Rapper Narrates Mounting Puerto Rico Crisis

Drawing on influences as disparate as Mercedes Sosa and Eminem, René Pérez Joglar, the MC of Puerto Rican alternative hiphop band Calle 13, has suddenly emerged as a central figure in that colonial island-nation's increasingly contentious political scene. Using the unlikely setting of MTV Latin America's award show, held in Las Vegas Mandalay Bay Hotel last Thursday, Pérez made a series of statements that crystallized several tendencies of the new Latin American Left with prop black-and-white T-shirts, and most stridently, with remarks directed at Puerto Rico's current rightist governor, Luis Fortuño.

"Latin America is not complete without Puerto Rico, and Puerto Rico is not free," Pérez said during an interlude before introducing two presenters at the awards show. "Today, October 15, the Puerto Rican people marched against unemployment, because the governor laid them off and the governor of Puerto Rico is a son of a whore..."

Pérez was referring to a massive General Strike held last Thursday to protest the latest round of layoffs of government workers enacted by the governor in late September, one that eliminated about 17,000 jobs (4,000 were laid off in June), ostensibly to balance the budget. With an official unemployment rate of 15.8%, and an economy that depends on high government employment, these layoffs have struck a deep chord of resentment in Puerto Rican society.

The week after the announcement, during a press conference about the development of an eastern port near an area abandoned by the departure of a US Military base at Roosevelt Roads, the governor had to duck an egg thrown at him by a 44-year-old unemployed resident of a nearby town. The "huevaso" or "egg-blow" became a major news story that embodied the frustration of many islanders.

The same week, it was announced that several books, such as Luis Rafael González's "El Entierro de Corijo" (The Burial of Cortijo) and Carlos Fuentes's "Aura" were banned from public school libraries because they contained "inappropriate language" for grammar and high school students. This action, which spurred a protest in New York last week by local poets and artists, appears to be a manifestation of a Republican platform that has been let loose on Puerto Rico because of the election of Fortuño, a board member of the Republican National Hispanic Association, which includes party figures such as "macaca" slurrer and ex-Virginia governor George Allen, Senators Orrin Hatch and John Ensign, RNC chairman Michael Steele, Juan Carlos Benítez, K-Street lobbyist tied to the Abramoff scandal, and the insidious Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform.

As a result of René Pérez' verbal attack, Calle 13's upcoming Halloween show, scheduled to take place in the Choliseo, the Madison Square Garden of Puerto Rico, has been cancelled by Republican mayor Jorge Santini. Pérez, who also wore t-shirts lauding Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and criticizing Colombian president Álvaro Uribe for allowing US military bases in his country. The Colombian government has also issued statements stating their "indignance" about Pérez's "slanderous" statements and future Calle 13 concerts in Colombia are in doubt.

Predictably, Pérez's Republican victims (the party they belong to, the Progressive National Party, bases its platform on a desire for U.S. statehood, and is currently more strongly affiliated with the U.S. Republican party than in the past) have resorted to denouncing Pérez's vulgarity. They read his "son of a whore" comment as a literal attack on Puerto Rican women, ignoring the fact that Pérez's biggest supporter is his mother, whom he lionizes in the recent documentary "Sín Mapa," a kind of neo-Marxist travelogue of Latin American in which Pérez tries (unsuccessfully) to shed himself of material success. They do this of course, to disguise the obscenity of a balance the budget economic policy that causes massive unemployment during a world-wide economic crisis.

Pérez's almost unprecedented pose as a pop star intent on slinging his "poetry of filth" in the hopes of some kind of Rabelaisian stirring of Latin America's severely exploited underclass is symbolic of something very deep stirring in the Puerto Rican soul. The island was rocked again over the weekend when a drug shootout in the small town of Toa Baja killed 8 people and injured 20. While there is new talk in Congress over once again foisting a dubious plebiscite on the island to "decide" its fate as a "nation," there may be a more tectonic shift in store for the would-be 51st state, one perhaps presaged by Pérez's lyrics from the song "Cabe-C-O"

There are no rules here

No oaths here

No government

No colonels

No sergeants

Add a hot pepper to your anger

This movement won't be cancelled

This is for your legs to rebel

This is for your ears to fly

This is for time to freeze over

Gates on the Front Porch of American Race Conflict

The spectacle of Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates, shouting while handcuffed on his front porch, was so painful that it took even Barack Obama out of his carefully scripted, impeccably controlled game plan. It was so painful that even Obama, the most skilled politician of our time, made comments that he would have known, if he were thinking more rationally, would obliterate everything he said previously in his press conference about health care reform, seemingly his most urgent political goal of the year.

