When activism is not optional

Chicana feminist and San Francisco Mission stalwart Yolanda M. Lopez passed in 2021; a free exhibition of her art, Women's Work is Never Done, is currently on display within the library at the University of San Francisco.

Lopez's voluminous body of work touched all the struggles of her time:

Moving from San Diego to San Francisco in the late 1960s, she became active in the cause of Los Siete de la Raza, young Latinos charged with killing a police officer who were eventually acquitted with broad community support.

 

Latino Californians were forced during the 1980s and 1990s, particularly by 1994's racist initiative Prop. 187,  to organize themselves to win political power commensurate with their numbers. 

 

Although Lopez eventually won increasing respect for her more sophisticated feminist art, one explanatory panel reminds exhibition visitors that, "at the height of her career she still made ends meet by working at the Macy's gift-wrapping counter." Lopez was a worker.

I found an installation she called "The Nanny" most poignant:

The show will be open daily from noon to six until November 12.

Yet another piece of very good news from the 2022 election

Did you know that Arizona -- otherwise known as home to xenophobic politicians like Kari Lake and former Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio -- just voted for a ballot measure that will allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition at their public universities? 

The best evidence of Arizona’s shift away from Republican policies was the passage of a ballot measure reinstating the right of undocumented Arizonans to pay in-state tuition at public colleges and universities.

At 2.48 percentage points, the margin of victory for “yes” on Proposition 308 was bigger than the margin that secured the governor’s seat for Democrat Katie Hobbs over Kari Lake and broke 13 years of Republican dominance in Arizona.

How did this victory come to be? As usual, the answer was organizing, combined with building the broadest coalition possible. Dreamers even lined up the Chamber of Commerce for this effort, convincing the business group and moderate Republicans that an educated Arizona Latinx population was in their interest.

A voter-approved in-state tuition ban had made college three times more expensive for the last decade, putting it out of reach for many undocumented students. But Arizona has demonstrated it can move on from a season of fear of the newcomer.

Observations from Nevada that expand on the media picture

The Los Angeles Times highlights the importance of Latino voters in the impending midterm election.

Latino voters strongly support Democrats’ policy priorities: letting Medicare negotiate prescription drug prices (91%), canceling student debt (74%) and protecting abortion rights (77%), according to a weekly tracking poll by the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. But Biden’s approval rating with Latinos is just 58%...

It's good to see the paper trying to dig into the issues that seem to be depressing Latino enthusiasm for Democrats, but as a person working in a campaign many of whose primary target voters are working class Latinos, I have some observations.

Most importantly, this was written as if all "Latino" voters are similar to each other. Nonsense -- people broadly labelled "Latinos" may have many common concerns. But they also have particular concerns that vary widely based on many variables including class status, language preferences, gender, immigration status, U.S. region, countries of family origin, etc. This is a wildly diverse population and can't be lumped together. I've pulled out below some themes touched upon by the LA Times.

• Representation
This writer found many prominent spokespersons for the idea that the Biden administration had appointed too few Latinos.

Although Biden appointed a historic four Latinos to his Cabinet, there have been no Latinos appointed as assistant attorneys general at the Justice Department, no Latinos named to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that addresses workplace discrimination, and no Latino leadership at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. 

“Appointments send a message,” said [Thomas] Saenz of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and a former counsel to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. “This goes far beyond the notion of progress. We have actually seen some regression in comparison to the Obama administration.”

The Biden administration naturally has a Latina White House aide who says this ain't so. It's hard for me not to think that perhaps these advocates were the easiest quotes for a reporter to get -- a commentary on the sources readily available to the LA Times.

• Communication about Kitchen Table Issues
Another theme in the article is that Latinos are being hit particularly hard by the post-pandemic disruptions in our economy.

Sending working families $1,400 pandemic relief checks, canceling as much as $20,000 of student loan debt and enacting the first gun safety reforms in 30 years after the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, this year are “overwhelming policy successes,” said Chuck Rocha, a Democratic consultant and advisor on Latino outreach to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). “The problem is the Latino voters don’t know about it. You don’t see ads talking about the litany of successes this White House has delivered for the Latino community.” 

