Esther J. Cepeda

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Legal Hispanic students missing school -- for vacation

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

CHICAGO -- It’s that time. If you’re a teacher in a school with a large concentration of Hispanic students, you’re doing end-of-year reviews and preparing for final exams -- and you have kids trickling up to you to let you know they won’t be around for them.

This also happens at the beginning of the school year and during the holidays as parents take their children out of classes for long family trips. But I can tell you from first-hand experience that there’s nothing worse than getting through the post-spring break blahs and pushing hard to end the year strong, only to have students drop like flies before you reach the finish line.

Understand that I’m not talking about children of farmworkers whose families follow the harvest. I turn your attention to students of families who are financially stable enough to travel for pleasure -- or at least can afford it when the need arises -- and can do so legally.

When I last surveyed administrators in the Chicago Public Schools system in 2007, they said that although the Hispanic attendance as students returned from Christmas vacation was still bad, it was improving. An unfortunate combination of increased violence in Latin America and intense border security crackdowns had bolstered their own targeted outreach to parents about the importance of keeping students in class throughout the entire year.

Indeed, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, the percentage of eighth-grade Hispanic students who reported missing three or more days of school in the previous month decreased significantly from 1994 to 2011 (from 27 percent in 1994, to 21 percent in 2011). And attendance among Hispanic fourth-grade students in these groups remained stable from 1994 to 2011.

These numbers don’t indicate whether the absenteeism is clustered around the first and last weeks of school or vacations. Nor am I trying to imply that non-Hispanic students don’t also miss school as well. But note that the highest performers in schools today, Asian and white students, also happen to have the lowest absenteeism rates. In 2011, only 11 percent of eighth-grade Asian/Pacific Islanders and 18 percent of white students reported missing three or more days of school in the previous month.

Still, the sheer number of Latino students in public schools -- one out of every four elementary school students -- and their distinctive pull toward extended family, not to mention high dropout rates, demand that these types of absences get more investigation.

Based on what I’m hearing and seeing, it’s now the students of families who have the proper papers to move freely between two countries who are most likely to skim a few days off school here and there. But while those numbers may be smaller than in the past, the stakes are higher. Many schools now have strict policies regarding such absences, which take them from the level of annoyance to a real opportunity for failure.

In my majority-Hispanic school district, the policy is clear and tough: “Vacations during the school year are not a valid cause for an absence and will be considered unexcused. Students will be disciplined for unexcused absences.” And, yes, students fail courses when they miss finals.

Strangely, the whole issue is largely taboo. Of the many teachers I’ve talked to about their experiences with Hispanic student attendance, none wanted to be named for fear of being labeled as culturally insensitive.

One educator, who is himself Hispanic and works mainly with Latino students, told me, “From a cultural perspective, I have too many parents disregard school with ease if it does not fit into their holiday plans. Students are always most successful when parents support their kids academically. I realize this is obvious, but if a kid misses on finals or school for an extended period of time, that is the opposite of supporting your kids academically.”

Daniel King, superintendent of the Pharr-San Juan-Alamo Independent School District near the Texas border with Mexico, verified that he’s seen a drop in such absences at his schools since border security was tightened. But he was unsure what would happen if immigration reform gave those living here illegally a Registered Provisional Immigrant status that would allow them to easily travel outside the U.S.

“I hadn’t really thought of that to be honest with you, but I can see where that might make it more of an issue,” he told me.

Trust me, it’ll be an issue -- so let’s start talking about it.

 

 

 

 

Esther Cepeda’s email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group

 

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Missing school - for vacation

Opinion: Hispanic students missing school for vacation deserves more scrutiny

Never mind voting power, GOP's biggest Hispanic challenge is perception

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

CHICAGO -- The U.S. Census Bureau released its November voting data and one thing is clear: The so-called Latino Sleeping Giant is still snoozing -- fewer than half of all eligible Hispanics turned out to vote in 2012.

After nearly a year of breathless reports about how Latinos were going to trip over themselves to get to the polls and vote against Mitt Romney’s hard-line immigration stance -- remember Time magazine’s Spanish-language cover “Yo Decido”? -- the reality is less dramatic.

Yes, 11.2 million Latinos turned out to vote in 2012. But these headlines tell a different story: “As Hispanic Vote Lags, Millions of Votes Left on the Table,” “’Record’ Hispanic Voter Turnout In 2012 a Misnomer, Census Numbers Show,” and “Gains in Hispanic vote fall short of projections.”

Last year I took heat for suggesting that the Latino vote wouldn’t live up to the hype. But the numbers don’t lie.

According to the Census Bureau, the percentage of Latinos casting ballots went down to 48 percent from 49.9 percent in 2008.

Paul Taylor and Mark Hugo Lopez summarized it for the Pew Research Center: “Hispanics continue to punch below their weight. Much was made right after the November election about the clout of the Hispanic vote (by, among others, the Pew Research Center). But the new Census Bureau data show that Hispanics’ turnout rate -- just 48 percent -- was far below that of whites (64.1 percent) or blacks (66.2 percent).”

Taylor and Lopez noted that because of population growth, the number of Latinos who voted for president did increase, but the number who were eligible but chose not to vote increased even more -- by 2.3 million -- from 9.8 million in 2008 to 12.1 million in 2012.

The reason you don’t hear much about these sobering numbers from the Hispanic advocacy organizations -- as opposed to how they react with any statistic even remotely suggesting an impending Latino supremacy -- is obvious. After all, immigration reform is only in play because Republicans are scared witless that unfavorable Latino voting power will sink their party in upcoming elections.

But how true can this be when fewer Latino voters bothered to vote in a contest featuring an incumbent Democrat and a Hispanically tone-deaf Republican candidate who could never quite get past “self-deportation” than in 2008, when Barack Obama and John McCain -- a longtime supporter of immigration reform -- were running?

Yes, Republicans have a Hispanic problem, but it may be less a voting power dilemma than it is a perception issue.

One big misperception is that Latino voters care foremost about politicians’ stand on immigration, a notion that has been disproved time and again. And even though it is a topic of importance to them, Latinos do not speak with one voice on immigration, as a recent study by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press reaffirms.

When asked whether those living in the U.S. illegally should be allowed to stay legally, 9 percent of Latinos said “no” and another 6 percent didn’t know. Asked about giving those in the U.S. illegally a way to obtain legal status, 29 percent of Latino respondents said it would be “like rewarding them for doing something wrong” and another 10 percent weren’t sure. Yes, these are minority opinions, but they point to a diversity of thought Latinos are rarely credited with.

Another perception is that Republicans hate Hispanics.

Many Latinos see the Republican Party as a mix of a few opportunistic politicians trying to make inroads to win their votes and many xenophobes who believe not only that most Hispanics are living here illegally but that they’re intellectually inferior.

It’s hard to assume otherwise after the controversy over the Heritage Foundation’s estimates on the cost of legalizing the 11 million immigrants living here illegally.

At the same time as some conservative leaders were rushing to register their disapproval with the report -- which accounted for costs, but not benefits, of legalization -- others were quiet after news outlets reported that one of co-authors of the study had written a Harvard Ph.D. dissertation contending that Hispanics have low IQs that will likely never reach parity with whites and will produce more low-IQ children and grandchildren.

Shout this from the rooftops: Perception, not voting power, is the Republican Party’s biggest Hispanic challenge.

 

 

 

Esther Cepeda’s email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

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Iron Man 3 - Tony Stark's healthy conversion

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

CHICAGO -- Is it just me or is Tony Stark on a health kick?

In the third “Iron Man” -- a series that spent its first two installments glorifying the reckless life of a spoiled, rich genius -- Stark, the man inside the metallic exoskeleton, seems to have finally taken a turn toward wellness.

No spoiler alerts are needed for me to point out that, though subtle, Stark set beautiful examples of healthful eating throughout this latest episode.

In a scene set in what appeared to be a familiar chain restaurant of the burger, hot wing and beer variety, Stark joked with a pal in front of a lush vegetable plate of carrots, celery and what appeared to be broccoli.

Later in the movie we see him snack on a sliced apple, working in a room with a cart loaded with fresh fruit and juices. In another scene, Stark tells an ex-girlfriend that he ate a gluten-free waffle for breakfast.

At one point, suffering from despair and fatigue, he asks a young co-conspirator to bring him something to eat -- “a tuna fish sandwich.”

To put it bluntly, I didn’t much care for Stark’s boozy, womanizing, arrogant persona in the first two “Iron Man” movies and in “The Avengers.” Yet there I was last weekend, annoying my popcorn-chomping family members as I shook their shoulders every time the ultra-cool playboy made a healthy food choice.

