RECENT ARTICLES

Tradition Counts More Than Beauty

A Budding Ambassador for Latin American Art

Finding the Beat of Chicago’s Latino Quarter

Skilled immigrants a ‘brain waste’ in California’s workforce

Big Turnout of Latino Voters Boosted Obama

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Tradition Counts More Than Beauty

JAYUYA, Puerto Rico — The seven girls posed, preened and smiled with all the energy of Miss Universe contestants, but this was no ordinary pageant. The competitors, from about 6-years-old to 16, had just paraded through a downpour to a small stage surrounded by mountains, where they displayed elaborate outfits handmade from wood, plants or, in one case, jingling shells. And the judges also sought a special kind of beauty: those who most resembled Puerto Rico’s native Indian tribe, the Taíno, received higher marks.

Puerto Ricans have long considered themselves a mix of African, European and Native American influences. But since the 1960s, the Taíno — a tribe wiped from the Antilles by European conquest, disease and assimilation — has come to occupy a special place in the island’s cultural hierarchy.
The streets of Old San Juan are lined with museums and research centers dedicated to unearthing Taíno artifacts and rituals. Children are taught from a young age that “hurricane” is Taíno in origin, from the word “huracán,” while no Latin pop music concert is complete without a shout out to Boricuas — those from Borinquen, the Taíno name for Puerto Rico, which means “land of the brave noble lord.”

The ties may be more than cultural. In 2003, Juan Martinez Cruzado, a geneticist at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, found that at least 61 percent of Puerto Ricans possess remnants of Taíno DNA — and nearly all seem to believe they belong in that group.

“The Indian heritage is very important because it unites the Puerto Rican community,” said Miguel Rodríguez López, an archaeologist with the Center for Advanced Studies of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, an independent graduate school in San Juan. “There is a feeling that it represents our primary roots.” He added, “It is our symbolic identity.”

In Jayuya, a town of a few thousand people in the mountains north of Ponce, Taíno celebrations began decades ago. When local leaders discovered in the mid-60s that the town was named for a Taíno chief, they commissioned a sculpture to honor him. It was dedicated in November 1969 at the first indigenous festival, and every year since, the chief’s stern eyes have looked out over the event from a perch above the central plaza.

At times, he has been forced to share space with the more modern forces that decimated his people. One of the city’s major archaeological sites, discovered here two years ago, sits across from a Burger King. And before the pageant began on Saturday night, a performance of traditional Taíno dance competed with a pop song from Maná, Latin America’s biggest rock band.

Mostly though, the Taíno influence in Jayuya seems to have merged with its surroundings. The standard Taíno sun symbol, called a guanin, is now carved into the Spanish-style plaza. Many of the crafts being sold at the festival, like jewelry, purses and soap, also included Taíno symbols.
And even the pageant is a hybrid. Actual Taíno women wore only loincloths. But with the influence of local teenagers, the costumes have become exponentially more extravagant A few years ago, organizers had to limit their size to 8 feet high by 6 feet wide.

Even with those boundaries, which, of course, the teenagers tried to push, the costumes amounted to a mix of homecoming queen, Halloween, “Last of the Mohicans” and Las Vegas showgirl. Mr. Rodríguez, the archaeologist and a former judge of the pageant, compared it to Brazil’s carnival. “It’s a sincretismo,” he said, using the Spanish word for “syncretism.” “They mix different cultures, different beliefs.” Some scholars have scoffed at the concept, saying it is more a reflection of the joke that Puerto Ricans love festivals enough to have one for every cause or crustacean. But Mr. Rodríguez defended the idea. “You have to enjoy it because it’s for the people,” he said.

The contestants clearly love it. Natalia Fernandez, 16, said she had spent a month and half building her outfit, which required her to carry on her back a wooden Taíno dancer weighing at least 25 pounds, with a sprout above his head the size of a small coffee table. Her bangs had been cut, her dark hair was straight (in a nod to what is considered Taíno style) and her naturally copper-colored skin made her appear as Native American as Chief Jayuya. But she was also 100 percent teenager. Asked before the contest how she thought she would do, she fiddled with her cellphone and said, “I’m going to win.”