Still we return to that image of Gates, shouting perhaps for his cane, which hadn't been given to him at that point, dressed like he'd just gone on a pseudo-preppie shopping spree at the Harvard Coop, in the grip of one white officer, being browbeaten by another, while a third, African-American officer stands guard in the foreground. We can forgive Obama if instead of saying the police acted "stupidly," he should have said, "I don't know all the details, but if you see a photo of a 58-year-old man in handcuffs calling out for his cane on his own porch, and all he did was get cranky from a serious case of jet lag after flying all the way from China, you gotta think that something's wrong with this picture."

But the only apparent effect of this spectacle in our media is a resumption of a static "race debate" where two sides argue in an ahistorical vacuum, devoid of context, facts, and analysis. There has been little debate about the apparent contradictions in comments made about the incident by Gates and his arresting officer, James Crowley.

This is what Gates said, according to a NY Times article:

After getting in and calling Harvard’s maintenance department to come fix the door, Professor Gates said, he saw Sergeant Crowley on his porch. The sergeant was disrespectful from the beginning, the professor said, asking him to step outside without explanation and demanding identification while refusing to provide his own.

This is what Crowley said:

“He was arrested after following me outside the house,” Sergeant Crowley said on the radio, “continuing the tirade even after being warned multiple times — probably a few more times than the average person would have gotten. He was cautioned in the house, ‘Calm down, lower your voice.’ ” He added, “The professor at any point in time could have resolved the issue by quieting down and/or by going back in the house.”

The Cambridge police report reads that Gates was arrested for "exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior in a public place" (emphasis mine). If it's true, that as the report reads, Gates said "ya, I'll speak with your mama outside," the professor seemed not to want to come outside. Yet Crowley insists that Gates could have defused the situation by 'going back in the house.'" It's hard to believe that Crowley wasn't aware of the fact that by stepping outside Gates would leave himself more vulnerable to arrest than by simply continuing his rant inside the house.

Finally, how about some context for the actions of Harvard Magazine fundraiser Lucia Whalen, Gates's next-door neighbor, who called the police to report suspicious activity at his home. It's sad enough that she didn't even recognize him. But perhaps her Homeland Security Threat Level was Elevated because of a recent incident on the Harvard campus that seems to have been quickly forgotten. On May 18, a Harvard student named Justin Copney was charged with murdering someone who was apparently selling him marijuana in a Harvard Yard dorm. As a result of that incident, 21-year-old Brooklyn native Chanequa Campbell, who was friends with Copney's girlfriend, and who has not been charged in connection with the murder, was expelled from her on-campus residence and not allowed to attend her own graduation.

Campbell told the Boston Globe that week that she was being singled out because was "black and poor and from New York." While it has been rumored that Campbell has associations with drugs, there is no doubt that there are many undergraduates at Harvard of various class and race background for which this is true, and they are not being denied attendance at their own graduation. If anything, the Campbell case helped to cast a light on other incidents on the Harvard campus, such as a 2007 campaign called "I Am Harvard," organized by black students in response to racial profiling, that I'm sure both Skip Gates, Lucia Whalen, and his arresting officer were well aware of. (And I'm not even mentioning Cornell West's testy falling out with Larry "Women Are Scientifically Not as Smart as Men" Summers, former Harvard president and currently helping to "fix" the economy for Obama.)

All of this is to say that we are far from living in a post-racial America. It's much closer to the truth that we're only just beginning to deal with the issue.

Fear of a Latino Planet

We know why the right wing of the Republican Party is giving Sonia Sotomayor such hard time. They are scared silly of her. They look at her and see a Hollywood stereotype: an unbridled woman they can't control, like the character played by Linda Cristal, an Argentine fronting as a Puerto Rican in the LatinoExploitation classic "Cry Tough." It doesn't matter that the things she's being attacked for were logically consistent with things Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have said in the past.
The Republicans are in an identity crisis, and all they have left as a bogeyman is identity politics.

The Ballad of Gregory Rodriguez

Today's op ed column by center-right assimilationist Gregory Rodriguez (cq no accent) is a whole new take on the idea of self-hatred. In his subtle "The Generic Latino: What does the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor really say?" he argues for the abolition of the Latino category because, like white Republicans, he's a little bit queasy about being in the same room with a Puerto Rican.

While he has a point that many Latinos identify first with their home country over the broader category of "Latino," his analogy between French considering themselves French first over European and Latino ethnicities and Latino identification is ridiculously flawed. Europe's various tribes speak vastly different languages and have been feuding, well, since the days when the ruling language there was Latin. Spanish-speaking Latinos have been collectively racialized by Anglo-American hegemony over the hemisphere and have a considerably stronger unifying possibilities than Europeans.

Then he proceeds to tell his version of the origin of "Latino" political alliances, when Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans joined forces to create a common political purpose, something that in retrospect, should have raised "brown" flags.

