Estimadas(os): As I write this, we are witnessing the moral and political force that our young people, who inspired this posting, represent. As you undoubtedly know by now, President Obama has issued an Executive Order stopping the deportation of Dream Act-eligible young people, an action that has profound implications for these youth, their families, and their futures.
DREAM Act protesters at John McCain’s office in Tucson.
But this did not happen magically. Over the past year, young Latinas/os have demonstrated at the offices of federal lawmakers and at Republican and Democratic Party headquarters in support of the DREAM Act and to protest the blatant injustice of the deportation of young people who are American in every respect except one—because they were brought here as children, they are not documented.
Two weeks ago, DREAM Act-eligible young people and other young Latinas(os) demonstrated at the Arizona Democratic Party headquarters to protest the Arizona Democratic Party’s silence regarding SB 1070, HB 2281, and the Dream Act.
And last week DREAM Act-eligible young people sat in in Obama campaign offices in Colorado, Ohio, Michigan, and California,
These young Latinas(os) have risked arrest and a good number of them risked being deported due to their status. But even in the face of those risks, these young people looked injustice in the eye and stood up for their beliefs, for which they deserve our profound respect and admiration.
Interestingly, young Latinas(os) made up a good number of the responses I received to my last two postings regarding the perfidy of the Arizona Democratic Party. To a person, the young people agreed with what I wrote.
Their comments make it clear that they readily grasped that even as my postings were embedded in the realm of politics, my perspective in addressing the Arizona Democratic Party situation is that of a civil-rights issue rather than a political matter.
For, there is no qualitative difference between the Republican efforts throughout the country (e.g., in Florida) to suppress minority voting—particularly among Latinos—and the efforts by the Arizona Democratic Party to suppress the candidacies of Democratic Mexican American and Native American candidates.
The other responses to my postings were from Latino and non-Latino Democrats. Most of them agreed, to varying degrees, that the Arizona Democratic Party is betraying its principles by engaging in the behavior I detailed in my postings. A few disagreed with what I wrote.
Most of these respondents are of my generation, and some were involved in the political dynamics of the 1960s-1970s, .i.e., the civil-rights, Chicano, United Farm Workers, Vietnam War, Women’s Liberation, La Raza Unida Party, etc., movements. I walked picket lines with some of them.
A leitmotif in these latter responses, even from those who agreed with me, was the suggestion—accusation, in some cases—that I was encouraging Latinos(as) to vote Republican.
Rather than write individual responses, I fashioned a general response, for I believe the dynamics I described, re: the Arizona Democratic Party, may be at play in other localities. And my commentary regarding today’s politically active young people is relevant universally, I believe.
Thus, this posting is in the form of a response to the people I reference above, particularly those I walked picket lines with, viz.:
Dear Reader: Thanks for your response to my recent postings. Before I get to the heart of my response, the answer to your question is: No, I am not advocating that Latinos vote Republican.
But, the AZ Democratic Party is on the path to guaranteeing a Republican victory…
Here’s the point I was actually making: by its actions, the Arizona Democratic Party is virtually guaranteeing a Republican victory in Congressional District 1.
In my last posting I reference that 68,000 voters stayed home in 2010 rather than vote for Ann Kirkpatrick, whom the Arizona Democratic Party is supporting in contravention of its own policy and tradition of not getting involved in contested Democratic Primaries.
68,000 voters!! Almost half (44%) of the people who voted for Kirkpatrick in 2008 stayed home in 2010. There was no organized “Do not vote” movement in that election. Those 68,000 people individually and independently stayed home rather than vote for Kirkpatrick!
Kirkpatrick has done nothing in the two years since her stunningly embarrassing defeat that would lead an intelligent person to believe that those 68,000 people will swarm to the polls in 2012 to vote for Kirkpatrick, and, while there, vote for Obama and other Democratic candidates.
Actually, my discussions with hundreds of people in circa nine communities in CD1 indicate that people still view Kirkpatrick as they did in 2010, that is, as the one-term congresswoman…
* who stood with the Republicans against the unions on the Employee Free Choice Act (the entire Copper Basin in CD1 is comprised of union towns)…
* who supported a non-union mine (operated by a notorious union-busting corporation) that would desecrate sacred Indian land and destroy the environment…
* who stood with Russell Pearce, Jan Brewer, Joe Arpaio, Tom Horne, Paul Babeu, John Huppenthal in opposition to the U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit against SB 1070…
* who refused to vote for the DREAM Act two times during her tenure in Congress…
* who voted for the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy…
In contrast, based on my conversations with the above folks in CD1, I believe firmly that these people WILL go out to vote if Wenona Benally Baldenegro is on the ballot.
