The installation of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States was a welcome relief from four years of Donald Trump’s constant demonization of Latinos, from separating immigrant children from their families to building his border wall to tossing paper towels at hurricane-ravaged Puerto Ricans. Inauguration Day featured the New York-bred Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, […]
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Back in 1973, often remembered as the bad old days of the Lower East Side, Miguel Algarín, focusing on the light he saw shining from an emerging New York Puerto Rican community, began hosting a series of informal poetry readings in his apartment on East Sixth Street that brought together poets, theater types andmusicians. The […]
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On July 26, Ángel Figueroa Jaramillo, the head of UTIÉR (Unión de Trabajadores de la Industria Eléctrica y Riego), Puerto Rico’s electrical and irrigation workers’ union, tweeted from one of the island’s power generation stations. From Costa Sur Unit 5, near the southern coast, he posted a video of an open porthole that allowed people […]
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By now, it seems almost everyone has had an encounter with “Latinx,” the newish label that many people of Latin American descent in the United States have been using to describe themselves. Objections to it have been rampant, from those who see only its unpronounceable non-Spanishness (Latinks?) and those who say it erases Black and […]
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I’m surprised (or maybe I shouldn’t be) by the contentious posturing around how many Latinx voted for Trump and the term Latinx itself. Bottom line: overall Republican totals didn’t vary much in 2020, and “x” is a letter that makes people nervous. In this post a Newsy reporter asks if I’m too woke to see […]
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The heightened media attention to the Latino vote reached a spectacular climax during this year’s general election, with a higher total than expected going to the Republican side. Yet while many pundits have pointed to this increase as a significant factor in President Donald Trump’s victory in Florida and Texas, the overall picture shows not only that […]
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2020’s moment of racial reckoning has created a new and different kind of visibility of Latinx in the media, yet in many ways has muddled things further, conflating any layered analysis about what our issues are into an unwanted Biden-Trump binary. The silencing of the Bernie Sanders program has reduced analysis of US Latinx politics […]
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This November, Puerto Rico is bracing itself for two different elections that will have great repercussions for its future. The US general election could reshape policy towards the unincorporated territory in the years to come, particularly if Democrats regain the presidency and the senate. This is even though its residents, who are nominally American citizens, […]
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As one of baseball’s most physically graceful performers, Roberto Clemente was known for his sleek, precise strides roaming right field, the unerring quick strikes of his throws to catch foolish runners who would test his arm, and the crackling line drives from his bat, which earned him a stellar .317 lifetime batting average. But he […]
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The news about Jessica Krug, disgraced George Washington University history professor who has been asked to resign by her department, came fast and furious on Thursday. In a post on Medium, she confessed to having masqueraded as an African descendant, “gaslighted those whom I love,” and asked to be “canceled” for having lived a “violent, anti-Black lie.” The irony to Krug’s […]
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