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The Hispanic American Village commemorates African American History Month, 2007We commemorate African American History Month on these, the pages of the Hispanic American Village, with a heart that’s heavier today than it was in February of last year. Recent events in Los Angeles have dimmed the Hispanic American Village’s guarded optimism that relations between Latinos and African Americans were not deteriorating as was being reported by the bad news bears of the mainstream media. We’re daunted but not with no hope; HAV shares the determination of right-thinkers such as activist/journalist Earl Ofari Hutchinson to work their way into the deepest layers underlying a hostility, tragically open now, between two groups who have so much to cooperate on. The issues are real and growing: many of them stem from the shrinking numbers and political clout of blacks in L.A.., their ranks being replaced, either by upward-moving 2nd and 3rd generation Latinos raising their voices--even electing a mayor with a background like their own--or by swaths of immigrants, desperate and willing to do work their African American counterparts, tired of the humiliation and without a pueblito back home to sustain, will not. There are contentions over public services like access to health care, off the books for the undocumented and greatly diminished currently for poor African Americans, and the natural instinct some African Americans harbor to want to sweep the tossed crumbs from under the boots of the next guy and into the palm of their own hand. The portals for a rootless, often motherless, alienated Latino youth population have opened onto critically mounting Angelino crime rates where the applied instinct is to lash out at the closest “other,” the one who, from blinkered eyes, seems the greatest threat. Hutchinson reports, “Since the summer, 2006, there have been nearly a dozen murder attempts in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles on blacks by alleged Latino gang members.” Just weeks ago, an innocent 14 year-old African American girl was gunned down, murdered by 2 Latino gang members with allegiance to the ever-growing Mexican Mafia. Control of the proliferation of gangs and gang violence, accomplished first by a commitment to get at the etiology of the problem, is key to ameliorating race relations between the groups in the schools, on the streets, and in the prisons. The Mexican Mafia preaches racism and the Mexican Mafia recruits—hardly even needs to recruit –in the prisons, where racism is institutionalized due to the systematic penning of Hispanic and African American men in separate cellblocks and the authorities’ use of other pointedly divisive tactics. California’s penal institutions, notoriously overcrowded and brutal, are active volcanoes, with frequent, sometimes deadly eruptions. The fact that the Mexican Mafia scores so high in the prisons is not casually related to the fact that they snatch up people in desperation. Lockups do a good job at lowering already sub-basement self-esteem to the point where these men have nothing to lose and behave accordingly. Without wanting to sound hopelessly naïve, I must confess that I’ve always believed that hatred of the other stems from self-hate, and the prisons both breed and nurture self-hate, ripened until it turns into other-directed violent acts. Without downplaying the more intangible realities such as the fact that cultural differences cause division, and that humanity just doesn’t evolve that rapidly, it’s safe to agree with social critics and lay much of the blame for the ugliness going down in L.A . on shrinking beneficence and an underlying glee at seeing the underclasses baring their teeth at each other. In the end, however, we must all stand categorically and together against violence, against unfairness, against voiced antipathies bred from tired old stereotypes. ******************* In New York, the chords are not so dissonant. There does seem to be a growing, just barely palpable sense of distance and maybe suspicion between African Americans and the increasing numbers of Mexican and Central American migrants. African Americans and Caribbean Latinos, on the other hand, seem to be maintaining their traditional comraderie, smattered with die-hard skin tone prejudices carried north from their island homelands that inform Caribeños’ attitudes towards African Americans, and themselves. (See the Hispanic American Village’s exploration of black-brown relations in the City, Explorations in Black and Tan.) (See also Racial Rough Spot by Jennifer Weil for a chewy morsel on this dynamic.) Attesting to the more complex mosaic of race relations in New York is a recent study by the Community Service Society, The Unheard Third, on the attitudes of lower income groups in the City and the relationship of these groups to each other. Unsurprisingly, more differences were revealed between African Americans and the immigrant population than between New Yorkers as a whole and the newly-arrived. Also unsurprisingly, The Unheard Third found, that native-born blacks were more ready than native-born whites to agree that “New immigrants are taking away jobs that would be filled by American citizens” (52% vs. 44%), and that “New immigrants are keeping wages lower for American citizens” (56% to 45%). Latinos, both native and foreign-born, agree that “…immigrants and African-Americans both face discrimination and together should fight for equal opportunities” (60%), while native-born blacks are the largest group of lower income New Yorkers to believe that “…immigrants have an easier time getting ahead than African-Americans and often take jobs from [them] “(46%). The Unheard Third does not isolate working poor African Americans from the larger cohort of lower income working New Yorkers, including immigrants, but one would have to assume, by the high numbers, that they share a sense of purpose favoring, even if it means raising taxes, free tuition for struggling families (91.5%); job training for high school dropouts (91%); mandatory pre-k and kindergarten (86%); health care for ALL the uninsured (84%), and more. ************* We’re waiting for two currently itinerant associates of the HAV to return from canvassing Southern precincts, and will then be able to embark on a multi-dimensional exploration of black-brown relations in the South. It’s an issue very much in flux as undocumented immigrants have been coming first to the fields where there’s little competition between the groups -–African Americans for the most part exited agricultural work in the 1960s--and then on to high-stress, low-pay, often repugnant factory work where, with little if any union representation and draconian management, tensions could easily be ignited. The Gulf region has been absorbing the greatest numbers of Hispanic workers, most of them undocumented, and sparks of antipathy between the two groups have been kindled by reports of undocumented Latinos being robbed of large amounts of cash by African Americans and the familiar rising of black voices that these workers are taking their jobs away. This may well be true, given the great number of accounts of non-payment of wages in post-Katrina clean-up operations: are contractors hiring Hispanics to the exclusion of African Americans, knowing they can only pull their shenanigans on folks with no bedrock of resistance? But, stay tuned. We’re promising to take a hard, searching look at the South in the months to come. ******* In closing, we return to Richard Rodriguez again, sometimes misunderstood, sometimes too-well understood, but whose words ring as relevant this year as they did last: "I do not tolerate it when I see young Latinos working on Martin Luther King Day, and I ask them why, and they say well, he was for them, dos [sic] otros. And I say, you are wrong, he was one of us." Also on the site: L.A.’s Black-Brown Divisions Deepen Is There Hope for Change? http://www.imdiversity.com/Villages/Hispanic/dialogue_opinion_letters/amoruso_black-brown_0805.asp In New Orleans, Black and Brown Rebuild Lives Together http://www.imdiversity.com/villages/hispanic/special/nam_rebuildno0701.asp To Live and Let Live in South L.A. http://www.imdiversity.com/villages/hispanic/special/nam_to_live_1006.asp Discrimination, Not Illegal Immigration, Fuels Black Job Crisis http://www.imdiversity.com/Villages/Hispanic/special/ofari_discrimination0502.asp |
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