Thursday, December 1, 2016

Michelle Malkin: 15 Things Every Legal Should Know About the Mexican Fascist Party of LA RAZA

BE PREPARED!


"We don't want to drink from a White water fountain, we have our own wells and our natural reservoirs and our way of collecting rain in our aqueducts. We don't need a White water fountain … ultimately the White way, the American way, the neo-liberal, capitalist way of life will eventually lead to our own destruction." 
THE FASTEST GROWING POLITICAL PARTY IN AMERICA IS THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA. IT IS AN AMERICAN TAX SUPPORTED POLITICAL PARTY.

15 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT LA RAZA “THE RACE”
by Michelle Malkin
"The American Southwest seems to be slowly returning to the jurisdiction of Mexico without firing a single shot."  --- EXCELSIOR ---  national newspaper of Mexico


THE U.S. TAX SUPPORTED MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA

FIFTEEN THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT LA RAZA “THE RACE”

by Michelle Malkin

 Only in America could critics of a group called "The Race" be labeled racists.
Such is the triumph of left-wing identity chauvinists, whose aggressive activists and supine abettors have succeeded in redefining all opposition as "hate." 
The presidential candidates and the media have legitimized "The Race" as a mainstream ethnic lobbying group and marginalized its critics as intolerant bigots.
The unvarnished truth is that the group is a radical ethnic nationalist outfit that abuses your tax dollars and milks PC politics to undermine our sovereignty.

Here are 15 things you should know about "The Race":

15. "The Race" supports driver's licenses for illegal aliens.

14."The Race" demands in-state tuition discounts for illegal alien students that are not available to law-abiding U.S. citizens and law-abiding legal immigrants.

13. "The Race" vehemently opposes cooperative immigration enforcement efforts between local, state and federal authorities.

12. "The Race" opposes a secure fence on the southern border.

11. "The Race" joined the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in a failed lawsuit attempt to prevent the feds from entering immigration information into a key national crime database -- and to prevent local police officers from accessing the data.

10. "The Race" opposed the state of Oklahoma's tough immigration-enforcement-first laws, which cut off welfare to illegal aliens, put teeth in employer sanctions and strengthened local-federal cooperation and information sharing.

9. "The Race" joined other open-borders, anti-assimilationists and sued to prevent Proposition 227, California's bilingual education reform ballot initiative, from becoming law.

8. "The Race" bitterly protested common-sense voter ID provisions as an "absolute disgrace."

7. "The Race" has consistently opposed post-9/11 national security measures at every turn.

6. Former "Race" president Raul Yzaguirre, Hillary Clinton's Hispanic outreach adviser, said this: "U.S. English is to Hispanics as the Ku Klux Klan is to blacks." He was referring to U.S. English, the nation's oldest, largest citizens' action group dedicated to preserving the unifying role of the English language in the United States. "The Race" also pioneered Orwellian open-borders Newspeak and advised the Mexican government on how to lobby for illegal alien amnesty while avoiding the terms "illegal" and "amnesty."

5. "The Race" gives mainstream cover to a poisonous subset of ideological satellites, led by Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan (MEChA). The late GOP Rep. Charlie Norwood rightly characterized the organization as "a radical racist group … one of the most anti-American groups in the country, which has permeated U.S. campuses since the 1960s, and continues its push to carve a racist nation out of the American West."

4. "The Race" is currently leading a smear campaign against staunch immigration enforcement leaders and has called for TV and cable news networks to keep immigration enforcement proponents off the airwaves -- in addition to pushing for Fairness Doctrine policies to shut up their foes. The New York Times reported that current "Race" president Janet Murguia believes "hate speech" should "not be tolerated, even if such censorship were a violation of First Amendment rights."

3. "The Race" sponsors militant ethnic nationalist charter schools subsidized by your public tax dollars (at least $8 million in federal education grants). The schools include Aztlan Academy in Tucson, Ariz., the Mexicayotl Academy in Nogales, Ariz., Academia Cesar Chavez Charter School in St. Paul, Minn., and La Academia Semillas del Pueblo in Los Angeles, whose principal inveighed: "We don't want to drink from a White water fountain, we have our own wells and our natural reservoirs and our way of collecting rain in our aqueducts. We don't need a White water fountain … ultimately the White way, the American way, the neo liberal, capitalist way of life will eventually lead to our own destruction." 