This might sound trivial to anyone who doesn’t agonize over how to slip vegetables and salads onto the weekly dinner menu without inspiring a hunger strike. But I have to feed two boys who have spent their whole lives in a society that not only assumes children won’t eat their vegetables, but rarely tries serving them at school or in “kid-friendly” restaurants.

These are children who, from preschool, were taught by their academic institutions that “snacks” are vitamin-fortified sugary cereals and cookies, salty pretzels, or anything that comes in a cheerfully colored crinkly plastic bag.

So Stark modeling healthy food choices on the big screen? This is huge.

Movies today, specifically the kind that are made to appeal to teens, are generally populated by guys desperate to find their next beer, joint or jumbo coffee -- that is when they aren’t on an energy drink-fueled quest for junk from the corner store or a fast-food chain.

Hey, I get that the best fiction diligently imitates life. So even though we live in a country where so many children are overweight or obese that federal health officials and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend universal cholesterol screenings for kids between 9 and 11, what else would you expect to see on the silver screen?

We may be a very long way from a time when every kid-centric TV show, web video and big-budget movie features its stars drinking tap water, snacking on nutrient-rich foods and indulging in only occasional, moderately sized treats. But I believe such a utopian entertainment landscape -- you can go ahead and call it propaganda if you’d like -- could have a deep impact on how children perceive what they should eat.

Processed and fast-food advertisers get most of the blame for enticing children with truly bad-for-you foods such as candy-flavored cereals, stuffed-crust pizzas, packaged lunch kits and fake juices. But rarely do the shows or videos they accompany get scrutinized for modeling poor eating habits.

As it is, young people who grew up watching tween programming crave the whipped-cream topped coffee drinks, brightly colored smoothie sugar bombs and thin aluminum cans of energy drinks they see their TV and movie counterparts regularly downing without ever gaining a pound or getting sick from being over-caffeinated.

If Hollywood put its mind to combating the country’s childhood obesity epidemic, kids across the land might someday beg their parents for greens like the orphan Juan Pablo in the comedy “Nacho Libre,” who asked Nacho with weary politeness: “How come we can’t ever have just, like, a salad?”

Until that day comes, I have a new rejoinder for the inevitable vegetable complaint on chicken-rice-and-broccoli night: “Well, it’s good enough for Iron Man.”

 

 

 

Esther Cepeda’s email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group

 

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Guns that look like toys have got to go

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

CHICAGO -- Two summers ago, my husband and I took our sons to a shooting range for multiple days of firearms training with a certified instructor. Our logic was simple: In our low-income community with lots of gang activity, it was laughable to imagine that our boys wouldn’t someday find themselves in a situation where a pal had brought a gun to school or asked them to come see his parents’ gun.

Did we want them to clumsily handle a deadly weapon -- seduced by the excitement of seeing a real, live gun for the first time -- or did we want them, as experienced shooters, to be able to step away from the situation with full knowledge of the danger involved? We opted for the latter and I sleep better for it.

That said, I can easily imagine either of my boys, now 11 and 14, innocently picking up a pint-size, colorful rifle and squeezing the trigger under the assumption that such an item couldn’t possibly be anything other than a toy.

In fact, as we discussed the terrible incident in which a 5-year-old boy shot his 2-year-old sister in the chest with a .22-caliber firearm marketed under the name “My First Rifle,” it came out that in teacher-led discussions at school about the incident, my sons’ peers still could not understand that the gun in question was not actually a toy.

During our firearms training, the most important thing our instructor drilled into us was our whole reason for being there: to ensure that our kids learned that “guns are not toys.”

How, exactly, do you teach that to a 5-year-old wielding a small, brightly colored gun that looks exactly like a toy? It seems practically impossible.

In the case of the Kentucky 5-year-old, it would be very easy to be satisfied with thinking, as the local coroner told a reporter, that this incident was “just one of those crazy accidents.” But that’s just plain lazy.

You could blame the parents -- according to news reports, the weapon was left loaded and sitting in a corner of their home. When the parents accepted this birthday present on behalf of their son, they appeared to not understand the respect it deserved.

Proper firearms training instills safety habits such as never keeping loaded weapons out in plain view, where the untrained might stumble upon them and harm themselves or others.

But in a country where even requiring a background check for the purchase of firearms sends some people into convulsions, it’s ridiculous to consider a day when certified training would be required for the purchase or ownership of guns. It’s easier to just call accidental firearm deaths -- 851 in 2011, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- “crazy accidents.”

These “accidents” are preventable.

How in the world can it be that pellet-shooting replica guns -- generally known as Airsoft or BB guns -- are governed by federal regulations stating that they must be sold with clearly visible markings, but firearms merchants are not prohibited from selling real weapons that look like toys?

Do a Google image search. In addition to the rainbow, blue and fire engine red weapons from “My First Rifle,” you’ll find photos of real, hot pink Glocks, Louis Vuitton-inspired guns and blinged-out rifles. The Baltimore Police Department released a bulletin displaying pictures of real Rugers, AKs, KEL TECs and Colts that have been painted up in bright colors to look like toys.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal this past March, toy store owner and gun enthusiast Rhett Power lamented, “Let me get this straight: Children are not allowed to have toy guns that look like the real thing, but adults are allowed to have the real thing that looks like a toy? That has got to change. This isn’t about ‘gun control,’ it’s about something closer to simple decency.”

Obviously, criminals are going to customize their guns to evade law enforcement. But in terms of responsibility, is this that far removed from legitimately selling real firearms that look like toys to adults -- or worse, are expressly designed for children’s little bodies?

Parents are within their rights to teach their children how to shoot and care for guns responsibly at any age they feel is appropriate. But not with toy-like weapons that violate the visual and tactile safety tenet that real guns are not playthings. Get these “first” weapons off the shelves.

 

 

 

Esther Cepeda’s email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

 

 

 

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We are living in an Accommodation Nation where everyone is "special"

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

CHICAGO -- Our society is on the path to random chaos because our willingness to make exceptions for people has morphed into never-ending feelings of grievance and expectations of entitlement.

Let me illustrate:

While earning my master’s in special education, I became aware that the 1975 Education for All Handicapped Children Act gave equal protection to children with disabilities.

This important piece of legislation opened doors for untold millions of children who would have otherwise been trapped in special facilities for the profoundly disabled despite their capacity for learning in a general education setting.

Yet what started out as a policy of accommodation and modification for students who were intellectually, if not altogether physically, capable of learning has transformed into a general education culture of adjustments for practically any student who requests them.

High school in spring means certified teachers spend days on end reading aloud to eligible students every question on college entrance tests such as the ACT. Many taking the test get double the time to complete such assessments.

This is not limited to special education. Almost every public school teacher manages a cornucopia of special seating arrangements, read-aloud exams, extended time for work, and endless opportunities for students to keep turning in work and tests until all the questions are right. Administrators strongly encourage such measures to boost student performance.

All students are tracked toward college, but many can’t deal with the work if they get there. Some of them, I’ve witnessed, will fight dumbfounded professors who can’t understand why students are lodging academic complaints against them for not allowing assignments to be handed in over and over again until the grade is an “A.”

One day, professors may be required to accommodate them, as I suppose employers will be, because it seems that people with any issue, especially if it can be classified as medical, expect to be given special consideration -- sometimes to the point of absurdity.

For instance, an Oregon police officer who was fired for driving drunk in an unmarked police car while off duty recently filed a $6 million lawsuit against his former employer, alleging his rights were violated under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Because alcoholism is recognized as a disability under the ADA, the ex-officer claims he shouldn’t have been dismissed even though he had not sought treatment for the disease before the incident. One of his lawyers told The Associated Press: “Just as with any type of disability or disease, they should have made some kind of effort to accommodate that, or some kind of effort to work with him, and not simply sever all ties.”

The courts will have to decide whether his case has merit, but the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission provides a fact sheet describing a similar example in which an alcoholic is justly fired.

I’m not suggesting that alcoholism can’t be managed -- people who overcome it can be safe, productive members of society. I am, however, saying that it’s not right to claim a disease as the reason for behavior that puts others in harm’s way and then object to being kept out of similar situations in the future.

But that’s not who we are as a country. We want whatever upper hand we can get. We each believe we are deserving of special privilege and it hardly matters if it’s not good for us, or others, in the long run, or if it comes at the expense of those who are legitimately in need.

Apache ASL Trails, a subsidized housing complex in Tempe, Ariz., designed for deaf and hard-of-hearing senior citizens, is under attack from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for, yes, favoring deaf and hard-of-hearing people over applicants with non-hearing-related disabilities or no disabilities at all.

