Who are we helping?

(This post first appeared in Spanish in the May 6 issue of Al Día News.)

The numbers are shocking.

14.5 percent of households went hungry in 2010. That’s the highest number ever recorded in the United States.

Now, some members of House of Representatives are proposing to cut more than $35 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps, which is the government’s best means of addressing hunger in our nation.

And, since you can’t sever hunger from poverty, here are some more numbers for you to think on: 46.9 million people were in poverty in 2010. This is the highest number in the 52 years the nation has tracked poverty numbers. Of those, 20.5 million live in extreme poverty. If we break down the poverty rates by demographic, we get this: Latinos 26.6 percent; African Americans 27.4 percent. The percentage of children living in poverty is 27.7 to 36.1 percent of the total population (depending which federal measure you use).

You might be tempted to think that the majority of those receiving food aid from the government are in the families of the unemployed. Think again. More than half of the families that receive help have at least one member of the family who is employed fulltime — many of them at low or minimum wage jobs — and still fall beneath the poverty line. How? According to the World Hunger Education Service’s “Hunger Notes” web site: ‘In 2008, the official U.S. poverty level for a family of 4 was $21,834 [...] with a 40 hour week, a family of 4 with one minimum wage earner would earn $15,080, only 69 percent of the poverty level.”

Some of those same members of the House Budget and House Agriculture Committee proposing the devastating cuts are saying that churches should be the ones taking responsibility for feeding the poor, not the government. Bread for the World, a faith-based organization that works to end hunger, estimates that “on average every church in the country would have to come up with approximately $50,000 dedicated to feeding people — every year for the next 10 years.” The thing is that many churches already do feed the poor on an ongoing basis, but proposing that they could make up what the House members are proposing to cut is disingenuous.

What do we pay individual income taxes to government for if not to help our nation provide for the basic needs of its people?

I’m going to give you some more figures (thanks to ProPublica): Fannie Mae, $116 billion disbursed; Freddie Mac, $71 billion; AIG, $68 billion; General Motors, $51 billion; Bank of America, $45 billion; Citigroup, $45 billion; JPMorgan Chase, $25 billion; Wells Fargo, $25 billion. Well, I could go on, but you catch my drift. The bailouts of the aforementioned corporate entities (and many others) took taxpayer money to restore interests considered vital to our nation. As we know from subsequent reports, a number of CEOs from those same corporations took home six figure bonuses at the same time as ordinary taxpayers were contributing our hard-earned dollars to bailing them out.

During my childhood, when my father would tell me about the United States, he talked about his country with pride and admiration. He was the first in his family to be born an American citizen and there was no place comparable to this one in his heart. I, an American citizen from birth but one who grew up in a nation with the fourth highest rate of chronic malnutrition in the world and the highest in Latin America, understood from him that the United States was different. It was a country, he told me, that strove to protect and take care of its people. It had a governmental safety net and offered recourse for those in need. Moreover, he said, it was a country which didn’t choose to aid the powerful and influential at the expense of the ordinary citizen.

My father died in 2004, and I miss him every day. But I’m glad he’s not around to see how his fellow Republicans on that blasted House Budget and House Agriculture Committee are proposing to make a mockery of his words.

Beta-readers

 

A thank-you for a pretty thankless job. =)

Heads up! Books are forbidden

This column first appeared in Spanish in Al Día news, April 13. Read it here.

I’ve been closely following Arizona schools compliance with House Bill 2281, a measure that pulled Mexican-American history and literature from the curriculum and, quite literally, off the classroom shelves. Some of the big names in U.S. Latino fiction and poetry have been deemed inappropriate for young Latino students to read as part of their school work.

Like that state’s noxious and contested immigration law, the move cannot be read as anything but a blatantly anti-Latino move. Unlike SB 1070, however, this ruling doesn’t bother to disguise its prejudice with the excuse of illegal entry or unauthorized residence. No, this move simply seeks to make sure Latino students, citizen and non-citizen alike, don’t get too uppity.