2. "The Race" has perfected the art of the PC shakedown at taxpayer expense, pushing relentlessly to lower home loan standards for Hispanic borrowers, reaping millions in federal "mortgage counseling" grants, seeking special multimillion-dollar earmarks and partnering with banks that do business with illegal aliens.

1. "The Race" thrives on ethnic supremacy -- and the elite sheeple's unwillingness to call it what it is. As historian Victor Davis Hanson observes: "[The] organization's very nomenclature 'The National Council of La Raza' is hate speech to the core. Despite all the contortions of the group, Raza (as its Latin cognate suggests) reflects the meaning of 'race' in Spanish, not 'the people' -- and that's precisely why we don't hear of something like 'The National Council of the People,' which would not confer the buzz notion of ethnic, racial and tribal chauvinism."


The fringe is the center. The center is the fringe. Viva La Raza.

LA RAZA FACISM:
Ethnic Cleansing By Mexicans Occupying California…. Where Mexico loots first!

ANTONIO “Taco Runt” VILLARAIGOSA DECLARES MEXIFORNIA’S SURRENDER TO LA RAZA SUPREMACY
“Taco Runt” is a member of the Mexican Fascist Movement of M.E.Ch.A. and a racist LA RAZA supremacist.

He is proud of the fact that he FAILED California’s State Bar test more than any other illiterate Mexican on earth and that qualifies him to operate California’s Mexican Welfare State for LA RAZA.

LA RAZA MEX ETHNIC CLEANSING IN CALIFORNIA…. of legals.

SANTA ANA SURRENDERS TO LA RAZA FASCIST MOVEMENT

 

Another California City Waves the Mexican Flag





THE LA RAZA CRIME TIDAL WAVE


….. then they go vote Democrat for wider open borders and more welfare!


40% of all Federal Border Crimes are by invading Mexicans!




FROSTY WOOLDRIDGE:

 

MEXICO’S STAGGERING LOOTING IN OUR OPEN BORDERS….



ARIZONA…. MEXICAN WORLD CAPITAL FOR LA RAZA CAR THEFT


http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/10/frosty-wooldridge-what-if-hillary-gets.html



Here did those vehicles go? Who stole them? Take a guess. Arizona is the temporary home of 500,000 illegal aliens. They cost Arizona taxpayers over $1 billion annually in services for schools, medical care, welfare anchor babies, loss of tax base and prisons. Illegals use those vehicles for smuggling more people and drugs from around the world into our country. When the vehicles are recovered, they are smashed-up wrecks in the desert. If not found, they have new owners south of the border as thieves drive the cars through the desert and into Mexico as easily as you drive your kids to soccer practice. THAT’S how porous our borders are!


 

 THE STAGGERING  COST OF AMNESTY: non-enforcement is another form of AMNESTY!
Legals to pay trillions for open borders and Mexico’s looting
Between one-quarter and one-third of the 1.5 million new arrivals in 2014 were illegal aliens, meaning that a conservative estimate is that 1,000 illegal aliens a day are moving to the United States.

THE LA RAZA MEXICAN LOOTERS: Invade, Occupy, Loot and bred anchor babies for 18 years of gringo-paid welfare

FROSTY WOOLDRIDGE

HISPANIC FAMILY VALUES: 

Mexican flag wavers loot the stupid gringo for billions!

Mexico’s massive looting in our open borders:


http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2009/07/hispanic-family-values-or-runaway.html



City Journal
Hispanic Family Values?
Runaway illegitimacy is creating a new U.S. underclass.