Who raised a stink to HUD because someone didn’t get a placement in the care facility? It’s anyone’s guess. But as a result, The New York Times reports, Apache ASL Trails and other residential facilities designed for people with complex medical needs are worried that any federal money they accept to serve such unique communities will come with the possibility of being labeled as discriminatory to the healthy.

If any of this seems ridiculous or wrongheaded, you’d better get used to it. We’re now living in Accommodation Nation, a place where the only people who won’t get special favors are those who speak out against the notion that everyone is entitled to special treatment.

Esther Cepeda’s email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

 

 

 

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Unaccompanied alien minors are young, alone and in court

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

CHICAGO -- Last week, a federal judge in California ordered immigration courts in three states to provide legal representation for immigrants with mental disabilities who are in detention or facing deportation.

This happened the day after federal immigration officials issued a new policy that would effectively expand that ruling, making government-paid legal representation available to people with mental disabilities in immigration courts in all states.

This is a common-sense move to provide protection to the most vulnerable of a class of people -- immigrants facing deportation -- who don’t have the right to a lawyer if they can’t afford one.

Now that such an important precedent has been set, it is imperative that the government move quickly to ensure that minors get similar protections.

As it stands now, children under 18 without a parent or guardian are forced to navigate the immigration detention process alone. Even children who are little more than toddlers are expected to appear before immigration judges to defend themselves in legal proceedings if they can’t secure a lawyer.

According to the Vera Institute of Justice, a New York-based non-governmental criminal justice research and policy organization, from Oct. 1, 2008, through Sept. 30, 2010, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, reported that 13,945 immigrant children were admitted into its Division of Unaccompanied Children’s Services. Sixteen percent of these kids were 12 and under.

“The recent litigation to protect individuals who cannot defend themselves in court set us up to connect the dots to children,” said Wendy Young, president of the Washington, D.C.-based legal advocacy organization Kids in Need of Defense (KIND).

“Extending these protections to children is the natural next step. These, too, are individuals unable to understand the proceedings they are involved in. We’ve represented children as young as 2 years old and it’s really a travesty of justice -- the judges are almost as distressed as the children when they see young kids coming in to court without counsel.”

According to KIND, each year more than 8,000 unaccompanied children come to the U.S. alone, many of them escaping abuse or persecution, or as victims of trafficking, abandonment or severe deprivation. They’re expected to face the courts without counsel even though most children can’t understand the complex procedures or the options open to them. And there’s almost always a language barrier.

With the right legal representation, many of these children -- about 40 percent in 2010, according to the Vera Institute -- would qualify for some form of relief from removal.

KIND, like other organizations such as the Immigrant Children’s Assistance Project of the American Bar Association, provides pro bono legal assistance to detained, unaccompanied children and trains lawyers to take up these complex cases.

As with any other proposal for immigration system relief, the first question raised by doubters is how much it would cost to provide such services.

“You have to remember that we’re talking about a very small slice of the 11 million undocumented immigrants on which most of our attention is focused,” Young told me. “Even though we’re seeing an increase in the numbers of children in this situation, the cost would be a fairly modest amount, to be perfectly honest. Because we’re talking about a private-public partnership, we’re only looking at a range of $15 million to $28 million per year, depending on the fluctuation in the numbers.”

To put that in context, though at the high end $28 million isn’t chump change, it’s also a relative pittance within the Department of Justice’s $27.1 billion budget request for fiscal year 2013. And the benefits would ripple far beyond cases involving minors.

”It would help the courts become more efficient,” said Young. “Rather than have kids coming in at multiple times, it would be much faster if they had counsel from the get-go so their cases could move ahead quicker.”

This is not a pie-in-the-sky dream. According to Young, the comprehensive immigration reform proposal being developed in the Senate includes a provision that would require the Department of Justice to appoint counsel in cases where such immigrant minors were unable to access pro bono services.

If there’s a shred of humanity in the legislators who negotiate the final compromise, this suggested protection will not end up on the cutting room floor.

Esther Cepeda’s email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

 

 

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How to deal with stereotypes? Shrug off words that hurt

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

CHICAGO -- What do you do when you get trapped in a stereotype that doesn’t apply -- or just plain hurts?

This is not a trivial question. As Hispanics start populating academia, newsrooms, boardrooms and courtrooms across the country, they face the tricky terrain of interacting with people who have different backgrounds and upbringings. And sometimes those folks say the craziest things.

Recently, the Chicana writer and Huffington Post blogger Michele Serros wrote about once finding herself as the only Latina at an elite national writers conference in California. In addition to being the only participant from a rural farming community -- and not from some Latin American country -- she experienced the following crack:

“At the lunch buffet line, another aspiring writer nudged me. ‘Look,’ he motioned to a basket of tortilla chips. ‘l guess they knew you were coming.’”

Ouch.

“When that happens, you just have to roll with the punch and see where it’s headed,” said Luis Martinez, a human resources consultant and executive coach in Rochester, N.Y. As a Cuban immigrant, he gets a lot of questions about cigars and baseball -- two topics he cares little about -- and has learned to take it all in stride.

“Sometimes when it’s something serious, you really have to stand your ground and explain in as civil a way as you can why someone has made the wrong assumption about you,” Martinez told me. “But other times it’s not worth the trouble. You read the body language, the tone of voice and go from there. It would take someone being really over-the-top, extraordinarily ignorant to make me stand my ground.”

Having gotten such an evenhanded answer from a professional relationship pro, I had to wonder if there were other, zingier, ways to respond to such situations. The kind that maybe a brilliant satirist could get away with.

I called Lalo Alcaraz, the nationally syndicated Mexican-American cartoonist and “jefe-in-chief” of the humor site pocho.com. But he, too, counseled against telling someone who blunders to take their tortilla chips and shove ‘em.

“I get out ahead of it, I like to proclaim my beanerness ahead of time because then it’s like, ‘If I can say it, then you can say it. Maybe.’”

Frequently mistaken for some of his more direct cartoon alter egos, Alcaraz said, “People get uncomfortable around me, they think I’m some thoughtless militant. But I’m really not out there barking at people. So I think I maybe overcompensate, but I can usually spot when someone’s being lame and racist or being sincere.”

In the past, Alcaraz has coped with uncomfortable food references by “just putting it out there.”

“I was in an office party situation once and I brought in pan dulce,” which is sweet Mexican bread. “I’m not a stereotype machine, but I enjoy pan dulce, everyone should like pan dulce, so why not?”

Aurelia Flores, founder of the Latina leadership site powerfullatinas.com and senior counsel at a Fortune 500 company, completed my trifecta of experts who suggested giving stereotype-laced comments the benefit of the doubt.

“If I go into any situation where I’m the minority thinking ‘These people are jerks, they don’t understand me,’ that’s not going to get me anywhere,” Flores said. “But if we try to figure out where the other person is coming from and meet them there -- even if we’re thinking in our heads, ‘How clueless is this person?’ or conversely, ‘What an a------!” -- it might help me or someone else.”

“Like it or not at that point, you’re the representative Latino or Latina of their world and you don’t want to leave them feeling like, ‘Not only do I not understand these people, but they’re all so uppity -- I was just trying to be nice,’” Flores said. “While it’s not fair to have to deal with other people’s misperceptions, you have to be open to the possibility that they might actually be trying to relate to you on a personal level.”

This is the secret to dealing with life’s little slights: Assume the best and just try to be nice.

 

 

Esther Cepeda’s email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group

 

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The wise words of bombing suspects' Uncle Ruslan

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

CHICAGO -- After a gut-wrenching week of terror, my award for bravery in the face of adversity goes to Ruslan Tsarni.

The uncle of Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who are suspected of having carried out the Boston Marathon bombings, stepped into the spotlight and showed uncommon humility and fortitude.

Tsarni did not back away from evidence of his two young relatives turning against their adopted country to do the unthinkable -- he owned up to it and said what needed to be said.

Over the course of several interviews, he freely admitted that he’d cut ties with the two boys years ago because he thought they were on the wrong path.

With a refreshing lack of sugarcoating, Tsarni called his nephews “losers,” illustrating the pain that he and his family had to withstand in order to express their sorrow for being even tangentially associated with such horrific events.

“I just wish they never existed, I’m wordless. ... The people who did this ... they do not deserve to exist on this earth,” Tsarni told one reporter. “Since these people do have association with me through blood ... these barbarians ... what can I say? ... Sympathy, condolences with [the victims] and if some one of them may just have sent a curse on me, I’m ready to accept it. ... What else can I say?”

Yet Tsarni did have the presence of mind to say several other very important things that spoke far beyond the shame at being associated with this violence. The grieving uncle addressed the domino-effect prejudice that so many others will suffer as a result of two young men’s mistakes.

