The Latino and Latina Roundtable is being asked to help in identifying people that have been affected in the delivery health care due to language barriers and miscommunication (see the message below). If you can help in this effort, please contact Matthew A. Maldonado, AFSCME 3930, at 1-619-206-4898 or Yvonne Olivares-Maldonado at yolivares@udwa.org
Internationally recognized Peace Activist Cindy Sheehan, mother of Casey Sheehan who was killed in Iraq, is beginning the Tour de Peace from Californaia(at her son Casey’s gravesite in Vacaville) to Washington DC- on bike!
HuffPost Latino Voices
The Associated Press dropped the term “illegal immigrant” from its style guide Tuesday, handing a victory to immigration rights advocates and Latino media organizations who have pressured the news media for years to abandon a phrase that many view as offensive.
The news was first announced in a statement from AP’s Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Kathleen Carrol on the wire service’s blog, who said the change resulted from conversations with people who opposed the term, as well as a commitment to eschew labels.
“Our goal always is to use the most precise and accurate words so that the meaning is clear to any reader anywhere,” Carrol said.
AP will also avoid sweeping labels like “undocumented” or “unauthorized” used by some in the news media who avoid the term “illegal immigrant.”
“Except in direct quotes essential to the story, use illegal only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant,” the style guide update says. “Except in direct quotations, do not use the terms illegal alien, an illegal, illegals or undocumented.”
Instead, the AP styleguide instructs reporters to specify how someone entered the country. Those brought to the country as minors “should not be described as having immigrated illegally,” the guide says.
The National Association of Hispanic Journalists first pushed the news media to stop referring to immigrants without lawful immigration status as “illegal” in 2006, arguing that the term criminalizes people rather than their actions. Almost half of likely Latino voters find the term “illegal immigrant” offensive, according to a Fox News Latino poll published last year.
The NAHJ was later joined by the Applied Research Center and its publication ColorLines, which pressured the media to “Drop the I-Word,” calling it a “racially charged slur used to dehumanize and discriminate against immigrants and people of color regardless of migratory status.”
But pressure to drop the term “illegal immigrant” ramped up last year, as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and immigrant rights activist Jose Antonio Vargas and ABC/Univision News openly challenged the New York Times and the Associated Press to change their stylebooks. At the time, the AP said it would restrict its use of the term illegal immigrant without dropping it entirely, while the New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan said she continued to view it as the appropriate word choice.
“It is clear and accurate; it gets its job done in two words that are easily understood,” Sullivan wrote in October. “The same cannot be said of the most frequently suggested alternatives – ‘unauthorized,’ ‘immigrants without legal status,’ ‘undocumented.'”
Vargas welcomed AP’s decision to strike the term entirely.
“This was inevitable. This is not about being politically correct,” Vargas said in an interview with Poynter.
The AP’s new policy leaves the New York Times increasingly isolated. Several news organizations, particularly in television, have abandoned the term “illegal immigrant” — an editorial decision likely prompted by networks’ efforts to attract the growing U.S. Hispanic market. CNN, ABC News, and NBC News have all excised the term in recent years, according to ABC/Univision News. Fox News Latino, a digital property of the Fox News empire, uses the term “undocumented” to refer to those without legal immigration status.
The Huffington Post uses the term “undocumented immigrant” to refer to those without lawful immigration status.
UPDATED: The New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan writes on her blog that the paper is also considering changing its stylebook. She writes:
The Times, for the past couple of months, has also been considering changes to its stylebook entry on this term and will probably announce them to staff members this week. (A stylebook is the definitive guide to usage, relied upon by writers and editors, for the purpose of consistency.)
From what I can gather, The Times’s changes will not be nearly as sweeping as The A.P.’s.
Read the rest of the explanation at the New York Times.
This post was updated at 5:10 p.m. on Tuesday, April 2, 2013.