Because that’s what being engaged by education does. That’s what seeing your history and heritage seriously considered and represented in academic texts does. That’s what identifying with literary protagonists who might look like you, or sound like you, or live like you, does. It makes you damn uppity and harder to disenfranchise and bamboozle.

It gives you voice.

Poet Lorna Dee Cervantes gave evidence of just that during a rally to protest the ban. It wasn’t until she read the works of U.S. Latino writers, she said, that she felt entitled to put her words on paper. She went on to become not only a university professor, but one of the best known U.S. Latina poets.

The importance of Cervantes’ example should not be underestimated. Young Latinos grow up barraged with images of themselves as nannies, housekeepers and farmworkers — not writers, intellectuals and academics. Understand, I’m not disparaging that first set of  occupations — all honorable jobs requiring far more specialized skills and abilities than we commonly attribute to them — but bemoaning the lack of visibility for the second set.

Arizona institutionalizes that lack by banning from the classroom evidence that young Latino students can, and do, grow up to be U.S. Latino historians and writers and intellectuals who are not satisfied with rehashing Anglocentric historical analysis or literary trope.

By its decision, Arizona denies that U.S. history is big enough to include the history of its Latino citizens and of their legacy, which includes (but is not limited to) an academic, intellectual tradition that predates any other in North America. (The first university in Mexico opened a full 100 years before Harvard, the first university in the U.S., and 127 years before the first university in Canada.)

None of those students will be exposed to or discuss in class the literary merits of the novels written by “las Girlfriends” (Sandra Cisneros, Denise Chavez, Julia Alvarez and Ana Castillo), some of the nation’s brightest Latina literary stars, because the measure prohibits courses or classes that "are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group" and the school boards in places like Tucson believe none but Latinos would be interested in such literature.

It is a disaster — not only for the Latino students, but for all high school students in Arizona. Is it any wonder the Quality Counts compiled by Education Week journalists in 2012 gave Arizona a C- for its educational efforts overall and a D+ for its K-12 education?

To my dismay as a Latina writer, there hasn’t been a huge outcry about the Arizona ban, certainly nothing akin to the furor we saw when school districts tried to ban Harry Potter novels a number of years back.

But there have been some wonderful and ingenious responses. Tony Diaz, known on twitter as @librotraficante (www.librotraficante.com), put together a book caravan of the banned books, handed those books out to students and started four underground libraries. Gina Ruiz, a writer and the blogger of Banning History in Arizona (www.banninghistory.blogspot.com), promoted a YouTube “read-in” of the banned books. And almost all of the writers whose words have been excised have advocated for the ban to be overturned — in person at rallies, in print or online.

All of them, giving voice.

INK: Of butterflies, and my novel's due date

Advance Reading Copies of my novel, INK, set to be released by Crossed Genres Publications on Oct. 15, will be available soon... I know, because I just read through the final before it goes to proof.

In a word: Aieee! Excited and terrified at once.

Despite the photo at the top of this post, INK has nothing to do with butterflies (but certainly started producing that fluttery feeling in my stomach as soon as I saw the ARCs).


Here's a synopsis of the novel:

What happens when rhetoric about immigrants escalates to an institutionalized population control system? The near-future, dark speculative novel, INK, opens as a biometric tattoo is approved for use to mark temporary workers, permanent residents and citizens with recent immigration history — collectively known as inks.

The main characters grapple with ever-changing definitions of power, home and community. Relationships reshape their lives in ways they don’t fully understand. Magic and “the other” breach borders, both personal and public. In this world, the protagonists’ magicks serve and fail, as do all other systems — government, gang, religious organization, news media and Internet — until two things alone stand: love and memory.

Despite its political underpinnings, INK is primarily a story about relationships: ink and non-ink; history and future; stories and life; and the magic that attends all of them.

INK will be published by Crossed Genres Publications Oct. 15, 2012.

Interested in reading for review? Email me at svourvoulias(at)yahoo(dot)com, and let me know.