NewsTaco

By Huffington Post Latino Voices

While Charles Ramsey has become an Internet phenomenon for his role in saving the three women abducted and allegedly raped for years in a Cleveland home, another hero’s efforts have passed by relatively unnoticed, ABC News Channel 5 reports.

Angel Cordero, who speaks only Spanish, told the ABC affiliate that he arrived at the scene first and he was the one to kick the door down, freeing Amanda Berry, who had been trapped inside for nearly 10 years.

“I helped her,” Cordero says in the newscast that aired Tuesday. “I was first.”

Cordero often visits the house across the street to have dinner, according to a report form CNN.

Reporter Stephanie Ramirez said Cleveland police brought Cordero to her for an interview, saying he had played a role in the rescue. She pointed out…

Click HERE to read the full article.

This article was first published in Huffington Post Latino Voices.

[Photo screen shot courtesy WEWSTV]

By Victor Landa, NewsTaco

It took more than 200 years for the United States to allow women to serve in the front lines of military combat. It might not take that long to require women to register for the Selective Service. The ban on women in combat was lifted last January, and with it the question of women being eligible for a possible draft was opened as well.

Truth be told the notion hasn’t occurred to too many people, at least not in public. But it’s a logical next step – that now that women can serve in combat they should also be required to register for the Selective Service. In fact it isn’t a new idea, in 2003 the Selective Service was sued in a Boston District Court for alleged discrimination because it only required men to register.

If it were to happen it would require a congressional act. I spoke recently to Lawrence Romo, Director of the U. S. Selective Service about a possible requirement for women to register with the Selective Service.

[Photo by United States Marine Corps Official Page]

By Genevra Pittman, Reuters/Chicago Tribune

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Among young women diagnosed with breast cancer, black and Hispanic patients were more likely to wait weeks for treatment, in a new study from California.

Researchers found treatment delays were also more common among poor women and those without private insurance – and that a woman’s chance of surviving at least five years after cancer surgery was lower when it was put off.

Click on picture to read full story.

[Photo by Rhoda Baer]

By Erika L. Sánchez, NBCLatino

It’s no secret that Latinas are the hardest hit by the gender wage gap. A recent analysis from the National Partnership for Women and Families showed that Latinas are paid 55 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men  in the nation’s top 50 metro areas. Although wage disparities exist at all career levels for Latinas, immigrant women are especially susceptible and are considered the least economically secure population in the United States.

Currently, there are approximately 5.4 million undocumented immigrant women living and working in the United States who must work the lowest-paying jobs because of their immigration status. In 2011, 208,000 Latina women worked in jobs paying below the federal minimum wage compared to 172,000 Latino men.

Research shows that a woman’s average lifetime earnings are more than $434,000 less than a comparable male counterpart over a 35-year working life. This means very difficult financial choices for women of color, who are more likely to be the breadwinners that than their white counterparts.

“When women are not paid enough, it affects their families, particularly the education of their children,” says Claudia Williams, research analyst at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

She says that this lack of financial security also means that they are less likely to save for retirement.

Williams believes that immigration reform would improve women’s economic circumstances. If they are subject to abuse, they would also be able to move to another job. Not only are undocumented Latinas underpaid, they must often work in hostile environments. Women in agribusiness, for instance, experience high levels of sexual harassment and sexual violence at work and their undocumented status makes it very difficult for them to challenge these conditions or look for other jobs

Iliana Guadalupe Perez, 25, an independent contractor who helps educate other undocumented immigrants to find her kind of work, says that though her sales and marketing contracting has certain benefits, such as flexibility and a fairly high hourly rate, it’s not what she wants to do in the long run. “This has nothing to do with what I’ve studied,” Perez says. “My degree in math was useless. I couldn’t even get an interview. This is not my ideal situation.” Perez, who is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Education and a Masters in Economics, says her dream job would be working in the U.N. or the World Bank

Another disadvantage is in her line of work, Perez says, is that she’s unable to get tenure, which would result in pay increases over time. Not only that, she points out that undocumented people don’t have the option of insurance, retirement funds, or investment funds.

Perez also feels that immigration reform will significantly improve the financial status of Latinas. “It will give a lot of Latinas the opportunities to use their skills. A lot are educated but are limited to their potential. A Social Security number would allow people to explore new avenues for employment.”

Ann Garcia, an immigration policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, says that the Paycheck Fairness Act and immigration reform would help close the wage gap for Latinas and improve the economy. “When you legalize workers, you offer them citizenship. Taking the worker out of the economic sidelines would cause a rise in productivity and wages that would create a great ripple effect in the economy,” says Garcia.