Nopal Award Recipient
Dr. Jose Zapata Calderon,
Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Chicano Studies, Pomona Pitzer
Tuna de Nopal recipient
Roxanne Mendez, ‘04
Executive Director, The Riordan Programs
UCLA Anderson School of Management
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Kellogg West Conference Room, 6:00 P.M.
Cal Poly Pomona
RSVP by April 8th by calling (909) 869-2963 or
Visit http://hildasolis2013.eventbrite.com/# or
Email alumni@csupomona.edu — with Roxanne Mendez and Jose Z. Calderon.
This is to let you know of the 20th Anniversary of taking students to work and carry out educational advocacy with the farm workers. We had an exhilarating Alternative Spring Break in La Paz that included on Saturday: a service at Cesar Chavez’s gravesite, students making UFW flags and posters for an action on immigrant rights, carrying out service projects that included cutting weeds at a peace memorial site, an evening dinner (with Paul Chavez and key leaders of the UFW and Cesar Chavez Foundation) that featured former alumni who had been part of the Alternative Spring Break in the last 20 years, the presentation of a 20th anniversary plaque to the Chavez Family, and a presentation by the La Paz hip hop group that includes the son of Dolores Huerta. On Sunday, the events included: a visit to Radio Campesina and a presentation by the grandson of Cesar Chavez (who is also named Cesar Chavez and is one of the directors of the radio station); an action with signs and flags in the Latino section of Bakersfield (the streets of Mt. Vernon and Nile) where we passed out 800 educational leaflets on the need for immigration reform (with Melissa Ayala and Maria Rodriguez taking the lead in gathering over 100 signatures in support of driver’s licenses for undocumented) and support for a march on Sunday, March 24th (covered by 4 different televisions stations and by local news media); and led on a tour of 40 acres, Agbayani, and other historic sites of the UFW in Delano by Marc Grossman. We had a really good dinner at a restaurant in Delano run by a former farm worker who supports the UFW. On Monday, the students made very moving teatro presentations of their experiences to farm worker organizers, staff, and community at a special luncheon in La Paz (Keene, CA). The place was packed like Saturday night — and especially attended by the grandsons of Cesar Chavez and some farm workers who came in from Arvin just for the teatros.
Here is some of the coverage:
Local leaders rallying for immigration change
An announcement on Youtube:
And an article with a picture of some of my students holding signs:
Francisco Sola writes:
demagogue: a political leader in a democracy who appeals to the prejudices and ignorance rather than by using rational argument in order to gain power
Marco Rubio… asserted, without offering any evidence, the president is opposed to free enterprise. He spent much of his time attacking that government programs cannot help address problems of economic inequality. But then he turned around and acknowledged that his own family has benefited from government programs such as Medicare, Social Security and federal financial aid.
The president can use an executive order to stop the unjust dividing of families — undocumented brothers and sisters — who contribute more than $70 billion to the economy and, through remittances, have held up the economies of other countries in Latin America (such as Mexico and El Salvador)
Do you know the quota for number of deportations each year? It’s the thing people aren’t talking about in immigration.
By the end of today, 1,100 more people will be deported.
Mr. President, actions speak louder than words. its time to announce a suspension on deportations.
With the promotion of standardized tests and quantitative methods that evaluate the performances of both teachers and students, there is a diminishing of the space for the 
creation of democratic bridges between what is being learned in the classroom and the challenges of democratic decision-making in our communities. This trend is characterized by the growth of for-profit charter schools and companies that are redefining the meaning of education.
Special Report: Class Struggle – How charter schools get students they want | Reuters
With the growth of a global economy, there is the need for a type of educational system that promotes civic engagement as a means of building new models toward a democratic society.
There is a trend emerging in our present educational system that wants to take us back to the days of reproducing individuals to fit a more authoritarian philosophy. This trend seeks to promote a managerial “banking” system where the power of disseminating knowledge is being transferred to the needs of the business and political establishments. This shift fits into the early 20th century industrial model of schools where students were socialized in assembly-like rows to be taught the status quo and not to be heard from. Continue reading