Program 108

This is Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture.

I'm Maria Hinojosa. This time on Latino USA, perspectives on the confirmation of John Ashcroft as the new U.S. Attorney General.

I'm aghast. This person can be actually the leading force in our country. I think he's moist with the majority of Hispanics, you know, they're not.

Also, a conversation with Latin American writer Eduardo Galeano and his unique views of American culture.

This is a culture which is inviting us to become objects, to become things. We are becoming the tools of our tools.

And a commentary on jazz, this and more, coming up on this edition of Latino USA.

For this week, this is News from Latino USA. I'm David Alvarez.

In advance of President Bush's first foreign trip to Mexico later this month, Secretary of State Colin Powell recently met with his Mexican counterpart.

From Washington, D.C., Lakshmi Singh has more.

The changes in the U.S.-Mexico relationship may be more attitude than policy. Immigration was a big focus in talks between Secretary of State Colin Powell and Mexico's Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda.

Castaneda says Mexico wants to fight violence along the U.S.-Mexican border. He believes the problem can be minimized with a guest worker program to allow Mexicans to temporarily work for American businesses. Powell agreed immigrant safety is a top priority.

On the issue of Cuba, Powell says the U.S. will maintain sanctions against the Communist Island. Castaneda criticized that U.S. policy as counterproductive. He says Mexico intends to improve its ties with Cuba. These are among several issues expected to dominate discussions between Presidents Bush and Vicente Fox in Mexico February 16.

For Latino USA, I'm Lakshmi Singh in Washington.

The Bush administration is nearing a decision on final census numbers. Democrats are urging the president to allow statistical sampling to correct an expected undercount. From Washington, Lisette Olmos reports.

Larry Gonzalez, Washington Office Director of the National Association of Latino-Elected Officials, said proper sampling is crucial and affects not only federal monies and social services, but political redistricting as well.

If statistical methods had been used to make up for the differential undercount, Latino and other minority communities would have had additional opportunities in at least 40 different districts to elect the candidates of their choice.

President Bush has stayed clear of the headcount versus sampling debate, but may finally show his hand when he names a replacement for Kenneth Pruitt, Census Director under the Clinton administration. Bush has agreed to meet with Democrats during their caucus retreat in early February to discuss this and other issues.

For Latino USA, I'm Lisette Olmos in Washington, D.C.

The U.S. General Accounting Office has issued the first of several reports on Spanish land grants in New Mexico. From Albuquerque, Catalina Reyes has more.

For 150 years, rural Latinos have argued the U.S. broke its agreement to honor their Spanish and Mexican land grants. Now, the GAO has issued a draft in the first of a series of reports to Congress that may finally lead to redress. New Mexico Land Grant Forum member Roberto Mondragon.

Although it doesn't carry the weight of law, it does provide for recommendations to be given in the event that wrongs were done in the taking of some of the lands from the land grant heirs. After legislation to resolve land grant claims repeatedly failed to clear Congress, New Mexico senators requested studies to define types of grants and analyze how they were implemented. Remaining reports are due by 2003.

For Latino USA, I'm Catalina Reyes in Albuquerque.

This is news from Latino USA.

In Utah, the Senate is debating a bill designed to strengthen that state's hate crime law. From station KUER in Salt Lake City, Kat Snow reports.

Utah Senator Pete Suazo wants to revise an existing hate crime statute that prosecutors say is so vague and difficult to use that not one person has been convicted under it since it was enacted in 1992. Yet statistics show a steady onslaught of reported hate crimes during that same period. Suazo says Utah must send a message to hate groups.

I think it's time that Utah clearly say their hatred, their poison that they hope to spread is not welcome here, especially as we are about to host the world in about 365 days.

Suazo is referring to the 2002 Winter Olympics. Although the bill does not list protected groups, Suazo says many colleagues oppose it because it implies protection for homosexuality.

For Latino USA, I'm Kat Snow in Salt Lake City.

Once again, NBC Television has issued an apology to the Puerto Rican community for the content of a show aired on the network. Latino USA's Alex Avila reports.

Puerto Rican leaders met with NBC executives to discuss a recent episode of Law and Order, which showed women being attacked at the Puerto Rican Day Parade. NBC issued an apology and promised never to rerun the episode again.

Although producers of the show were upset over the network's apology, Manuel Miraval, president of the National Puerto Rican Coalition, says TV producers are out of touch with the issue.

And I think that the production companies are hiding behind this principle of freedom of speech in order to ignore their responsibilities to the community at large. If you have free will and freedom of speech allows you to do something, it doesn't mean that you should go ahead and do it, knowing that it is going to harm someone else.