According to the Center for American Progress, immigration reform that would legalize the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. would add a cumulative $1.5 trillion to U.S. gross domestic product, or GDP, over 10 years.

Garcia says that American workers and undocumented immigrants would see a huge rise in income and that the boost in wages would be bigger for woman than men. “It would provide improved economic outcomes through increased legal protections, better investments in education and training, higher paying jobs, economic mobility. It would also easier for people to start their own business,” Garcia says. “If we can have economic actors earning more, consuming more, and paying higher taxes, the economy would see a serious amount of growth.”

This article was first published in NBCLatino.

[Photo by ChrisGoldNY]

By The Bakersfield Californian

Labor leader and human rights activist Dolores Huerta was inducted into the California Hall of Fame during a ceremony Wednesday night at The California Museum in Sacramento, according to a press release.

She is part of the seventh class of inductees to join the Hall of Fame since the program began in 2006.

Click on picture to read full story.

[Photo by Freedom To Marry]

By Jennie Pasquarella, ACLU of Southern California and Axel Caballero, Cuéntame 

Where would you expect to find half-a-dozen patrol cars on New Year’s Eve?  In Bakersfield, California, ranked in the highest ten percent of the most violent cities in America, you’d hope they’d be responding to incidents of violence and preventing murder, rape, and other violent crime.  At the very least, you’d expect them to be patrolling for drunk drivers.

Not so.  At least not when it comes to prioritizing such matters as “barking dogs.”  On December 31, 2012, the Kern County Sheriff’s Department deployed six police cars and numerous officers at the behest of a white resident who called for help from, well, the sounds of two small barking dogs.  Her neighbor, Ruth Montaño, a Latina farm-worker, and her three American children owned the dogs.

As Ruth poignantly describes in her own words, when she and her children returned to their trailer around 10pm that night from the grocery store, officers approached her and began shouting and cursing at her.  They said they were responding to a neighbor’s complaint that her two small dogs were being noisy.  Her dogs, a Chihuahua and a Shih Tzu, were enclosed in a fenced-in area outside her trailer.  But when Ruth asked the officers what the dogs had done, they refused to answer.  When she offered to put the dogs inside, they ignored her.

Instead, the officers questioned her about how long she had been in the United States and insulted her for not speaking English well.  They called her and her children garbage and threatened to arrest her.  When she pled with them to tell her why they were interrogating her, they again refused to say, growing even more hostile and agitated, and aggressively placing her under arrest.  As they walked her over to the patrol car, her children cried and pled for them not to take their mommy.  One officer violently bashed Ruth’s head into the side of the patrol car, before forcing her into the vehicle.

The dogs, meanwhile, remained outside, untouched.  Barking.

The officers claim that they arrested Ruth for “having animals making excessive noise” and for resisting arrest. But, under Kern County law, “having animals making excessive noise” is neither an arrestable offense, nor is it within the authority of the Sheriff’s Department to investigate – rather it is an issue for Animal Control.

Ruth believes she was arrested for one sole reason: racism.  We think she’s right.  If not, what’s one other plausible explanation for what happened to her?  Anti-immigrant sentiment runs high in places like Bakersfield, and law enforcement officers often target Latino residents.  Officers know that all they have to do is make an arrest – whether lawful or not – to turn any suspected “illegal immigrant” from today’s contributing resident into tomorrow’s deportee.

This is because under the federal government’s disastrous Secure Communities (“S-Comm”) program every person who is arrested is immediately screened and identified by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) for possible deportation, regardless of their charges.

Dragnet federal immigration enforcement programs, like S-Comm, increasingly are to blame for abusive and unlawful police conduct that target Latinos, violate their civil rights, and undermine public safety.  The program encourages police to take action based on race, language, and perceived immigration status – knowing that any arrest could lead to deportation – rather than doing their jobs to ferret out threats to public safety.

Stories like Ruth’s only reinforce the urgent need for California to finally adopt the TRUST Act, a bill that would ensure that the police can no longer detain for ICE people like Ruth who have done no harm to our communities.  And it demonstrates the need for Congress to pass common-sense immigration reform to ensure that residents like Ruth are put on a road to citizenship, not a highway to family separation.

Ruth still faces deportation.  Do your part and tell ICE to take her out of deportation proceedings.  Call (202) 732-3000. Her case number is A205 763 399.