Making a very clear distinction between the overwhelming majority of immigrants, refugees and asylum-seekers who find a haven in this country after fleeing torture, repression and other nightmares, Tsarni spoke to the misguided fears of those who would make this terrible event about immigrants, immigration or Islam.

Tsarni speculated that his nephews acted out of “hatred for those who were able to settle themselves. These are the only reasons I can imagine of. Anything else, anything else to do with religion, with Islam, it’s a fraud, it’s a fake.”

And he addressed the singular fear that every olive-skinned, brown-eyed, dark-haired backpack-toting person felt when the Internet was engaged in the crowd-sourcing of potential suspects: “I hope it’s not one of us.”

My Hispanic friends thought it, my Muslim friends thought it, my Middle Eastern friends thought it. We were all holding our breath, hoping that America’s next super villain wouldn’t be one of us. And when it turned out that the suspects were Chechens, a very small segment of our diverse American population, we sighed relief tinged with empathy.

“He put a shame on our family, [the] Tsarni family,” said the uncle. “He put a shame on the entire Chechen ethnicity. Because everyone now, they play with the word, Chechen, so they put that shame on the entire ethnicity.”

This takes guts to acknowledge. So few Americans were even vaguely familiar with the Chechen people that the Czech ambassador had to put out an official statement asking people to not confuse Chechnya with the Czech Republic. And now Chechen stands a chance of forever meaning “terrorist,” even to those who don’t make a habit of judging countries by their most infamous representatives.

Hispanics, like Muslims, know exactly what Tsarni meant and how every Chechen in America is feeling right now. One can easily imagine them thinking, “Great. Now everyone is going to hate me because I’m Chechen.”

Well, not everyone. But some people will use any excuse to vilify those who are unlike them and welcome any situation in which their narrowest fears seem to be reinforced. How many politicians, talking heads and plain old bigots have already jumped on these bombings to cast doubts on legal immigrants, Muslims and refugees? Too many to count.

Ignore them.

If they were smart, they’d forget trying to make examples of two young men who went astray and instead realize that the uncle is far more typical of people who come here from abroad and work hard to become one of us.

They talk straight, own up to their embarrassments and, like Ruslan Tsarni, tell their youngsters what so many other immigrants have told their descendants: “Just do your business. Work, go to school, be useful, know why you came to America.”

Esther Cepeda’s email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

 

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Finding middle ground between school safety and criminalizing students

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

CHICAGO -- Safety in public schools has been much on the public’s mind in the post-Newtown era. The massacre has inspired calls for getting more police officers into school buildings.

At the same time, civil rights organizations are calling for the exact opposite: getting the cops out. Critics cite horrors such as the 5-year-old who was cuffed and taken down to the police station for having a temper tantrum and a 7-year-old who was interrogated for 10 hours for allegedly stealing $5.

Thankfully, schools across the country, reacting to public outrage over ridiculous zero-tolerance policies, are trying to find middle ground.

The Texas state Senate recently cleared a bill that would require schools to adopt a tiered system to address misbehavior and rules violations with in-school consequences and remediation. More serious situations would be elevated to parent and community-based programs, while serious criminal behavior would still be handled by police and end up in court.

Like most other contentious issues involving the potent mix of race, education and politics, it’s far too easy to pick a side based on outrageous headlines that don’t take into account how thorny it is to navigate drama-drenched school hallways.

In truth, while some people abhor the idea of having police in schools, others welcome it.

A decade before the Columbine massacre kicked off the era of cops in schools, I attended a very diverse Chicago public high school where police were stationed, providing a constant daily presence to keep students safe. The students who worked hard and stayed out of trouble generally had no issues with the police. For those students, as well as faculty, it was a relief to have officers around on the frequent occasions when tempers flared and fights erupted in busy corridors.

Years later as a barely 5-foot-tall teacher working in high schools that served low-income, high-crime communities, I jumped into scrums of violent teenagers with some regularity. How I wished there had been police stationed in hallways to protect us.

That’s not to say, however, that we should let safety fears turn our nation’s public schools into what Texas reformers describe as a massive referral system for the courts and others call the school-to-prison pipeline.

We need a national movement to define what safety means in schools and how such a lofty goal can be achieved. Similar to how the nation is finally getting school districts on board with having common standards for teaching core subjects such as math and language arts, we need standards for keeping schools safe and orderly without creating a situation where scores of students stand little chance of graduating from high school or avoiding jail.

“We need to have a holistic approach to securing our building from common-sense things like locking the doors, requiring buzzers to get into buildings, having hall monitors -- my daughter’s school didn’t do some of these things prior to Newtown -- to having long-term supports in place for students to deal with the mistakes they will inevitably make in a school setting,” said Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project. The Washington, D.C.-based racial justice organization is heavily involved in trying to keep students from entering the adult criminal justice system over misbehaviors that in the past would have been handled with a trip to the principal’s office.

Dianis’ organization believes that schools, especially low-income ones in which students lack basic supports at home, should provide more school psychologists, counselors, social workers and teachers trained in conflict resolution.

“Safety has to happen but not through the short-term fix of police in schools,” said Dianis. “They’re not educators, they’re only trained to enforce the criminal code. And often their very presence creates a hostile environment not conducive to learning.”

To be fair, police have proved to be great partners in school districts across the country, but they really shouldn’t have to bear the whole responsibility of maintaining safe and positive learning environments.

Parents, school administrators and policymakers must find more ways to reach a middle ground on school safety that ensures that all students -- even the ones who haven’t yet figured out how to control their tempers or make good choices for themselves -- have the opportunity to learn.

Focusing solely on barring intruders and making problem children simply go away can’t cut it anymore.

Esther Cepeda’s email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

 

 

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Mexico Barbie's chihhuahua and Hispanics' bad rap

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

CHICAGO -- I love Mexico Barbie’s Chihuahua.

There, I’ve said it. Let the Latino community slam me for lacking cultural sensitivity if it will, but I’m sticking to my pistolas on this one.

The furor over Mexico Barbie came to a head last week when a $30 doll that had been released in June 2012 became the subject of news stories and chatter on social media networks for perpetuating offensive stereotypes.

Accusations of cultural insensitivity included outrage because Mexico Barbie comes with a passport and therefore implies that the inanimate piece of plastic is not living in the United States illegally. Journalist Laura Martinez was widely quoted: “Play with your Barbie Mexicana and don’t even think of calling her indocumentada.”

Chuckle-worthy, yes, but there are two significant issues at play here:

First is that when Hispanics freak out over something as innocuous as a toy that was treated with every bit the same amount of cultural sensitivity as the rest of the dolls in a collection -- all of Mattel’s “Dolls of the World” sport traditional costumes, tote an animal or other symbol of their country, and come with stickers and a passport -- we look irrational and humorless.

The second is that being seen as overly sensitive is the least of our problems -- Latinos in the United States have deadly serious issues with our image.

According to a spring 2012 online survey for the Latino Donor Collaborative, a Hispanic image advocacy organization, the research and communications firm Hill+Knowlton Strategies found that most non-Latino Americans have highly skewed perceptions of U.S. Hispanics.

Three-quarters of the non-Latinos surveyed overestimated the proportion of the Hispanic population who reside here illegally. A third believed that over half of all Latinos are in the U.S. illegally (the real percentage is about 18, according to the Pew Hispanic Center). More than 80 percent of non-Latino respondents associated Latinos with not having learned to speak English and nearly 80 percent associated Hispanics with crime and gang violence.

Traditional offline research has found much the same. Last fall the National Hispanic Media Coalition and the polling firm Latino Decisions found that more than 30 percent of non-Hispanics believe a majority of Hispanics are here illegally.

This same study found that 51 percent of non-Latinos think “welfare recipient” describes Latinos “very” or “somewhat” well, 50 percent think of Hispanics as “less educated” and 44 percent believe Hispanics “refuse to learn English.” (According to the Pew Hispanic Center, 65 percent of all U.S. Hispanics age 5 and older either speak only English at home or speak English very well.)

Living under those circumstances, it’s difficult not to be annoyed at those who would stir outrage over a doll. It’s not a big deal that a company is hoping to make profits by selling impressionable young children on the idea that Mexicans have both brightly colored clothing and official passports that entitle them to travel the world freely.

Can Hispanics in the U.S. just please focus on the truly important issues before us -- our reputations, low education-attainment levels and poor health for starters? Must we waste time worrying about the accessories of a doll representing another country?

And while we’re at it, let’s get over ourselves a little. Could it really be such an affront to the dignity of Mexicanos all over the world to imply that the Chihuahua is their country’s national dog?

Seriously: Mexicans love Chihuahuas. I didn’t say all Mexicans, but more of them than any other ethnic group I can think of. I’ve had countless in my family and the two sitting on my couch were highly offended to hear that this petty Mexican Barbie kerfuffle has brought into question the place of honor that the proud Chihuahua holds in the hearts of the Mexican people.

