Latino USA Episode 15

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

[Opening theme]

I'm Maria Hinojosa. Today on Latino USA, the border prepares for free trade.

And the question is how do you manage this process in a way that really leads to people's lives being better off?

Also, tackling border health problems and the perennial question, what do we call ourselves?

I'm Chicano.

I'm Puerto Rican,

I'm Cuban Argentine,

and now we have this new thing, non-white Hispanics. I mean, it's crazy.

[Transition Music]

That's all coming up on Latino USA. But first, las noticias.

This is news from Latino USA. I'm Maria Martin.

It is not a perfect solution. It is not identical with some of my own goals and it certainly will not please everyone, perhaps not anyone.

As President Clinton correctly predicted, his policy on gays in the military drew mixed reaction. From the gay community, there was anger and disappointment. Letitia Gomez is with a National Latino Gay and Lesbian Alliance in Washington.

It's incredible to me that if you say you're gay and you're in the military, that that is considered sexual misconduct and you can be thrown out. I mean, who in the United States has to deal with that except gays and lesbians in the military? One Gallup poll showed that 58% of Americans do favor the compromise.

The City of Los Angeles, with a 40% Latino population, is facing drastic cuts in its public healthcare system, and experts warn a possible medical disaster. From Los Angeles, Alberto Aguilar, reports.

The possible closure of healthcare facilities in Los Angeles has sent ripples of fear throughout Southern California. County administrators have opted to cut deep into their health system to relieve some of the economic pressures brought on by the loss of property tax revenues and the poor local economy and the growing number of uninsured families. Susan Fogel of the Legal Aid Society is a lead attorney on the case against closures.

This is going to cause the death of many people in Los Angeles. It will pervade every part of the community, not just poor people, not just people without insurance.

Healthcare experts warn the proposed closure of four comprehensive healthcare centers and 20 clinics will mean an unbearable pressure on the remaining facilities as well as the eventual breakdown of the healthcare system. Reporting for Latino USA, I am Alberto Aguilar in Los Angeles.

In the San Antonio federal court, former Texas Congressman Albert Bustamante has been found guilty on two counts of racketeering and using his office to obtain an illegal gratuity. Bustamante, who represented a South Texas district for seven years was acquitted on eight other counts. Migrant worker advocates say farm workers in the Midwest are being left out of the aid effort in that flood-devastated region.

They are viewed as nomads. They're viewed as people who are here to today and gone tomorrow, so it's much easier to focus FEMA funds, for example, on the severe loss that a farmer with 600 acres and millions of dollars worth of crops standing underwater. You can actually see the damage.

Bobbi Ryder is the director of the National Migrant Resource Center in Austin, Texas. The floods have left hundreds of farm workers without work in several Midwestern states. You're listening to Latino USA.

A bill now before Congress would create a commission to tackle health problems along the US-Mexico border. From Washington, Patricia Guadalupe reports.

In some counties along the border, diseases such as tuberculosis and hepatitis and even cholera, occur at rates far higher than other US communities. Congress members representing border states have proposed a commission to tackle the special health needs along the 2000-mile stretch between the US and Mexico. Legislation recently introduced would establish the US-Mexico Border Health Commission to address those concerns. Democratic representative Ron Coleman of El Paso, chairs the Congressional Border Caucus, he is proposing the legislation.

I wanted to create a health commission to coordinate and direct an all-out effort to reduce the rates of illness in the border region. Those, as I say, are oftentimes caused by poor environmental conditions, and they need to be addressed.

Coleman says that part of the problem is just plain ignorance about the border.

I would point out that in Des Moines, Iowa, we have already passed several billion dollars worth of assistance. I wonder why? Because we have been directed by FEMA to know exactly where to spend the funds in the best way possible. The president himself visited that region and yet, along the US Mexico border, we have exactly the same problem of not having clean drinking water, and there are 350,000 Americans without clean water or sewage facilities along the US-Mexico border. And yet, why isn't there a crisis there?

The proposed commission would be made up of public health officials, physicians, and other professionals from both United States and Mexico. Representative Coleman is asking Congress for close to $1 million to set up the Border Health Commission. The legislation moves onto the foreign affairs and energy and commerce committees, but no action is expected before the summer recess. For Latino USA, I'm Patricia Guadalupe in Washington.

