Archive for the ‘holidays’ Category
Happy New Year!
31 Dec 2009I’m working on a year end round up post, which is more time consuming than I thought (especially with two kids running around). In the meantime, on behalf of the entire VivirLatino sisterhood, here’s wishing all of our readers a happy and healthy new year filled with hope y justicia.
See you all in 2010!
Feliz Navidad: The Original, the Offensive and the Adorable
4:44 pm By Maegan La Mala · holidays|Immigration|Music · 1 Comment
24 Dec 2009It’s the original bi-lingual English/Spanish Christmas song full of cheese and employed too often as proof that a holiday celebration is “diverse”. Pero I know in casa Mala, it’s the favorite of my younger daughter who thinks it’s the best song up there with “twinkle twinkle”
I wonder if Jose Feliciano ever gets tired of singing that song? Even if he does, he certainly isn’t appreciative of peeps taking it and twisting it into an anti-migrant “spoof”.
Read more…
Feliz Hanukkah
12 Dec 2009
May this holiday bring you 8 noches of bagels and bongos (sorry I couldn’t resist).
Image Via / Boing Boing
According to Some Charities, the Undocumented are on Santa’s Naughty List
10:43 am By Maegan la Mamita Mala · children|Family|holidays|houston|Immigration · 3 Comments
3 Dec 2009
Update:Due to protests and no doubt media attention, the Salvation Army announced they were not going to ask families to provide social security numbers in order to get gifts for their children.
Santa Claus has a list and he’s checking it twice. According to some charities, that list has to be cross-reference with the Department of Homeland Security. There have been numerous reports over the internet that some charities are requiring families asking for help for holidays show proof of legal status. So before you send your kids on Santa’s lap, make sure your papers are in order.
Some Houston charities have decided to confirm immigration status before conferring Christmas cheer. It’s about “making the best decisions about whom to help” these charities claim. And naturally, a few aren’t directly asking for proof of citizenship, just a birth certificate or demonstrated need via receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and/or Medicaid (both of these programs exclude undocumented residents).
Something to think about this “holiday.”
Reflecting the racial structure of the nation’s entire food system, turkey processing relies largely on the hard labor of low-wage workers of color. On plant floors across the country, a predominantly black, Latino and Asian work force kills, guts, cleans, processes and packages the Thanksgiving centerpiece along fast-moving production lines.
Injuries are commonplace. Thousands of individual repetitive motions every shift raise the probability of chronic pain for line workers.
Federal safety inspectors are spread thin, and when they do arrive it is not unusual for supervisors to silence workers. At a recent meeting of Somali immigrants with an Occupational Safety and Health Administration representative, workers were shocked to learn that they had the right to speak when an inspector came to their workplace.
Happy? Veteran’s Day
11:00 am By Maegan la Mamita Mala · history|holidays|Immigration|military · 4 Comments
11 Nov 2009Today is the day set aside by the U.S. government to recognize those who lived and died in military service for the U.S. Despite my strong opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the countless smaller undeclared wars all over the world, that doesn’t mean there is no love from me for those who have chosen the military life. They include members of my own familia, primas and tios who have fought for the United States and they represent a growing number of young men and women of color who look to the armed forces as a way to survive and move forward with their lives. Pero as today’s editorial from el Diario/la Prensa points out, the role of Latinos in the U.S. military is nothing new, it’s just that people have failed to recognize it.
As many as 750,000 Latinos and Latinas served in the armed forces during World War II, according to the U.S. Latino & Latina WWII Oral History Project. During the Korean War, the 65th Infantry of Puerto Rico won the praise of legendary military commanders such as General Douglas MacArthur. Yet, in the telling of U.S. history, Latino soldiers have received little mention.
Y porque? Is it because that if the history books were to acknowledge the role of Latinos then the U.S. would have to start acknowledging Latinos as humans as part of its’ policy including passing or hell even getting started on comprehensive immigration reform?
Feliz Halloween
31 Oct 2009
From Hispanic Heritage Month to Hateful Halloween
9:00 am By Maegan la Mamita Mala · Culture|history|holidays|Shopping · 7 Comments
18 Oct 2009As a Latina mami, I think I hate September through November more than any other time of the year. Hispanic Heritage Month, Columbus Day, Halloween, and Thanksgiving provide way more damn teaching moments than I care to experience and the worst part of it is that I’m not teaching my children, but rather those charged with educating them, why certain things are just plain old fucked up.
So far, with la Mapu, my older daughter, in a new school, I haven’t had to send notes to her teacher or make copies of articles, as I have done in the past, about why it’s wrong to teach what a great guy Columbus was. For Latino Heritage Month, she wrote about Chile and it’s U.S. sponsored 9-11-73 military coup and was praised. I was pleased to hear that there was an actual discussion of how the conquistadors contributed to what amounted to Native American genocide. There was discussion not of the contributions the Europeans brought to the not so new world but rather of the diseases they brought.
Now comes Halloween. Now I love Halloween. It’s always been one of my favorite holidays. With a long family history of good relationships with muertos, it was more about dressing up in fanciful costumes, begging for candy, and decorating the house with carved pumpkins. I don’t ever remember thinking that it was ok for me to dress up as an “Indian Princess”, a stereotypical Mexican (or a Puerto Rican for that matter), and sure it sure as hell wasn’t ok for me to dress up as an “illegal alien”. I was a smurf, a vampire, a poodle skirted 1950′s girl, and a devil. I even wanted to be he-man one year because I was obsessed with He-Man pero that’s another post. My kids have been cats, hot dogs, turtles, pirates, dead punk zombies, mimes, dinosaurs, skeletons and ghosts. As if the racist costumes that have me pretty much boycotting most Halloween shops wasn’t enough, there’s a lack of appropriate tween girl costumes. My 12 year and I, thanks to my mom, have put together a pretty awesome costume but that came after hours of being disgusted by having to treat my daughter like a baby or a slut.
And then it’s only a hop, skip and a jump to thanks for nothing day or as I always used to hear Tiokasin Ghosthorse on WBAI say, “There goes the neighborhood day”.
Contribute to Our 30 Days of Latino Heritage Tumblr
8:54 am By Maegan la Mamita Mala · Culture|history|holidays|Internet|Latin America|Linking Latinos|Politics · Comments Off
16 Sep 2009As part of the 30 Days of Latino Heritage Series that I announced yesterday, I started a tumblr site of the same name.
There I will collect images, quotes, audio, video etc related to Latinidad and I invite you to do that same! If you would like to submit something, please visit the submission page or email latinoheritagemonth@tumblr.com to submit posts. All submissions are subject to my approval.
Gracias!!!
30 Days of Latino Heritage : An Introduction
11:44 am By Maegan la Mamita Mala · Culture|history|holidays|Internet|language|Latin America|Media|Politics|VivirLatino · 2 Comments
15 Sep 2009
30 Days of Latino Heritage : Introduction from VivirLatino on Vimeo.
An introduction to the 30 Days of Latino Heritage Series on VivirLatino.com featured Maegan “la Mamita Mala” Ortiz.
Hola!
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