And I hate to be the one to break it to all the evolved, pan-American “New Generation Latinos” out there, but millions of other Hispanics whose families hail from all over Latin America love Chihuahuas, too.

Mexicans tend to also love tacos and mariachi music. Such a broad generalization may be highly offensive to some, but the reality of life is that while no rule of thumb accounts for all instances, some stereotypes are true. We can either embrace them and share our affinities with others or be the humorless clod who won’t be invited on the next Chipotle lunch run.

Esther Cepeda’s email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

 

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Ken Burns' "Central Park 5": A nightmare of criminal injustice

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

CHICAGO -- History is littered with examples of innocents who were punished for crimes they didn’t commit.

You don’t have to think very hard to remember someone who made headlines for an atrocious act only to find out years later the person didn’t do it.

When such a thing happens, we usually shrug our shoulders and say, “That’s too bad,” and try not to think about the destruction of the wrongly accused’s life. You might think, “There’s nothing I can do about it.”

But there is something you should do: Take a couple of hours and peer inside the courageous survival of a group of people who went through such a nightmare. Watch Ken Burns’ new film “The Central Park Five,” which will air on PBS stations across the country on April 16.

If you’ve never heard of the Central Park Five, you were either very young or not paying attention in the spring of 1989 when the case of the Central Park Jogger -- New York City’s de facto crime of the century -- played out. A young white woman was brutally beaten and raped in the city’s iconic park. Not long after, five youths -- four blacks and one Latino -- who happened to be in another part of the 800-acre park, were branded as marauding rapists.

This film puts you in the middle of cosmopolitan-yet-gritty New York City at the end of the ‘80s. It walks you in the shoes of the millions of people who were outraged and terrified over this one instance of violence because it so perfectly encapsulated every fear they had about urban decay, the erosion of common decency and the rise of a generation of “wilding” teens who could not be tamed.

Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise, ages 14 to 16, paid for all the sins of a city that had to admit to itself that even its rich parts weren’t very safe places to live. In the city’s lower-income neighborhoods, the nightmare forced some parents to acknowledge that they really were frightened of their own children.

The five underwent 24 to 30 continuous hours of aggressive interrogation by seasoned homicide detectives who promised to let them go home if they’d only confess. They were denied water, food and sleep.

These were not boys with records of causing trouble. They came from from intact, albeit poor, families who had never before interacted with the criminal justice system and had no idea how to navigate the situation they found themselves in. Four of the five boys confessed on videotape to a beating and rape they didn’t commit.

The five served their entire sentences, from six to 13 years, and even though serial rapist Matias Reyes confessed to the crime in 2002, they’ve still spent the last decade trying to reclaim their good names.

“This is our most journalistic film to date,” said Burns, eager to put the names of his co-directors, David McMahon and daughter Sarah Burns, author of “The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of a City Wilding” out in front of his own. “We took our voices out of it and practiced huge conscious restraint -- we didn’t want this to be a one-sided advocacy piece filled with huge neon signs and pointing arrows and emotional descriptors in the narrative text. We were just so anxious to be utterly fair and let the story tell itself. You can come into this film saying ‘I know they’re guilty’ and you get to listen and make up your own mind.”

We have that luxury -- an extravagance that even the jury in the criminal case didn’t have. Here’s my own neon sign for you as you watch the film: Look for Ronald Gold, juror No. 5, who was convinced of the defendants’ innocence throughout deliberations, yet admits that in the end he was so tired and under so much pressure to say they were culpable that he agreed to the guilty verdict just so he could go home.

“The Central Park Five” is not a movie you should watch to learn about something that happened a quarter-century ago. It’s one you should study to identify what might keep us from quickly blaming the most vulnerable the next time a horror causes the public to call for immediate retribution.

Esther Cepeda’s email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

 

 

 

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Michael Moss' 'Salt Sugar Fat': read it to defend yourself against the food industry

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

HICAGO -- People don’t know how to eat right. Almost from birth, the food we take in and the way it is marketed conspire to make us addicted and even sick. As a result, all but a few of us will face an early grave because of our indulgences.

This is not the thesis of the recently released book “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us” by Michael Moss. Rather, it’s the logical conclusion after years of studying the obesity epidemic, the science of nutrition, and the nature of the politics that surrounds public policy involving food. But Moss’ book reinforces this view with an up-to-date narrative buttressed with gems of little-publicized data, confidential corporate memos and interviews with confessional food industry insiders.

After countless hours of reading about our agriculture system, industrial food complex, junk food empires and the physiology of the obese human body, this book could have been snore-inducing for me. Instead, it was terrifying and thought-provoking.

“Salt Sugar Fat” has gotten a lot of media attention, some of it surprisingly lukewarm. One reviewer went out of his way to point out that it was definitely not Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.”

How could it be? “The Jungle” broke new ground. We’re no longer a nation of innocents, blind to both the billions that are spent on junk food and the ever-widening waistlines that are the calling card of the Type 2 diabetes epidemic. We are living in a society in which experts are conducting rigorous scientific research on the importance of families eating together and writing advocacy articles about sitting down to eat because the act is quickly becoming extinct.

The reason so many of us willingly turn away from considering our daily life-altering food decisions is that we’ve fallen into believing that there’s nothing we can do, even when there is.

This book won’t inspire many of us to think otherwise.

Among the many new factoids I picked up concerns our addiction to salt -- babies are not born with an inherent love for it, as they are with sugar. It’s a preference they develop once parents start plying them with the salty cereals (like Cheerios, though few people know that), crackers and other foods they themselves so love.

Another fascinating tidbit answers the question I’ve been asking myself for years: Why isn’t healthful nutrition a part of the standard curriculum in food-preparation classes offered in public schools?

It’s a long and fascinating story. As Moss tells it, in the late 1950s, General Foods Corp. started using high-school home economics teachers as a vehicle for promoting highly processed convenience foods. They buttered up the American Home Economics Association (now known as the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences) with hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants and fellowship programs and sponsored Big Food executives for top leadership posts.

The rest is no less alarming, even to those highly aware of the many scientific and marketing tactics that persuade people to fall in love with convenient fatty, sugary, salty foods. And when I say people I mean even the ones, like myself, who believe that personal responsibility is the No. 1 cure for our nation’s failing health. Hey, at the end of the day I’m still someone who grew up eating peanut butter sandwiches with a side of crunchy Cheetos (”one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure,” according to one food scientist) and a tall glass of Coca-Cola -- and I still crave such foods.

The details of the high-tech science used to make foods so tasty as to compel overconsumption -- and the ways that big food companies use their billions in revenue to seduce the young, the already sick and the poor to eat more of their products are explored in depth in the book. As Moss concludes:

“This book is intended as a wake-up call to the issues and tactics at play in the food industry, to the fact that we are not helpless in facing them down. We have choices, particularly when it comes to grocery shopping, and I saw this book, on its most basic level, as a tool for defending ourselves when we walk through those doors.”

Read “Salt Sugar Fat” and start defending yourself.

Esther Cepeda’s email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

 

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HPV and boys: For health's sake, get teens of both sexes inoculated

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

CHICAGO -- Let’s talk about the last thing in the world the mother of a 13-year-old boy ever wants to think about: her young son’s sex life.

If you’re lucky, your 13-year-old doesn’t have a sex life yet. And if you’re smart, you’ve taken that opportunity to get him immunized for the human papilloma virus.

Take it from someone who had an awkward kitchen-table conversation with an incredulous teen who thought his mom was plain out-of-her-mind for insisting he get a series of three shots in the arm, months apart, for a disease generally associated with women. It’s not an easy chat.

First and foremost, 13-year-olds generally don’t give a hoot about the news that less than a year after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended that boys get vaccinated against HPV, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) joined the call to protect boys against the virus that causes a large number of cancers of the mouth, throat, head and neck, plus the penis and rectum.

The last two cause a squirmy boy to snap to attention. Those are the ones that bring home the idea that HPV isn’t solely about what some teens like to refer to as “chick cancer.”

The main contention was that the boy in question was still a free agent. “But Mom, I don’t even have a girlfriend yet.”

Exactly.

The AAP’s guidelines call for routine vaccination between ages 11 and 12, the full range for high effectiveness is between ages 9 and 15, but the vaccine is most effective at any age if it is administered before the onset of sexual activity.

My real hurdle had been jumped long before, as a young parent, when I decided to always talk openly with my kids about sex for the express purpose that they not start too early in their lives or without the knowledge of how to do it safely.

