Latino Rebels' Open Letter to Fusion

photo: latinorebels.com

Two days after Univision and ABC's Fusion made its debut, the people over at Latino Rebels posted an open letter  to the new channel.

The letter also comes two days after the Morning Show Mash-Up with Good Morning America and Despierta America,

The popular Latino-based website offered their best wishes as well as some advice to Fusion. Latino Rebels also hinted towards their stance on Fusion's decision to market itself to all millennials, instead of solely Latino millennials as the channel originally intended to do.

The opening of the letter reads:

"We are rooting for you guys, ever since you you had said a long time ago that you were going to be a new channel for young Latino millenials. That was cool. Somewhere, that message went from Latino millenials to millenials in general, and even though we scratch our heads about that one, we still wish you tons of luck with the new channel. Having you guys succeed would send a message to the rest of the media landscape that this new multicultural world matters. We admire you for that."

While I agree with Rebels when they say that "that this new multicultural world matters", I also agree with one of the comments on their post that says:

"Fusion is fucking confused....they won't last too long...they suffer from the same exact thing Mun2 and Sitv suffered from. They have NO IDEA who they are or who they are trying to service."

As I said on my last post, it's great that Fusion is bringing Latino interests to a more English-speaking audience, but it may encounter some problems in standing out from other entertainment-news content on television. If it's not sure about who its main audience is, how will they know what content to provide?

It's millennial Latino focus is what made the channel interesting, but if they change their aim then surely other things are bound to change as well. And this is where they may fall back on the Latino interests and audience. I think young Latinos in particular need a news source that appeals specifically to them as English-speaking Latinos, and if Fusion gears away from that, they may not last very long.

 

Fusion: The Future of Television?

photo: fusion

A new Univision-ABC channel called Fusion premiers tonight. Unfortunately, I can't check it out for myself, but I have read a couple of articles that talk about the "Latino-aimed" news and entertainment channel.

Fusion claims that its target audience is not just Latinos or Hispanics, but really anyone in the millennial generation that might not find other news channels as appealing. The only obvious aspect of Fusion that is geared towards Latinos is news anchor Jorge Ramos. Other than that, the content on their website seems pretty inclusive to many racial and ethnic groups.

The channel also has more entertainment-based material with things such as: "an animated satire show, comedians taking on sports, a puppet talk show, and an evening program on sex and politics." So if the news doesn't get people in, the entertainment will.

For Latinos, the only local news channels available are Telemundo and Univision, both in Spanish. In comparison with what Fusion has to offer, the two news channels do seem more geared towards an older, more traditional audience.

But does this new channel actually offer millennial Latinos, and millennials of other groups, something worthy of news? Will there be a good balance? Or is this just another MTV-like channel that makes entertainment its main attraction, with the news in the background?

From their website, it looks as if Fusion is off to an okay start. They have a piece on Obama and the NSA scandal, and an interview with Joe Arpaio about his Tent City prison. They also have sections that focus on immigration, women's rights, and justice.

Regardless of how this new channel will keep its audience—mainly through entertainment or news— I think it's interesting that the channel sort of marks where we are as a people in the United States. Inclusion. To have a channel in English that tries to capture the Latino audience is like the start of a beautiful friendship, even if one of the main objectives is money. Isn't is always?

I hope this new fused channel is a sign that Latinos, and other ethnic and racial groups, will be included more in the English-speaking media.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/10/27/3715419/just-a-dash-of-latino-flavor-accents.html#storylink=cpy

No More Old School

photo: samantha g.

Ted Cruz recently made some comments about the Affordable Care Act requiring employers to cover birth control. Cruz called them "abortifacients". His comments got me thinking about how Latinos feel about contraceptives in general.

Here is a student project from students of the University of Michigan that does a pretty good job of covering the basics of Latinos' beliefs about sex and contraceptives. Although the project focuses on teen pregnancy— a pretty big issue in the Latin community —it touches on what many in the community call an "old school" way of thinking.

"Old school" ways of thinking include beliefs such as: a woman can only leave her family when she gets married, women should wait to have sex until marriage, and so on. I think a lot of these beliefs stem from a mix of religious and social beliefs that have influenced generations of Latinos.

While I may not be an expert of Catholicism, I do know enough to comfortably say that it has definitely had a huge role in the lack of contraceptive use among Latinos.

I think it's bullshit for Latinos to blame Catholicism on unplanned pregnancies. Contraceptives are the only realistic way to avoid getting pregnant, and maybe to avoid abortions all together.  That last part is just a thought, though.