So, by supporting Kirkpatrick, the Arizona Democratic Party is, for all intents and purposes, helping the right-wing (Payday Lending lobbyist) Republican candidate in the CD1 race.
In all due respect, if anything should concern you, that should!
The civil-rights dimension of the Arizona Democratic Party’s actions is clear:
The Arizona Democratic Party’s breaking its own rules and tradition in order to derail the candidacy of a highly-qualified Native American woman on track to become the first Native American woman (ever!) to serve in the U.S. Congress and deprive the Native American community a voice in Congress in itself is a civil-rights matter, and some of the issues listed above (e.g., SB 1070, DREAM, Act) in reference to the Arizona Democratic Party’s preferred candidate, are civil rights issues.
And the Arizona Democratic Party’s providing support and resources (e.g., voter lists) to white candidates and depriving them to Mexican American candidates (as I detailed in my postings) falls squarely within the realm of civil rights.
Fear, er, I mean respect, the young folks…
I am of the Chicano Generation, that is, I came of age politically in the 1960s, and I do not purport to be an important or an influential person. Thus, the Arizona Democratic Party has nothing to fear from an old fogey like my good self criticizing it.
Whom the Party should fear—or better put, respect—are the young folks who are responding positively to my piece. I’m too low tech to navigateFacebook, but I’m informed that some of my former students posted my last two pieces on Facebook and that at last count my pieces have logged over750 “likes” and have been re-posted over 100 times. My young friends tell me that these are good numbers that reflect the deep interest among their generation in the issues raised in my last two postings.
These are the young people that WE were 40-plus years ago…when we criticized the Democratic Party for abandoning its values. Remember how we railed against the Democratic Party for such things as…
The Democratic Party’s setting off a police riot against the young protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago…
The Democratic Party’s deceptions, re: the Vietnam War…
The Democratic Party’s caving in to the Southern Democrats [the Jim Crow Dixiecrats] that, among other dastardly deeds, exempted farm workers from the National Labor Relations Act…etc.?
And these are just the national issues. Every community had its own horror stories regarding the Democratic Party.
These are the young people who were the heart and backbone of the Recall Pearce campaign last November. That historic recall effort would not have succeeded without the work—and incredible energy!—of these young people.
As an aside: Wenona and Sal (her husband, my son) and members of her campaign staff and volunteers drove up to Mesa several weekends to gather petition signatures for the recall and to canvass precincts and do phone banking for the recall. Many young people from all over the state did this.
These are the young people who two weeks ago—totally independent of my pieces—protested in front of the Arizona Democratic Party’s headquarters. Their issues?
The Arizona Democratic Party’s total silence and inaction, re: SB 1070, HB 2281, the Dream act, and in some cases the Arizona Democratic Party’s actually enabling the forces behind SB 10 1070, HB 2281, and the opposition to the Dream Act. And it turns out that in the Phoenix area, the Arizona Democratic Party, again in contravention of its own policies and tradition, is involved in a Democratic Party primary race, working against a progressive candidate.
As noted above, we are witnessing right now the moral force our young people represent. By demonstrating at Democratic and Republican Party headquarters and sitting in in Obama campaign headquarters in various cities in the country to protest the Party’s and its leaders’ inaction regarding the DREAM Act, they accomplished what politicians could or would not.
A relevant aside that shows how out of step the Arizona Democratic Party is: Ann Kirkpatrick, whom the Arizona Democratic Party is supporting, refused to vote for the DREAM Act the two times it came before Congress during her single term, and…
Wenona Benally Baldenegro, whose campaign the Arizona Democratic Party is working hard to derail, has stood with the young people demonstrating on behalf of the DREAM Act, including those who sat in in the office of U.S. Senator John McCain last summer.
If history is any kind of a guide…
Take my pieces out of the picture and these issues are still there, these young people are still disaffected by the Democratic Party’s behavior. Want or not, the Democratic Party will have to deal with this cohort of young people. And if history is any kind of guide, the Democratic Party would do better by embracing these young people rather than fighting them and driving them out of the Party.