And this is news from Latino USA. In Austin, Texas, I'm Maria Martin.

My friends, today, on the 25th anniversary of our birth, I pledge to you that the National Council of La Raza will carry on the struggle.

That's Raul Yzaguirre, president of the National Council of La Raza, the nation's largest community-based Hispanic organization. At its recent national conference in Detroit, NCLR celebrated its 25th anniversary, and as Latino USA's Vidal Guzman reports, "While many of its members believe great strides have been made for Latinos over the past 25 years, they also see challenges and struggles ahead."

The 25th annual conference of the National Council of La Raza opened with a retrospective hosted by actor Edward James Olmos.

The year is 1968, and it is a year of tragedy. First, Martin Luther King, then Bobby Kennedy are killed by assassin's bullets. For those neither black nor white, but brown. It is a momentous year. In that year, a great organization is born in Phoenix, Arizona. It was then called the Southwest County...

As I look back, and I saw the photos of the marches we were doing, we were fighting discrimination.

Ed Pastor, a founding member, went on to become the first Latino congressman from the state of Arizona.

I look back, there's a lot of stories of success that people have empowered themselves and there has been movement forward, but the irony of the whole thing is that we have a long way to go.

This was made clear with a release during the conference of a report called the State of Hispanic America. According to the survey, Latinos are more likely to be among the working poor than other Americans. In 1991, one third of Latino families living below the poverty line had at least one full-time worker. The authors say this challenges the stereotype of poor Latinos, as well for recipients. Another study released at the conference focuses on Latinos in the Midwest; up to now, a largely invisible population. John Fierro, one of the authors of the report is Director of Community Affairs at the Guadalupe Center in Kansas City, Missouri.

Well, I think overall what we've seen was Hispanics in the Midwest resemble the national scene as far as educational attainment. Both areas suffer from high dropout rates. Poverty is high, the income is basically similar, but a couple things that stand out to me is definitely the labor force participation among Hispanic females, that when you look nationally, Hispanic females rank third among blacks, whites and Hispanics. Whereas in the Midwest, they're leaders.

Everyone in attendance at this 25-year retrospective agreed great accomplishments and great strides have been achieved. However, they also felt that many of the original problems that the council began to tackle in the sixties have still not disappeared, but they left the conference feeling the 90s will provide many opportunities for continued progress. NCRL president Raul Yzaguirre, echoed that sentiment.

We will win because our issues are America's issues, because ending poverty and discrimination is not only the right thing to do, it's the smart thing to do.

For Latino USA, covering the National Council of La Raza's 25th anniversary in Detroit, Michigan, I'm Vidal Guzman.

[La Semilla--Dr. Loco's Rockin' Jalapeno Band]

This program is called Latino USA, but would a program by any other name, Hispanic, for instance, sound as sweet?

I consider myself a Hispanic. I don't like the term Latino.

When you say Latino, you get, I think, a warmer sense of who our people are; just a greater sense, a more comprehensive sense of culture.

What I call myself, I'm Chicano, seventh generation in this country.

I'm Puerto Rican. That's it, period.

I'm Cuban-Argentine, I'm Caribbean, and I'm South American.

And now we have this new thing, non-white Hispanics, non -- I mean, it's crazy.

I speak Spanish, but I'm not Spanish. I speak English. I'm not English, I'm Latina, I'm Hispanic, I'm Puerto Rican. I'm all of those things, just don't call me Spic.

I hate the categorizations. I really don't like them because I think that they pigeonhole us into a certain niche and we can't escape it.

It's not the most important issue facing Latinos or Hispanics or Cuban Americans, Puerto Ricans or Mexican Americans. But the questions, what do we call ourselves, and why this label rather than the other, surfaces so regularly that it's almost an inside joke among Latinos or Hispanics or whatever. It's also one of the questions studied by a group of political scientists who conducted a study of political behavior called the Latino Political Survey.

The evidence that I see from the Latino National Political Survey and every other survey that I've seen that asks people to self-identify, demonstrates, I think conclusively that most people who we might choose to identify as Latino do not choose that as their first term of identification, who identify as Puerto Rican, as Mexican, as Mexican-American, as Cuban, as Cuban-American, and many other ways.

