[Click on tweet for link to article referred to in tweet]
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[Click on tweet for link to article referred to in tweet]
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Okay let’s get this straight. Last week Obama free-styled on the White House lawn, apparently said he had the Oscar López Rivera matter “on his desk,” then took off for Havana, where he watched a baseball game and then on to Argentina to throw down with some tango dancers. Prominent members of the Puerto Rican/diaspora […]
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Looks like there’s clearly been a problem with postcolonial representation. Some times you gotta put on the mask to take off the mask.
Read more2015 was not an easy year to get through in many ways. A lot of troubling signs have appeared on the landscape: Continuing injustice toward people of color in the form of extra-judicial police killings of unarmed civilians, increasing wealth inequality, the Puerto Rico Debt Crisis, the continued threat of gentrification, out of control gun […]
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Note: I’m re-posting this piece from a couple of years ago about Eddie Figueroa, founder of New Rican Village, an arts space that thrived on Avenue A in the East Village in the 1970s. Because of all the recent attention being given to the Young Lords era as a result of three excellent art exhibits […]
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This morning on WBAI’s Morning Show I interviewed Jessica Torres, a researcher who has been posting on the Media Matters site. We discussed the controversy over the reaction to the cover of the new issue of The Economist, which grossly stereotypes all Latin@s by using the image of chili peppers standing in for the stripes in […]
Read moreThe Economist’s cover image for its current issue, “Firing Up America: A Special Report on America’s Latinos” has already stirred up some controversy, for obvious reasons. It’s another form of the horrendous stereotyping that affects not only Latin@s but any other non-majority group. It’s a fancy reductio ad absurdum: Latin@s are essentially red hot chili […]
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What’s in a name? The label “Latino” is often used to describe a monolithic interest group or voting bloc. And while criticized as inaccurate because of Latinos’ diverse national, ethnic, and racial manifestations, as an organizing principal the label still conveys significant meaning—a narrative of shared experience—in both Latin America and the United States. Although […]
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“I’ve known many jazz standards since I was 14,” said Rubén Blades to the well-heeled crowd at the Jazz at Lincoln Center venue Rose Hall. Spontaneously he launched into a histrionic imitation of Sinatra singing “Summer Wind,” then a nasal send-up of Sammy Davis, Jr. “I used to just stand on the streets in Panama […]
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There is a moment in Dear White People, a film that is drawing a lot of attention for its frank treatment of “post-racial” America–particularly in Ivy League universities–that made me laugh, although I felt not many in the theater got the joke the way I did. It was during a voiceover dialog during which the protagonist […]
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