Texas Dragging Death May Mave Been a Racially Motivated Crime Associated Press
In a gruesome case with powerful echoes of the dragging death of James Byrd a decade ago, a black man was killed underneath a pickup truck in East Texas and two white men have been charged with murder. Paris is the same Texas town in which a black girl was sentenced to up to seven years in a juvenile prison for shoving a teacher's aide at school. That same judge sentenced a white girl to probation for burning down her parents' house.
You knew it was just a matter of time before immigrants would be the likely scapegoats for the country's current financial and credit meltdown. One of the country's most conservative and reactionary bloggers, Michelle Malkin (née Maglalang), blames the current economic crisis on "the rapidly expanding illegal-alien home-loan racket."
This is not surprising given her willful distortion of the facts. See her below for her take on immigration.
And speaking of willful distortion, here she is claiming that former presidential hopeful John Kerry shot himself for the sake of getting a purple heart. "This one" throws what she can on the national wall to see what sticks. Leave it to an immigrant to attack immigrants?
"...At UCLA, Proposition 209 resulted in a decline of Black students from 221 freshmen in 1997 to 96 admitted in 2006. University officials scrambled to come up with some creative ways around the law—appointing an alumni commission to offer scholarships to encourage admitted Blacks to choose UCLA and revamping the process of judging applications to better acknowledge students for overcoming disadvantages. By fall 2007, Black admissions had more than doubled from the year before.
But the focus on admissions numbers is still a limited one in the larger context of anti-affirmative action and systemic public school inequities. Ward Connerly, the architect of Proposition 209, has won ballot initiatives banning affirmative action in two more states—Washington and Michigan—and is close to getting it on the November ballot this year in Colorado, Arizona and Nebraska (his supporters have gotten enough signatures in the three states, but opponents are claiming voter fraud and suing)
Many of the girls at Central High School in Phoenix, Arizona, couldn't hide their excitement when John McCain introduced "Ramón," the Puerto Rican reaggaetonero "Daddy Yankee." From one daddy to another, McCain praised DY for being married fifteen years and for “making the right choices” in his youth. "Man of few words," Ramón said McCain was the right choice for president for his stance on immigration issues (mind you, not that Ramón has to worry about deportation like many other Latino homies), and for being "a fighter for the Hispanic community." McCain, a fighter for the Latino community? Not since Ricky Martin's performance at the George W. Bush's 2001 inauguration have progressive Puerto Ricans been so perplexed if not outright appalled. It was a career ender for Ricky, though he purportedly thought the performance would increase his appeal among the oxford button-down and Sperry top-siders crowd. The bread and circuses were captured in the video below. Many continue to sleepwalk though history, while others simply can not understand why "history is what hurts" when a reaggaetonero dispenses somnambulence with every repetitive beat of a soon to be worn postmodern lullaby. "Gasolina," indeed.
The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory (NYU Press, 2007) tells the story of the United States Latino body politic and its relation to the state: how the state configures Latino subjects and how Latino subjects have in turn altered the state. This interactive blog continues some of the discussions initiated in the book and, in the process, expands the book’s obsessions by further interrogating national conceptions of Latina and Latino forms of personhood and how these have been written on the Latino body. (The book was published by NYU Press' Sexual Cultures Series.) Irreverent, polemical, visually provocative, and hopefully fun to peruse, the interactive blog is meant to persuade and influence conversations on and about the Latino body politic. Send related images, videos, art and text to me at lazlima@gmail.com. You can get the book directly from NYU Press and Amazon.
Book Blurbs
"Through a bricolage of carefully crafted textual readings, Lima has produced a text that traces the relationship between corporeality and citizenship by marking the process by which the Latino body has become historical. Situated in moments of national and bodily crisis, his archive is decidedly precise and imaginatively expansive, metaphorically rich and politically dynamic. Drawing on texts central to third world feminism, queer studies, and Latin and Latino American literatures, this work is as central to rethinking the American literary canon as it is to an invigorating remapping of Latino Studies." —Juana María Rodríguez, University of California, Berkeley, author of Queer Latinidad
"Lima's Latino Body promises to productively disrupt the business-as-usual of critical and scholarly practice in the still-emerging field of U.S. Latino studies; it will contribute directly to the next stage in the long process of what it itself terms Latino identity's 'becoming historical' in North American cultural, political, and intellectual contexts. For this reason alone, The Latino Body could not be more welcome, or more timely."
—Ricardo L. Ortíz, Georgetown University, author of Cultural Erotics in Cuban America