The term Latino is just a useful term in terms of describing the fact that there are all these different groups. The question is what does it mean politically? That's the significance of the term. Now, I guess the point is, if you put it all together, is that this is a very fluid kind of situation and it's something that changes over time in the sense that it depends on what kind of movement and context you have and what the leadership's saying, and it depends also on whether you have any kind of real social movement in place that does something with these kinds of symbols.

And right now, what we were falling into is mostly Hispanic being used by kind of a middle class of professionals by default because the term was either being used by the media or, I know in the Puerto Rican case, there were many Puerto Ricans that were using a term like Hispanic professionals because being Puerto Rican identified you as someone on welfare, that kind of thing. So it was a more acceptable kind of term, and those are kind of different political reasons that many of us would advance for using these types of terms.

Well, when I think of the term Latino, it brings to mind the diversity that exists within the Latino communities. It also brings to mind the fact that individual Latinos are not unidimensional, but they're multidimensional. I consider myself a Chicano, a Mexicano, a Mexican American, a Latino, a Hispanic, all depending on where I find myself, who I find myself with.

One of the other things I think about is there is a lot of out-group marriage that is occurring within the Latino community, and not necessarily to Anglos or African-Americans, but to other Latinos. I have two cousins who are Mexican American who married to non-Mexican American Latinos. What are their children? They're half Guatemalan, half Mexican? Are they going to go around saying, well, I'm half Guatemalan, I'm half Mexican? No, they go around saying, I'm Latino. When you're walking down the street in Los Angeles and an Anglo comes to you, he doesn't say, oh, excuse me, are you Mexican? Or Salvadorian? Or Nicaraguan? They see a brown face and they say, you are Mexican. So what's happening, while we have individual past histories as a Cuban, as a Puerto Rican, as a Central American, as a Mexican, our destinies are tied together as Latinos.

Over 60% of this country's Latinos, Hispanics, or... or whatever, are of Mexican descent. And as we hear in this audio essay, in their case, the issue of labels and identity takes on a whole other dimension.

[Chicano--Rumel Fuentes and Los Pinguinos del Norte]

When I was younger, we had to be Chicana/Chicano movement.

Hispanic is such a new term that it started off as nobody knew what it meant and now they know what it means and they like it.

Well, I really don't know why they call it Hispanic because we weren't Hispanics until recently.

Mexican American is fine. Chicana is fine.

The word Hispanic, I don't like. I'd rather use the word Indo-Hispanic.

I believe Hispanic is for the people from Spain.

Something for sure. We'd rather be called Hispanics than Chicana.

And the older generation thought that this was a derogatory term.

Actually Chicana, it's a slang word. It used to be a slang word for Mexicana.

I don't know why the Mexican American keeps changing names.

[Chicano--Rumel Fuentes and Los Pinguinos del Norte]

I am not Hispano. I'm not Latin American. I am not American or Spanish surname. I am not Mexican American. I am not any of those terms, those vulgar terms that come from Washington and the bureaucrats and the functionaries, and when they try to make sense of us and they make no sense of us. I do not label myself. I'm a Chicano.

Chicano has a lot of negative definitions. Chicano, I've been told it came from Mexico when they put the Chinese in Mexico in one certain area in Durango. So they called them Chinganos. They tell me Chicano means peon, the lowest class Mexican that there is. They tell me Chicano is a militant activist from the 60s that was a true radical on the extremist side. Also, I don't like people keeping themselves at one level when anybody can advance and should not be put into a class and kept there.

So when you have to fill out a form, what do you call yourself?

I call myself Caucasian. [Laughter]

You see, I'm not into that sort of thing really because I decided that I'm no longer a Latino. No, I'm a Hispanic, I'm a Hispanic dammit, and there is a difference. You see, when I was a Latino, my name was Ricardo Salinas, but now that I'm Hispanic, it's Brigardu Salinas.

I don't see that we have an identity crisis anymore. I think that we've overcome and passed that a long time ago. We know who we are and we're proud of it.

The more time that we spend on trying to identify ourselves, I think the more time it takes away from trying to do something about bettering our lives.

