Against the Current
| 03 September 2009
Rabble-rousers. Agitators. Dissidents. Contrarians.
Now that Latinos make up as much as 15 percent of the country’s population, there are bound to be those who just don’t land in line with most of the rest. And these three controversial contenders in today’s political playing field certainly prove that.
“Being Latino is not a monolithic entity,” says Professor Allert Brown-Gort, the associate director of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. “Today’s contrarian is going to be tomorrow’s mainstream.”
Maybe. Or maybe tomorrow is just a long way off.
ROSANNA PULIDO
Rosanna Pulido has been called a racist, a bigot toward her own brown brothers and sisters. At first, such slurs hurt the 53-year old North Sider’s feelings, but not anymore. Maybe, she acknowledges, because she’s heard them so often.
Pulido serves as the state director of the Illinois Minuteman Project. The daughter of Mexican immigrants has now stood guard on the Mexican border three times and called the authorities on 14 who tried to cross illegally. “I’m for Latinos,” Pulido says defiantly. “Every Latino who does it the legal way, God bless them.”
Whatever she’s for, she’s for it with a passion — and with little pay. Her day job is in senior transport, a job she took when she saw the difficulties her own mother had following a stroke. Her position with the Minuteman Project is unpaid, and it’s a position she felt called to after seeing what she names as immigrant “abuses” during her days as a Chicago police dispatcher.
“I was working with five I.D.s, with different addresses, different birthdays, and the names switched around,” Pulido recounts of the undocumented in criminal trouble who served as her impetus to enter the movement against illegal immigration in 2005.
"When I first read of the Minutemen, I thought, ‘what kind of yo-yo would take a week's vacation and go sit on the border with binoculars!',” Pulido says with a laugh.
When asked what if that yo-yo is a Mexican herself, Pulido answers patriotically, siding with her support of America above all others. “It’s not for me to sit here and live off the fat of the land,” she asserts, emphasizing a sense of “personal responsibility” she inherited from her parents.
“My dad always told me, ‘If you want to be here, speak English and do what Americans do.’” It’s a sentiment she says many young Hispanics she meets are sympathetic with.
But it’s actually the criticism that charges her, and Pulido has had plenty of energy lately. There was the failed congressional run early this year, when Democrat Mike Quigley railroaded her Republican bid with almost 70 percent of the vote to replace current White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.
Then there’s being ostracized by her own Latino people. Her biggest critic? Very likely the Illinois Coalition of Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), an organization that challenged her petition to even be on the congressional ballot.
Says ICIRR executive director Joshua Hoyt: “Rosanna Pulido [is] a sad human being because she is so twisted with self-hatred for herself as a Latina, except for the extraordinary harm she does to very vulnerable people.”
Brown-Gort says Pulido’s positions are not unfamiliar to Mexican-Americans. In fact, they were widespread as recently as 15 years ago when California’s Proposition 187, the initiative that was designed to prohibit undocumented workers from using any public services, was put on the ballot. Latinos of all varieties stood up and took notice.
“Most Latinos don’t take the position they take on undocumented immigration because they love undocumented immigration,” Brown-Gort says. “They do it because they know the discussion feeds questions of the legitimacy of their presence in this country and in this society.”
Brown-Gort says it’s unfortunate that Pulido “buys into the idea that Latinos don’t belong here.”
But Pulido still thinks she may belong on Capitol Hill. Don’t count out another congressional run, one with the stated goal of helping others “build their American dream” — much like her own parents did after settling here in Lincoln Square.
And as for those “racist remarks,” be prepared, because she is ready to turn those right around. “People call me a racist, but I’m fighting for people of every race and creed,” Pulido sighs. “They’re fighting for Latinos only. What’s wrong with this picture?”
MAURO MUJICA
Mauro Mujica may speak English with an accent, but his grammar is perfect.
The 68-year old Chilean-born President of U.S. English takes issue with the term Chilean-American, because in his words, he “hates” any hyphenated description. “I’m an American, period,” Mujica says emphatically — emphasis on the period.
And with being American comes a mandate to learn the English language, the Columbia University graduate believes, but so far it’s an unofficial mandate he’s trying to make the law of the land. “If you’re serious about coming to live in this country and you want a good life, learn English,” Mujica says.
And if you don’t? “You’re going to be parking cars or frying eggs all your life.”
It’s the “parking cars” along with the “frying eggs” that Brown-Gort cites as reason for the language-learning delay. “It takes them awhile to learn the language because they work more than one job,” Brown-Gort says.
Mujica works two jobs, too, as both the Chairman of the Board and C.E.O. of the Washington, D.C.-based citizens’ action group, which boasts almost two million members nationwide. The majority of those two million members aren’t Hispanic, however.
“The worst guys who want to stop this movement are the Mexicans,” Mujica exclaims. “And I don’t know why! Mexico has an official language!”
Having an official language in a country is a natural desire of both its government and its citizens, he believes, and it would only lead to the betterment of the immigrant, as Mujica once was. U.S. English supports E.S.L, and government-funded language schools where new immigrants could attend and receive pay for their studies while enrolled, so in his words, “they don’t have to cut grass.”
