Tag: Mexico

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The INE (Mexico’s National Electoral Institute)

 

The 2nd Mexican presidential debate was organized by INE (National Electoral Institute or the Instituto Nacional Electoral). It is an autonomous public organization in Mexico responsible for organizing federal elections.

I consider INE a prime example of Mexico’s progress in its political development because it is chartered to function independently of the president, congress, and the nation’s political parties; furthermore, it regulates funding for elections. As a result, tycoons and other powerful individuals cannot easily influence elections the way they do in the U.S., and the exorbitant spending that has come to mark our elections is kept under control by our neighbor to the south.

The INE has raised a lot of hackles (as you might imagine!) but what an intelligent way to do elections!

Please click the back arrow to return to my impressions of the 2nd Mexican Presidential Debate.

 

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I gave my last lecture today…

I gave my last lecture today for my “KEYS IN UNDERSTANDING MEXICO” course, at the Lifetime Learning Center in Lake City, Seattle, to retirees, mostly. In evaluation forms they reported to have all loved it. It seems I became a minor sensation. Wow!
After I retired from the University of Washington (14 years ago!) I became heavily involved working with my wife, Barbara Deane, at our GilDeane Group offices, doing training and consulting, some of which I really liked. When all that came to a lull, I began writing my recent book (We Became Mexican American) but also thought of looking for some part-time teaching.
It was then that I discovered that if I did that, I’d be preventing some newly minted Ph.D. person from getting a foot in the door wherever I applied. I knew that it takes gobs of time, energy and money to get that darned degree, so I said to myself, “No. I won’t compete with them.” So I just continued with my writing and several years slipped by.
Having finished my long written pieces (including the translation of We Became Mexican American--and I’m looking for a publisher), I decided I needed to keep my old brain busy. Why? I was forgetting too many words, here and there. So, I started worrying about it, and said to myself, “I need to teach again,” to keep my mind from going dark.
This is how I found the Lifetime Learning Center 15 minutes from my home and where I offered to teach the course mentioned above. The director said, “Yes, we’d be pleased to have you,” and so I committed myself to 8 classes, one per week. I started in April and now, its over! I’m so glad I did it, and I’ll most probably teach the course again, next Spring. They certainly want me to.
My students told me they learned a lot (they too wanted to keep their brains busy). Thank goodness. So I’ll give some more lectures. ¡Qué bueno, pues!

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December 12th: Dia de la Virgen de Guadalupe

Today is December 12th, a day in which the entire Spanish language world pays tribute to La Virgen de Guadalupe. Special masses were being said today in Buenos Aires, Madrid, and Mexico City. And, of course, in San Fernando, California, my hometown—and, nowadays, here in Seattle too.

December 12th was hard to overlook, when I was a boy, because we rose early in the morning, before dark, to attend “Las Mañanitas,” sung full throat by hundreds of Mexicans jammed into our Santa Rosa Church. We sang “Las Mañanitas” because it was her birthday. When I was in my 20s, mariachi musicians became accepted as part of the musical tributes, which had been entirely religious up to that point. I remember attending a December 12th mass in Tijuana in the early 1970s, when I was in a very emotional period, and feeling gratified and comforted by it. I’ve witnessed the overwhelmingly exotic December 12th festivities in the famous Basilica in Mexico City many times too.

There is a fascinating story that gave rise to the culto, or the sum total of devotional happenings, around La Virgen de Guadalupe. Legend has it that she appeared about 15 or so years after Hernan Cortes, in the company of his fellow Spaniards, conquered Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital. It was a bloody conquest, of course, and a spiritual one too: it was Catholicism over Aztec paganism, which had included human sacrifice. Many people heralded the Spanish victory with mystical significance even though the winners were no more than a bunch of bawdy and rough-hewn Iberians who didn’t know what they were getting into.

The basic point here is that the legendary appearances, which form the core of the culto, served to solidify the conquest psychologically. Historical studies show that the subjugated Indians became more willing to abandon their ancient beliefs and begin to accept Spanish Christian ones, after word spread about the Guadalupe appearances.

