 the body of a gay 19 year old was found a few miles away from the town in which he was residing in called Caguas. He was a very well known person in the gay community of Puerto Rico, and very loved. He was found on the site of an isolated road in the city of Cayey, he was partially burned, decapitated, and dismembered, both arms, both legs, and the torso. This has caused a huge reaction from the gay community here, but its a difficult situation. Never in the history of Puerto Rico has a murder been classified as a hate crime. Even though we have to follow federal mandates and laws, many of the laws in which are passed in the USA such as Obama’s new bill, do not always directly get practiced in Puerto Rico. The police agent that is handling this case said on a public televised statement that ‘people who lead this type of lifestyle need to be aware that this will happen’. As If the boy murdered Jorge Steven Lopez was asking to get killed…”

May peace be with Jorge Steven Lopez and VL sends so much love and support to his family and loved ones during this horrible time. VL will keep you updated on any actions that happen.

Story found via facebook

Supreme Court Hearing Two Cases on Juvenile (In)justice

12:36 pm By Maegan la Mamita Mala · crime|Justice|Linking Latinos|Politics|youth · Comments Off

9 Nov 2009

Today the Supreme Court is hearing two cases that could hopefully change how the (in)justice system sentences juveniles. The cases specifically deal with sentencing youth to life without parole and if that is unconstitutional. The cases being used are that of Terrance Jamar Graham and Joe Sullivan, who were 16 and 13, respectively, when they committed their crimes. Not surprisingly, considering how in all phases of the criminal (in)justice system people of color are profiled and targeted, the Supreme Court’s ruling could impact the case of Latino Efrén Paredes, Jr., who at age 15 and wrongly convicted in 1989 for a murder and armed robbery he did not commit; a crime to which others have admitted guilt.

This week’s News With Nezua discusses what the Supreme Court is up to and what’s at stake.

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