The event started an hour late, and the rain and competition seemed to surprise Natalia. She frowned under the downpour, looking chilled with a bare midriff and no shoes, as she glanced nervously at the girl with shells and starfish netted in a four-foot-high headdress. But her fears were unfounded. After all the girls introduced themselves and explained their outfits, the judges called Natalia’s name last, like all great pageant winners. Her friends and family cheered loudly from beneath umbrellas as she smiled and twirled for the digital cameras.

“It’s about a beautiful culture,” she said before taking the stage. “It’s not about just beauty.”

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Source: The New York Times

A Budding Ambassador for Latin American Art

By Kate Taylor of the New York Times
Estrellita Brodsky’s life is not that of your typical graduate student. Instead of frugal dinners of ramen or grilled cheese, there are $1,000-a-head museum galas. Home is an apartment on Park Avenue, not a share with roommates in Brooklyn. And although she is hoping to finish her dissertation, which focuses on Latin American artists in postwar Paris, by January, Ms. Brodsky is not planning to enter the academic job market any time soon.

Instead she is devoting more and more energy these days to figuring out how to use her wealth and connections as one of the city’s leading arts philanthropists, along with her scholarly perspective gained from her studies at New York University, to raise the profile of Latin American art in museums, the academy and the international art market.

For two years Ms. Brodsky has endowed the post of the Latin American art curator at the Museum of Modern Art, held by Luis Pérez-Oramas. Her encouragement led Harvard to create a position for a Latin American art specialist in its history of art and architecture department. Currently she is in discussions with the Harvard Art Museum about financing Latin American acquisitions as the museum moves into collecting contemporary art.

At many institutions and in art history departments Latin American art was for a long time either ghettoized or excluded from the Western art historical canon. Survey courses might have mentioned Diego Rivera or other muralists, partly because they executed major works in the United States.

Only in the last 15 years have scholars fully embraced the contributions of Latin American artists to 20th-century abstract movements, particularly in the areas of installation and performance. At the same time the rise of international art fairs has brought greater attention to contemporary artists working in Latin America.

In a recent interview at her apartment, filled with work by artists like Jesús Rafael Soto, Julio Le Parc and Gego (Gertrude Goldschmidt), as well as the odd European, Ms. Brodsky discussed her quest to help bring Latin American art to the forefront.

Apart from her passion for the art and its history, she said she wanted Latin Americans in the United States, particularly young people, to feel pride in their culture’s creative achievements. Growing up in New York City in the 1950s and ’60s, with parents who had immigrated from Venezuela and Uruguay, Ms. Brodsky, 56, said she learned how ignorant most of her young peers were about Latin America. “It was pretty much, ‘Oh, were your parents Indians, living in the jungle?’ ” she said of her classmates in the fourth or fifth grade. Her great-great-grandfather on her mother’s side, Juan Idiarte Borda, was the president of Uruguay. He was assassinated in 1897 — presumably, the theory goes, by a political foe — “but we don’t talk about that,” she said with a wry smile.

In 1995 a friend enlisted her to help organize an exhibition on the Taíno, pre-Colombian inhabitants of the Caribbean, at El Museo del Barrio. She traveled to Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba helping to arrange loans. The overall experience was transformative, she said. In a visitors’ comment book at the exhibition, she recalled, “A little kid said, ‘My name is Taino, and I’m so happy now to learn what I’m named after.’ I thought that was so cute: Here was this kid, who probably felt like a little bit of an outsider because he had this strange name, who now felt proud about his heritage.”

Realizing that the museum was important but needed help with fund-raising, Ms. Brodsky joined its board in 1997 and began recruiting friends, many of whom had barely heard of the museum, to support it. She rose to become the board’s chairwoman, and with the artist and lecturer Tony Bechara, its chairman, she started an annual gala. By the time she left the board, in 2003, the gala regularly raised $500,000.

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Source: The New York Times

Finding the Beat of Chicago’s Latino Quarter

By Jeff Bailey of the New York Times
IN a fifth-floor art gallery in Pilsen, Chicago’s fashionable Latino neighborhood, vibrant guitar chords were pouring out an open window on a recent Friday night. Four Latina artists were showing their paintings, and the shoebox of a gallery was jammed with a mixed, talkative crowd. Some swayed in time to the music, swigging beer and sipping wine. The din seemed to be drawing art patrons and good-time Chicagoans from all over the huge building at 1932 South Halsted Street, the central site of an every-second-Friday art walk.