There is a mountain of historical information about this, but suffice to say here that December 12th always tugs at my heart and soul even though my religious fervor cooled long ago. Nevertheless, I still remember and pine for those old feelings. They’re so comforting.

 

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We Became Mexican American, a book

What Trump’s pardon of Joe Arpaio means for Latinos: “We mean little to President Trump.”

President Trump’s pardoning of Joe Arpaio, the former Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, represents a slap in the face to the Latinos of the United States, clear and simple. Everything indicates that our president did this with total impunity and without a trace of shame or regret. We, Latinos, mean little to him so he shoved us aside when he cancelled the criminal contempt case against Arpaio, as widely reported. That he did it early in his administration, an exceptional occurrence as many commentators have noted, simply underscores my observation: we mean little or nothing to him. (His ending of the DACA program on September 5, 2017–Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals–illustrates this quite clearly: he didn’t take a lead on it, he passed the fate of these young culturally assimilated Americans on to Congress. No one can call that leadership.

Why is Arpaio an issue?

Everyone in Arizona knows that as sheriff of Arizona’s most important county, Joe Arpaio brazenly went out of his way to tear every shred of dignity from the Latin Americans, mostly Mexican, he accused of entering the country illegally, men, women and children. It seems he enjoyed doing it, according to reports. It is apparent that like his protector in the White House, he considers all migrants, who cross the border without permission, as sub-humans and criminals. According to The New Yorker, up to 2009 only, his department cost the State of Arizona more than forty three million dollars for settling lawsuits that alleged mistreatment of the lowly migrants, and even their wrongful deaths. He mocked them by putting them in gaudy colored uniforms, fed them two meals a day that cost less than fifty cents each, and even marched them publicly in chain gangs, women too. His deliberate scare-‘em Gestapo tactics generated more than twenty two hundred court cases, exceeding the worst raids of undocumented workers in the 1950s, some of which I witnessed.

All this is against the moral standards we Americans have always considered fitting and proper, but Mr. Trump turned a blind eye, insisted Arpaio was a “good man”, and pardoned him.

Clearly, the Trump administration is anti-Mexican, anti-Latino, and anti-immigrant. And, the 30% of Americans who continue to support him are too, apparently.

Should we worry about this?

Should we, Latinos of the United States, who don’t have to worry about getting picked up and deported care about this? Of course, we should, if for no other reason than the fact that the hapless deportees look like our ancestors, they look like us. They speak as our descendants spoke, they eat what they ate, they worship as they did. They are as we were. In addition, you and I know that most of them crossed the border to find work, keep their heads down, and send a few pennies back home.

To call them “criminals” is repulsive and immoral. They may have broken a law to get into the U.S. but that does not give any American official license to diminish their humanity. Arpaio swaggers about it according to reports. His tactics, his demeanor, and his penchant for publicity remind us of the black-booted Nazis persecuting Jews in the 1940s (he would have made a good Sturmmann or Storm Trooper).

What can we do?

We can speak up. We can make known our contempt to our friends personally, and through Facebook, Twitter and other social media. We can ask our pastors to help raise awareness in our communities.

We can ask our community organizations to help spread the word about Trump’s anti-immigration stance. There are groups like CHIRLA (Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles), and the NCLR (National Council for La Raza).

Get their address and send them a note with $5 or $10. You surely must know a DACA youngster (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, also known as “The Dreamers”), the ones who were brought to the U.S. from Mexico without documentation; they are being persecuted by Mr. Trump and his ilk (all this sounds so Nazi like). Talk to the young Dreamer; ask how you can support their cause. To have them deported is immeasurably immoral, a stain on America!

Most importantly, YOU CAN REGISTER TO VOTE. NEXT TIME MAKE SURE YOU GO OUT AND VOTE! OUR ONLY LINE OF DEFENSE IS POLITICAL! We can vote. Let us stand up against Mr. Trump and the Joe Arpaio’s who support him.

¡Si se puede!

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MEXICAN CARDINAL CONDEMNS TRUMP’S BORDER WALL AS IMMORAL AND BIGOTED

The head of the Mexican Catholic Church condemned President Trump’s proposed border wall in the harshest words I’ve seen so far. He also blasted any Mexican company willing to help build the wall, and he also threw a strong jab at Mexican government officials for not speaking more forcefully on the matter.