Heather Mac Donald

Unless the life chances of children raised by single mothers 

suddenly improve, the explosive growth of the U.S. Hispanic 

population over the next couple of decades does not bode well for 

American social stability. Hispanic immigrants bring near–Third 

World levels of fertility to America, coupled with what were once 

thought to be First World levels of illegitimacy. (In fact, family 

breakdown is higher in many Hispanic countries than here.) Nearly 

half of the children born to Hispanic mothers in the U.S. are born 

out of wedlock, a proportion that has been increasing rapidly with 

no signs of slowing down. Given what psychologists and 

sociologists now know about the much higher likelihood of social 

pathology among those who grow up in single-mother households, 

the Hispanic baby boom is certain to produce more juvenile 

delinquents, more school failure, more welfare use, and more teen 

pregnancy in the future.

The government social-services sector has already latched onto 

this new client base; as the Hispanic population expands, so will the

demands for a larger welfare state. Since conservative open-borders

advocates have yet to acknowledge the facts of Hispanic family 

breakdown, there is no way to know what their solution to it is. But 

they had better come up with one quickly, because the problem is 

here—and growing.

The dimensions of the Hispanic baby boom are startling. The 

Hispanic birthrate is twice as high as that of the rest of the 

American population. That high fertility rate—even more than 

unbounded levels of immigration—will fuel the rapid Hispanic 

population boom in the coming decades. By 2050, the Latino 

population will have tripled, the Census Bureau projects. One in 

four Americans will be Hispanic by mid-century, twice the current 

ratio. In states such as California and Texas, Hispanics will be in 

the clear majority. Nationally, whites will drop from near 70 

percent of the total population in 2000 to just half by 2050. 

Hispanics will account for 46 percent of the nation’s added 

population over the next two decades, the Pew Hispanic Center 

reports.

But it’s the fertility surge among unwed Hispanics that should 

worry policymakers. Hispanic women have the highest unmarried 

birthrate in the country—over three times that of whites and 

Asians, and nearly one and a half times that of black women, 

according to the Centers for Disease Control. Every 1,000 

unmarried Hispanic women bore 92 children in 2003 (the latest 

year for which data exist), compared with 28 children for every 

1,000 unmarried white women, 22 for every 1,000 unmarried Asian

women, and 66 for every 1,000 unmarried black women. Forty-

five percent of all Hispanic births occur outside of marriage, 

compared with 24 percent of white births and 15 percent of Asian 

births. Only the percentage of black out-of-wedlock births—68 

percent—exceeds the Hispanic rate. But the black population is not

going to triple over the next few decades.

As if the unmarried Hispanic birthrate weren’t worrisome enough, 

it is increasing faster than among other groups. It jumped 5 percent 

from 2002 to 2003, whereas the rate for other unmarried women 

remained flat. Couple the high and increasing illegitimacy rate of 

Hispanics with their higher overall fertility rate, and you have a 

recipe for unstoppable family breakdown.

The only bright news in this demographic disaster story concerns 

teen births. Overall teen childbearing in the U.S. declined for the 

12th year in a row in 2003, having dropped by more than a third 

since 1991. Yet even here, Hispanics remain a cause for concern. 

The rate of childbirth for Mexican teenagers, who come from by far

the largest and fastest-growing immigrant population, greatly 

outstrips every other group. The Mexican teen birthrate is 93 births 

per every 1,000 girls, compared with 27 births for every 1,000 

white girls, 17 births for every 1,000 Asian girls, and 65 births for 

every 1,000 black girls. To put these numbers into international 

perspective, Japan’s teen birthrate is 3.9, Italy’s is 6.9, and France’s 

is 10. Even though the outsize U.S. teen birthrate is dropping, it 

continues to inflict unnecessary costs on the country, to which 

Hispanics contribute disproportionately.

To grasp the reality behind those numbers, one need only talk to 

people working on the front lines of family breakdown. Social 

workers in Southern California, the national epicenter for illegal 

Hispanic immigrants and their progeny, are in despair over the 

epidemic of single parenting. Not only has illegitimacy become 

perfectly acceptable, they say, but so has the resort to welfare and 

social services to cope with it.

Dr. Ana Sanchez delivers babies at St. Joseph’s Hospital in the city 

of Orange, California, many of them to Hispanic teenagers. To her 

dismay, they view having a child at their age as normal. A recent 

patient just had her second baby at age 17; the baby’s father is in 

jail. But what is “most alarming,” Sanchez says, is that the “teens’ 

parents view having babies outside of marriage as normal, too. A 

lot of the grandmothers are single as well; they never married, or 

they had successive partners. So the mom sends the message to her 

daughter that it’s okay to have children out of wedlock.”