NBC last apologized to the Puerto Rican community about a year ago, when an episode of Seinfeld depicted the burning of the Puerto Rican flag. That episode was also removed from the network's rerun rotation.

For Latino USA, I'm Alex Avila.

From Austin, Texas, I'm David Alvarez. You're listening to Latino USA.

I'm Maria Hinojosa.

After a grueling debate regarding his fitness to head the Justice Department, John Ashcroft has become the nation's new Attorney General. Among the estimated 200 organizations which opposed his confirmation were a number of leading Hispanic groups.

Latino USA's Maria Martin spoke to Latinos with varied perspectives on the Ashcroft nomination and has this report.

Never in this nation's recent history had Latino organizations been so vocal in opposing a president's nomination to the cabinet. Coming together under the banner of the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda to oppose John Ashcroft had been such organizations as the National Council of La Raza, the League of United Latin American Citizens, LULAC, and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, MALDEF.

Marisa De Mayo is the regional council for MALDEF in Washington.

Most of the attention has focused on his opposing an African American nominee and an openly gay nominee as well as an Asian American nominee. But it has been less publicized that he also has opposed well-qualified Latino nominees including Judge Sonia Sotomayor as well as Richard Paez who also eventually did get confirmed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Raul Izaguirre of the National Council of La Raza had made the case that Ashcroft's record on issues such as racial profiling, he voted against keeping statistics on it, showed, in Yzaguirre's words, a consistent, aggressive, even hostile opposition to the fundamental civil rights of Hispanic Americans.

NCLR's rights president, Cecilia Muñoz, had concerns about the attorney general's record regarding legislation affecting immigrants.

It's important for people to understand that this is one of many nominations we're going to have to deal with and it sets a very important tone. It sends an extremely important message to President Bush about future appointments at the INS and the associate attorney general positions in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. They're only going to want so many fights. So this is a very, very important battle for a variety of reasons.

I understand they have some concerns about certain things that Ashcroft might have, some positions he might have taken 15, 20 years ago.

Lupe Saldana, who served on the Bush-Cheney transition team, says those Latinos who have concerns about the new attorney general really have nothing to worry about.

First of all, he's going to be under the leadership of George W. Bush, number one. And number two is that Ashcroft is a very, he's an honorable person, you know. He's a person of high integrity and character. We must not forget that. That's very important to us Hispanics, you know, because I think that he, I think, represents very much the character, you know, Hispanics, you know. And I think that, you know, I think he's more in step, you know, with the majority of Hispanics, you know, than not, you know.

In John Ashcroft's home state of Missouri, his Senate confirmation received mixed reviews from Hispanics there.

I am the chairman of the Hispanic Leaders' Group of Greater St. Louis.

Tony Ramirez holds a favorable view. About 15 years ago, he says, when Ashcroft was Missouri's governor, he was responsive to the concerns of the state's then small Latino community.

When we asked for the celebration of the Hispanic Heritage Month, there would always be something coming from the governor's office. In the city of St. Louis, there was an effort to build a dome stadium here. We wanted to make certain that Hispanic businesses were included, and we were included at these meetings. That was something that I remember that Governor Ashcroft did in regard to the Hispanic community.

I'm aghast. This person can be actually the leading force in our country. Just, it just keeps me from sleeping.

Dr. Cristina Lindal of Columbia, Missouri, is a university employee, the host of the radio program La Hora Latina, and a self-described Hispanic advocate.

He stands on his morals and his religious beliefs, and he says, for example, that here in Missouri, you know, we've had towns around us like Boonville, Missouri, that has been wanting to have gambling boats open, you know, for, and he has definitely been instrumental in making that an impasse and divisive. He's on grounds of morality, but yet he's pro-tobacco. I mean, just, the man makes absolutely no sense. You know, he's against gun control. He's against the right to choose.

For his opponents, John Ashcroft's confirmation by the U.S. Senate indicates how little representation minorities have in that upper body of the Congress. Again, Marisa de Mayo of MALDEF.

We do not have any Latino senators. We also do not have any African American senators. It just goes to point out that we still lack a lot of political power in this society.

The Department of Justice, which regulates immigration through the INS, as well as legislation such as the Voting Rights Act, is especially important to Latinos. Angelo Falcón of the Institute for Puerto Rican Policy says that now that Ashcroft has been confirmed, Latinos need to mobilize. To dispel the idea held by many Republicans, the Latino organizations represent fringe, liberal interests.

