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
Only in America could critics of a group called "The
Race" be labeled racists.
LA
RAZA FACISM:
THE U.S. TAX SUPPORTED MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA
FIFTEEN THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT LA RAZA “THE RACE”
by Michelle Malkin
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.
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
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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