Sanchez feels almost personally involved in the problem: “I’m 

Hispanic myself. I wish I could find out what the Asians are doing 

right.” She guesses that Asian parents’ passion for education 

inoculates their children against teen pregnancy and the underclass 

trap. “Hispanics are not picking that up like the Asian kids,” she 

sighs.

Conservatives who support open borders are fond of invoking 

“Hispanic family values” as a benefit of unlimited Hispanic 

immigration. Marriage is clearly no longer one of those family 

values. But other kinds of traditional Hispanic values have survived

—not all of them necessarily ideal in a modern economy, however. 

One of them is the importance of having children early and often. 

“It’s considered almost a badge of honor for a young girl to have a 

baby,” says Peggy Schulze of Chrysalis House, an adoption agency 

in Fresno. (Fresno has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in 

California, typical of the state’s heavily Hispanic farm districts.) It 

is almost impossible to persuade young single Hispanic mothers to 

give up their children for adoption, Schulze says. “The attitude is: 

‘How could you give away your baby?’ I don’t know how to break 

through.”

The most powerful Hispanic family value—the tight-knit extended 

family—facilitates unwed child rearing. A single mother’s relatives 

often step in to make up for the absence of the baby’s father. I 

asked Mona, a 19-year-old parishioner at St. Joseph’s Church in 

Santa Ana, California, if she knew any single mothers. She 

laughed: “There are so many I can’t even name them.” Two of her 

cousins, aged 25 and 19, have children without having husbands. 

The situation didn’t seem to trouble this churchgoer too much. 

“They’ll be strong enough to raise them. It’s totally okay with us,” 

she said. “We’re very close; we’re there to support them. They’ll do

 just fine.”

As Mona’s family suggests, out-of-wedlock child rearing among 

Hispanics is by no means confined to the underclass. The St. 

Joseph’s parishioners are precisely the churchgoing, blue-collar 

workers whom open-borders conservatives celebrate. Yet this 

community is as susceptible as any other to illegitimacy. Fifty-year-

old Irma and her husband, Rafael, came legally from Mexico in the 

early 1970s. Rafael works in a meatpacking plant in Brea; they 

have raised five husky boys who attend church with them. Yet 

Irma’s sister—a homemaker like herself, also married to a factory 

hand—is now the grandmother of two illegitimate children, one by 

each daughter. “I saw nothing in the way my sister and her 

husband raised her children to explain it,” Irma says. “She gave 

them everything.” One of the fathers of Irma’s young nieces has 

four other children by a variety of different mothers. His 

construction wages are being garnished for child support, but he is 

otherwise not involved in raising his children.

The fathers of these illegitimate children are often problematic in 

even more troubling ways. Social workers report that the 

impregnators of younger Hispanic women are with some regularity 

their uncles, not necessarily seen as a bad thing by the mother’s 

family. Alternatively, the father may be the boyfriend of the girl’s 

mother, who then continues to stay with the grandmother. Older 

men seek out young girls in the belief that a virgin cannot get 

pregnant during her first intercourse, and to avoid sexually 

transmitted diseases.

The tradition of starting families young and expand- ing them 

quickly can come into conflict with more modern American mores. 

Ron Storm, the director of the Hillview Acres foster-care home in 

Chino, tells of a 15-year-old girl who was taken away from the 21-

year-old father of her child by a local child-welfare department. 

The boyfriend went to jail, charged with rape. But the girl’s parents 

complained about the agency’s interference, and eventually both 

the girl and her boyfriend ended up going back to Mexico, 

presumably to have more children. “At 15, as the Quinceañera 

tradition celebrates, you’re considered ready for marriage,” says 

Storm. Or at least for childbearing; the marriage part is 

disappearing.