Brown-Gort says such schools are ideal, and virtually all immigrants would instantly enroll. But it’s those jobs “cutting grass” that lure them here in the first place. “We keep talking about immigration being something that is supply driven, and yet we totally forget about the demand for it,” Brown-Gort says. “Somebody is giving them those jobs.”
Mujica was given the opportunity to perfect his English in the private schools of Chile in the early 1960s, and he understands his life of privilege led to greater ease in his assimilation into America. “The majority of people who come here from Latin America are not educated,” Mujica says. “Some, especially from Central America, can barely read and speak their native Spanish.”
These Central Americans, Mujica says, are the ones that need such language schools the most. “They’re at the bottom of the scale, the guys who come to do the menial jobs,” he sighs.
But Raul Gonzalez of the National Council of La Raza, calls Mujica’s quest “pointless.” Citing Census polls showing that 93 percent of Americans speak English, and 82 percent speak only English, Gonzalez asks, “What’s the problem we’re trying to fix here?”
He says Mujica’s movement is ugly at its core. “It’s about taking advantage of xenophobia in the immigration movement to ensure you never hear Spanish again,” Gonzalez says.
Mujica compares groups like La Raza to slave owners. “They didn’t want slaves to read and write so they can control them,” Mujica asserts.
And control, Mujica believes, is what’s happened to the Latino people — especially from Central America and Mexico — over the course of the last few decades. With no language education, he says, they’ve become ghettoized in their own cities. "Do you see Russian ghettos? No,” Mujica asks and answers. “Argentinian ghettos? No.”
So why hasn’t the U.S. adopted his English-only stance? “Because in this country,” Mujica answers confidently, “It takes forever to get something that makes sense.”
LINDA CHAVEZ
Linda Chavez once championed the cause she now opposes. That was back in 1969 at the University of Colorado, where she was among a team that developed the first affirmative action programs in the nation.
But Chavez quickly became at odds with her fellow Chicano activists in Boulder. “They wanted to water down the curriculum and push students along, all of which was very self-defeating,” Chavez explains as the reason for her eventual departure from education and entry into politics.
“When we began,” Chavez says of the program, “affirmative action students had to maintain a 2.0 average, and within that year my colleagues demanded a 1.5, and in 1970, it was down to a 1.0.”
Fast forward almost 30 years, and the 62-year old Chavez is now the Chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity (C.E.O.) - a Washington, D.C.-based think tank working to create a “color blind society.”
She’s half-Mexican, half-Anglo, and when she’s not appearing on Fox News Channel or writing a syndicated column, she’s spending time with her husband, eight grandchildren and three sons — one of whom works alongside her at the C.E.O. in its quest to promote merit-based opportunities in education and the workforce.
After a lifetime of identifying as a Democrat, it was in 1985 that Chavez officially became a Republican, the year she was appointed by President Ronald Reagan as the White House Director of Public Liaison. Sixteen years later, President George W. Bush nominated Chavez for Secretary of Labor, but she withdrew that nomination when news broke she had given money to an illegal immigrant from Guatemala who had lived in her home in the early 1990s.
Since then, she’s been working with the organization she founded and dodging attacks from the political left and her own Hispanic community. “I’m comfortable,” Chavez laughs. “I’m not the only Hispanic in America who feels the way I do.”
But there are plenty of Americans, Hispanic and non, who feel Chavez is setting minorities back.
Donna Stern is the national coordinator of By All Means Necessary, a coalition to defend affirmative action. She says if it weren’t for such preferential programs at the college level, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would not have gotten into Ivy League schools, and may not have achieved such levels of success today.
“Racism and sexism still deform opportunity in our society,” Stern says. “Affirmative action programs have been the only tool that have desegregated higher education and professions in the U.S.”
Those at the American Association for Affirmative Action say that, in her fight, Chavez glosses over history and the laws of this country. Shirley Wilcher is the association’s executive director, and cites President Lyndon Johnson’s executive order of 1965, which laid out the purpose of affirmative action as to “promote equal opportunity” whether in hiring, promotions or pay.
“It is not a political issue, it is a fairness issue,” Wilcher explains. “It levels the uneven playing field and gives others who are qualified a chance to compete.”
Brown-Gort believes Chavez isn’t really that far off from any Latino political standard, if Latinos really examine what she believes. “Conservative Latinos are a dime a dozen,” Brown-Gort says. “The question here is do you take away affirmative action programs or do you strengthen them?”
Brown-Gort says the solution is putting teachers and administrators in the right places. “You need to have people in the schools who look at these kids as normal kids, not as exotics,” Brown-Gort explains. “You’ve got to be taken on your own terms and not be excused because you are Hispanic, or something else viewed as inferior.”
That’s why Chavez calls herself a “fanatic” about teaching English, and the need to spend more time and money on English immersion programs. Affirmative action programs would actually be okay with Chavez, if there were some regulations in place.
“If we went back to the notion which is to create a special program but make sure the students are taught the skills they need for a year, and then hold them to the same standards as everyone else,” Chavez would be all for it.
Ever politically savvy, Chavez points out that both she and her opponents share the same goal, but their routes to that destination drastically diverge. “There is no real short cut to making sure people have the skills necessary to succeed.”
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