El Pasoans with Cuban roots skeptical about business opportunities as U.S. renews ties

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Every Friday, Helio Gonzalez and his wife Sunny Sapien load their yellow food truck with homemade Cuban empanadas and ‘cafe Cubano’. They park on Remcon and Mesa in West El Paso. Their truck, emblazoned with a the sign, “Sunny’s Cuba Rican Empanadas,” does brisk business all weekend, especially during the lunch hour. Gonzalez, 28, a law enforcement officer in El Paso, was born in Miami of Cuban parents. As a child, he traveled to Cuba twice to visit his grandparents and extended family in the east side of Santiago.

Reies López Tijerina celebrated as a dedicated leader for Chicano rights

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EL PASO — Shouts of “Viva Tijerina!” rang out in the Sacred Heart Catholic Church, reverberating over the crowd gathered to honor the tiger of the Chicano movement, echoing over the mourners huddled around the casket. During a Mass for Chicano civil-rights leader Reies López Tijerina, his widow, Esperanza placed a wood cross on her husband’s casket and sat with family toward the front of the church.  The Mass was one of various memorial observances held here this weekend for Tijerina, who died of natural causes at a local hospital, January 19. He was 88. The Centro de Salud Familiar La Fe hosted the services on behalf of the family. According to La Fe, Tijerina’s internment will be a private event at a later date.

Latinos join March for Life but also face other issues

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By Jose Soto, SHFwire.com
WASHINGTON – Priscilla Trastaway and Jair Vergara, both 20, from Paterson, N.J., are a young couple who have decided that chastity is the best way to prevent difficult situations, including a possible abortion. “We decided that we were going to be pro-life,” Trastaway said. “It’s a difficult decision to make as a young couple, but we did.” Vergara said that being pro-life is like a ratio of one to a hundred. “There is a lot of opposition,” Vergara said. “Especially with being the age we are.

Republicans start year with challenge to Obama’s immigration plan

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The Republican dominated House opened the year with votes to fund the Department of Homeland Security and attack President Obama’s executive action granting legal status to “dreamers,” and an estimated 4 million undocumented immigrants. The House voted 236-191,on January 14 in favor of funding the Department of Homeland Security with a budget of $39.7 billion, but added amendments which would overturn President Obama’s latest executive order to grant an estimated 4 million undocumented immigrants lawful permanent residency in the United States. Also, it aims to strike down Obama’s 2012 policy that granted work and lawful residency in the U.S. to another 600,000 persons. Cecilia Muñoz, the White House Domestic Policy Director, speaking in an on-the-record press call January 14 with R. Gil Kerlikowske, Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said that among the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., those that were brought as children to the United States and who do not know any other country are equally subject to deportation as those who have been convicted of serious crimes under this bill. The bill, according to Democratic leadership and a few conservatives, may not pass through the Senate, which may jeopardize DHS’s chance of receiving funding before the Feb.

PiktoChart graphic by Maria Esquinca showing countries in the TPP

New U.S. international trade deal raises concerns about shadowy negotiations

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EL PASO — Clouded in secrecy, the United States is negotiating a trade agreement with 11 other countries throughout the Asia-Pacific region, including Mexico, known as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TTP). TPP has been compared to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a trade agreement between Mexico, the U.S, and Canada that was signed by President Bill Clinton in 1993 and came into effect in 1994. Critics of TPP have referred to it as NAFTA on steroids. The other countries involved in the agreement are Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia and Japan. Negotiations for the treaty have been conducted behind closed doors with no public or congressional input.

LGBT advocates push for broader nondiscrimination law

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By Wesley Juhl – SHFWire.com
WASHINGTON – A new report by the Center for American Progress prompted renewed calls for legislation to protect the LGBT community from discrimination. Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., the lead sponsor of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act in the Senate, spoke Dec. 10 at the progressive think tank’s headquarters about the importance of such legislation. Sarah McBride, the lead author of the CAP report, said that progress made by the LGBT community in the last 10 years highlights the issues it still faces. “A lot of Americans think that LGBT discrimination is a relic of the past,” she said.

Border job growth tied to better college prep, school funding

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EL PASO – Political and community leaders on the U.S.-Mexico border are promoting improved college graduation rates as a key to future economic development in the region. The importance of increasing the number of college graduates to attract and fill high skill, high paying jobs was a big part of the discussion at the 2014 Border Legislative Conference Sept. 12 in El Paso. The conference brought together civic, political and business leaders from both sides of the border to talk about issues of trade, commerce, mobility and education. “There must be a push for higher education in order for the border region to succeed,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas.

For Hispanics, same-sex marriage another sign of generational culture shift

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By Vanessa Hornedo, Hispanic Link News Service
WASHINGTON, D.C., Oct. 8 –The Supreme Court’s recent decision to not hear five states’ appeals that challenge same-sex marriage, coinciding with the majority of states now accepting the rapid social change, leaves the nation’s 54-million Hispanics trying to determine where their cultural heritage fits in. “Hispanics have been lagging a couple of steps behind and this will move our community to be more embracing,” Armando Vázquez-Ramos, professor of Chicano and Latino Studies at California State University, tells Hispanic Link News Service. “We have to go beyond the traditional teachings of the Catholic Church relative to same-sex marriage and gay and lesbian communities in Latino families because it’s not typically accepted.”
According to a 2013 Pew Research Center National Survey, 55 percent of Latinos identify as Catholic – a faith which denounces marriage between two people of the same gender. Bishop Richard Malone, who chairs the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth, and Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone, chairman of the USCCB’s Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage, responded in a joint statement released Oct.