But though older men continue to take advantage of younger 

women, the age gap between the mother and the father of an 

illegitimate child is quickly closing. Planned Parenthood of Orange 

and San Bernardino Counties tries to teach young fathers to take 

responsibility for their children. “We’re seeing a lot more 13- and 

14-year-old fathers,” says Kathleen Collins, v.p. of health 

education. The day before we spoke, Scott Montoya, an Orange 

County sheriff’s deputy, arrested two 14-year-old boys who were 

bragging about having sexual relations with a cafeteria worker from

an Olive Garden restaurant. “It’s now all about getting girls 

pregnant when you’re age 15,” he says. One 18-year-old in the 

Planned Parenthood fathers’ program has two children by two 

different girls and is having sex with five others, says health worker 

Jason Warner. “A lot of [the adolescent sexual behavior] has to do 

with getting respect from one’s peers,” observes Warner.

Normally, the fathers, of whatever age, take off. “The father may 

already be married or in prison or doing drugs,” says Amanda Gan, 

director of operations for Toby’s House, a maternity home in Dana 

Point, California. Mona, the 19-year-old parishioner at St. Joseph’s 

Church, says that the boys who impregnated her two cousins are 

“nowhere to be found.” Her family knows them but doesn’t know if

 they are working or in jail.



Two teen mothers at the Hillview Acres home represent the outer 

edge of Hispanic family dysfunction. Yet many aspects of their 

lives are typical. Though these teenagers’ own mothers were 

unusually callous and irresponsible, the social milieu in which they 

were raised is not unusual.

Irene’s round, full face makes her look younger than her 14 years, 

certainly too young to be a mother. But her own 

mother’s boyfriend 

repeatedly forced sex on her, with the mother’s acquiescence. The 

result was Irene’s baby, Luz. Baby Luz has an uncle her own age, 

Irene’s new 13-month-old brother. Like Irene, Irene’s mother had 

her first child at 14, and produced five more over the next 16 years, 

all of whom went into foster care. Irene’s father committed suicide 

before she was old enough to know him. The four fathers of her 

siblings are out of the picture, too: one of them, the father of her 

seven-year-old brother and five-year-old sister, was deported back 

violation of his probation conditions. 

Irene is serene and articulate—remarkably so, considering that in 

her peripatetic early life in Orange County she went to school 

maybe twice a week. She likes to sing and to read books that are 

sad, she says, especially books by Dave Pelzer, a child-abuse 

victim who has published three best-selling memoirs about his 

childhood trauma. She says she will never get married: “I don’t 

want another man in my life. I don’t want that experience again.”

Eighteen-year-old Jessica at least escaped rape, but her family 

experiences were bad enough. The large-limbed young woman, 

whose long hair is pulled back tightly from her heart-shaped face, 

grew up in the predominantly Hispanic farming community of 

Indio in the Coachella Valley. She started “partying hard” in fifth 

grade, she says—at around the same time that her mother, separated

from her father, began using drugs and going clubbing. By the 

eighth grade, Jessica and her mother were drinking and smoking 

marijuana together. Jessica’s family had known her boyfriend’s 

family since she was four; when she had her first child by him—

she was 14 and he was 21—her mother declared philosophically 

that she had always known that it would happen. “It was okay with 

her, so long as he continued to give her drugs.”

Jessica originally got pregnant to try to clean up her life, she says. 

“I knew what I was doing was not okay, so having a baby was a 

way for me to stop doing what I was doing. In that sense, the baby 

was planned.” She has not used drugs since her first pregnancy, 

though she occasionally drinks. After her daughter was born, she 

went to live with her boyfriend in a filthy trailer without plumbing; 

they scrounged food from dumpsters, despite the income from his 

illegal drug business. They planned to get married, but by the time 

she got pregnant again with a son, “We were having a lot of 

problems. We’d be holding hands, and he’d be looking at other 

girls. I didn’t want him to touch me.” Eventually, the county 

welfare agency removed her and put her in foster care with her two 

children.

Both Jessica and her caddish former boyfriend illustrate the 

evanescence of the celebrated Hispanic “family values.” Her 

boyfriend’s family could not be more traditional. Two years ago, 

Jessica went back to Mexico to celebrate her boyfriend’s parents’ 

25th wedding anniversary and the renewal of their wedding vows. 