I’m the odd bird in this respect because I actually went ahead with it. Though 89 percent of parents say they believe that talking to their preteens about sex is important, few actually bring themselves to have those admittedly difficult conversations, according to a 2010 paper published in the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health titled “Parents’ Perspectives on Talking to Preteenage Children About Sex.”

Though well intentioned, many parents surveyed found themselves unable to follow through. Thirty-nine percent reported feeling uncomfortable, 37 percent thought someone else could do it better, and 32 percent gave the answer most parents worry about whether they’re talking to kids about sex or not: fear that the conversations themselves might encourage kids to have sex.

It’s just too bad that there’s no vaccination against that parental qualm. If there was, I’d be rolling up my sleeve -- because what parent in their right mind doesn’t fear that confronting such a complex issue with so young a child will give some sort of implicit permission?

The worry that the vaccine will encourage promiscuity is a huge roadblock -- the biggest factor in the decision not to vaccinate, according to a Yale study of parental attitudes toward the HPV shots.

And it shows. According to a March study in the journal Pediatrics, in 2011 just 35 percent of girls 13 to 17 had been fully vaccinated and more parents reported not intending to vaccinate in 2010 than in 2008 when public awareness of the importance of such vaccines was lower. The CDC reports that in 2011, only a meager 1 percent of boys had completed the full series of shots.

Parents would be glad to learn that initial research shows that getting the vaccine isn’t altering kids’ sexual behavior. A study published in Pediatrics last October found that of nearly 1,400 girls, there was no evidence that those who were vaccinated beginning around age 11 went on to engage in more sexual activity than those who were not vaccinated.

More likely than not, the desire to protect their child’s innocence -- or well-being, in the case of those suspicious or downright scared of all vaccines -- will lead more parents to needlessly ignore a potential prevention.

But with nearly a third of children 14 to 19 already infected with HPV, that’s an awful gamble to take. I’d rather roll the dice on my son’s protection coupled with hearing his family promote safe sex well into the future rather than pretend that not talking about it at all will be inoculation enough.

Esther Cepeda’s email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

 

 

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When it comes to Hispanics Hollywood still doesn't get it

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

CHICAGO -- Unbelievably, the entertainment industry’s dearth of ethnic diversity and surplus of stereotypical Latino portrayals have devolved into something unsettling. We’ve gone from seeing poor representation in films and TV shows to wanting that diverse characters be played by people of the same ethnicity.

My recent compulsion to do a name check on Hispanic characters and their actors did not, as it did for so many others, start with the “Argo” controversy. I have no doubt the Academy Award-winning movie would have never made it onto the screen without Ben Affleck’s Hollywood clout, and that alone made it seem like a fine trade-off that Affleck played CIA officer Tony Mendez.

Then it came out that the real Tony Mendez, on whom the “Argo” hero was based, doesn’t identify himself as Hispanic because his family has been in the U.S. so long that he considers himself just a regular all-American guy.

Unlike those who were bewildered that Mendez doesn’t see himself on their terms, I don’t believe we should allow a knee-jerk ethnic pride mindset to snub those who identify themselves as Americans first and foremost. That would be tantamount to expecting Affleck to take only roles reflecting his Scottish ancestry.

But look at the case of “Olympus Has Fallen,” an action movie about a White House terrorist attack, in which the vice president, Charlie Rodriguez, is played by the Caucasian actor Phil Austin. When reached by an NBC Latino reporter, Austin said, “I’m straight up Caucasian and there was no attempt to play any sort of ethnic spin. The script did say Charlie or Charles Rodriguez, but the fact I wasn’t Hispanic was never discussed or brought up on set.”

That kind of stings.

Hispanics, by virtue of their underdog status resulting from years of being painted as criminal immigrants by right-wing nativists, have become big-time parity scolds. Whereas not too long ago few complained about being absent in popular culture, today every little factual or fictional “first” is celebrated well out of its deserved proportion.

The first “Hispanic vice president in a movie” is seen by some as no less important a precursor to such a historic moment in real life than Morgan Freeman and Dennis Haysbert making the American public comfortable with the idea of a black president.

Worse than simply telegraphing laziness at getting casting choices right, such Hollywood oversights show a fundamental disregard for both Hispanic audiences -- the Motion Picture Association of America recently reported that Hispanics currently buy a quarter of all tickets sold in the U.S., continuing a strong upward trend -- and for the pool of talented Hispanic actors trying to find work.

Here’s another one for you: In the recent movie “Parker,” Jennifer Lopez played Leslie Rogers straight -- no hints of ethnicity, which I thought was great. However, her movie mother, Ascension, who seemed very Latina, was played by Patti LuPone. That confused me, too.

The miscasting phenomenon isn’t limited to movies, of course. A few weeks ago, I settled on my sofa to finally treat myself to the new Kevin Spacey made-for-Netflix show “House of Cards.” I loved it right away and even liked the fact that the creators of the show decided to make the president’s White House chief of staff a Latina named Linda Vasquez.

But at the beginning of the second episode, I scanned the opening credits for the name of the actress so I could look up her bio and came up empty. It wasn’t until I saw the character and actress’s name in the closing credits that I realized that she is, in fact, the Indian-American Sakina Jaffrey.

She plays the role beautifully, so don’t get me wrong here. But it seems unbelievable -- unfathomable, really -- that of all the Hispanic actresses out there, not a single one was up to the task of earning a role on “House of Cards.” It’s far more likely that when it came to casting, it just wasn’t anyone’s priority to ensure that enough high-quality Hispanic actors were given a shot at the role.

When will Hollywood finally wake up? Writing in Hispanic characters and casting them may be a challenge. But it’s one that could be overcome with just a modicum of respect and consideration for a quarter of the total movie audience and about 48 million Hispanic television viewers.

Esther Cepeda’s email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

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Identity thieves target children, steal childhoods

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

CHICAGO -- A few years back, I profiled an identity theft victim who didn’t learn that someone had been using his very common Hispanic name to obtain jobs and credit until the IRS came after him for thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes.

At the time, state’s attorneys, law enforcement officials and immigration experts told me that legal immigrants, naturalized citizens and U.S.-born residents with common ethnic names were increasingly being targeted by illegal immigrants who resort to stealing plausible identities to find jobs.

As bad as that is for an adult, just imagine how much worse it would be if you were already a longtime victim of identity theft as a minor.

This very thing just happened to a Hispanic student at one of the high schools near my home. She was filling out her applications for college when she discovered that for years, someone else had been using her name and Social Security number. Worse, the person was someone she had trusted.

“Children are actually being targeted at a rate 35 times greater than adults -- one in every 40 households in America has at least one child that has been victimized by ID theft,” said Robert Chappell, a lieutenant with the Virginia State Police and the author of the book “Child Identity Theft: What Every Parent Needs to Know.”

“Twenty-seven percent of the children victimized knew the person and it was either a close family member, extended family member or a friend,” said Chappell, who told me that criminals use the identities to gain credit cards, employment, medical insurance and government benefits.

“That’s an emotional no-win situation for the child because if they’re one of the 73 percent who didn’t know who did this to them, they’re left with the feeling that their parents couldn’t or wouldn’t protect them. The 27 percent feel personally violated and believe their parent specifically targeted them for victimization, plus they’re often left with the inability to clean the mess up themselves.”

A child is especially vulnerable in such a situation because the most important thing a victim can do is go to the police and report that they’ve had a crime committed against them.

But in the case of a relative or close family friend “borrowing” a child’s name, date of birth and Social Security number, the child’s parents might be unwilling to get the authorities involved.

“One of the first critical steps is reporting the crime to the police. But many times, family members are unwilling to turn their relatives or family friends into the police, and without that police report, credit agencies are very reluctant to clean up the child’s record,” Chappell said. “The standard of proof is the police report, so without it the child is left with damaged credit and it doesn’t go away when they turn 18.”

Much like the young woman I mentioned earlier, many children are learning that this crime has been committed against them when they apply for a driver’s license, to college or for their first jobs.

As for whether Latinos are at outsized risk for this kind of crime, Chappell noted that he was unaware of any definitive research on the subject. But, he added, “there are particular traits or characteristics that increase your risk. In particular, if an illegal immigrant is looking for an identity to steal, then they want to steal from someone who either resembles them or is of the same culture so they can pass off the stolen name as their own.

“In general, the lower income you have, the more at risk you are for identity theft. People with fewer means don’t have the luxury of safes or lockboxes.”

Safeguard your child’s identity by understanding that their names and data have great financial value to others. Get them thorough credit reports that include manual searches on their Social Security numbers to weed out criminals who frequently use close-enough names and birthdates to fool creditors.

If it uncovers wrongdoing that can be repaired, your kids will benefit from your efforts for the rest of their lives.