A March 26, 2017 article in a leading Mexico City daily printed the hard-hitting words of Norberto Rivera Carrera, Cardinal and Archbishop of Mexico, condemning President Trump’s wall project as “immoral” and “bigoted.” He said that “Trump’s wall can only nurture discrimination and serve to subjugate millions of people.”

The article in El Universal referred, first, to President Trump allotting 2 billion dollars to build the wall, and, second, to Mexican contractors announcing their interest in bidding for it. Archbishop Rivera condemned the move by Mexican entrepreneurs in no uncertain terms: “It would be immoral for any [Mexican] company intending to invest in the wall of that zealot Trump, but more than anything else, the shareholders and owners ought to be considered traitors of the nation.” These are strong words indeed!

El Universal quoted from an editorial entitled “The Betrayal of the Nation,” printed in a church weekly by the name of Desde la Fe, issued on the same date.

The Cardinal added that the companies justifying their actions as “job producing” was nothing more than bogus; what they want, he stated, is to profit from the “shameful wall.” He lamented businessmen in Mexico who would collaborate in such a bigoted enterprise. “Taking part in a project that affronts human dignity is to shoot yourself in the foot.”

He also lambasted the government’s pussy-footing about it by parroting that the United States may do whatever it wants on its side of the border. But, “it is the usual short-sighted people who cannot see that the wall represents a threat that can only weaken the relations between the two countries and endanger peace.”

Referring to President Trump’s drive to deport undocumented workers from the United States, the church leader considered it “showing off the power to terrorize, by deporting people who have not committed a crime or faulted a regulation, according to law.”

Regarding the wall, he also declared that it “represents a monument to intimidation and silencing, it symbolizes xenophobic hate that seeks to drown out the voices of ill paid and ill-treated workers, of families who lack protection and of people who are violated.”

The idea of a wall represents “a departure from the noblest desires of mankind[; it is a retreat] which has brought much shedding of blood; it is a prelude to the destruction of democratic values and social rights.” He also added, “The wall represents the power of a country that is considered good, [yet endowed] with a manifest destiny to overwhelm a nation that it considers perverted and corrupt: Mexico.”

–Carlos B. Gil

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We Became Mexican American, a book

 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: July 1, 2016

VOTED “BEST BIOGRAPHY”

AUTHOR TELLS OF THE HARD RESOLVE

HIS MEXICAN IMMIGRANT FAMILY NEEDED

TO SETTLE AND THRIVE IN AMERICA

 KENMORE, WA.  We Became Mexican American narrates the story of a family emigrating from Mexico to the United States in the 1920s. Author and family member, Carlos B. Gil, tells how his folks settled against all odds to pursue the American Dream in southern California. This award-winning book offers you the following:

      It reviews what the Latino immigration experience represented for the author’s family,

            It explores the cultural shock of arriving in the U.S. for the first time,

                        including the difficulties of raising children in a new culture,

            It unveils the cultural conflicts inside the family as the children began growing up in America,

            It describes living in a Mexican barrio near Los Angeles, California, and it

            It discusses the personal process of slowly becoming Mexican American. 

We Became Mexican American was awarded “BEST BIOGRAPHY” in two book competitions in the United States in 2013. And, in 2015 it won an “HONORABLE MENTION in Biography/Autobiography” at the 2015 Book Festival in Amsterdam (The Netherlands). The 2013 honors came from The 15th Annual International Latino Book Award ceremony held at the Cervantes Institute in New York City, May 30, 2013: 1) Best Biography in English and 2) Best Latino Focused Work. On March 8th his book also won Best Biography at the 2012-2013 cycle of the Los Angeles Book Festival for independent authors and publishers. As a result, his book “sits” at “The Table of Honor,” digitally speaking, which you can visit at: http://tableofhonor.com/?product_cat=biographyautobiography ).

For more information see http://www.facebook.com/WeBecameMexicanAmerican.

To obtain your own copy, go to:

barnesandnoble.com, amazon.com, or special ordering through your neighborhood bookstore.