Jessica’s own mother got married at 15 to her father, who was ten 

years her senior. Her father would not let his wife work; she was a 

“stay-at-home wife,” Jessica says. But don’t blame the move to the 

U.S. for the behavior of younger generations; the family crack-up is

happening even faster in Latin America.

Jessica’s mother may have been particularly negligent, but Jessica’s

experiences are not so radically different from those of her peers. 

“Everybody’s having babies now,” she says. “The Coachella 

Valley is filled with girls’ pregnancies. Some girls live with their 

babies’ dads; they consider them their husbands.” These cohabiting

relationships rarely last, however, and a new cohort of fatherless 

children goes out into the world.

Despite the strong family support, the prevalence of single 

parenting among Hispanics is producing the inevitable slide into 

the welfare system. “The girls aren’t marrying the guys, so they are 

married to the state,” Dr. Sanchez observes. Hispanics now 

dominate the federal Women, Infants, and Children free food 

program; Hispanic enrollment grew over 25 percent from 1996 to 

2002, while black enrollment dropped 12 percent and white 

enrollment dropped 6.5 percent. Illegal immigrants can get WIC 

and other welfare programs for their American-born children. If 

Congress follows President Bush’s urging and grants amnesty to 

most of the 11 million illegal aliens in the country today, expect 

the welfare rolls to skyrocket as the parents themselves become 

eligible.

Amy Braun works for Mary’s Shelter, a home for young single 

mothers who are homeless or in crisis, in Orange County, 

California. It has become “culturally okay” for the Hispanic 

population to use the shelter and welfare system, Braun says. A 

case manager at a program for pregnant homeless women in the 

city of Orange observes the same acculturation to the social-

services sector, with its grievance mongering and sense of 

victimhood. “I’ll have women in my office on their fifth child, 

when the others have already been placed in foster care,” says 

Anita Berry of Casa Teresa. “There’s nothing shameful about 

having multiple children that you can’t care for, and to be pregnant again, because then you can blame the system.”

The consequences of family breakdown are now being passed 

down from one generation to the next, in an echo of the black 

underclass. “The problems are deeper and wider,” says Berry. 

“Now you’re getting the second generation of foster care and 

group home residents. The dysfunction is multigenerational.”

The social-services complex has responded with barely concealed 

enthusiasm to this new flood of clients. As Hispanic social 

problems increase, so will the government sector that ministers to 

them. In July, a New York Times editorial, titled young latinas and 

a cry for help, pointed out the elevated high school dropout rates 

and birthrates among Hispanic girls. A quarter of all Latinas are 

mothers by the age of 20, reported the Times. With the usual 

melodrama that accompanies the pitch for more government 

services, the Times designated young Latinas as “endangered” in 

the same breath that it disclosed that they are one of the fastest-

growing segments of the population. “The time to help is now,” 

said the Times—by which it means ratcheting up the taxpayer-

subsidized social-work industry.

In response to the editorial, Carmen Barroso, regional director of 

International Planned Parenthood Federation/Western Hemisphere 

Region, proclaimed in a letter to the editor the “urgent need for 

health care providers, educators and advocates to join the sexual 

and reproductive health movement to ensure the fundamental right 

to services for young Latinas.”

Wherever these “fundamental rights” might come from, Barroso’s 

call nevertheless seems quite superfluous, since there is no shortage

of taxpayer-funded “services” for troubled Latinas—or Latinos. 

The schools in California’s San Joaquin Valley have day care for 

their students’ babies, reports Peggy Schulze of Chrysalis House. 

“The girls get whatever they need—welfare, medical care.” 

Advocates for young unwed moms in New York’s South Bronx are 

likewise agitating for more day-care centers in high schools there, 

reports El Diario/La Prensa. A bill now in Congress, the Latina 

Adolescent Suicide Prevention Act, aims to channel $10 million to 

“culturally competent” social agencies to improve the self-esteem 

of Latina girls and to provide “support services” to their families 

and friends if they contemplate suicide.

