When I was eight years old, I tried to get my parents to move back to the projects. I thought only Latinos lived there. Growing up in a small farm town, I assumed the only way I would become a real Latino is if I lived in a tough, urban environment. I would speak better Read More

via Huffington Post – A Utah man hatched a creative scheme to avoid going to prison on a drug charge: He lied to authorities and said he was an illegal immigrant so he could get deported to Mexico and evade time behind bars. The jig was up, however, when 27-year-old Jaime Alvarado returned to the U.S. Read More

- via The Queens Courier Alice Cardona, who advocated for women’s rights and bilingual education, died Nov. 1 at age 81. She was born March 17, 1930 as the first of nine children to Puerto Rican parents. She was raised and educated in Spanish Harlem in New York. Her parents moved to New York from Read More

In America, you can be anything you want to be, and everybody has unlimited potential. Well, if that were really true, the entire population would be nothing but rockstars, senators, Oscar-winning actresses, and NFL quarterbacks. At the very least, the ancient burdens of race and ethnicity continue to have an influence on how successful (or Read More

Last night I re-watched actor John Leguizamo’s 1998 Broadway show Freak, a semi-autobiographical summary of Leguizamo’s early years growing up in New York City. A prominent figure in the story is his father, described as violent and generally absent much of the time. The show ends with Leguizamo’s poignant reenactment of a reconciliatory moment between Read More

- via MSNBC Nicole Leszczynski couldn’t imagine that two chicken salad sandwiches would land her and her husband in jail and her 2-year-old daughter in state custody. But it happened five days ago, when the 30-weeks-pregnant woman forgot to pay for her snack while shopping.

From the editor… I’m pretty blessed to know some pretty amazing people. Among these are a wonderful director who sacrificed everything to make a movie with a positive message for Latinas; an entrepreneur who has more than once been a one-man march for justice; a team of people dedicated to making education a reality for Latinos; a Read More

- via Huffington Post The details may change, but every Latino shares a version of the same story: that moment when another Latino attacked her . . . for not being Latino enough. For my friend Ali, it happened during her first week at college. She had pledged a sorority, and as she stood in Read More

The Washington Mall is one of the greatest places in America to take a long stroll. An hour or two of your time, could bring about a beautiful sense of awareness of our history. However, there is one memorial that I refuse to visit. Martin Luther King, Jr. is one of my favorite Americans, but Read More

Apparently, a bunch of sluts were running around my city recently. I’m talking, of course, about the SlutWalk movement, which began earlier this year when a Toronto cop implied that women who dressed like “sluts” deserved to get raped. Outraged at the cop’s statement, women all over North America hit the streets both to protest Read More