We get these contradictory kinds of things that basically the administration, the new administration is talking about reaching out to the Latino community. On the other hand, many of our leaders are said to be fringe people who really don't represent anybody. And I think what happens with this Ashcroft nomination is just kind of, it becomes the first kind of round of battles that hopefully clarify a lot of these issues and stake out different positions. So that people don't get lulled into believing that this administration is going to be any better for the Latino community than any other administration. So I think we need to stay critical as a community on these things. I think we have to be ready to mobilize and ready to really start exercising our growing political clout.

After John Ashcroft's confirmation by a 58 to 42 vote in the U.S. Senate, El Paso Congressman Silvestre Reyes, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, issued a statement declaring his readiness to work with the new attorney general. I take Mr. Ashcroft at his word and hope that he will enforce the law of the land fairly, judiciously and equitably.

All over the country, Latinos and other Americans share Reyes' hopes. All over the country, Latinos and other Americans share Reyes' hopes.

In his documentary series Jazz, Ken Burns looks into the history of the music as a way to look into the history of the country, especially the issue of race. It is a great idea, but in Jazz, Burns has construed the art form and the society that created it almost completely in terms of black and white.

Commentator Fernando Gonzalez has some thoughts on the 10-part, 19- hour PBS documentary, which has been running on most public television stations.

In the United States of Jazz, Latin music and musicians, or more to the point, Latinos and their culture in general, barely merit a footnote. This view obviously reflects the biases and cultural limitations of Burns and his advisors, but their perspective, however, is one widely shared. In its obsession with race, the United States is stuck on the idea of an imaginary country, populated only by descendants of white Europeans and their former slaves. Nobody else counts. This is an astounding notion, especially given that, with more than 30 million Latinos living within its borders, the United States is actually the fifth largest Latin American country. This is a country within a country. In fact, racial issues between blacks and Latinos, and the balance of political and economic power both between those two groups and in relation with the white majority, will help define life here for this century and beyond. And yet, in the United States, Burns explores in Jazz, Latinos are simply not relevant to the story. Not then, not now.

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Back in the late 1930s, the great Jerry Roll Morton said, quote, "If you can't manage to put pages in Spanish in your tunes, you'll never get the right seasoning for jazz." But in Burns' Jazz, there is no mention of historic Latin Jazz figures such as saxophonist and bandleader Mario Bauza, timbalero Tito Puente, or arranger and composer Arturo Chico O'Farrill. And when he looks to the future, Burns does not see fit to mention young artists such as Panamanian pianist Danilo Perez or Puerto Rican saxophonist David Sanchez.

These are not small-time Latin Jazz players working obscurely in some stylistic ghetto, but superior musicians who happen to be Latinos, and who, for the past decade, have been developing a pan-Latin view of Jazz that might very well be the music's future. Early on in Jazz, trumpetist Wynton Marsalis, who was also a crucial advisor to the series, speaks about how, quote, "the real power of jazz is that a group of people can come together and negotiate their agendas with each other." That in Jazz is a prime example of such negotiation. Here is a music drawn from several cultures and traditions, played by groups made up of musicians with often profoundly different backgrounds, and more. Here is a music with all deep roots, embracing the new world. A music rich with memories, but looking for a future unburdened by history. A music street-wise and brash, but also touchingly familiar with the past. Here is a music with all deep roots, embracing the new world. It is a soundtrack for a nation of immigrants. But you won't hear any of it in Jazz, and that's too bad. By perpetuating the notion of a United States and an American culture drawn only from two races, Jazz doesn't just fail Latinos or Latin music fans. It fails us all.

Fernando Gonzalez is a Miami-based writer and a regular contributor to the Washington Post and Downbeat magazine.

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Points of view. In the East of the World, Western Day is night. In India, those in mourning were white. In ancient Europe, black, the color of the fertile earth, was the color of life. And white, the color of bones, was the color of death.

Uruguayan writer and journalist Eduardo Galeano, who wrote the critically acclaimed book Las Venas Abiertas de Latinoamerica, The Open Veins of Latin America, sees the world from many different points of view.

From the point of view of a worm, a spaghetti dish is an orgy. According to the wise old men of Colombia's Chocó region, Adam and Eve were black, and so were their sons, Cain and Abel. When Cain killed his brother with one blow, God's fury thundered across the heavens. Cringing before the Lord's rage, the murderer turned so pale and pale from guilt and fear that he stayed white until the end of his days. And that's why we whites are all children of Cain.

Eduardo Galeano's latest work translated into English is entitled Upside Down, a primer for the looking glass world. We're honored to have Eduardo Galeano now join us on Latino USA.

So many people, so many Latinos and students of Latin America in this country look to you as more than a role model, as someone who is life-changing. I mean, certainly reading The Open Veins of Latin America changed my life. Is that a heavy burden? Do you want to have that burden, or is it okay to have that on your shoulders?