Those old, outdated beliefs have resulted in a lack of communication about sexual and reproductive health between older and younger generations.

This is perhaps why teen pregnancies are so common in the Latino community. Of course, there are always other factors to this, not just one.

It doesn't look that bleak for the future, however. As the student project points out, there is some hope. As younger generations become more assimilated into American culture, their knowledge of sexual and reproductive health improves. The more we are educated, the safer we will be and the stronger our communities will be.

We are living in a time of change. Those outdated beliefs are more sexist than they are helpful, and I hope that all Latinos—women especially—take the time to learn about how to protect themselves, not only from pregnancy but from STDs.

I hope my thoughts aren't too rash, but I honestly think that birth control is important. I'd hate to think that our community and our people are stuck on an old way of thinking that does not help us move forward as a people.

Check out the Latinos for Planned Parenthood Facebook Page for more information!

Multiple Identities

photo: ivn.u

The Chicago writer Raul Dorantes gave a great guest lecture for my ACP class last week. He read from one of his many essays, and unfortunately I cannot recall the name of it. What he spoke about touched a lot on the complications of identity. His lecture reminded me so much of my own experiences, and the experiences the Dreamers' experiences. Coming from one country to another isn't just a physical movement, it is a mental and emotional one.

Dorantes spoke mainly about the Mexican immigrant experience, but he related it to any other immigrant of any country. He argued that what the immigrant wants the most is to one day return to his homeland, the land that saw his creation. However, the return to the homeland gets complicated when you consider the fact that for years and years "home" has been the U.S. So returning to the homeland after so long actually creates a lost feeling for the immigrant. 


This is where the identity part comes in that interested me so much.


He says that knowing where you belong, who you are, are things that the immigrant questions. These questions often get complicated and can go unanswered for many immigrants. They can't still be Mexican if they live in the U.S., yet even when in Mexico they feel they are not Mexican but American.


It's such a complicated thing to think about that I even question "What's the point?"


The point is that even though this identity is based on a nationality, it is nonetheless an identity that is very real. A fellow student in my class gave a great example that I think exemplifies what the purpose of these national and cultural identities is.



The student was born in Russian and is Jewish, and in his community, is one of few immigrants his age. He explained that depending on who he is around, his identity changes. When he is with a group of other Russians he is Russian. But this gets broken down when you consider what kinds of Russians he is around. 

When he is with a group of younger Russians that are not immigrants he is a foreigner, a "real" Russian. When he is in a group of older Russian immigrants, he is seen as a young assimilated American. And when he is among other Russians, his Jewish faith also sets him apart. He claims that all of these identities are a part of him because he plays a role in all of them, even if he doesn't want to. 

And I think that's what most Latino immigrants do. Within their cultural community, they are Mexican, they are Colombian, they and Venezuelan. But outside of those communities, they are American. They have to be in order to function in the society. 

So I guess his lecture really got me to think of identity as something more than just what a person is, but what a person can do, or what they are allowed to do.


Unfortunately, these identities can get many Latinos labeled as "others" and can hinder their advancement in any area of their lives. Any drop of non-American can have great consequences. Promotions can be withheld, intelligence can be challenged, deportations can occur. 


Is a multitude of identities such a bad thing? 

*Midterm Exam*

Douglas Rushkoff makes a lot of arguments in his Program or Be Programed: Ten Commands for the Digital Age. His main argument is that digital technologies as they exist today have a lot of biases. He argues that we need to be aware of these biases so that we can use technology as it was intended to—to have it serve us—instead of letting technology use us. To go along with this, Rushkoff has his ten commands to serve as sub-arguments. They are:

1.     Time- He argues that we should not be “always on”; we should learn to set the technology down a bit.

2.     Place: He argues that digital media is biased toward dislocation and that we should not let this affect our real in-person interactions.

3.     Choice: he argues that technologies only give us a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ choice and that it is possible for us to chose none of the above.

4.     Complexity: He argues that the Internet takes away the complexity of the actual learning since people can “cherry-pick” what they want to know; it is biased toward the reduction in complexity.

5.     Scale: He argues that digital technologies create abstractions of real entities that exist in the world, which can lead to s disconnection between the “here and now”.

6.     Identity: He argues that the anonymity of the online world leads to a disconnection between our real-life and online actions and consequences.

7.     Social: He argues that people should not sell their friends, that we should keep with the internet’s bias toward contact and not let it become into a popularity contest.

8.     Fact: He argues that the internet is biased towards truth, and that it is the truth that is the easiest way to accomplish things.