... “One of the first things that comes out of people’s mouths when I talk to them in the district is gas prices,” said Rep. Tony Cárdenas (D-Pacoima). “If gas prices weren’t where they were, then people would be talking more about what we have done.” In those conversations, Cárdenas said he looks to focus constituents on all the things Democrats have done to help working families, as well as last year’s bipartisan infrastructure overhaul. “Biden has a lot to brag about. But something people don’t realize is that over 50% of construction workers are Latinos,” he said. “That infrastructure bill is a tremendous boost to millions of Latino households.”

This agrees profoundly with our experience here in Reno, Nevada, where the hospitality workers' union, UniteHERE/Culinary, is campaigning to activate working class voters, many Latino. Even though there are many more jobs advertised here than workers to fill them, people are weighed down by a rising cost of living, particularly the cost of rental housing. And they have very little idea that their Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak and their Latina U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto have been working to ease their economic burdens. We enjoy talking with the people we meet about these efforts. Join us on the campaign and see for yourselves.

• Abortion/Women's Rights
The number two issue we hear from voters is fear that abortion rights will be restricted or women's rights undercut by Republicans.

In last week’s National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials tracking poll, abortion rights were a top-three issue for 28% of respondents — a huge jump from 2018, when only 4% listed it as such.

These people have reason to worry; both of our Republican opponents have pandered to extreme anti-abortiionists, though they are now trying to walk this back. Sisolak and Cortez Masto won't let them.

• Immigration
The LA Times makes the assumption that immigration injustices are high among Latino priorities. This is not what we are hearing at the doors. I almost think there's stereotyping going on, though in other states the miseries of a broken immigration system may be central concerns. Those issues don't seem top of mind among voters here. This may not be so true in border states, but the folks here who are immigration obsessives seem to be white Republicans.

The University of Nevada Reno is working to be an officially designated Hispanic Serving Institution

Here in the Southwest (and I'd include southern California in this) it's almost an anachronism to think of "Latinos" as a separate constituency group. Sure, people have their own history and traditions which they honor, but they are also building, alongside other ethnicities, an inclusive, and new, Southwestern American society. For a sensitive discussion of this development on the occasion of the beginning of Hispanic Heritage Month, see this article in the Nevada Independent.

When Latinos complain that no one talked with them, as they often do, they are not alone. National Democrats are too often behind the curve on the novel adaptation of U.S. culture being birthed throughout the Southwest.

They are coming for Trump

She's lost more than enough to Trump - Culinary Union canvasser getting out the vote.

Tim Alberta of Politico reports a series of interviews with Latinx voters in Phoenix. He is trying to uncover how it can be that eligible Latinx citizens have for so long cast a far smaller proportion of the total vote than their numbers would suggest they might. So he talked with some voters. 

The phenomenon of low Latinx voter turnout has been part of the work of my life, beginning with mobilizing against California's anti-immigrant Prop. 187 in 1994 and continuing in various venues through the present campaign. Lots of what's written about this topic seems to me either oblivious to how I see Latinx communities really living or designed to promote particular individuals or organizations as offering a magic solution to low turnout. Alberta's observations seem to go to the heart of why some Arizonans are newly voting this time and ring true to me.

Too many outside activists fail to understand that, especially in Mexican American communities, immigration status is not a binary thing -- either "legal" or "undocumented." That's not how people's lives work.

“Latinos are afraid to vote, man. Trust me. I was born here, I’ve been voting for 50 years, and I’m still afraid to vote,” said Miguel Saldiva, a 70-year-old landscaper who stopped for groceries at the Food City marketplace.

Why? What makes an American citizen afraid to vote? 

“It doesn’t matter if you have papers or don’t have papers,” Saldiva explained, referring to immigration status. “Because even if you have papers, maybe you live with someone in your house who doesn’t have papers, and you’re worried about registering with the government. You know what I mean?”

He continued, “I have a lot of friends—friends with papers—who don’t vote. They get mad, they get frustrated, but they don’t vote. They don’t want any trouble. Plus, they hear too much crap on the television that confuses them. They are good people, and they don’t want to be taken advantage of by the politicians.”

Trying to activate people with these feelings has to go beyond just getting them registered. If registering is easy enough, they'll sign up. But the mechanics, the very processes of voting, are intimidating. New voters don't want to feel stupid or ashamed by not knowing what to do. If you aim to raise voting in Latinx communities, maybe you need to put on skits (role plays or sociodramas) that show infrequent voters how to get through the mechanics. Nobody wants to feel like a dope. And nobody wants to bring down ICE on their tio. There has to be lots of reassurance from trusted sources.