This article was first published in Cuéntame.

[Video and screenshot by Mycuentame.org]

By Delaney Hall, Laitno USA

Meet the Garza sisters. Playing Tex-Mex Conjunto music publicly used to be the sole domain of men…till sisters Lala and Marcella took up the accordion and the drums. They’re back on the scene after many years. Delaney Hall brings us this story from Stories from Deep in the Heart.

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This article was first published in Latino USA.

Delaney Hall is a radio producer and multimedia reporter in Austin, TX. She’s the lead producer of the Austin Music Map, a community documentary project based at KUTX and produced in collaboration with the Association of Independents in Radio and Zeega.

[Photo courtesy Latino USA]

By Nadine Natour, NBCLatino

This is the second installment of Latinas empowering other Latinas to succeed in honor of Women’s History Month. 

For ten high school girls enrolled in the photography program Las Fotos Project, the summer of 2012 was a lesson in disguise.

Rather then a host of drowsy days spent on the sidewalks of Los Angeles, they traipsed through the San Gabriel Mountains and snapped photos of rocky cliffs and lazy rivers, lilies in full bloom and vistas of the California landscape.

The group then used the same film to capture scenes in their community, edited the double exposure photographs and wrote poems to accompany the art. Finally, the girls published a bookfeaturing the photographs and presented it at a public exhibition which they personally marketed.

Founded by freelance photographer Eric Ibarra, Las Fotos Project helps its young Latina members build their photography skills and their confidence.“The program is such a unique setup,” says the 28-year-old Ibarra, who launched the club three years ago after he noticed a lack of extracurricular opportunities in the area for young girls. “They learn all these life skills almost without realizing it.”

Ibarra partners with Los Angeles organizations to find Latinas aged 11-17 who could most benefit from the experience. The girls, who often come from low-income or middle-income communities, then enroll in ten-week classes where they’re quickly taught the basics and given a personal point-and-shoot camera.

Las Fotos mentors help the students brainstorm possible field projects, with the freedom to choose any theme or landscape near the Boyle Heights headquarters. Every project ends with a community exhibit, photo book or mini-documentary.

Lizbeth Rojas, now a student at Loyola Marymount University,  joined the group at 17 and suggested the San Gabriel trip for their summer project. She says it gave her a different perspective on her East Los Angeles neighborhood.

“We feel like we have to live in a place where it has to be busy but being in the mountains is different,” says Rojas, who ultimately led the trip. “I was able to notice things. It gave me another view of the world.”Another member of the group, Ana Cortes, created a photograph of a craggy mountain scape over the facade of the East Los Angeles Municipal Courts. She captioned the photo: “We owe nature justice!”

“I took a picture of the courts because I’ve always been into law and law enforcement,” says Ana, now a freshman studying criminal justice at California State University, Los Angeles.

Cortes joined the group at 17, never having handled a film camera. She says the group made her feel more confident and stood in marked contrast to her experience at her high school.

“At school, everyone’s judging everyone ,” says Cortes. But the project, she says, was “totally different. I was shy at first but it was fun and you just felt welcome.”

The various field projects offer the students a chance to explore their community but, more often, they wind up exploring their inner selves. For one assignment, the girls were told to take photos of the most inspiring person in their life. They then fashioned the photo series into a revealing video documentary.

Las Fotos Project maintains a roster of around sixteen girls at a time, in several California locations as well as a project in Guatemala. According to Ibarra, the girls can remain in the program once they pass the 17-year-old age limit, but many go on to attend college or find work elsewhere.

Though she has aged out of the program, Ana Cortes says she still retains a love of photography. She said she plans to take photos and create a scrapbook of her family, friends and memorable events.

“It was my own idea, something to keep all the nice memories I’ve had,” says Cortes. “I’ll do it just for fun, just for me.”

This article was first published in NBCLatino.

[Photo by ric Ibarra/Las Fotos Project]

By Salud Today

Latinas who have an abnormal mammogram result take 33 days longer to reach definitive diagnosis of breast cancer than non-Hispanic white women, according to a new study by the Institute for Health Promotion Research (IHPR) at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

Such a time delay can have a critical impact on tumor size, stage at diagnosis, treatment, prognosis, and survival of subsequent breast cancer.

For this study, published online in SpringerPlus in March 2013, IHPR researchers worked with partners in the federally funded Redes En Acción: The National Latino Cancer Network to evaluate the differences in time to diagnosis of breast cancer among 186 Latinas and 74 non-Hispanic whites who received an abnormal mammogram result in six U.S. cities.