Esther Cepeda’s email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Mexican immigrants stick together to get ahead

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

CHICAGO -- Thank you, US2010 Project, for stating the so-often misunderstood obvious: “Hispanic” is not synonymous with “Mexican.”

The project, based at Brown University and dedicated to researching changes in American society, has released a report titled “Hispanics in the United States: Not Only Mexicans.” For non-Mexican Hispanics who try not to seem anti-Mexican when they explain for the umpteenth time that they themselves are not Mexican, the report is a welcome acknowledgement of Hispanic diversity.

For the half of me that’s Ecuadorean, it’s a joy to see an independent organization confirm that “Hispanics come to the U.S. from many origins and there are real differences between them.”

My Mexican half, however, wasn’t terribly pleased that the good news about Latino diversity was overshadowed by the finding that every Hispanic group has become less segregated since 1990 -- except Mexicans.

According to the research, Mexicans, who represent the largest portion (more than 60 percent) of Latinos, are still living heavily segregated from whites compared to, say, South Americans, who more often have integrated themselves into neighborhoods with larger shares of non-Hispanic whites.

Segregation as a societal construct is bad and enforced segregation is against the law. But when it comes to Mexicans in the United States, I don’t think either applies. It would be fantastic if new arrivals could immediately settle into diverse middle-class neighborhoods. But this would only happen if they got here relatively wealthy, well-educated and bilingual.

For the majority of Mexican immigrants who come here without such resources, self-segregation can be a crucial first step in the assimilation process.

I hail from a city known for its diverse ethnic enclaves -- Chicago boasts one of the largest Polish communities outside Warsaw -- and we’ve always seen these as strengths and assets.

So iconic are our Mexican neighborhoods that whenever I mention I’m from Chicago, people automatically assume I grew up in one of the two major predominantly Mexican neighborhoods, Little Village or Pilsen. I didn’t -- my family settled on the North Side in an Irish neighborhood near a concentration of South Americans -- but the strengths of those communities reach every corner of the city and suburbs because they serve as immigrants’ first stop in America.

“It cuts both ways. We’re anxious to involve Mexicans into the greater city community because the city benefits quite a bit when the segregation breaks down,” said Dick Longworth, a senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs who studies the impact of globalization on Chicago and the Midwest. “But a lot of immigrants wouldn’t come here unless there was a group already present, with a common language -- and often times having arrived from the same hometown -- who could help them settle, break them in, get them in housing, schools, jobs and teach them how this strange place called Chicago works.”

He added: “One assumes that this breaks down after a while -- the first generation is likely to stick together, but the second moves on. The neighborhood stays intact, though, because you might see the old folks stay put, but it’s generally an ever-changing population because the kids move out and newcomers settle in. You see this in Chicago, where Pilsen and Little Village have not grown or spread out even though Chicago’s Hispanic population has increased.”

Additionally, these highly concentrated neighborhoods are epicenters for cities to provide integration resources such as English as a second language and citizenship classes.

“[Segregated Mexican communities] help people get in touch with similar individuals who have gone through the process, it aids the assimilation process. I can’t say it’s a bad thing,” said Nilda Esparza, the executive director of the Little Village Chamber of Commerce, which represents a 600-business corridor known as Chicago’s second Magnificent Mile because it’s the second-highest retail tax generator for the city. “There’s definitely a progression and, while not everyone moves forward, Little Village is a perfect example of a community that has created a space for so many families to live the American Dream of buying a home, starting a successful business and contributing to the economy.”

Yes, assimilation should always be the goal. But sometimes, sticking together can be a community’s greatest strength.

 

 

Esther Cepeda’s email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group

 

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A dual-language gesture for bringing together a school community

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

CHICAGO -- Something bordering on the miraculous happened at my community high school the other night: The parents who speak only Spanish were included and respected in a meeting in a way that did not turn the whole thing into a big, fat mess.

In the past, the school district’s well-intentioned efforts to include non-English-speaking parents in assemblies had turned them into long, plodding exercises in maintaining focus through short bursts and long pauses.

A presenter would impart a message in chunks and a translator would repeat the information in Spanish. Invariably, the English speaker would go for way too long without breaking to let the translator catch up. Then the Spanish information would stream out, sometimes too quickly to understand.

The crowd would get shifty and exasperated because both audiences were waiting to hear the portion that was for them. The presentations would take twice as long as they would have in a single language, and some parents left agitated.

When piling out of the gymnasium or auditorium, it was not uncommon to hear loud complaints of English-only speakers of the sort that would usually be limited to behind-closed-doors harrumphing about school communications arriving home printed in two languages.

Such is life in a community that was once strictly blue-collar white and over the course of a very few years became 50 percent Hispanic. You don’t have to hang around the local coffee shops too long before you hear someone grousing that the signs on Main Street businesses are increasingly only in Spanish.

The dual-language school assemblies were a nightmare -- at least half the crowd felt left out at any given moment -- and it reinforced to longtime residents that their new neighbors were making things worse, not better.

So imagine my surprise when I attended a recent meeting in which the Spanish-speaking families were outfitted with discreet headsets streaming real-time translation from a school employee.

A quick check around the room showed an equally engaged audience that was seamlessly following the featured speaker and was given ample opportunity to ask questions in either language for immediate response.

No one sat glassy eyed for their turn to listen, no one grouched about how long it was taking and, best of all, I didn’t hear any snarky grumblings about how people "should learn to speak the language."

I fully agree that parents of public schoolchildren should be responsible for making every attempt to speak the primary language of their community. I, too, wish that our financially struggling, academically failing schools weren’t further burdened by the intense needs of children and parents who can barely communicate in English.

But even when attacked with fervor, English-language acquisition doesn’t always happen quickly enough to make it possible for parents to actively participate in their child’s education without some help.

According to the National Education Policy Center’s just-released brief on English-language learners (ELLs) and parental involvement, these students mainly attend schools with few resources and low instructional capacities and have high communication barriers to overcome.

The No. 1 tonic for clearing those obstacles is strengthening parental involvement in school. Among many best-practice recommendations, such as recruiting ELL families as volunteers and audiences and including them in school governance, is the practice of providing translators for all key parent meetings.

As you can see, that’s easier said than done -- even the best-intentioned solutions can end up feeling oppressive and divisive.

Thankfully, my school district realized how ineffective meetings had become and was able to find a workable solution to the tricky puzzle of maintaining a welcoming school environment for non-English speakers that avoids further segregating the community.

A district representative told me that the set-up had just arrived and I’d been among the first to witness the new system in action. And I was asked to make sure I told the school’s administration how much I liked it.

You see, such a system isn’t exactly cheap -- and there are some who would make the argument that it was an investment that could have been made in other materials benefitting the entire student body.

But I’d disagree. The inconspicuous translation services benefit everyone. As far as I’m concerned, any system that both accommodates a second language and equally respects all the cultures present in a school community is worth its weight in gold.

Esther Cepeda’s email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group

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Reach Out And Read: A prescription for a life-long love of reading

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

CHICAGO -- A few weeks ago, I approached an apocalyptic-sounding essay in The New York Times titled "The Country That Stopped Reading." Finally, I thought, another pessimist to join me in bemoaning the awful state of reading in America.

The author, David Toscana, was actually writing about Mexico. But he paralleled what I see here in this country. When he lamented that, in Mexico, baseline literacy is up but "the practice of reading an actual book is not," the observation rang true stateside.

Admittedly, it’s not all that bad. According to a 2012 survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, 83 percent of Americans between the ages of 16 and 29 had read a book in the past year and more of them did so for pleasure than for work or school.

But if you spend enough time in low-income communities and schools, the world looks a lot different than what the national statistics imply.

Toscana recalled asking an auditorium filled with 300 or so 14- and 15-year-olds the question "Who likes to read?" He was shocked to see but one shy hand. I’ve had similar experiences in my local schools.

He’s also spent time among teachers, never seeing them crack open a book. I’ve witnessed instructors scoff at the very suggestion that they read a novel over the summer in order to participate in a back-to-school book discussion.

The underlying problem isn’t simply about literacy. The reality is that while many people are taught to read, not enough grow up with a love of reading as young children. One group has honed in on this sad state of affairs and is doing something meaningful to change it.

Reach Out and Read is a national nonprofit organization of pediatricians and medical providers that prescribes books as part of well-child health visits. The organization helps young families learn how to read together and impresses upon parents that they are their child’s most important teacher.

"The founders said ‘We talk about nutrition, sugar, seat belts, car seats, exercise and such, why not start incorporating the message of the importance of reading?’" said Judith Forman, the Boston-based organization’s public awareness manager. "Eventually, the program grew national. We now serve 4 million children and families a year via 5,000 health centers in all 50 states."