According to Phoenix voter Greg Morales, the combination of Trump and a new generation of Latinx activists may just get his community out this time. 

“It’s Trump,” he cried, slapping the back of his right hand into his left palm. “He gave us the jump-start we needed. And now that we got the jump-start, there’s no shutting us down. And you know why? This new generation of Latinos. These kids, man. They’re not playing games. They’re voting whether anyone likes it or not.”

Miguel Nunez, an ex-Marine who voted for Trump in 2016, but soured on the President's failures of integrity, thinks he sees a change in his community this time around.

“I don’t think it’s political, actually. It’s the ownership we have now in our communities. Growing up here, this is day and night from when I was a kid. I never saw a Hispanic lawyer’s face on a billboard. That would have been crazy. But they’re everywhere now,” Nunez said. “So, that’s cool for my son—he’s 19—for him to see that every day. But I don’t know what that ownership means in terms of politics. ...”

For all his doubts, Nunez was moved enough to vote on the first day he could. 

So did one hundred and eighty-five other Latinx Arizonans at this obscure polling place. Alberta interviewed 15 of them -- every one of them was motivated to vote against Trump. He wonders if he has seen the rise of the sleeping Latinx giant.

This longform article is very much worth a full reading.

From my clutter: oddments from the pandemic

Since we seem, once again, to be entering a dire phase of this disease outbreak, let's earnestly hope there will be no more of this:
No, Mr. Trump, it's not just going away. And killing the messenger (that would be Dr. Fauci) won't end the pandemic either.

It turns out that smoking and vaping are risk factors.
I wonder about this when I pass, six feet or more away, someone smoking on the sidewalk. If I can smell smoke through my mask, might there be aerosolized coronavirus out there? You can't smoke wearing a mask.

One-third of young people across the country may be at risk of getting seriously sick with COVID-19, especially if they smoke or vape, according to a UCSF study published Monday in the Journal of Adolescent Health. Smoking was the most common risk factor for severe COVID-19 complications among otherwise largely healthy young people, the study found.

Some health workers feel ever closer to breaking down. Listen to a doc in Arizona.

In a medical crisis, my job is to manage a clinical team, problem-solve and be in control. It is hard to admit that I feel vulnerable and scared when I think of the Covid-19 surge we are facing now and the combined Covid-19 and influenza tsunami expected later this year. But I am admitting it because you need to know how close health care workers are to breaking.

... Emergency medical and critical-care team members are canaries in the coal mine. When we are understaffed and overworked, when there is no staff to triage patients, when more and more patients are piling up at the emergency department door, the system breaks down, then people break down. You can borrow ventilators (until you can’t) and make more personal protective equipment (we hope). You cannot magically produce more nurses, respiratory therapists, physicians or other professionals.

Researchers are beginning to understand how the virus spreads. Fortunately not every infected person passes it on -- but wow, this disease can flare up fast.

Most infected people don’t pass on the coronavirus to someone else. But a small number pass it on to many others in so-called superspreading events.

“You can think about throwing a match at kindling,” said Ben Althouse, principal research scientist at the Institute for Disease Modeling in Bellevue, Wash. “You throw one match, it may not light the kindling. You throw another match, it may not light the kindling. But then one match hits in the right spot, and all of a sudden the fire goes up.”

Some of the worst fires seem to be ignited in bars. Gov. Gavin has just shut down the bars in California again. Might help slow this thing. Meanwhile Jordan Weissmann proposes "We need a national bar rescue."

People who've lived through coronavirus infections probably have some immunity, but researchers fear immunity is not lasting. Studies are still preliminary and may change with more information, but if this finding holds, it is going to make it difficult to develop a vaccine.

People who have recovered from Covid-19 may lose their immunity to the disease within months, according to research suggesting the virus could reinfect people year after year, like common colds.

The immune system has multiple ways to fight the coronavirus but if antibodies are the main line of defense, the findings suggested people could become reinfected in seasonal waves and that vaccines may not protect them for long.

Here in the San Francisco Mission, a testing study documented that a vastly disproportionate number of local cases of COVID happen among the Latinx population. Elsewhere, authorities are having trouble documenting which groups are most afflicted because of confusion about who should be counted as Latinx, according to the Washington Post.

