Tuesday is a second day of mourning in Mexico. Chavela Vargas, one of the greatest singers of Mexican traditional music, died Sunday at age 93. While Monday tens of thousands of Mexicans of all ages and economic and social strata gathered spontaneously in Garibaldi Plaza in Mexico City — the very heart, the pulse and epicenter of Mexican music and culture —to sing and cry in the heat and thunderous rain until deep in the night, Tuesday's farewell at the Palacio de Bellas Artes will be formal and, perhaps most ironically given her history, official. No other Mexican cultural figure — not Cantinflas or Pedro Infante — has had such a prolonged farewell.
Mexican folk great Chavela Vargas dies at 93
Aug. 7, 2012The Senate's growing conservative Latino caucus
Aug. 4, 2012When Ted Cruz, the U.S. senate GOP nominee, wins in November — and it will be a helluva a scandal if he doesn't — the world’s greatest deliberative body will have three Latino senators. And two of them will be Republican.
Given the Democratic Party’s much greater civil rights record and its much more traditionally muscular grassroots efforts, there’s something off about those optics. So how did that happen?
Robert Menéndez, the Latino Democratic senator from New Jersey, rose up the old fashioned way, through a close and often controversial mentorship with an older pol, former Union City Mayor William Musto (against whom Menéndez eventually testified). Menéndez worked his way up steadily, from school board member to mayor, to state senator to U.S. congressman to U.S. senator.
Who is Ted Cruz?
Aug. 3, 2012This has not been a good week for Florida U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio.
Sure, he’s making money hand over fist as his memoir, An American Son, sails up the New York Times bestseller list, but Politico, which has been promoting him since he started stumping for the senate, just ran this headline: “Move over, Marco Rubio: Ted Cruz’s star rises.”
There’s a new conservative Latino cowboy in town. And he’s so extreme, he makes Rubio look downright bipartisan (that’s good news in some circles, but not so good in others).
Who is Ted Cruz, the GOP nominee for the U.S. Senate seat in Texas, and the very likely winner of the general election contest in the fall?
Romney's Israel comments: What was he thinking?
Jul. 31, 2012
Mitt Romney’s London Olympics blooper got all the headlines, but another gaffe foreshadowed his disastrous comments in Israel — and revealed how unprepared he is to be the most powerful man on the planet.Romney’s serious tongue trip was blithely mentioning that he’d had a meeting with the head of the MI6, Britain’s intelligence agency.
A real no-no in terms of protocol, but here’s the deeper problem: Should Romney win in November, just how special will our relationship with Britain be when he can’t be trusted to keep his mouth shut about something so simple?
And now, of course, Romney has gone to Jerusalem and talked about “the hand of providence” (i.e.
What happened to Cuba's Oswaldo Payá?
Jul. 27, 2012
Did Oswaldo Payá die in a straightforward auto accident, or was he killed by Cuban government forces?
According to official reports, Payá and another Cuban died when the driver of the rented car he was in lost control and violently crashed against a tree in the far Eastern side of the country, where roads are particularly bad.
But speculation swirls around the incident. Was the car run off the road by another vehicle? Payá’s daughter, Rosa María, says that’s the case, that maybe it was only meant to be a warning but that her father ended up dead as a result.
Sally Ride comes out, posthumously
Jul. 24, 2012Most news organizations treated the death of Sally Ride pretty straightforwardly on Monday. They noted her historic role as the first American woman in space. A few also pointed out that she was America’s youngest astronaut.
And they almost all mentioned her post-NASA work as a professor and as founder of Sally Ride Science, a company that promotes interest in science among kids, but especially girls.
And just about everyone — even Fox News — mentioned in the last few lines of their stories that Ride was survived by “Tam O’Shaughnessy, her partner of 27 years.”
Progress, right? I mean, here was an extraordinary person — someone who’d actually made history, not just notched notable achievements — whose same sex relationship was being treated in the same ho-hum, matter of fact way as that of any other celebrity.
New campaign ad touts Romney’s Spanish-speaking son, Mexican-born father
Jul. 21, 2012Remember back in the day when Mitt Romney told Univisión that talking about his father, George, and suggesting that his birth in Mexico somehow gave him some sort of link to Latinos would be “disingenuous”?
His position seemed remarkably honest. But then, just as Latinos garnered the spotlight, Mitt started to talk about how George was Mexican-born. Of course, he never mentioned the crucial context of his father’s birth: That he was born in Mexico in a polygamous colony that had broken off from the larger Mormon Church when the church dropped its acceptance of multiple wives in order to get Utah admitted to the Union.
And now Romney has gone one step further, actually suggesting his father — who was a U.S.
Will leaked Romney VP shortlist be enough to distract from Bain, taxes?
Jul. 19, 2012
For the last several weeks, President Obama’s re-election campaign has managed to keep GOP challenger Mitt Romney on the ropes with attacks on his company’s outsourcing , the exact exit date by which he left that company and his lack of transparency with his tax returns. (Though Romney keeps saying he’s released two years’ worth of taxes, he’s only released one year’s worth, for 2010. His taxes for 2011, the second year, are unfinished — and don’t have to be finished until October — and he’s released only a summary.)