I can’t say this emphatically or often enough: These are the intelligent, energetic, and idealistic young people whom the Arizona Democratic Party ignores and antagonizes at its own peril.
As we were at their age, these young people are loyal to ideas, to principles, to ideals…not to political parties or to political hacks.
Take a minute and…Remember when we were being arrested…
Remember how we reacted when WE were these young people whom the Democratic Party ignored and demonized…
When we were badmouthed in the media…
When the Democratic Party sycophants and minions would come around to counsel us to be “patient,” to tell us that they—the Party, the sycophants and minions—knew things that we didn’t (but could not divulge to us), that we were too young and inexperienced to know the score…
Remember when the political establishment, including the Mexican American political establishment, got the cops to put us under surveillance and to harass us…
When the political establishment, including the Mexican American political establishment, tried to buy us off with jobs and other favors…
When that same political establishment, including the Mexican American power brokers, blacklisted us when we were trying to get a job and even got us fired from our jobs after their attempts to buy us off with jobs and other favors failed?
Remember when we were walking all those picket lines (for Chicano/a rights, for the UFW, etc.), sometimes in the scorching heat, other times in driving rain…
Remember all those marches we were in, including that 5-day march in the Arizona summer heat in support of César Chávez’s movement to organize farm workers into a union…
Remember when we were being arrested for doing the above and for sitting in in places that discriminated against people of Mexican descent?
And, in those marches, those picket lines, those police cars we were taken to jail in we vowed…
that we would set an example for our children and grandchildren by standing up against injustice wherever and whenever we encountered it…
even if the perpetrators of the injustice were of our own ethnicity, our own religion, our own political affiliation, etc….and
that we would never become, or be co-opted by, the political establishment.
And remember how we didn’t stop at simply making that vow: we took on the political establishment head-on and exposed their corruption, their war against the civil rights of people of color and women, etc.? And we moved mountains and changed our communities for the better by changing the political culture in which we lived.
I do not remember our putting a time limit, an expiration date, as it were, on our vow.
This may sound self serving, but I actually think I’m doing the Arizona Democratic Party a service by raising these issues. There is still time for the Party to self correct and salvage not only its reputation but its viability as a political party. Frankly, I’d much rather the Party do right than say “I told you so!” in November.
To enable or not enable…
You know the old adage about “The only way for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing” (paraphrase). Well, that applies here.
The Arizona Democratic Party is doing things that are wrong. These “things,” which I detailed in my last two postings, include the following:
* Taking sides in contested primaries…
* Deciding which Democratic candidates to support on the basis of race and ethnicity, with Mexican American and Native American candidates on the losing side of those decisions…
* Secretly getting in bed with the Payday Lending industry, which research shows targets and preys on low-income working families and particularly on Native Americans, Latinos, and African Americans (all traditional, and very loyal, constituencies of the Democratic Party) while in public condemning the Payday Lending industry for preying on working families…
* Supporting candidates (i.e., Kirkpatrick) whose campaigns are being funded almost exclusively by corporate lobbyists, many of them affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the right-wing organization funded (as is the Tea Party movement) by the Koch brothers. One egregious example is theCorrections Corporation of America (CCA), which worked with Russell Pearce in writing SB 1070 and stands to make millions in profits from the incarceration of immigrants occasioned by SB 1070.
* Supporting proponents of SB 1070 and its vile cousin, HB 2281…
As I noted in my last two pieces, if you are a Democrat in Arizona, the Arizona Democratic Party is doing these things in your name and on your behalf.
To disagree with what the Arizona Democratic Party is doing, re: the above, and remain silent in the face of that disagreement is to be an enabler of the Arizona Democratic Party’s behavior.
Just as you and I—and virtually our entire generation, for that matter—dealt with what the Democratic Party was doing as a civil-rights matter and chose not to enable the Democratic Party and its shenanigans in the 1960s-1970s, I choose not to enable the Democratic Party and its shenanigans today.
And as I did back then, I take my stand openly and publicly.
So, to end as I began: refusing to be a Democratic Party enabler does not equate with being a Republican Party cheerleader. These are two completely and qualitatively different things.
Salomon