9.     Openness: He argues that people should be shared and not stolen for personal or monetary gain.

And finally…

10.  Purpose: He argues that people should learn how to program the code that creates these technologies.

The evidence he offers isn’t very “factual” most of the time; it doesn’t point to a specific date or time. His evidence is, however, pretty logical in some ways. For example, when arguing for Time, he talks about digital technologies biased toward asynchronicity. He talks about online conversations and activities and how one can choose when to get out of it, and when to pick it back up. Although there aren’t any real numerical facts in his evidence it is logical to think of the internet as a come and go type of thing that, as he argues, does make people be “on” more than they really need to.

Other evidence Rushkoff provides can be seen as a bit more factual. For example, when he talks about Choice, he talks about a digital CD and a record. He says that the “analog recording is a physical impression, while the digital recoding is a series of choices”. For any music junkies, this evidence can make perfect sense. The record’s quality is in a sense authentic while the CD is represented in numbers, making choices about “when those seconds are changing from one to the next”.  In other words, the record just is while the CD makes choices, much how most digital technologies make choices for us by limiting what we can choose. I think this supports his argument and when applied to the choices we make on our daily internet usage it rings even more true. Most of the time we are are given a choice of black or white, yes or no, right or wrong. But the real world doesn't work that way.

One of his arguments and the evidence for it do not really make a whole lot of sense. He sort of sums up the whole book in his last command when he says that people should learn how to program the programs in order to take control of the technologies’ biases whether they are for or against something. Rushkoff says that by becoming programmers, “we can shape the world any way we see fit”. This is not the most logical argument. There are plenty of non-programmer people that use technologies in a way that do not fall victim to the biases he speaks of. You can use digital technologies for a purpose without having to know all the codes. I think what we are doing in class with our blogs is a good example of this. I don’t think there are many people in our class that can call themselves programmers, yet we have all managed to create something. And although there are many templates and codes that were used to create the look of our blogs, the content is from our minds—purely our choice—and not that of a computer.

I wouldn’t say all of Rushkoff’s arguments are valid, but they are persuasive. He touches on a lot of what I would call real world examples to get his readers to understand his arguments. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t. However, what bothers me about some of his arguments are the presumptions they make about where technology and people are going. He seems to say that unless we control the programs, we are doomed to be programmed by all the digital technologies around us. We will hardly interact in real life, we will never be able to read a book in its entirety, and so on. While I do agree that technology causes a lot of problems, I don’t think we need to control if and know how to make it in order to use it properly. I think we just have to remember one of the commands that Rushkoff has—that we all have the choice to choose nothing. We are all capable of making the right choices when it comes to using digital technologies.

This is What Latinos Look Like

Ronald Beltran- El Salvador

Claudia Vanessa Espinosa- Ecuador and Nicaragua

Ashleyann Bermicilia Sanabria- Puerto Rico

Yorlan Machin- Cuba

Elizabeth Corea Sanders- Nicaragua

Ivonne Amaya- Mexico

I recently read a piece by the Huffington Post Latino Voices  that answered a couple of FAQ regarding Latinos. The questions are mostly related to the idea of race and ethnicity as they relate to the Hispanic vs. Latino issue. The question that intrigued me the most, however, was question number five, which asked why so many Latinos are brown.

This is a loaded question in the Latino community. As in the Black community, lighter skin is sometimes more desirable than darker skin.That goes in a little deeper than what I'm trying at get at here, though.

The point is that whether you are a light skinned or dark skinned Latino, you are still Latino. No amount of color is going to change that—at least it shouldn't.

What does end up happening to many Latinos, however, is that their identity is assumed based on their skin color. Almost every brown Latino is assumed to be Mexican, while almost every light skinned Latino is assumed to be white, or at least half white.

The reality is this: Latinos come in all shades and they comes from a variety of countries. Please don't assume that every brown person is Mexican just because it's the closest non-white country to the U.S. Sometimes these assumptions are completely innocent; some people really don't know about most of the other countries that exist below Mexico. Hopefully this post clears some things up, as obvious as they may seem to some people.

Above are pictures of some great people I know, and they kindly let me use a photo of them to show the variety of skin colors and nationalities/countries that are present in the Latino community.
I'm sure that all of them at one point in their lives have been mistaken to be something they are not. This even happens within the Latino community sometimes. And as annoying as it may be, the only thing to do is to explain and educate.

"Sin papeles y sin miedo" (Without Papers and Without Fear)

I deleted my Facebook account in March because I was sick and tired of posting about social issues and having them be ignored. I'm ashamed to say that most of my "friends" on Facebook only care about what's in front of them; the outside world and all its problems don't exist.

