Here’s the first paragraph in this week’s New York Times story about Puerto Rico’s manufactured debt crisis: “Standard & Poor’s downgraded the debt of Puerto Rico to junk status on Tuesday, intensifying a cash squeeze for the commonwealth, whose financial condition is of outsize importance to the rest of the United States because its debt is widely […]
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Is This DREAMer a Diva?
Dee Dee García Blase, the moderate-right Sarah Palin of Southwest Latino activism, has been on a bizarre campaign against Sergio G. García, an undocumented immigrant recently granted the right to practice law in California. It turns out that García, who reportedly arrived in the US 20 years ago to pick almonds with his father, is […]
Read more“It’s Politics, That’s Life”
From the New York Daily News this morning, a quote from City Councilwoman Rosie Méndez, who made the mistake of being too late to support the candidacy of the new City Council Speaker and was not rewarded with a plum committee assignment and lulu. “It’s politics,” said Méndez. “That’s life.” I imagine this is true but it […]
Read moreOur Long National Nightmare Is Over
My fellow Boricuas, our long national nightmare is over. No longer do we have to be inundated by daily tidal waves of tales of Chickengate, Low to Moderate Income Townhouse-gate, Casabe Houses-gate, even Jewish Nursing Home on the Upper West Side Rezoning-gate. No longer do we have to live without ever having seen a Latin@ […]
Read more¡Brujería!
The worst thing about today’s stories in the Daily News and the Unmentionable Murdoch Propaganda Tabloid (I refuse to link to it, so find it for yourself) about “El Barrio Chickengate,” besides the fact that they are at times sloppily written and racist, is that they are in danger of giving thoughtful criticism of the probable […]
Read moreCity Council Speaker: The Rules of the Game
The recent rumblings over Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio’s choice for City Council Speaker, District 8 Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito, have unearthed some of the gnarly underbelly of East Harlem political strife, and raised difficult questions about progressive politics. De Blasio’s involvement in “pushing” Mark-Viverito’s candidacy is being questioned because it apparently doesn’t have a recent precedent. […]
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René Pérez and the Art of Showing Up
About three years ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote something in the New Yorker about how the social media’s role in political activism was overrated, and some people got upset. Let’s not even mention where Egypt is at lately. It might be that Gladwell is one weird-looking dude, and there was a recent study that backed him […]
Read moreBill de Blasio: Hope on Hold
Bill de Blasio’s victory in the mayoral election tonight may seem like a triumph of progressivism and a rejection of outgoing Mayor Bloomberg’s Wall Street agenda, but it is clearly an accident, and it remains to be seen what lies in New York’s future. It’s got to be more than a big red sign that […]
Read moreCall and Response: A Conversation
Let’s have a conversation. About death. It’s been on our minds lately. Everyone seems to be talking about it. This is the culmination of a season where, according to a panelist last night at the Viajero-Borish Dia de los Muertos Collective event at the Julia de Burgos Cultural Center, we have been observing the slow […]
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The Signifying Taco
This GIF is from an ad for Tums I saw the other day. It is apparently trying to demonstrate the way Tums wards off indigestion from spicy Mexican food. But it seems to have a double meaning, perhaps also signifying the subliminal hostility toward Mexicans and other Latin Americans that continue to flow northward and […]
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ED MORALES 