Many come to the art walk from the suburbs or other parts of the city, but like much of Chicago these days, the affair draws its real energy from the city’s surging Latino population. One of the painters whose work was on display — Carolina Reyes — moved to Pilsen from a North Side neighborhood two years ago to paint. “Being a Latina, I’m still searching to learn more about my culture,” she said.

For that, there is no need for her to leave Chicago. More than 1,000 miles from the Mexican border, the city is home to about 800,000 people of Hispanic origin, mostly Mexican. That’s more than a quarter of the population and gaining share daily — this when the city shrank by nearly a million residents after the 1950s. But in Latin Chicago, there is a new boomtown to explore.

A native of a mostly Latino suburb of Los Angeles, I moved here 25 years ago; my wife, a Latina from Texas, came 12 years ago. So, it’s natural we would be drawn to areas like Pilsen, where Spanish and English mix against a backdrop of brilliant mosaics and murals of Mexican heroes, and Little Village nearby, where mariachi bands carrying their instruments into restaurants could easily be south of the border. But it’s more than just familiarity and the fact that eating and entertainment on the Latin side of Chicago is generally cheaper. It’s where the energy is.

“It’s happening so fast,” said Carlos Tortolero, who came to Chicago from Mexico at age 3 and, as a 28-year-old school teacher in 1982, started what would become the National Museum of Mexican Art, the city’s leading Latino cultural organization. “It’s becoming a very Mexican city.”

The museum made a name for itself in 2006 when it opened an exhibition about the influence of Africans in Mexico. In a city known for its racial separation, blacks flocked to Pilsen for the show. This summer, the museum will insert itself into the national political debate with an exhibition opening on the Fourth of July — “A Declaration of Immigration” — that will go beyond painting and sculpture to present data to argue that point. “It is pro-American to be pro-immigrant,” Mr. Tortolero said.

Immigrants certainly made Chicago one of history’s great boomtowns. It grew from a nearly uninhabited swamp in the early 1800s to a metropolis of a million people by 1890. An up-to-date version of that multicultural frontier town is on display every Sunday morning at a flea market, just around the corner from where Mrs. O’Leary’s cow — in fable, anyway — is said to have kicked over the lantern that started the Great Fire of 1871. Known as the Maxwell Street Market, it runs along Canal Street south of Roosevelt Road. (The city closed down the original location on nearby Maxwell Street in the 1990s, but the name stuck.) After more than 100 years, it still attracts immigrants and their offspring from many points on the globe. But today, as with much of Chicago, the market moves to a Latin beat. Browsers seem to move in step with the blaring Latin music as they peruse the four-block stretch of stalls that feature art, jewelry and the usual knock-off purses and leather goods.

If you see a skinny fellow with a goatee who appears to know the street-food vendors, he might be Rick Bayless, the Chicago chef and cookbook author who raised traditional Mexican cooking to gourmet status, stopping by on his day off to snack on mole and hand-pressed tortillas. The crowds become thicker around the stall for Lencho’s Tacos, where people take a number and wait their turn. Well before 10 a.m., Lencho’s fans are three and four deep around the counter, lined up for tacos of grilled beef, onions, cilantro and hot sauce — a perfect on-the-go lunch for about $5.

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Source: New York Times

Skilled immigrants a ‘brain waste’ in California’s workforce

By Teresa Watanabe of the Los Angeles Times

About 300,000 college-educated legal immigrants in the state, and 1.3 million nationwide, are unemployed or working in low-level jobs because their credentials aren’t recognized here, a study finds.

As a physician in Peru, Luis Garcia amassed nine years of medical education and five years of practice, including successful appendectomies, Cesarean deliveries and other surgeries. Since he immigrated to Southern California four years ago, he has earned a community college degree specializing in geriatrics. The only work he’s been able to find, however, has been cat-sitting, dog-walking and elder care.