Doctors’ offices volunteer to join the program, train in specific literacy tactics and fund the purchase of enough age-appropriate books to furnish each one of their young patients with 10 books over the span of a few years. Each child between the ages of 6 months and 5 years who comes in gets a book, and their parents are given a mini-lesson on what age-appropriate literacy activities should take place at home.

One thing that really stuck out to me as I spoke with Forman is that although the physician groups participating in the program are heavily concentrated in low-income communities -- arguably, where they’re most needed -- once a practice signs on, all families are exposed to the benefits of reading.

"The medical provider tailors the program to each family," Forman said. "Particularly now, in the age of technology, some families are time-poor as opposed to economically poor and fall into the trap of replacing reading with screen time. In other families where parents might have low literacy, or a second language, we show parents how to sit with a child and flip through books, look at pictures and ask questions. The reading, talking, singing, and rhyming together are all the things that set the skills for children to be ready to read, learn and succeed. And it’s a special bonding moment when kids are on a parent’s lap."

Dipesh Navsaria, a pediatrician and children’s librarian, as well as the director of Reach Out and Read Wisconsin, literally writes out prescriptions to his patients calling for doses that range in minutes per day to "every night at bedtime." Refills are to be requested at the public library.

"It’s cute and gimmicky but families are surprised by it," Navsaria told me. "It helps them understand that I really mean this. It is as important as bike helmets, ‘back-to-sleep’ and immunizations. It is as important a prescription as one for [the antibiotic] amoxicillin."

Prescribing a love of reading to young families -- what a brilliant idea. Sadly, it’s one that needs to be more seriously considered for widespread adoption as book reading remains nonexistent in some families and gives way to our society’s endless electronic entertainments in others.

Esther Cepeda’s email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com.

(c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

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Jeb Bush now has the reputation of a flip flopper on path to citizenship for illegal immigrants

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

CHICAGO -- After reading former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s book "Immigration Wars: Forging an American Solution," it’s very hard to imagine how any moderate, willing-to-compromise person could find much fault with this ode to the many benefits of earnest, hardworking, U.S.-loving immigrants.

Naysayers have already declared the tone of the book too harsh, but then again, they’re probably the same people who harrumphed in self-recognition when Bush and his co-author Clint Bolick described the far-left fringes of the debate as those who wouldn’t be satisfied until the borders were simply opened.

This book actually claims a middle ground both by celebrating the positives that immigrants bring to our economy and national fabric, and by being clear-eyed about the undeniable fact that some illegal immigrants take up precious safety-net resources and others commit crimes.

And you can’t say Bush doesn’t wholeheartedly love immigrants -- he’s married to one from Mexico. So when he harps on the fact that our immigration laws aren’t set up to meet our country’s pressing economic challenges, you have to understand that he’s not dissing immigrants or their families. He’s just telling it like it is.

The only thing Bush really disdains is the current immigration system itself, which he says is driven by a preference for broadly defined family reunification that encourages endless "chain immigration." Bush describes the system as cumbersome, complex, opaque, sometimes capricious, incoherent, self-contradictory and downright bureaucratic. Who could possibly disagree with that?

But here’s the part of the book that has sent so many into a tizzy:

"Once [adult] immigrants ... plead guilty [to having committed the crime of illegal entry] and pay the applicable fines or perform community service, they will become eligible to start the process to earn permanent legal residency. Such earned residency should entail paying taxes, learning English and committing no substantial crimes.

"Permanent residency in this context, however, should not lead to citizenship. It is absolutely vital to the integrity of our immigration system that actions have consequences -- in this case, that those who violated the laws can remain but cannot obtain the cherished fruits of citizenship.

"To do otherwise would signal once again that people who circumvent the system can still obtain the full benefits of American citizenship. It must be a basic prerequisite for citizenship to respect the rule of law. But those who entered illegally, despite compelling reasons to do so in many instances, did so knowing that they were violating the law of the land. A grant of citizenship is an undeserving reward for conduct that we cannot afford to encourage. However, illegal immigrants who do wish to become citizens should have the choice of returning to their native countries and applying through normal immigration processes that [under this blueprint] would be much more open than before."

My problem is not Bush’s statement of core beliefs -- it sounds like a perfectly reasonable compromise to me -- or the immediate, emotional opposition to it. It’s been Bush’s response to the subsequent controversy.

Former fans rushed to remark that this was a sudden, radical change from his past statements, and they’ve noted that as recently as January, Bush and his "Immigration Wars" co-author had an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal favoring a path to citizenship in upcoming reform proposals.

Bush responded to heated criticism about a right-leaning change of heart by suggesting that the book, written long before the Republican Party had its post-2012 election immigration evolution, was out of date. He then went on Sunday talk shows to specify that he’s open to a path toward citizenship only if an immigration bill could prevent creating even more incentives for immigrants to enter the country and live here unlawfully.

That’s a tall order, and the kind of nuance that gets lost in headlines.

The net result is that while Bush used to be considered a moderate Republican and thoughtful proponent of immigration reform, many are now unsure whether he really is, as his co-author Bolick wrote, "willing to speak his mind regardless of political consequences."

It’s sadly unclear what Bush will actually stand up for and it’s hard to have much confidence that he won’t fall into the trap of bending his immigration beliefs to the dysfunction of our political system and "the political correctness of our times."

As it is, he’s already become as self-contradictory as our present immigration system.

Esther Cepeda’s email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com.

(c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

 

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The new digital divide for minorities: not access, but empowerment

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

CHICAGO -- For years, I’ve been saying the "digital divide" -- equal access to Internet-enabled technology -- was destined for the dustbin of history. Its extinction is finally starting to be recognized.

Last week, the Pew Hispanic Center released data noting that when it comes to using the Internet, the divide between Latinos and whites is smaller than what it had been just a few years ago.

According to Pew, between 2009 and 2012, the share of Latino adults who say they go online at least occasionally increased from 64 percent to 78 percent. By comparison, Internet usage among whites increased by half as much.

During that same time frame, the gap in cellphone ownership between Latinos and other groups either diminished or disappeared -- in 2012, 86 percent of Latinos said they owned a cellphone, up from 76 percent in 2009.

These statistics reflect a trend that has, for years, been accelerating among minorities and people with low incomes -- though, it should be noted, not among people who live in rural areas and are still mostly disconnected.

The next challenge is for everyone to achieve the savvy and understanding necessary to use online tools for empowerment and transformation.

For instance, we know that a slightly higher percentage of Latinos and blacks say they own a cellphone than whites, and that Latinos are just as likely as whites or blacks to own an Internet-enabled smartphone. But what do they do with them?

Is it a pocket fun machine that simply keeps social media close at hand? Or are there enough opportunities available for these previously disconnected users to learn how to fill out online job applications, use health management apps or access banking services with their phones?

I’m not completely sure. I can pull up a zillion studies showing how many Hispanics and blacks are on Facebook or Twitter or watching videos, but research on less "fun" usage habits is harder to find.

The Captura Group, a marketing firm, reported last year that only 32 percent of all Hispanics online use the Internet for their banking. In June 2011, only 10 percent of Latinos online were using LinkedIn, according to comScore. Curiously, informal research by a ClickZ marketing columnist estimated that less than 4 percent of them openly identified themselves on LinkedIn as Hispanic.

It’s good progress that 72 percent of Latinos say they now own a desktop or laptop computer (compared to 70 percent of blacks and 83 percent of whites), but what does this mean for families? Is that desktop being used to write and print school papers, research colleges or create resumes -- or for some combination of light information and entertainment?

In 2009, researchers at the University of Chicago did field studies in Romania to see if students in low-income households would gain better academic outcomes if they were afforded a home computer. Reinforcing the results of other similar studies, they found little or no educational benefit.

In fact, the students in low-income households reacted quite badly to the new technological arrival. Their test scores often declined after the machine arrived because it was overwhelmingly used as an entertainment device, further separating them academically from their more privileged counterparts.

Last year, The New York Times published an eye-opening article titled "Wasting Time Is New Divide in Digital Era." It chronicled worries from entities such as the Federal Communications Commission and some of the same groups that struggled to get technology into the hands of the underprivileged that, as some studies had already found, minority kids spend considerably more time using their computers and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites than do children from more well-off families.

We need to start thinking in terms of a much different digital divide.

Now that minority and low-income populations have more access to tech tools and decent Internet service -- even if only at community hubs such as the local school, library or McDonald’s -- we need programs that will teach them how to use this access to better their lives. And we need more research to drive those initiatives.

There will be little momentum to push for meaningful digital literacy until we are acutely aware of how few minorities go online to get higher education, access financial services or enhance their careers. Until this happens, our society will continue to be a tale of two Internets.

Esther Cepeda’s email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com.

(c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

 

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