Federal and local governments and hospitals all count race and ethnicity differently.  In many critical forms and submissions, including the census, the government race category forces Latinos to choose among white, black or African American, Asian, American Indian and Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander. There is nothing for a Latino to check except the lonely box marked “other.” Latinos are literally “othered” in these official government counts. Federal forms allow Hispanics to be counted in the ethnicity category, but this is not always the number used for policy development or resource allocations. 

Let's just hope somehow the work of the Census is accomplished during the pandemic; the feds have extended the response deadline to October 31. Maybe some of New York City's rich Upper East Side residents who fled the coronavirus outbreak will come back by then and get with the program. As of now, they are not completing their Census forms.

Dr. Larry Brilliant, the Marin County public health guru who is given credit for a major role in eradicating smallpox, finds the COVID pandemic both terrifying and exciting.

... This is a big fucking deal. If I would not be excommunicated from the world of science, I would call this an evil virus, but I can’t do that because I can’t [impute] motives to it. But if I could, I would call it that. It’s certainly pernicious. This is the worst pandemic in our lifetime. And it is the first time we have had a pandemic in the United States in which we have had such a total, abysmal failure of our federal government.

... When you get a vaccine, you get a vaccine campaign. We have around 160 vaccines today in various stages of trial or hypothesis or funding, with maybe a dozen candidates emerging. Several are from China. China is looking at its ability to rapidly produce a vaccine as a demonstration of modernity, scientific acumen, and a little bit of redemption, because they were the place at which Covid emerged. When one or two or three of those vaccines are declared workable and we have made sufficient quantities, you don’t get rainbows and unicorns. What you will most likely get is a food fight.

... You can be really optimistic that science is moving at a pace unknown before. Just as the virus is growing exponentially, science is growing exponentially. MIT has recorded over 20,000 scientific papers that are on the virus. We have taken a page out of Silicon Valley, and we are exchanging money for speed. And we are doing things now in parallel instead of in sequence.

We are simultaneously testing the safety and the efficacy and the efficiency of vaccine candidates. You may begrudge the fact that it’s not days or months, but you have to be optimistic about creating a novel vaccine in the length of time that Tony Fauci is talking about, 12 to 18 months. ...

We can certainly hope he's right.

Dean Maurice Charles of the Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago urges patience.

I already made the decision at Rockefeller Chapel to suspend services for the duration of the summer term and interim despite guidelines to the contrary offered by the state and city based on politics, not science. Faithful people long to gather, I know. But I have it on good authority that viruses are agnostic. Masks and physical distancing indoors only reduce the possibility of transmission. They do not eliminate it. Those of us who lived through the height of the HIV/AIDs pandemic (which we still cannot discuss in many churches, to our detriment and our shame) have dealt with this before. We need to be patient as scientists and medical professionals learn more about this virus.

Those who lived through the panic and confusion of the early days of AIDs have lessons to offer in this time -- and still have to ask, does anyone want to listen?

A reminder: democratic hope lives among people with reason to fear

Those blue spikes in citizenship applications in California followed Republican advocacy of the anti-immigrant Prop. 187 and before each subsequent change election. Source: Cato Institute

The Atlantic's Adam Serwer has written what seems an important addition to my recent discussion of the fear driving white U.S. evangelicals mad and into the arms of unscrupulous right wing politicians:

Black Americans did not abandon liberal democracy because of slavery, Jim Crow, and the systematic destruction of whatever wealth they managed to accumulate; instead they took up arms in two world wars to defend it. Japanese Americans did not reject liberal democracy because of internment or the racist humiliation of Asian exclusion; they risked life and limb to preserve it. Latinos did not abandon liberal democracy because of “Operation Wetback,” or Proposition 187, or because of a man who won a presidential election on the strength of his hostility toward Latino immigrants. Gay, lesbian, and trans Americans did not abandon liberal democracy over decades of discrimination and abandonment in the face of an epidemic.

This is, in part, because doing so would be tantamount to giving the state permission to destroy them, a thought so foreign to these defenders of the supposedly endangered religious right that the possibility has not even occurred to them. But it is also because of a peculiar irony of American history: The American creed has no more devoted adherents than those who have been historically denied its promises, and no more fair-weather friends than those who have taken them for granted.