The trendy “case management” concept, in which individual 

“cases” become the focal point around which a solar system of 

social workers revolves, has even reached heavily Hispanic 

elementary and middle schools. “We have a coordinator, who 

brings in a collaboration of agencies to deal with the issues that 

don’t allow a student to meet his academic goals, such as domestic 

violence or drugs,” explains Sylvia Rentria, director of the Family 

Resource Center at Berendo Middle School in Los Angeles. “We 

can provide individual therapy.” Rentria offers the same program at

nearby Hoover Elementary School for up to 100 students.

This July, Rentria launched a new session of Berendo’s Violence 

Intervention Program for parents of children who are showing signs

of gang involvement and other antisocial behavior. Ghady M., 55 

and a “madre soltera” (single mother), like most of the mothers in 

the program, has been called in because her 16-year-old son, 

Christian, has been throwing gang signs at school, cutting half his 

classes, and ending up in the counseling office every day. The 

illegal Guatemalan is separated from her partner, who was “muy 

malo,” she says; he was probably responsible for her many missing 

teeth. (The detectives in the heavily Hispanic Rampart Division of 

the Los Angeles Police Department, which includes the Berendo 

school, spend inordinate amounts of time on domestic violence 

cases.) Though Ghady used to work in a factory on Broadway in 

downtown L.A.— often referred to as Little Mexico City—she now

collects $580 in welfare payments and $270 in food stamps for her 

two American-born children.

Christian is a husky smart aleck in a big white T-shirt; his 

fashionably pomaded hair stands straight up. He goes to school but 

doesn’t do homework, he grins; and though he is not in a gang, he 

says, he has friends who are. Keeping Ghady and Christian 

company at the Violence Intervention Program is Ghady’s 

grandniece, Carrie, a lively ten-year-old. Carrie lives with her 26-

year-old mother but does not know her father, who also sired her 

12-year-old brother. Her five-year-old brother has a different father.

Yet for all these markers of social dysfunction, fatherless Hispanic 

families differ from the black underclass in one significant area: 

many of the mothers and the absent fathers work, even despite 

growing welfare use. The former boyfriend of Jessica, the 18-year-

old mother at the Hillview Acres foster home, works in 

construction and moonlights on insulation jobs; whether he still 

deals drugs is unknown. Jessica is postponing joining her father in 

Texas until she finishes high school, because once she moves in 

with him, she will feel obligated to get a job to help the family 

finances. The mother of Hillview’s 14-year-old Irene used to fix 

soda machines in Anaheim, California, though she got fired 

because she was lazy, Irene says. Now, under court compulsion, 

she works in a Lunchables factory in Santa Ana, a condition of 

getting her children back from foster care. The 18-year-old 

Lothario and father of two, whom Planned Parenthood’s Jason 

Warner is trying to counsel, works at a pet store. The mother of 

Carrie, the vivacious ten-year-old sitting in on Berendo Middle 

School’s Violence Intervention Program, makes pizza at a Papa 

John’s pizza outlet.

How these two value systems—a lingering work ethic and 

underclass mating norms—will interact in the future is anyone’s 

guess. Orange County sheriff’s deputy Montoya says that the older 

Hispanic generation’s work ethic is fast disappearing among the 

gangbanging youngsters whom he sees. “Now, it’s all about fast 

money, drugs, and sex.” It may be that the willingness to work will 

plummet along with marriage rates, leading to even greater social 

problems than are now rife among Hispanics. Or it may be that the 

two contrasting practices will remain on parallel tracks, creating a 

new kind of underclass: a culture that tolerates free-floating men 

who impregnate women and leave, like the vast majority of black 

men, yet who still labor in the noncriminal economy. The question 

is whether, if the disposition to work remains relatively strong, a 

working parent will inoculate his or her illegitimate children 

against the worst degradations that plague black ghettos.

From an intellectual standpoint, this is a fascinating social 

experiment, one that academicians are—predictably—not attuned 

to. But the consequences will be more than intellectual: they may 

severely strain the social fabric. Nevertheless, it is an experiment 

that we seem destined to see to its end. Tisha Roberts, a supervisor 

at an Orange County, California, institution that assists children in 

foster care, has given up hope that the illegitimacy rate will taper 

off. “It’s going to continue to grow,” she says, “until we can put 

birth control in the water.”



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