Free Republic

A new president takes office on Tuesday. It is time to ask for favors, to settle debts accrued during the campaign season. Latinos, who make up 9 percent of the national electorate, lent their support overwhelmingly to President-elect Barack Obama, voting for him at a rate of 2 to 1 over his Republican rival, Senator John McCain. [snip] Simon Rosenberg, president and founder of the New Democratic Network, a progressive think tank, said that the Latino vote is now too important to be ignored and that might help speed things up in Congress, especially as congressional district lines will be...

Location 2100 Maple Los Angeles, CA INTERESTING POINTS: 1. Interesting that this group has the recourses to rent a permanent facility. (even if it is in downtown) 2. Note the mural there is a man holding a Palestinian flag, leading a group of Hispanic people. 3. This facility just opened this month. Downtown Los Angeles is unbelievably dirty. Trash everywhere and just dirt. Very few light posts so it is dark and creepy. The meeting was supposed to start at 6:00 but at 7;15 a gang looking crowd was developing and since I was alone, I thought it best to...

It was late November when Angel and her boyfriend visited Silent Voices, a pro-life pregnancy resource center (PRC) in Chula Vista, Calif. Angel's menstrual cycle was also late. It wasn't the first time. The sexually active 17-year-old Latina had stopped in at Silent Voices five or six times since 2004 to take a free pregnancy test. Over the years, said Sharon Pearce, the center's executive director, Angel revealed herself bit by bit. From her perfect French manicure to her designer handbag and jeans, it was clear that her family had money. When she wanted a certain kind of car for...

Nearly one in 10 Latino homeowners fell behind in mortgage payments last year, and about 3 percent said they had received a foreclosure notice, a Hispanic research group reported Thursday. The Pew Hispanic Center's survey of Hispanic adults found that 9 percent said they missed a mortgage payment or made a partial payment during the past year. Nearly half of respondents, 47 percent, indicated they were homeowners, a figure consistent with census data that shows 49.5 percent of Hispanics owned their homes in the third quarter of 2008. Among Hispanic renters, 5 percent said they had lived in a home...

While thousands of dogs and cats are being given up by pet owners across the U.S. as times become harder, chickens are gaining popularity as household pets... The rising popularity of the feathered creature is due to the chicken's ability to provide eggs, pest control, fertilizer and eventually meat. To address zoning regulations, homeowners are working to amend local laws ... Some cities like New York, Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle already allow chicken to be raised by urban residents

The Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations recently presented a report about how hate crimes stacked up in Los Angeles County for the year of 2006. The report came back with some interesting figures on the rising tensions between African-American and Latino communities. Hate crimes directed towards African-Americans have been on the rise leading many to abandon their communities. According to an analysis by Manuel Pastor, a University of California, Santa Cruz professor, the Highland Park area was 80 percent black and 20 percent Hispanic in 1980. By 2000, it was 60 percent Hispanic, 40 percent black.

At the same moment, on the same busy day, the people of unincorporated East Los Angeles celebrated the completion of an "independencia" petition drive for cityhood and the annual pilgrimage of the Miracle of the Bleeding Street Vendor. After crunching some census numbers with my Times colleague Doug Smith, I found out that East Los Angeles had become the most ethnically homogenous place in Southern California. It seemed to be the tragic underside to the happier news we reported last week -- that Southern California suburbs were more racially integrated than ever before. In the center of Southern California, the...

In the past two years, community organizations across the United States mobilized like never before to help Latinos become citizens, register to vote and go to the polls. Now, many of these organizations plan to use that structure to advance the interests of Latinos on issues such as the economy, education and immigration. “The work has just begun,” said David Valladolid, who headed regional efforts to establish Viva Obama clubs and form a coalition with San Diego County's African-American population. The National Association of Latino Elected Officials worked with Spanish-language media and community groups in a get-out-the-vote effort, and it...

As the United States awaits the inauguration of its first nonwhite president, organizations representing women, gays and lesbians and people of color are working overtime to encourage President-elect Barack Obama to make good on his remark that he would nominate "one of the most diverse Cabinets and White House staffs of all time." Recommending names of possible presidential nominees is a time-honored part of the political process for interest groups of all stripes. But the push for diversity, which gained steam over the last couple of presidencies, has reached a crescendo this year, political observers say, with constituent groups building...