For review copies or ordering multiple copies go to:

http://diversitycentral.com/diversity_store/books.php,

or send an email to orders@diversitycentral.com

The author is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Washington.

We Became Mexican American: How Our Immigrant Family Survived to Pursue the American Dream

was published in 2012 and revised in 2015.

Trade Paperback; $18.99; 422 pages; ISBN 978-0-9899519-1-3

Trade Hardback; $26.99; 422 pages; ISBN 978-0-9899519-06

E-book, $3.99: ISBN 978-0-9899519-2-0

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ABOUT THIS BLOG

Hi folks.

This is a blog about things Latin American: the people of Latin America, their politics, their economic concerns, their culture, and so on. Mexico and things Mexican will get the lion’s share. My blog, as it evolves, will also take a look at the migration of Latin American people to the United States pausing to explain why they moved, where, and how they settled in America.  I also plan to discuss American politics from my Latino point of view.

My name is Carlos B. Gil. I’m a Mexican American and I’m releasing this blog to share some of my pensamientos, or thoughts, with you, reflections which tend to sweep over the U.S. Mexican border more often than not. At other times, however, my ruminations will also swing over other borders as well.

The general focus here is Latin America because I studied the region for over 40 years. I’ve been connected to Latin America almost all of my life; I lived there, as an American; I worked there; and some of my children were even born there. For several decades I also offered classes at the University of Washington about this part of the world to many young people interested in the history and civilization of that quarter of the globe, including its culture and music.

Truth be told, ya soy un viejo (I’m an old man now), and my many years of continuing to think about this region rewarded me with an understanding that few possess. And, so I want to share it, now that I find myself in the twilight of my years, yet fortunate enough to continue to reason clearly and be able to utilize the amazing World Wide Web to broadcast such ponderings unashamedly.

As mentioned above, Mexico will receive most of my attention because I was trained as a Mexicanist, a scholar specializing on Mexico. This orientation was due, in part, to the fact that my grandmother walked away from her adobe home in west central Mexico, with my mother in tow, a hundred years ago, in order to immigrate to the United States. So, my mother’s earliest recollections about her upbringing sparked my attention to the archaic world they left behind, my father having left separately at about the same time.

My parent’s experience as immigrants from Mexico, settling in southern California in the 1930s, also gave rise to my regard for the subject of Mexican immigration. I poured most of my knowledge on this topic into my most recent book (We Became Mexican American: How Our Immigrant Family Survived to Pursue the American Dream) to which I’ll refer in various places in this blog.

But I expect I’ll share my thoughts about other parts of the world too and our relations there, and here is why I feel you can give me some credence on this account too. My early study of Latin America coincided with the rise of our attention to “The Third World,” a 1970’s term that referred to the countries squeezed in between the industrial and capitalist nations like ours and those herded into the socialist bloc. Nowadays we refer to these countries as the “developing world,” some developing more than others, as I’ll make the case. So, as I gained knowledge and insight of Latin America, it turned out I was doing the same for the developing world whose connections and similarities I plumbed as the years went by.

I will also take the liberty of making known my views concerning our own country, the United States of America. The election of Donald Trump as President compels me to do so. You’ll see my comments progressively as my blog develops and as the Trump administration lurches forward. In any case, this is another example of the “other borders” over which my thoughts will run on this blog, this one arching all the way to Washington, D. C.

Aside from all this, please know I made my home in the Pacific Northwest almost a life time ago but I was born in San Fernando, near Los Angeles, California, and all of my formal educational training is U.S.-American. In the end I’m an American—a Mexican American—and this fact ought to give my pensamientos a special tinge of their own.

My hope is that the information you encounter on my website will inform you and enlighten you. That’s the whole purpose here. You may differ with me, of course, and so you’re invited to respond.

P.S. The photo above, of the many men with hats, is a prized one for me, thanks to the New York Times. These are braceros, the men whom our government contracted to harvest our fruits and vegetables during World War II, and years after, so that our own U.S.-born men could go to war or help in the manufacturing of war materials. This is how we’ve worked with Mexico over the years and they with us; our links with Mexico remain vital to this day even as they are being sadly handled by Mr. Trump.