And hopefully then in the future we won't have to be concerned about what we want to call ourselves.

[unintelligible] Don’t you panic, it’s the decade of the Hispanic! [unintelligible] Don’t you panic, it’s the decade of the Hispanic!

Syndicated columnist, Roger Hernandez of New Jersey has his own views on the issue of labels. Today, Hernandez tells us why he thinks we should call ourselves Hispanic rather than Latino, and why sometimes we should reject both labels.

Over the course of history, every Spanish-speaking country developed its own idiosyncrasies, its own cultural sense of self. Argentina, for instance, is largely made up of European immigrants. Neighboring Paraguay is so influenced by pre-Colombian cultures that the official languages are Spanish and Guarani, and the Dominican Republic has roots buried deeply in the soil of Africa. We're all different, so it's more precise to say Merengue is specifically Dominican music and that Cinco de Mayo is a Mexican holiday, not Hispanic, not Latino, too generic. The point is that the all-inclusive word, whether Hispanic or Latino, is often misused. Used, in other words, to cover over ignorance about who we are and how we differ from each other. But there is something else just as important. Our diversity does not erase the reality that we all do have something in common, no matter our nationality or the color of our skin or our social class.

And to talk about what we have in common, there is only one starting point; that which is Spanish, as in Spain. Language tops the list. Spanish is a common bond. Then there is culture. Why does an old church in the Peruvian Altiplano look so much like a mission church in California? You can find the answer in Andalusia. And why does a child in Santiago de Cuba know the same nursery rhymes as a child in Santiago, Chile? Listen to a child sing in Santa De Compostela, Spain and you'll hear Mambrú se fue a la guerra and arroz con leche.

Yet the word Spanish does not describe us. It is too closely tied to Spain alone. Latin and Latino lack precision. After all, the Italians and the French are Latin too. Hispanic derives from Spanish, but it's not quite the same. It suggests what we have in common without over-emphasizing it, so it leaves room for our diversity. And no, the word was not invented by the US census. The word Hispano has long existed in the Spanish language, and its English translation is Hispanic. What we all share and what no one else in the world has is being Hispanic. For Latino USA, I'm Roger Hernandez.

Commentator Roger Hernandez writes a syndicated column for the King Features Syndicate. It appears in 34 newspapers nationwide.

[Mesa Music Consort--Lovers Trail]

As representatives from the US, Canada, and Mexico prepare to enter into the final round of negotiations regarding the final form of the North American Free Trade Agreement, in San Antonio, Texas, bankers from both countries met recently to discuss infrastructure needs along the 2000-mile stretch between the United States and Mexico. Latino USA's Maria Martin prepared this report.

There is always a lot of talk about what we're going to do and when we're going to do it, what the border does need and what the border does not need.

Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and his Mexican counterpart, Mexico Secretary of Social Development Luis Colosio, touted as a strong possibility to succeed President Salinas, convened the gathering of government officials and some 400 business executives. Represented were some of the largest corporations in the US and Mexico. They came to make deals and to discuss ways to bring badly-needed infrastructure to the border area. A region which, in the last 10 years has seen a dramatic increase in population along with rising environmental pollution and deteriorating roads, bridges and sewer and water systems.

It's a development problem is what it really is. We are dealing with a border that is unique in the world, that is a linkage between the most developed country in the world and relatively poor country of which gap you'll find nowhere else. In Europe, the largest gaps are about a four to one difference. In US/Mexico it's a 10 to 1 difference.

UCLA economist, Raul Hinojosa, says the current discussion regarding financing for border infrastructure in anticipation of NAFTA presents a major challenge, since neither the government of Mexico nor this country will be able to afford the steep price tag of cleaning up and building up the border.

The real issue is how do we get the economies of North America such that there's rising living standards and environmental standards on both sides of the border? That is a concrete problem that is not going to be solved by simply reducing tariffs. That's going to have to mobilize both government and the capitalists of the private sector to get involved jointly in solving the environmental problems and solving the infrastructure and social infrastructure, physical infrastructure, housing, all of these very serious problems

As a way of dealing with those problems, the coalition of Latino organizations calling itself the Latino Consensus on NAFTA has come up with a proposal to establish a North American development bank. According to its proponents, including the National Council of La Raza and the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the so-called NAD Bank would be able to fund 20 billion dollars of infrastructure with 1 billion of startup investment. Antonio Gonzalez of the Southwest Voter Research Institute in Los Angeles was at the finance conference advocating for the development bank proposal.