That’s because Garcia hasn’t yet been able to pass the battery of requirements for a U.S. medical license, including several exams and a residency. He represents what a recent report calls a massive “brain waste” of highly educated and skilled immigrant professionals who potentially could, with a little aid, help ease looming labor shortages in California and nationwide in healthcare, computer sciences and other skilled jobs.

“I feel lost,” Garcia said. “Sometimes I’m embarrassed to talk to my family back home and tell them I’m taking care of dogs. But I know someday I will be able to do my geriatrics practice, and I know there are people here who need my help.”

Nationwide, more than 1.3 million college-educated legal immigrants are unemployed or working in unskilled jobs such as dishwashers or taxi drivers, according to the report by the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute. Nearly one-fourth of them, or 317,000, live in California. Professionals from Latin America and Africa fare worse than those from Asia and Europe, the study found. Two of the biggest barriers are lack of English fluency and non-recognition of foreign academic and professional criteria.

In some cases, for instance, U.S. medical systems require course work typically not required abroad, such as maternity and psychiatric nursing, according to Julie Hughes-Lederer, interim director of the Los Angeles County Regional Health Occupations Resource Center. Medical licensing exams are also different, such as the use of multiple-choice exams in the United States — a format regarded as more difficult than the essay exams used in other countries. “A lot of this is just technical obstacles they have to get through,” Hughes-Lederer said. “We don’t have to question their capability to learn and progress. You know they have the gray matter.”

“The U.S. historically enjoyed the advantage in picking the best immigrants in the world,” said Jeanne Batalova, a policy analyst with the institute. “But with other countries entering the race for global talent, the U.S. is losing its competitive advantage.”

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Source: L.A. Times

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Big Turnout of Latino Voters Boosted Obama

By Miriam Jordan of The Wall Street Journal
Record turnout among Hispanic voters helped push Barack Obama over the top in an election that signals the emerging political clout of the nation’s fastest-growing demographic group.

About 10 million Hispanics cast a ballot, up from 7.8 million in the 2004 presidential contest, accounting for 8% of the national voting public, exit polls show. Latinos voted for Sen. Obama over Sen. John McCain nationally by 66% to 32%, marking a dramatic shift toward Democrats from 2004, when more than 50% supported Sen. John Kerry and 40% voted for President Bush.

More important, this election shattered the perception that Latino voters only have a powerful impact in their traditional stronghold of the Southwest. While Latinos were key to Sen. Obama’s victories in both Nevada and New Mexico, where he lost the non-Hispanic white vote, their support also was crucial in hotly contested states such as Virginia and Pennsylvania, where Latinos now represent about 5% of the voting population. In Florida, this election marked the first time that a Democratic presidential candidate won a majority of the Latino vote.

This newfound clout is only expected to increase in the coming years, as the growth of the Hispanic population outpaces that of the rest of the nation. In 2016, Hispanics are expected to number about 60 million, up from 45 million today. And though Hispanics voted overwhelmingly Democratic this time around, they are likely to be courted heavily by both parties in the future. “Twenty years from now Latinos will be twice as important as they are today,” says Matt Barreto, a political science professor at the University of Washington who does Hispanic polling. He also noted that in the next presidential election, Latinos would emerge as an influential voting bloc in more states, such as North Carolina and Georgia. “Within the next decade, Latino voters could become decisive in several second-tier states,” says Prof. Barreto.

About one in five new voters were Hispanic, many of them immigrants who responded to a mass mobilization drive by Hispanic media and community groups to get out the vote. That energized Latino voters, who showed up at the polls in higher percentages than other newly registered voter groups. Relative to 2004, the total number of registered Hispanics soared by 144% in Nevada, 35% in Colorado, 34% in Florida and 30% in New Mexico.

In Florida, where 14% of voters are Latino, 57% of Hispanics backed Sen. Obama compared with 42% who favored the Democratic candidate in 2004, as the influence of older, conservative Cuban-Americans was eclipsed by young Cuban-Americans and South and Central American immigrants.
In the battleground state of Colorado, the Latino vote represented 17% of the voting public, with 73% of Latino voters supporting Sen. Obama. In New Mexico, Latinos constituted 41% of the voting population and 69% of them supported Sen. Obama. In Nevada, the Latino vote was 16% of the voting population, with 78% of them backing the Democratic candidate.

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Source: The Wall Street Journal