El Magonista | Vol. 11, No. 5 | February 16, 2023

Between 1830 and 1850, 60,000 members of five tribes were forcibly removed from eastern states under presidential order to western states. This was called the Trail of Tears.

Nine Republican-led states, Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, Kansas, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Mississippi, have asked a federal judge to end the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program, which affects 600,000 people primarily of Mexican descent that were brought here as children illegally. This would offer them no path to citizenship, and apparently, they would have to be deported.

The motivation behind doing so is the same that motivated the Trail of Tears. This is all about white supremacy and getting rid of people of color.

It is as heartless as what motivated Andrew Jackson, for one, to engage in such actions. What is amazing is that it shows that not much has changed in two centuries in regard to the racism that still pervades a large segment of the population and which has become the Republican party.

To expel these 600,000 people, it will be paid for by taxpayers and be very disruptive to American lives, families, communities, and neighbors, who have known these people for decades. The logistics will be unbelievable.

Will these people be lodged in temporary camps? 

What if Mexico refuses to take them? 

And most importantly, has the Republican party become so insensitive and inhumane that it is willing to destroy the lives of 600,000 people for xenophobic and racist reasons? Has it become that depraved? 

George Magakis, Jr., Norristown, PA... READ MORE

President Joe Biden made a wistful comment at his State of the Union Tuesday that there was a time when Congress found common ground on immigration reform. “Let’s also come together on immigration and make it a bipartisan issue like it was before,” Biden said. It has been three decades since Congress passed large-scale immigration reform. Since, executive orders, smaller targeted bills and measures, and court rulings have squeezed through different policies for people coming to the United States.

While the Biden administration has supported immigration reform, it is unlikely that any proposed legislation will get to the finish line in a divided Congress, continuing the decades-long partisan battle over who can be put on a pathway to citizenship. “If you won’t pass my comprehensive immigration reform, at least pass my plan to provide the equipment and officers to secure the border,” Biden implored Tuesday night. “And a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, those on temporary status, farm workers and essential workers.”

Immigration advocates wanted more from Biden’s speech. “To deny our country’s immigrants more than two sentences during the State of the Union is to deny the reality of their existence,” wrote Alejandra Oliva, an author and advocate, in a Thursday TIME article titled, “Immigrants Deserve More from Biden.”

Plenty of California Democrats in Congress have pushed a litany of bills and proposals to open up pathways to citizenship and grant more rights to undocumented immigrants, such as for essential workers and people who came to the U.S. as children. California Sen. Alex Padilla, the son of Mexican immigrants, has been one of the most prominent leaders in pushing reform and reaching across the aisle to achieve it... READ MORE

With the future of a program that protects young undocumented immigrants from deportation in limbo, senators on Friday introduced legislation to give them a path to legal residency.

It marks the formal start of the push in this Congress to enact protections for those known as dreamers, people who were brought to the United States as children. The legislation, introduced by Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), has been proposed year after year without success.

The Dream Act, as the bill is known, would allow people who were brought to the United States as children and have a high school education and college enrollment, employment or military service to earn residency and, eventually, citizenship.

The effort is urgent for hundreds of thousands of young adults whose future is in question as a challenge to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that now protects them moves through the courts. The program is also known as DACA.

But any immigration legislation faces a steep climb in a split Congress. It has been more than two decades since Durbin first introduced the act; in the last session of Congress, a version was passed in the House in 2021 but was unsuccessful in the Senate.

Many dreamers are protected by DACA, which allows them to work legally and protects them from deportation. But the future of DACA, which has long been challenged by Republicans who say President Barack Obama overstepped his authority in creating the program, is uncertain: A court case initiated in Texas challenging the program could result in an end to DACA.

“Dreamers are teachers, nurses, and small business owners in our communities, but because DACA hangs by a thread in the courts, they live each day in fear of deportation,” Durbin said in a statement Friday. “It is clear that only Congress can give them the stability they deserve and a path to lawful permanent residence.”

The Biden administration has pledged to defend DACA, and the president has urged Congress to pass immigration reform. The Dream Act would help those young people who fall under its parameters, but it would not provide a pathway to citizenship for other immigrants without legal status.

Republicans in Congress have in the past tied support for any dreamer legislation to tightening enforcement at the U.S. border. Introducing the legislation Friday, Graham told his Democratic counterparts that lawmakers must “repair a broken border” before relief for dreamers “is remotely possible.”  READ MORE

Lawmakers in the group are meeting to discuss the leadership of Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-Calif.), who's long had a reputation for being a strict boss.

Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus are preparing to convene a virtual meeting that could lead to Rep. Nanette Barragán’s ouster as chair, according to two people familiar with the situation.

The previously unreported news of the meeting comes just one day after Barragán (D-Calif.) fired the group’s executive director, Jacky Usyk, a little over a month into the job. Usyk was fired via an email for “insubordination,” one of the two people familiar with the group’s dynamics told POLITICO.

“This is a disaster,” said one Democratic chief of staff for a Hispanic Caucus member, granted anonymity to discuss the group’s internal discussions — as were several others who spoke for this story. 

Barragán’s actions surrounding the Usyk firing are prompting anger from within the group and skepticism that she will be able to lead it going forward, according to more than a dozen people interviewed. Both people who confirmed the Hispanic Caucus’ imminent meeting on its chair described it as a potential step toward seeking her removal after Barragán’s axing of its top adviser left the influential Democratic group without any staffers at the start of a new Congress — alarming lawmakers and aides alike.