Health Tue, December 02, 2008 05:11 PM Washington, DC (CapitalWirePR) December 2, 2008 –On World AIDS Day December 1, 2008 the Latino Commission on AIDS released “Shaping the New Response: HIV/AIDS and Latinos in the Deep South” Report, documenting the extraordinarily high rates of HIV and AIDS diagnoses among Latinos, the apparent contributing factors to this health crisis and recommendations for future action in the Deep South (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina)*. Shaping the New Response reached its conclusions after two years of research including more than 300 interviews, 8 roundtables covering all 7 states,...

President-elect Barack Obama continued rounding out his White House staff today, naming Jonathan Favreau director of speechwriting and Cecilia Munoz director of intergovernmental affairs. -snip_ Munoz, meanwhile, will oversee the White House office responsible for relations between the administration and state and local governments. The 2000 MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" winner is a senior vice president at the National Council of La Raza, a leading Hispanic civil rights group. There, she has spearheaded many of the organization's immigration initiatives. Currently, she is in charge of the group's entire advocacy and legislative agenda. "We're continuing to build a White House team...

If there is one message President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team has broadcast about Cabinet picks, it is that ethnicity and gender will not be the first considerations when filling the slots. Credentials over tokenism, after all, was a fundamental principle of Obama’s presidential campaign that highlighted his ideas and community values over his African-American background. Still, if all goes as planned, Cabinet members with hefty résumés will present a picture of diversity. Hispanic political leaders agree. Their expectations for seats at the president’s top policy table are not about meeting quotas but about advancing the reality that within this fastest-growing...

Soon after cutting billions of dollars out of programs that have helped working Latino families make ends meet, Republicans are putting that money towards tax cuts for capital gains and dividends that overwhelmingly ignore the needs of the Latino community. While one percent of Americans would enjoy over half of these tax cuts, more than 80 percent of Latinos would receive nothing. Working Latino families will find it harder to feed their families and heat their homes while money previously used to help cash strapped families will instead be redirected to wealthy investors. Democrats do not believe in balancing the...

On his first full day as President, Barack Obama will be greeted by salutes, good wishes - and throngs of protesters on the National Mall demanding immigration reform.   It will be a thunderous welcome, delivered mostly by Hispanic voters who - having provided a critical edge to Obama on Election Day in several key states - are looking for payback. "We voted in the millions, and now we're going to demand progress in the millions," said Angelica Salas, an organizer of the Jan. 21 protest and director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. RELATED: LATINO...

Latinos for Reform (LFR) called on Senator Barack Obama to come clean with the American people, and particularly with the Latino community regarding the issue of his aunt, who has been in the U.S. illegally for four years now. "We have no doubts that Senator Obama is once again hiding the truth from the American people when it comes to the story of his aunt," said LFR Chairman Robert Deposada. "For crying out loud, everyone would agree that when people in other countries have relatives in government, it is a common practice to contact them for assistance when they have...

In a historic change with political and cultural implications for the nation's largest minority group, a baby boom has helped Hispanics account for just over half of the overall population growth in the United States since 2000, according to a report released Thursday. Different from the past, the nation's Latino population growth in this decade has been more a product of birthrate than immigration, according to the report from the Pew Hispanic Center. Since 2000, the nation's Latino population has increased by 10.2 million - 6 million from births in the United States and 4.2 million from immigration. "What we...

I was bursting with pride when I read this account of Colombian-born Tito Munoz giving the liberal media a piece of his mind at a McCain rally in Virginia. Anyone who loves America can relate to Tito, but his story particularly resonates with me.

Before November 4th, every Latino needs to see this YouTube video of what Chicago Latinos think of Barack Obama. youtube.com/watch?v=rdWjjvpH1Qw

I found this video over at Uppity Woman's site. It is an eye opening, person on the street view of Obama's accomplishments in the Chicago Latino community. In short, there are none. What is truly heartening are the number of former Latino Hillary supporters that are now backing McCain. Enjoy! And please pass along. Latinos SPLATinosNObama! NO DEAL! Si Sarah y John!

A word of advice: if a Luchador asks you to register to vote, register to vote. Experts predict a 23 percent surge in Latino voters this Presidential election compared to 2004. And that surge is attributed to grassroots groups who are pounding the pavement and the Internet. A San Jose grassroots advocacy group called Somo Mayfair is using the Luchador, an icon of Latino culture, in YouTube clips to get people out to vote. "We wanna keep on pushing forward the power of the Latino vote," said Jaime Alvarado, of Somo Mayfair. "So the number of people who register turn...