Category: Uncategorized

Dear All:

As friends and colleagues of mine, I wanted to let you know about a great, inspiring upcoming documentary that will be aired on PBS the evening of Feb. 23 titled “A Class Apart.” Some of you may have received cross-postings already about this feature, and if so, then I’m very happy that the word is getting out. Some of you may have also seen the pre-screenings in San Antonio, Austin, Houston, Dallas, NY, SF or DC. For those of you who have not heard of the film or seen it, please read on and share w/ your friends, familia and colleagues.

The film chronicles the U.S. Supreme Court case, Hernandez v. Texas, in which the Court held [unanimously] that Mexican Americans are a distinct class and entitled to protections as a group under the Fourteenth Amendment. But it is much more than just a film about the case and also includes details about the civil rights lawyers who argued the case before the Supreme Court (including the late Gus Garcia and Judge Carlos Cadena, among others) and the tough times Mexican Americans faced in the mid 1900s. The film was co-produced and co-directed by Carlos Sandoval and Peter Miller and is narrated by Edward James Olmos.

I had the pleasure of watching a run of the film before the final edits were made and I can tell you that I truly enjoyed the film from start to finish, and being a Latino civil rights lawyer in San Antonio had little to do w/ it.

I hope you will take the opportunity to enjoy the film and perhaps you can share w/ your friends and familia.

Links:

AMERICAN EXPERIENCE has launched its official A Class Apart page here; Active Voice has the A Class Apart, A Night Together toolkits online here; the filmmakers webpage is here; and we’ve also created an A Class Apart Facebook page, where we’re posting links to reviews and articles, notice about upcoming screenings, and so on.

Hasta luego,

David G. Hinojosa
Staff Attorney
MALDEF

By Nick Braune

According to the McAllen paper, The Monitor, some 5,000 people in the Rio Grande Valley applied for jobs with the Border Patrol in the last four months. That it is not completely surprising since the agency pays almost $50,000 a year and has embarrassingly low entry-level requirements, a high school diploma. (Compare that to other federal enforcement agencies which require a college degree at minimum.)

As I have reported in previous columns, there has also been some question, arising from within their own ranks, about how well the new recruits are being screened and mentored. And The Monitor has also noted lately that there were four Border Patrol officers in the Valley arrested for felonies in 2008. Five, if you count the brother of one of the arrested agents. The brother is also in the Patrol and was arrested in neighboring Zapata County for taking $23,000 in bribes from drug traffickers. Four of the five arrested last year were involved in drug trafficking.

Why is it important to keep an eye on the Border Patrol? Well, it has been beefed up massively as part of the “virtual wall” initiated by the Bush crowd, a trend which probably will continue under Obama and his conflicted Homeland Security nominee, Janet Napolitano. And the Patrol’s rapid growth is also ominous because it is taking place during this unethical period of “criminalizing” immigrant labor violations. (“Search” for several other online articles about the Border Patrol and “Operation Streamline” in the Texas Civil Rights Review site.)

The Patrol has traditionally been hapless, and its mission unclear. Founded in 1924, its intended mission was not really to prevent Mexican immigrants, but European and Asian immigrants, from entering. Also worth noting is that it has always policed the working class – note its conflict recently with the California Day Laborers Organizing Network, which is accusing the Border Patrol of blatant profiling and operating on the basis of a quota. One often hears the chant “Abajo La Migra” in farm worker circles, and it makes sense: founded as part of the Labor Department and staying there for its first 16 years, the Border Patrol has always kept labor it its ken and served the employers.

During the 1930s it remained “poorly staffed, poorly equipped, poorly administered and largely disorganized.” (For this article I’m following Juan Ramon Garcia’s classic book, Operation Wetback, written in 1980.) And the Patrol soon developed an embarrassing reputation, which still survives in Border areas, that it will enforce the laws except when powerful interests, certain growers, don’t want it to. Even the Border Patrol’s clothing was inconsistent (generally lacking the usual military or police uniforms).

