Si Spika da Inglish

When having a “funny accent” can get you deported it's no laughing matter

Since Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney defended himself by asking whether he should check the immigration status of anyone speaking with a “funny accent,” I’ve been taking my passport with me whenever I go out, even to the bodega around the corner.See, I’m one of those American citizens who speaks with a “funny accent.” No, I didn’t grow up in Brooklyn, New Orleans or Dallas. Although people from those places, and many others, do speak with an accent, it’s never called “funny.”

Read full NY Daily News column

Let my people vote!

The anti-immigration hysteria is keeping 17 million Latino voters hostage. We're caught in a one-issue steel cage we need to get out of so we can address other issues affecting our community. Read my NY Daily News column of November 7, 2007, Let my people go!

Machismo vs. Manliness

Many men--and, sadly, quite a few women--are confused as to what makes a man, a man.
Read my VIVA/NY Daily News column on the misguided efforts to bring back a "new machismo"--including comments on the new book "Huevos y la Mujer Latina: The De-masculization of the Macho" by Julian Camacho Segura.

I am my brother's sweeper

Owning a home in New York City is no piece of cake. Local laws make homeowners responsible for garbage people drop on their sidewalks.
Read my oped piece in the NY Daily News.

Who's más American?

My jaw dropped down to my navel when I heard the woman from Tennessee say, “The only immigrants who’ve become real Americans are those who arrived through Ellis Island.”
She was a caller at one of those public affairs talk shows on cable television. She sounded quite agitated. “Everyone else is illegal!” she screamed and then hung up.
Well, I imagine that it’s quite possible that there may be people in Tennessee and other such places who still don’t know that the airplane has been invented. Otherwise, they’d know that in the last 50 years way more immigrants have arrived through Kennedy, LAX and Miami international airports than the paltry 12 million that came through Ellis Island between 1892 and 1954. And definitely, their mode of transportation and port of entry doesn’t make them and their descendants less American.
Read the full column at the New York Daily News.

Quinceañeras Gone Wild

What used to be a traditional Latino "rite of passage" has turned into what one of the teenagers interviewed by Julia Álvarez for her fascinating new book, "Once Upon a Quinceañera-Coming of Age in the USA," calls, in a marvelous example of insightful misspelling, "a right of passage."
No longer a simple affair for family and a handful of friends, quinceañera parties have become as big and expensive as a keeping-up-with-the-Perezes wedding — minus the groom.

Read my Daily News column of August 8 on the subject.

Simpaticos No More?

Because of history and geography and because we have more things in common that things that separate us, Americans and Latinos have been amigos for ages. Now we are not so sure.

The overheated, hateful, anti-Hispanic rhetoric fouling the air around the public debate about immigration reform has left a bad taste in the mouth for millions of Latinos who no longer feel welcome in El Norte. And I'm not talking about undocumented Latinos who've seen their hopes of legalization dashed in a hail of misunderstanding and xenophobia. I'm talking about long-established American citizens and documented residents. . .

Read my full column on the subject published in the New York Daily News July 11, 2007.