 However, it wasn't until today that I realized I should be ashamed of myself for not caring more, for not being more aware of the social issues out there. Because I didn't have my Facebook account, I was not able to see the many posts from and about Lulú Martínez over the summer months. This is by no means an excuse on part.

 I am only friends with Lulú on Facebook because I had commented on a post about a friend of hers who was facing deportation. She added me, and I honestly cannot remember our small conversation over messaging, but we had both gone to Harold Washington Community College at some point.

 Lulú, along with her fellow Dream 9 activists, courageously crossed into Mexico and attempted to cross back into the U.S. in protest of immigration policies.

photo: National Immigrant Youth Alliance 

This simple act of going in and out of a place wasn't so simple for them because they have no legal documentation allowing them to remain in the U.S. They are all back in their U.S. homes now, but of course they still have a lot of legal things to go through and have sorted out. Dream 9's protest has inspired others, including the Dream 30+ to do the same and call attention to the immigration issues in this country.

photo: National Immigrant Youth Alliance 

Here comes some more shame...

I am a permanent resident. My family and I got lucky in a lot of ways. But it's stories like Lulú's and Jose Antonio Vargas' that make me realize how my life could be completely different right now if I didn't have that "A-number" to put on legal documents that ask for my legality.

Even though I'm not a citizen, I still have more advantages than most of the Dreamers do. And that's unsettling for me. What they are doing makes me feel unworthy of having that "A-number". However, what I can do is to not let these advantages, these privileges go to waste.

 It is because of all this that I feel a personal responsibility to publish this post and encourage others, Latinos and non-Latinos alike, to at least think about this issue with an open mind. Even better, as I plan to do in some way, go out there and try to do something about it, even if it's just informing yourself on what's going on.

 

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Lulú Martínez with Rachel Maddow.

Check Out:
National Immigration Youth Alliance Facebook Page

Help Lizbeth and Lulú pay for college!

To students: 45th Anniversary of the Tlatelolco Massacre

Today marks the 45th anniversary of the massacre. This YouTube video captures the basics of the massacre, but I think it's important for students in particular to take a look at this.
I think it's important to show students how people banded together to fight for a proper education system.
Even though the protests ended in a massacre, the people's determination for change is what should be remembered as well.

La Malinche

photo:.integritymcseo.com

I am a traitor.
I am La Malinche.
La Malinche is the indigenous one that, according to mythology, betrayed the people—her people—by becoming Cortés’ lover.
Today, to be malinchista is to adopt foreign values, to assimilate to another culture—to be a traitor to your culture is what it really means.
I am a traitor to my culture for being an English major.
Mónica Torres is also a traitor for being an English major. In her article, she discusses the complications of being a “colored” person in the world of dead old white guys. She also brings up the complications that the English language, particularly for her as an English major, bring up in the home setting.
We both know what it’s like to be the translator of the family, to be the one in charge when it comes to signing legal documents and even something as simple as ordering food at a restaurant.
It’s a necessity in this country. Part of the reason my parents and I came to the U.S. was for a better life. Some sacrifices had to be made, I think, and the sacrifice was my culture. I immersed myself in the English language as much as I could because I knew, even from a young age, that knowing the language would make me belong.
And the culmination of that thought is in its final year. I graduate in the spring, the first of my family to graduate from college, and with what? An English degree.
Language may not be the sole ingredient in a culture, but for many Latinos, retaining the Spanish language in this country is imperative. It’s what sets you apart from los gueros. Sure, there are Latino people that look Italian or Swedish or even Indian, but as long as the language is there, you are a part of the culture—for the most part.
However, there are those who , like Mónica and I, are stuck in a sort of cultural limbo, neither fully Latino nor fully American. We have to be able to make it in America, to achieve that American Dream that was implanted in our mentality growing up. We have to be able to do everything the white man can because we can. And English is a big part of achieving that in this country.
I suppose the emphasis on retaining Spanish is an effort, a political statement in a way, that we will not let another people change us. First it was the Spaniards that wiped out our people and many of the indigenous languages. A second eradication of our common language is not welcomed now. So we must resist, I guess.
But it’s a hard place to be in. You can be bi-lingual, master both languages and live in both worlds. But you can’t do one more than the other and survive, especially not the English one. This is not exactly the most ideal situation though, especially when you are trying to climb up every social and economic ladder there is.
If we are traitors, then so be it. But it is not our fault. We are merely trying our best to survive in this country where, if our faces and names aren’t “American”, then at least one of our languages is.