But in 1940, the Immigration and Naturalization Services was moved from the Labor Department to the Justice Department. Garcia explains that Roosevelt, when WWII was nearing, was worried about Italians and Germans entering the country, not Mexicans. However, the Patrol also did not even do well in WWII. Why? First, many agents wanted to join the real military and quit, depleting the ranks. But secondly, the government, during the war, was happy to have documented and undocumented Mexicans coming into the U.S. to work, freeing up other workers to go into the military, so the Patrol agents were held in limbo, reinforcing their do-nothing image. And lastly, no doubt it was a little unclear what kind of important national security or law enforcement role the Patrol played.

Although we might think that joining the Justice Department would have been an ego boost for the Patrol, actually it made them feel even more like a second-rate enforcement agency, compared to the famed and focused FBI, for instance. And Garcia notes that the Justice Department did little to promote the Patrol — it is not very glamorous tracking down hungry and unarmed people.

Often half-blindfolding itself, it let in enough undocumented workers to serve the growers’ interests while also making sure there were not too many immigrants. And Garcia says, “It was not unusual for them to allow undocumented workers to roam the Valley and concentrate their efforts on keeping the undocumented away from the industrial jobs up North.” Could this — controlling the flow of labor north — be the origin of today’s “checkpoints,” the ugly, racially profiling, permanent roadblocks on highways about 80 miles north of the Border? (There were no such checkpoints coming south from Canada.)

It was really not until “Operation Wetback,” a racist military operation in 1954, coordinated by General “Jumping Joe” Swing, that the Border Patrol started to get some recognition and status. (Swing, a “professional Mexican hater” who served with General Pershing chasing Pancho Villa decades before, ran a military style sweep and a flashy publicity campaign against “wetbacks.” (Even President Eisenhower used this crude term, although he apparently apologized for it once.) Interestingly, today we hear of “border security” keeping terrorists from coming up from Mexico; in 1954, they warned us of communist infiltrators coming over the border.

General Swing, within a few short months, scattered hundreds of thousands of Mexicans — he bragged it was well over a million — deep into Mexico. Today we would call it “ethnic cleansing.” A thousand people a day were moved in and out of the McAllen detention camp. Swing even used ships, one called The Constitution, to drop immigrants off in Vera Cruz, 800 miles from the Tex-Mex border. (According to Garcia, The Patrol kindly let those who were dropped off have at least three dollars with them when they reached a part of Mexico they had never seen before.)

After participating in that touted 1954 success, the Border Patrol began to be seen as a bit more “respectable,” in the sense that it was said to have been successful in something. The uniforms got spiffier. But it has always been considered seedy, in the pocket of business, and it has had an inferiority complex and a chip on its shoulder; and consequently, when we see rapidly growing numbers of agents in the Rio Grande Valley, with vans and green uniforms and side arms, we feel uneasy.

[Much of this article appeared in the Mid-Valley Town Crier.]

One fact that connects Texas with other states of the “solid South” is a relatively low rate of educational attainment. According to 2007 figures from the Census Bureau, Texas barely qualifies for a rate of 78 percent High School equivalence.

(Source: Cenus Bureau M150. Compare to Obama/McCain electoral map.)

The Texas Workforce Commission’s request for appropriations includes an appeal to support funding of Adult Basic Education (ABE) through the Texas Education Agency (TEA). Says the TWC:

More than one-fourth of the adults who are out of school in Texas have no high school diploma or equivalent; indeed, more than one-ninth of adults who are out of school–1.6 million Texans–completed less than nine years of school. We support ABE as a pathway to employment and as a critical component of the state’s workforce development strategy.

It is our understanding that the Texas Education Agency is submitting an Exceptional Item to significantly expand ABE in Texas, and while we do not know the details of the request, we strongly support enhancing ABE to meet the critical needs in Texas. Existing ABE literacy activities would benefit from complementary skills training services with industry relevance. (Source: TWC Appropriations Request 2010-2011 [pdf format].

Texas doesn’t do as poorly when it comes to college education rates. Another map by the Census Bureau shows that nearly 25 percent of Texas adults have completed a Bachelor’s degree or higher. It’s not the worst showing Still, in order to find higher rates of college completion you have to go North or to California (Source: Census Bureau M1502).