Analysis showed that Latinas’ median time to definitive diagnosis of breast cancer was 60 days, compared to just 27 days for non-Hispanic white women.

“This long delay puts Latinas at greater risk of being diagnosed with larger tumors and more advanced-stage breast cancer, which can affect prognosis,” said Amelie G. Ramirez, Dr.P.H., the study’s corresponding author, director of the IHPR, and Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the School of Medicine at the UT Health Science Center at San Antonio.

Given this delay and that cancer now is the leading cause of Latino death, this study also signals a greater need for ethnically and culturally appropriate interventions to facilitate Latinas’ successful entry into, and progression through, the cancer care system, Dr. Ramirez said.

Dr. Ramirez’ team recently found that extra support for patients, called “patient navigation,” can lead to faster diagnosis for Latinas after an abnormal mammogram result.

In that study, published in Cancer, women who received help from trained patient navigators had significantly shorter time delays between an abnormal mammogram and definitive diagnosis—whether positive or negative for breast cancer—than those who did not receive navigation. Services provided by navigators included culturally-sensitive support and help overcoming barriers related to transportation, child care, insurance, language and more.

This article was first published in Salud Today.

[Photo courtesy Salud Today]

By Sam Quiñones, A Reporter’s Blog

Mexican Mafia member Rafael “Cisco” Munoz-Gonzalez was sentenced to life in prison today.

Munoz-Gonzalez was tried on charges that he’d controlled the Puente 13 street gang, ordering gang members to tax local drug dealers in the La Puente area, sell methamphetamine, and attack rivals and even one cooperating witness, who was stabbed 22 times in a jail lockup — all this according to a US Attorney’s report.

His brother, Cesar, was also sentenced to life in prison for running Puente 13 and giving orders on behalf of Cisco, who was locked up until 2008.

The Mexican Mafia prison gang has run its drug-dealer taxation/extortion scheme since the early 1990s. The scheme is as close as Southern California has come to a regional organized crime system.

Truth is, though, it’s not that organized. It’s remarkable that these guys can control Southern Califonria Latino street gangs from prison. The system has broken up the SoCal gang world into little fiefdoms. But it is far from perfect, communication between maximum-security prison cells and the streets being shaky at best.

That and the greed and conniving of Eme members often leads to feuding, plotting, death decrees and betrayal of the kind that would give Shakespeare fodder for a dozen more tragedies.

Cisco Munoz-Gonzalez was part of an earlier Mexican Mafia soap opera. He and Ralph “Perico” Rocha, also an Eme member, were allegedly feuding with the associates of then-influential Eme member, Jacques “Jacko” Padilla, who ran Azusa 13 from his maximum-security cell at Corcoran State Prison.

Rocha and Munoz were supposedly collecting taxes from dealers in Azusa.

Padilla’s wife and liaison to the streets, Delores “Lola” Llantada, went to war with the two carnales. Women liaisons with jailed Eme members have enormous shot-calling power across Southern California. On a couple occasions, I’ve thought they were as powerful as the local mayor.

But this was the first example I’m aware of in which a woman actually ordered hits.

Anyway, a big RICO case came down, brought against Llantada and others in her crew.

Llantada and her cohorts are now doing lengthy prison terms. Padilla has since dropped out of the Eme, and is a genial chap, as I found when I interviewed him a couple years ago.

Now the brothers Munoz-Gonzalez are going away forever.

As the world turns, Mexican Mafia style.

This article was first published in A Reporter’s Blog.

[Photos courtesy A Reporter's Blog]

By Salud Today

About 40% of Latinas have two or more risk factors for having a heart attack, according to a recent study.

But fewer than half of Latinas recognize the typical heart attack symptoms of chest pain, shortness of breath, and pain that spreads to the shoulders, neck or arms, according to the American Heart Association.

So the Haga La Llamada, ¡No Pierda Tiempo! campaign, based on the HHS Office of Women’s Health’s successful “Make the Call, Don’t Miss a Beat” campaign, aims to educate, engage and empower Latinas and their families to learn the seven most common symptoms of a heart attack and encourage them to call 9-1-1 as soon as they experience one or more of the following heart attack symptoms:

• Chest pain, discomfort, pressure or squeezing
• Shortness of breath
• Nausea
• Light-headedness or sudden dizziness
• Unusual upper body pain, or discomfort in one or both arms, back, shoulder, neck, jaw, or upper part of the stomach
• Unusual fatigue
• Breaking out in a cold sweat

You’re also invited to join @HHSLatino for a bilingual Twitter Chat on Latino heart health at 2 p.m. EST Thursday, Feb. 28. Use #CorazonChat to follow the conversation and submit questions ahead of time. The chat also involves @WomensHealth, @SaludDLaMujer, @American_Heart, @MinorityHealth, @US_FDA, and@FDAenEspanol.