New marijuana laws in U.S. violate international treaties

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By  Kara Mason, SHFwire.com

WASHINGTON – Marijuana’s legalization in Colorado and Washington has put the U.S. in violation of multiple international treaties for the past two years. And with Oregon, Alaska and Washington, D.C., possibly following suit, it could be bad news for the U.S. on the international stage, says a new Brookings Institution report. The U.S. government has been a strong supporter of three treaties that outlaw marijuana until 2012, Wells Bennett, a fellow in national security law at the Brookings Institution Governance Studies program, said at a recent forum in Washington, D.C.

But the Obama administration has been relatively quiet about the federal and international laws the two states are breaking. The federal government has taken no action in Colorado or Washington regarding legalization. “It’s a problem because we’re straining the limits of an international drug control regime that most participants, including the United States, have long understood to be quite strict,” Bennett said in a blog post on the Brookings Institution website.

Dolores Huerta sees end-game strategy in Obama’s delay on immigration

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By Griselda Nevarez

Labor leader and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta is standing by President Barack Obama on his decision to delay executive action on immigration and is asking the immigrant community to have patience. “We have to look at the big picture and don’t get caught up in saying we want it now,” she said, referring to action on immigration. “We’ve been waiting—we are a community that can wait. And we have to have faith in our president, because the Republicans have shown their hand. We know what they want to do.”

 

Many Latinos have been critical of Obama’s move to delay executive action to reform portions of the nation’s immigration system until after the November elections, but not Huerta.

Lawmakers call for more transparency in port-of-entry funding

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WASHINGTON – Texas needs more funding for its ports of entry. So does Michigan. Lawmakers from both states berated federal officials Wednesday for failing to improve the ports and for not even having a current list of which ports are on a list for funding. “The lack of transparency is troubling, to put it kindly,” Rep. Candice Miller, R-Mich., said during a House subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security hearing. “Customs and Border Patrol cannot continue to be a big black hole when it comes to ports of entry infrastructure needs, which can impact both trade facilitation and homeland security.”

Infrastructure needs at ports of entry often refers to CBP staffing, identification technology and roads.

Boehner takes more heat on reform comments and inaction

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and the Republican Party are getting an earful from Democratic congressional members and Hispanic leaders and organizations for saying they do not trust the president to enforce immigration laws and forecasting  that immigration reform isn’t likely to pass this year, if ever. Fair Immigration Reform Movement spokesperson Kica Matos said in a press release that FIRM’s efforts last year to gain House Republican support for reform were unproductive. “Persuasion got us only so far,” said Matos. “From now on, any lawmakers who do not support it should expect relentless confrontations that will escalate until they agree to do so.”

America’s Voice spokesperson Frank Sherry stated that Republicans should recognize that selecting a presidential candidate next year could create serious division within the GOP. “It’s now or never for the Republican Party,” he said, and to oppose reform carries the risk being perceived not only as anti-Hispanic, but also against Asians and other immigrants.

Cecilia Muñoz, Assistant to the President and Director of the Domestic Policy Council. (www.whitehouse.gov)

Hispanics are tired of Obama’s lip service on immigration reform

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By Kay Bárbaro

For Borderzine from Hispanic Link

WASHINGTON – WE’RE STILL WAITING:  Cecilia Muñoz, longtime vice president of the National Council of La Raza whose appointment in Jan. 20, 2009, to President Obama’s initial cabinet was seen as a payoff to the Hispanic community for its huge role in Obama’s winning a front-door key to the White House. This, we and many others innocently believed, would ensure that el presidente nuevo would move quickly to make good on his repeated promises to end our undocumented immigrant agony by delivering genuine immigration reform legislation. Did he? Of course not.

"Obama has made the case that the U.S. empowered by the world’s fear of and revulsion for chemical weapons should hit Syria hard. After all, we have seen the corpses – little ones and big ones – pile up, choked to death by sarin gas."

Politicians mull while chemical weapons kill hundreds in Syria

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LAS CRUCES, N.M. – They say politics makes strange bedfellows. Sometimes politicians call that compromise, something we have not seen much of late in Washington, but I can only imagine true-blue Beto O’Rourke’s face when he woke up this morning next to right-winger U.S. Senator Ted Cruz. Their procrustean bed had sliced off O’Rourke’s left side leaving Cruz with all the covers and most of the mattress. The ties that bind them are doubts about supporting President Obama’s decision to strike at Syria’s caches of chemical weapons. Obama has made the case that the U.S. empowered by the world’s fear of and revulsion for chemical weapons should hit Syria hard.

From left, candidates Dean Martinez, Steve Ortega and Jaime O. Perez at a recent mayoral forum hosted by the Greater El Paso Chamber of Commerce. (Michelle Blanks/Borderzine.com)

Eight aspirants vie for one job – Mayor of El Paso

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EL PASO – Eight men who aspire to run this city sit, slowly drinking water from Styrofoam cups in front of an audience some 120 persons, in anticipation of the questions they have to answer to prove they are worthy of the title of mayor. The Greater El Paso Chamber of Commerce held a mayoral forum recently where the candidates in the May 11 election attempted to prove they each were the best man for the job. Present in the packed hall were: educator Jorge Artalejo, business owner Robert Cormell, mortgage broker Gus Haddad, businessman Oscar Leeser, education management specialist Hector Lopez, U.S. Department of Defense retiree Dean Martinez, city representative Steve Ortega, and educator Jaime Perez. “There is a confidence in the community, optimism about El Paso that I have not seen since living here. If you support my candidacy you support the continued improvement of this community in a positive and ambitious direction,” said Ortega in an opening statement allotted to each candidate in reference to why they would be an ideal mayor for El Paso.