The highest percentage of college education (45.4 percent) resides in Washington, D.C. — gm

By Nick Braune
Mid-Valley Town Crier
by permission

Christmas comes but once a year and indeed we all have so much to be thankful for. God bless us everyone. On the other hand, this column will begin by talking about the economy, which is contracting quarter by quarter.

Although gas prices dropping over the last months may cause a blip in consumer spending this Christmas, an AP story on Christmas Eve by Christopher Rugaber puts the possible blip into perspective. “The economy has been mired in recession since last December, dragged down by declining home prices and clogged credit markets. Consumers have lost trillions of dollars in household wealth as the stock markets and home prices have sunk this year.”

Evidence also suggests a slow recovery, even if the new administration were to have a plan. For instance, unemployment has been climbing; the week ending December 20th shows the highest number of new unemployment claims in 26 years. Recovering from this much unemployment will not be quick.

And turning to the January 2009 Harper’s magazine, just out, we find a major article: “The $10 Trillion Hangover: Paying the price for eight years of Bush”:

“In the eight years since George Bush took office, nearly every component of the U.S. economy has deteriorated. The nation’s budget deficits and debt have reached record levels. Unemployment and inflation are up, and household savings are down. Nearly 4 million manufacturing jobs have disappeared and, not coincidentally, five million more Americans have no health insurance. Consumer debt has almost doubled, and nearly one fifth of American homeowners owe more in mortgage debt than their homes are actually worth. Meanwhile…the final price for the war in Iraq is expected to reach $3 trillion.”

Let me shift from the general economy to a local issue. This local issue, however, presages something which will be true of the nation broadly: as serious economic constriction takes place, the wealthy may begin to whine, but the poor will be the ones suffering.

There have been meetings and public protests this December in the Rio Grande Valley dealing with the University of Texas Medical Branch cutting its services to a McAllen cancer clinic. (Further north, in Galveston, which has taken enough hits lately, UTMB laid off over 2,000 jobs.)

In McAllen, UTMB backed up a big truck and emptied out a small but vital cancer clinic serving thousands of local residents, most of whom are low income and indigent women. Because this was an important clinic, with a staff of eleven people serving the poor, it was disturbing touring the empty offices: a waiting room and fifteen rooms behind it (a lab, examination and x-ray rooms, offices) now all stripped. Additionally, in their hurry to move, UTMB may not have been careful with medical records.

State Senator Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa called the Texas System “callous” in its recent decisions, and the Texas Faculty Association said that the Regents have always known that the narrowly focused cancer clinic for indigent women couldn’t be a money maker. But to get comparable service, the poor now would have to go to Austin and other points for treatment. The closure will be “a virtual death sentence” for some of the women. (Many undocumented women are afraid to go north because of the checkpoints.)

I interviewed Ann Cass, the Chair of the Board of El Milagro, the center housing the UTMB cancer clinic:

Braune: Any comments for our readers?

Cass: I am very concerned not only with the decision to close this cancer clinic but with the manner in which it was done. It seems absurd that a clinic that was given a grant to increase the numbers of women participating in the cancer clinic two years ago would now be closing its doors to these very women. There is nowhere else in the Valley for women to go for some of these services. No communication was given to them regarding how to access their records if they are even able to find another physician to treat them.

Braune: Is State Senator Hinojosa right that UTMB has become “callous”?

Cass: Yes, it is a sad state of affairs that the University system chose to pull the carpet out from under the feet of the poorest of the poor, in an area that is medically underserved, that has no public hospital closer than 350 miles, and leaves no other choices for treatment for women with dysplasia. My only hope is that the El Milagro Clinic will be able to find resources to duplicate some of the services if the University won’t re-consider their decision. We also will need cooperation from the board certified OB/GYN specialists in the area, particularly those with LEEP certification.

Braune: Thus arises a New Year’s resolution for the Valley.

Texas Faculty Association blogged this entry. Thank you, TFA.