He goes on:

Frank del Olmo, the Los Angeles Times columnist and associate editor, put it more squarely than most when he called the adoption of the catchall term "shortsighted" and "self-defeating." Del Olmo was instrumental in establishing which term the newspaper would adopt -- "Latino" -- but he also argued, in these very pages, that because Mexican Americans made up 65% of all Latinos (compared with 10% Puerto Rican and 4% Cuban), the generic term was more advantageous to non-Mexicans than it was to Mexican Americans. "The term Hispanic allowed other Latinos to use a large and growing Mexican American population to increase their influence," he wrote. "Add up all the Cubans and Puerto Ricans on the East Coast, for instance, and they are still outnumbered by all the Mexicans in the Los Angeles area alone."

This is laughable because so many commentators and politicians from the Left Coast have historically used the term Latino when they were really speaking about Mexican Americans. To imply that the use of Latino sucked political juice out of the Mexican American community is absurd. If anything, the notion of being Latino in America is closer to being Mexican-American than anything else.

Then he says:

I know just as many Mexican Americans who were moved by the nomination of a Puerto Rican woman to the Supreme Court as those who were not. I suspect that many voters may be happy enough about Sotomayor's achievement, but at the same time, they will realize that the elevation of a "Latina" goes only so far and not far enough. I suspect that they may even understand that Sotomayor's nomination could come at Mexican Americans' expense. Because the media and the political elites make no distinctions among Latino groups, Mexican Americans may find themselves waiting a very long time for one of their own to be nominated to the Supreme Court.

Sounds like he's still upset that they picked Jennifer Lopez to play Selena. Not one word that he is in any way pleased about the nomination of a woman whose class background is identical to the majority of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles, and who has consistently put herself on the line as an advocate for Spanish-speakers and minority women, and is being viciously attacked for that.

"They may still decide that Frank del Olmo was right," Rodriguez (cq no accent) concludes. "Becoming generic Latino or Hispanic was self-defeating. Maybe it's time to dump the catchall terms."

Well actually now that Gregory Rodriguez (cq no accent) no longer wants to be Latino, my Puerto Rican ass is feeling a lot better about identifying as such. After all, this is the "public intellectual" who quoted New York Times reporter Alan Riding (whose authoritative weight stems from the fact that he covered the Contra War during the '80s) to prove the supremacy of the Mexican American experience:

"While many other Latin American nations and cultures were the products of conquest and colonization, 'Mexico alone is truly mestizo: it is the only nation in the hemisphere where religious and political--as well as racial--mestizaje took place.' (xii, Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds, 2007 Pantheon Press)

Well gee whiz, maybe that's why Sonia Sotomayor is a disappointment. What could she possibly have learned about "mestizaje" or multiculturalism growing up in the South Bronx? A place where Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, African-Americans, and so many other razas made a mestizaje that birthed hiphop, salsa, graffitti, among other things (Colin Powell?). Should we be mourning the fact that alleged perjurer and probable war criminal Alberto Gonzales (cited as "one of our own," by Rodriguez on p. xvi, ibid), despite many teases from George W., never even got nominated?

Beyond Blithering Nonsensical Neoliberals

Okay I'm blowing the whistle. Time out. This opportunistic Errol Louis-style neoliberal "sack of dog mess" (to quote Whoopi on Glen Beck) ill-logic must end. Can we put a lid on the post-racial obfuscation parade? I'm pretty sure even Colson Whitehead doesn't appreciate it; all he did was write a novel about a black teenager who spent a summer in the Hamptons.

Today's Daily News column by Errant Errol, referenced above, entitled "Beyond Black and White: Obama Signals a Less Tribal Time in City Politics" is a piece of apologist anti-politics political commentary as disheartening as has been produced in a local tabloid for some time. Under the guise of announcing a new era where "tribal" politics is being replaced by "a referendum on the economic plight of the middle class," Louis seems unfazed that the Obama administration's tacit endorsement of Michael Bloomberg's re-election run is a complete abandonment of the majority of New Yorkers, who can only dream of being middle class.

Here is the crux of Louis's logic (and it's frighteningly similar to the weakest part of Obama's worldview): ethnic and racial politics have failed, left us with nothing but a legacy of corruption and inefficiency; the new politics is bipartisan, unencumbered by racial "special interests," and petty corruption.

So, the Obama administration, unwilling to investigate the illegal activities of the previous administration, helping to engineer the Wall Street takeover of the economy during a time of crisis, even siding with the Bush administration by denying Valerie Plame's rights to sue over being outed as a CIA agent by Dick Cheney's office, is more interested in alliances with Michael Bloomberg, one of the world's richest men, because of their common desire to save the middle class.