Find other resources in Spanish that contain the seven symptoms here or here.

This article was first published in Salud Today.

[Photo courtesy Salud Today]

By Andrew Zajac & Hans Nichols, Bloomberg

Edith Ramirez, a campaign official for President Barack Obama and one of his law school classmates, will be named as head the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, where she has been a commissioner for almost three years, according to a White House official.

Ramirez, 44, an intellectual property lawyer, served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review in 1990 and 1991 when Obama was its president. In 2008, Ramirez, who is Mexican-American and bilingual, was the Obama campaign’s Latino outreach director in California. She has been on the commission since April 2010.

Click on picture to read full story.

[Photo courtesy law.harvard.edu]

By Latino Rebels

A report out of Philadelphia revealed today that Judge Patrick Dugan, who believed a viral video showing former city police lieutenant Jonathan Josey punching Aida Guzmán last fall after the city’s Puerto Rican Parade was sensationalized by the media and who this week presided over Josey’s not guilty verdict for simple assault against Guzmán, is married to a Philadelphia police officer. According to Philly.com, “a chorus of criticism swelled Wednesday after word spread that Dugan is married to Philadelphia Police Officer Nancy Farrell Dugan, who has been on the force since 1997, city payroll records show.”

The story published reaction from the city’s Puerto Rican community:

Some members of the city’s Puerto Rican community who denounced Dugan’s acquittal of Josey were bristling over the revelation about his wife.

“It’s ridiculous. His wife is a police officer, and I understand he was endorsed by the FOP [Fraternal Order of Police],” said Quetcy Lozada, president of the Philadelphia chapter of the National Conference of Puerto Rican Women.

“We’re all human beings,” Lozada said. “There is no possible way that a judge put in a situation like that will be able to make an unbiased decision.”

Guzman’s attorney, Enrique Latoison, said he learned Tuesday that the judge is married to a cop.

“When it was brought to my attention that his wife was a police officer, it was very surprising and I consider it to be a conflict of interest,” said Latoison, who has asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the case and intends to file a civil suit against Josey on behalf of Guzman.

When asked about whether this was a conflict of interest, the Philly.com story said that Dugan “appeared pained Wednesday and paused in a courthouse hallway only long enough to say that the Code of Judicial Conduct constrained him from answering questions.”

The story also included opinions from local legal experts, who all agree that Dugan should have recused himself.

Frank M. McClellan, professor of law emeritus at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law, said the standard for a judge to recuse himself is if he has a personal interest in a case that would prevent him from being impartial, or if his presiding would create an appearance of impropriety.

“It certainly would have been appropriate, even if not required,” for Dugan to recuse himself, said McClellan, who teaches legal ethics and malpractice law. “We want to give the public confidence that there has been a fair and impartial decision made.”

Lynn A. Marks, executive director of Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts, a nonpartisan reform organization, said that although Dugan was not required to recuse himself, maybe he should have.

“Given the fact that this had the potential of being a high-profile case, it would have been wise to [step aside] so that people would not question his decision,” she said.

Marks, a lawyer, said that “at the least he should have disclosed to the attorneys that his wife is a police officer so they could decide if they wanted to bring a motion to recuse.”

According to the story, the city’s District Attorney did not know that Dugan was married to a cop and the spokesperson did not want to answer whether the DA would have asked Dugan to step down from the case. The story also said that it tried to reach Josey’s attorney on Wednesday, but that they could not reach him for comment.

This article was first published in Latino Rebels.

The Latino Rebels are a collective of social media influentials, bloggers, marketers, journalists, poets, writers, producers, photographers, and marketers. We use humor, commentary, opinions, independent stories, cross-links to others blogs, and our social media platforms to share our universe.

[Phot by Latino Rebels]

By Viviana Hurtado, The Wise Latina Club

In 1965, 25,000 people marched to Montgomery, Alabama to help pass the Voting Rights Act. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court, including Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, heard arguments on a section of this historic legislation with their decision having a big impact on the Latino vote.

Click on picture to read full story.

[Photo by Mrs. Gemstone]