Do take a look at the link in the quotation; Server reminds us the FBI once declared open season on Black radicals. There have been times when state violence was systematically deployed against disfavored citizens; these uppity dissenters had reason to fear.

Somehow it is hard to believe that government operatives are about to be turned loose against nice white Southern Baptists, but too many have been bamboozled by this dystopian threat.

Polling miscellany

What with my intense work on the campaign to make Nevada blue, I haven't had my usual amount of time to surf about in random polls. But in addition to the election, there are some interesting findings floating about.

For all the Trump base's hostility to gender non-conformity, a Harris poll finds support for trans people's rights in the workplace is increasing at least marginally. Seven in ten people support a law "to protect LGBTQ people from bias in employment, public accommodations, housing and credit." Nice to see when the Trump administration is gratuitously jerking around about visas for partners of foreign diplomats who happen to be gay.

Latino Decisions finds that adding a question about citizenship to the 2020 census arouses sharp suspicions that the Trump administration would use the answers against Latinx families. Not hard to understand where that fear comes from ... Latinx leaders have worked hard to encourage full community participation in the census to ensure their constituents are noticed in social policy. That effort will be in trouble if the Trump administration gets its way and adds that frightening question.

PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute) polled issues related to abortion, gender, sexual harassment, and women's power in the context of Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation and the midterms. The linked article explores numerous findings, most of which merely confirm what a divided country we live in.

Actually I'm a little surprised by how far we've come in converting Democratic men to advocates for women ... good for these guys. We're gaining, but it sure feels too slow and too painful.

Interestingly, PRRI found that in this fraught moment, abortion was more important to Democrats than to Republicans. That's a change. Just wait to until Justice Kavanaugh and the other four black-robed men decide to restrict abortions further.

More happily, generic (unnamed, hypothetical) Democratic candidates lead among registered voters who claim to be certain they will vote. But additionally, among those not quite so certain they'll vote, the partisan gulf in strength of intent to vote turns into a chasm. That's why we're doing all this work to find infrequent voters who will support Democrats at the top of the ticket here in Reno. Once we find them, we'll hound them until they get to the polls. Why not? voting for Jacky Rosen and Steve Sisolak is what they claimed to want to do. Campaigns help them realize their intent.

What happened to Stevie Juarez in Gilroy?

Over the weekend we attended the lovely wedding of two young friends in a family backyard in the southern Salinas Valley. On the way home, we stopped for gas in Gilroy -- and drove by this little community demonstration.
Stevie Juarez, 42, was well-known and well-liked in his East Gilroy neighborhood, a father, a son, and a football playing friend. On February 25, Gilroy cops, looking for a suspicious person, came upon Juarez lying on the ground. According to the Gilroy Dispatch:

Juarez died shortly after police responded to a 911 call on Feb. 25 reporting a suspicious person in a residential yard on the 7400 block of Chestnut Street.

When Juarez saw the responding officers, he fled on foot, over fences and onto rooftops of other homes, according to police. When officers caught up to him lying on the ground in front of a home, they tried to arrest him but Juarez allegedly struggled against them. Police said they used a variety of force techniques to subdue him, including a Taser and a carotid restraint. During the struggle, Juarez fell into medical distress and was transported to San Jose Regional Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.

As of April 26, police are "still investigating" how Jaurez died in custody. Officials say officers acted "lawfully" and "appropriately" but family and friends naturally expect to be told more. The Gilroy cops have insinuated that Jaurez may have been involved with meth and pointed out that he had a jail record. Community members think this is a smokescreen thrown up after an unjustified killing.

“(The police) will do everything they can to make him this person who deserved to be executed by police,” said Laurie Valdez, whose husband was shot and killed by San Jose State University police in 2014. “You remember who he was. Make that the narrative.”

The local paper certainly worries that local history shows there is more to be investigated than authorities have let on.

For local activists and the survivors of Steven Juarez, a chief source of danger in some Gilroy neighborhoods is that entity that is supposed to keep them safe—the Gilroy Police Department.

On enduring civic art

The NY Times reports that Latinx politicians in Los Angeles are celebrating the prospect of erecting a 19 foot high statue commemorating the contributions of braceros to our state and country. And well that contribution should be celebrated!

But I do wonder, if Latinas don't manage to influence the design, whether sometime in the future this figure may seem as embarrassing -- even offensive -- as this San Francisco 19th century erection seems to us today.