This was the only viable proposal put on the table. People heard it. People saw it. The media grabbed onto it, and I think very soon the administration may indeed embrace the development bank as the kind of third pillar of his NAFTA package. First pillar being NAFTA. Second pillar being the supplementary negotiations on labor and environmental. Third pillar being the development bank or financing mechanism, and the still missing element would be the new package of current US laws to retrain and support displaced workers.

Legislation to establish a North American Development Bank has been introduced in Congress by California representative Esteban Torres. But others say the development bank may not be the best way to finance border infrastructure, that perhaps existing institutions such as the Inter-American Bank could do the job. Still another idea is to establish a border transaction fee. Economist Hinojosa, a proponent of the development bank believes this solution is not viable considering the present economic reality along the border.

These are already poor communities right now, and you're going to be taxing the trade that you're going to try to enhance, in fact, for the benefits on both sides of the border.

The next few weeks will be key for the future of the North American Free Trade Agreement. As negotiations on the treaty and supplementary agreements on labor standards and the environment continue, and as proponents and opponents of the treaty gear up for the final vote in Congress. Meanwhile, polls show many Americans haven't even heard of NAFTA and in the Latino community there's been a steady erosion in support for the treaty as concern has grown about the possibility of job losses to Mexico. Latino organizations lobbying for NAFTA have their work cut out for them. Andy Hernandez of San Antonio Southwest Voter Research Institute spent the day following the finance conference in San Antonio, planning a strategy to advocate for the Latino consensus position on NAFTA.

So, I think the way we answer is this; you don't solve the job flight problem by taking down NAFTA. You can build a NAFTA with the side agreements to protect workers' rights on both sides of the border. And frankly, what the opponents of NAFTA have not been able to answer to us and where Chicano labor is not [unintelligible]. How do things get better if NAFTA's defeated? Are we going to have fewer jobs leaving or are we going to have more political will to clean up the environment? Are we going to have any focus at all upon our populations along the border?

If NAFTA becomes the reality, it would create the world's largest free-trade zone, removing virtually all barriers to trade and investment throughout North America. From the Yukon to the Yucatan, I'm Maria Martin reporting.

[Los Lobos--La Guacamaya]

Will the predatory Statue of Liberty, devour the Virgin of Guadalupe, or are they merely going to dance a sweaty cumbia. Will Mexico become a toxic and cultural waste dump of the US and Canada? Who will monitor the behavior of the three governments? Given the exponential increase of American trash and media culture in Mexico, what will happen to our indigenous traditions, social and cultural rituals, language, and national psyche? Will the future generations become hyphenated Mexican-Americans, brown-skinned gringos and canochis or upside-down Chicanos? And what about our northern partners? Will they slowly become Chi-Canadians, Waspbacks and Anglomalans? Whatever the answers are, NAFTA will profoundly affect our lives in many ways. Whether we like it or not, a new era has begun and the new economic and cultural topography has been designed for us. We must find our new place and role within this new federation of US republics.

Latino USA commentator Guillermo Gomez-Pena is an award-winning performance artist based in California. In 1991, he was a recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant. Well, what do you think of NAFTA? Give us a call and leave a brief message at 1-800-535-5533.

[Closing Theme]

And for this week,y por esta semana, this has been Latino USA. The Radio Journal of News and Culture. Latino USA is produced and edited by Maria Emilia Martin. The associate producer is Angelina Luevano. We had help this week from Vidal Guzman, Elena Quesada and Neil Roush. Latino USA is produced at the studios of KUT in Austin, Texas. The technical producer is Walter Morgan. We want to hear from you. So why don't you call us on our toll-free number. It's 1-800-535-5533. That's 1-800-535-5533. Major funding for Latino USA comes from the Ford Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the University of Texas at Austin. Y hasta la próxima, until next time, I'm Maria Hinojosa for Latino USA.