The turmoil also threatens to hurt the Hispanic Caucus’ engagement on issues important to the communities its members represent, because the executive director works with the chair to set the group’s priorities. In addition, the staffing change and resulting controversy over Barragán’s move could also distract the group from working on policy at a time when its members are preparing for intense negotiations this Congress on immigration in the Republican-controlled House... READ MORE

Abril Hernandez, a student at Southwestern Community College, sat in her car waiting in a seemingly never-ending line to cross the San Diego-Mexico border. It had already been a two-hour wait, but she knew the drill by now.

“You spend most of your time in line,” Hernandez, 33, said in Spanish. “When you finally get home you only have time for sleep.”

Hernandez, who was born in the U.S., has lived on both sides of the border while studying for an engineering degree at Southwestern College. Before her child was born, she would spend weekdays living with her father in San Diego so that she could attend class and avoid the high cost of non-resident tuition. On weekends, she would cross over to Tijuana to go home to her mother.

“It was uncomfortable having to go back and forth and not have a stable home,” she said. 

Hernandez now stays in San Diego full time. But for several years before her baby was born, she was one of approximately 7,000 students from kindergarten through college — among 100,000 people total — who cross the San Ysidro Port of Entry each day. Binational students living near the border, many of whom are U.S.-born children in low-income households, attend school in California but may live in Mexico because it’s more affordable. 

To serve these binational students, Assemblymember David Alvarez (D-San Diego) introduced Assembly Bill 91 to make it easier for students who live in Mexico to attend college in California. The bill would create a five-year pilot program allowing low-income students who live in Mexico within 45 miles of the California border to pay in-state tuition to attend one of seven campuses in the San Diego and Imperial Valley Counties Community College Assn...
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Learning about the word Latinx was an "eye-opener," said a student in Connecticut. Latino Democrats in the state have proposed banning if from government documents.

Cindy Hernandez hadn't heard of the word Latinx until a school class last Thursday, the day after Democratic lawmakers in her home state of Connecticut sought to ban it.

After hearing pros and cons, she didn't change her mind about identifying as Latina, but she saw how the nongendered word Latinx could be useful. 

“I feel like it’s a perfect way to kind of include other people,” Hernandez, 17, told NBC News.

A group of Latino lawmakers in Connecticut are trying to ban the word from the state's government documents because they say it is offensive to Spanish speakers. 

Debate over Latinx has intensified as its use has increased, with some saying the word has been imposed on Latinos. Polling by Pew Research Center in 2020 found that more than three-quarters of Hispanics and Latinos surveyed had never heard of the word. 

Hernandez is a senior at Henry Abbott Technical High School in Danbury, Connecticut. She said she and the majority of her peers learned about the term for the first time in their African American/Black & Puerto Rican/Latino studies class, an elective every school district in the state must offer. The discussions were kept civil, said Hernandez, who has Mexican and Salvadoran roots.

“I identified as Latina, but I think that using both terms is good. And I think that a lot of people would probably choose to use both,” she said.

The school's social studies teacher Adrian Solis made the debate over Latinx part of his course curriculum before the proposed ban. But the legislative proposal made the lesson especially timely for his most recent class. 

“It was pure coincidence that I was teaching it,” Solis said. “Many of them didn’t even know that the word existed. Some of them didn’t prefer to use it.”

Solis teaches three courses, two of which are honors classes, that include lessons on the topic. At the end of the marking period, after plunging into the pros and cons of the word, its background and context, a number of students said they now preferred to use the word Latinx. Most, however, opted for Latino or Latina... READ MORE

Biden used his State of the Union to tout two years of progress — and push for Congress to get plenty more done

President Joe Biden made a forceful case for his policy vision during Tuesday’s State of the Union address, crediting his expansive agenda for pulling the nation out of historic crises — and mapping a clear path to continued progress over the next two years.

During the 73-minute speech, Biden touted his administration’s success across a range of high-stakes challenges, from rallying global allies around Ukraine amid a grinding war to delivering bipartisan victories at home aimed at strengthening the economy and bolstering America’s competitiveness.

“We are the only country that has emerged from every crisis stronger than when we entered it,” Biden said. “That is what we are doing again.”

Yet Biden also warned that the job remains half-done, using the address to lay out priorities across several areas that, he argued, would be essential to keeping the U.S. on the right track.

And in a nod to the tougher political landscape he now faces with Republicans in charge of the House, Biden emphasized his openness to compromise. He urged GOP leaders to work with him to strengthen the economy and slash the deficit even as he vowed to pursue his own longstanding cost-cutting policies... READ MORE

Few thought of Welch as a Latina actress, but she embraced that identity late in her career; building a celebrated show business brand around sex appeal and, sometimes, a comic touch.

Raquel Welch, the voluptuous movie actress who became the 1960s’ first major American sex symbol and maintained that image for a half-century in show business, died on Wednesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 82.

Her death was confirmed by her son, Damon Welch. No cause was given.

Ms. Welch’s Hollywood success began as much with a poster as with the film it publicized. Starring in “One Million Years B.C.” (1966) as a Pleistocene-era cave woman, she posed in a rocky prehistoric landscape, wearing a tattered doeskin bikini, and grabbed the spotlight by the throat with her defiant, alert-to-everything, take-no-prisoners stance and her dancer’s body. She was 26. It had been four years since Marilyn Monroe’s death, and the industry needed a goddess.

Camille Paglia, the feminist critic, described the poster photograph as “the indelible image of a woman as queen of nature.” Ms. Welch, she went on, was “a lioness — fierce, passionate and dangerously physical.”  READ MORE