No, I don't feel like a burden. I don't feel loaded by what I have written. I mean, for me, you know, I feel happy about it. I mean, it's just a proof that I'm not... Remember, I think it was Jean-Paul Sartre who said once that writing is a useless passion. And I think it's a quite useful passion as soon as it allows you to be the friend of so many people. I mean, that's the way I feel it. I write like embracing others. So for me, it's not a burden at all.

Your book is entitled Upside Down, and it's looking at your perspective on the world, but certainly your perspective also on North America, on the United States. And I'm wondering then how you see this migration, this constant migration of Latinos to this country, if this country from your perspective is so upside down. How do you interpret that they all continue wanting to come here?

Well, the entire world is upside down. It's like a giant school teaching lead to float and corks to sink. But being the United States, the center of prosperity nowadays, it's perfectly understandable that people try to come here and improve their lives in the center of paradise. This is what the publicity says. Anyway, it's the invasion of the invaded, because all these people are coming from countries that have been invaded several times by the United States.

So when you walk the streets of New York, for example, and this has happened to me more than once, where I will be walking down Broadway and I will hear my paisanos, mexicanos, my Mexican compatriots speaking in Nahuatl, or Zapotec. And to me, that's almost the upside down world, that they come here and now they want to dress like New Yorkers, and yet they're walking the streets of Broadway speaking centuries old languages.

I like this melting pot. I mean, I like hearing so many different voices. I like diversity. The problem is that nowadays money is much more free than people, and then people have not the right to decide where to live.

They are being expelled at the frontier, many of them. Have all these tragedies of people trying to come here who cannot even arrive to the coasts like happened some months ago. I remember it was just a small news in the newspaper, but for me it was so expressive, so eloquent. It was the case of some Haitians, people coming from Haiti in a poor boat, 60, and they were drowned. They died. They were eaten by the Caribbean Sea. And what attracted my attention was the fact that they were, all of them were farmers. Farmers from Haiti that have been cultivating rice during their entire lives until to the moment in which an expert from the International Monetary Fund went there and said, no more subsidies for the rice. And Haiti began eating U.S. rice, which is highly subsidized by the U.S. government. And there is no IMF expert who goes to the White House and says, no more subsidies for the rice. This immigration process also hidden sometimes in some of these tragic stories about the unequal relationship between countries.

Esta es NPR, National Public Radio.

So when you travel, do you feel hopeful or hopeless?

At breakfast, hopeful. At about 11 o'clock, hopeless. At lunchtime, more or less hopeless, more or less hopeful. Later in the afternoon, a little more hopeful. At dinner, sometimes hopeless. At midnight, hopeless or hopeful, and so on. And I would mistrust any man or woman who is always hopeful. And I would be, I don't know, very sad thinking in any man or woman being all time depressed and hopeless. So I think life is as it is. You know, the only certainties that are really worthy are certainties that eat doubts at breakfast.

So what is the thing that you think is most horrifying about what we are living through today?

The upside down world. I mean, the world is organized against people and against nature to which people belong. And that's the worst thing. It's a scandal. I was reading the other day some reports from the United Nations and I was comparing figures and numbers and the conclusion is terrifying, really.

You also talk about your preoccupation with the commercialization of our world today.

Yes.

And yet, do you ever see yourself kind of being sucked into it?

Into the commodities world and the culture of consumption and so on. Well, nobody is much better than the society from which he or she comes. Because this is a culture which is inviting us to become objects, to become things. We are becoming the tools of our tools. And that's why we are being bought by the supermarket and driven by our cars and watched by our TV sets and programmed by our computers. And I try to stay alive as a human being. I think we human beings are much more important than things.

Uruguayan writer and journalist Eduardo Galeano, his latest book is Upside Down, a primer for the looking glass world. It's published by Metropolitan Books.

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And for this week this has been Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture. Thanks so much for listening. Gracias por su atención. Latino USA was produced this week by Alex Avila, Deepa Donde and Walter Morgan and by executive producer Maria Martin. The contributing editor is Katie Davis. We had help this week from Maria Angeles Flores, Andy Valdez, Dean Graver, WLRN in Miami and Chris Sackis. Further information about Latino USA is available on the web at latinousa.org. You can also call our listener comment line at 1-800-535-5533 and our email address is lusa.npr.org. This week's program is number 408. Support for Latino USA comes from the Ford Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Center for Mexican American Studies and KUT Radio at the University of Texas at Austin. Additional support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and National Public Radio whose contributors include the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. I'm Maria Hinojosa. Join us again next week for another edition of Latino USA.

Underwriting support provided by Brody, Weiser and Burns. Helping non-profit organizations plan and manage limited resources. 1-877-70-BRODY.