Bloomberg, who is only in the position to run because he pressured his own City Council to overturn a law that prevented a New York mayor to run for a third term, and who is an unabashed champion of the same corporate swill that drove the country into financial ruin, is then an example of a new politics that is not bogged down by the tired old issues of the '60s. And that's why Obama won't support Comptroller Bill Thompson, the likely Democratic challenger, an African-American, even though even Bill Clinton supported Dinkins over Giuliani in 1993.

Hey, it's post-racial. The same kind of post-racial politics that results in record-breaking stop and frisk operations by the NYPD, 90% of which were of blacks and Latinos.

Send 'Em On Over!

The Democratic Senate, which led the call to close the human-rights violating Guantánamo base in U.S.-occupied Cuba, is now too worried about NIMBY issues to support its closing. Keith Olberman's Countdown on MSNBC has a great interview with the Economic Development Director of Hardin Montana, in which the guy practically begs the administration to send the inmates there, saying that the locals prefer them to sex offenders. But, hey, why not send them to Puerto Rico? It would be a big boost to the economy there, and the inmates are already used to the tropical climate!

Last but not least, here's a classic Chomsky leftier-than-thou piece on why all of the liberal handwringing over the war crimes committed by the Bush administration isn't seeing that this is just business as usual. The set-up of his invocation of the "original 9-11" Chile CIA coup is brilliant.

Solo Star State

This is a photo from El Nuevo Día, the pro-statehood newspaper of Puerto Rico, a photo that would probably not run in any other newspaper in the world. It shows Puerto Rico's resident commissioner, Pedro Pierluisi, shaking hands with Representative Nick Rayhall (D-West Virginia), on the occasion of the submission of yet another proposed plebiscite on Puerto Rico's "status," or colonial relationship with the United States.

Why Nick Rayhall? Well, the distinguished West Virginian is the chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, which is the venue through which issues pertaining to Puerto Rico are heard. Pierluisi is a non-voting member of Congress whose role is to suggest things that, in this case, don't even make the Committee's homepage as part of its "Latest Committee News."

The pro-statehood party is currently in power in Puerto Rico, with its new governor and ex-resident commissioner Luis Fortuño benefitting from a misuse-of-funds "scandal" that brought down his predecessor, ex-resident commissioner Anibal Acevedo-Vilá. (Tangentially related to the U.S. Attorney scandal, which involved Bush White House appointees going after political enemies of some Republican faction, Acevedo-Vilá's prosecution resulted in his acquittal just months after he lost the election.) With the economy tanking rapidly, unemployment flirting with 20% and massive budget cuts to the government, the island-colony's largest employer, there is a good chance that Puerto Ricans will vote for a change in status as specified by the first round of the proposed resolution.

Puerto Rico flirting again with statehood? Still a bit of a laugh considering the anti-Latino bent this country's been on over the last few years. But here's an idea: instead of Puerto Rico becoming the 51st state, how about replacing Texas, whose governor is threatening to secede from the Union. It really wouldn't be too much of a stretch, I mean the flags are almost the same:

Call it the "Solo Star State."

Invisible Island

Puerto Rico y Cuba son dos alas del mismo ave"

-Pablo Milanes

Back in the days of nueva trova, that uniquely Cuban form of hippie-assed folk-singing that celebrated the collective triumphs of da people, there was a song that imagined "Puerto Rico and Cuba" as "two wings of the same bird." This sort of Cold War air-kiss encouraging the free associated state to your right to join hands with its socialist neighbor on the left (or at least that's how it looks if you're viewing a standard Mercator Projection) was just the kind of thing that made the good old boys in Washington nervous. Hence, the 1978 Cerro Maravilla affair, a sordid tale of political assassination that is unfortunately almost forgotten.

Twelve years later, a movie that depicted those events called "A Show of Force," which starred, among others, Amy Irving, Andy Garcia, Robert Duvall, and Lou Diamond Phillips, opened in New York, the city with more Puerto Ricans than San Juan, with almost no publicity, and closed a week later. There were rumblings about a media blackout, but of course this was met with stifled yawns in the pre cable-news era.

But are things any different now? Fast forward to April 18 in Trinidad, and Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega, who originally rose to power in the 1979 Sandinista Revolution, laments that the meeting he and Hugo Chávez and Barack Obama and several Latin American heads of state are attending should not be called "the Summit of the Americas" because Cuba and Puerto Rico were not represented.

At least that's what I read in this blog in Newsweek. Katie Connely's post describes Ortega's speech as "peripatetic," which etymology buffs will note derives from the Latin words adding up to "walk around." You know, meander. But Connely, clearly trying to avoid accusations of meandering, does not waste a single word on why Ortega mentioned Puerto Rico at all. Not even a parenthetical like: (Puerto Rico's representation as a nation would be irrelevant since it is an unincorporated territory of the U.S. and therefore not part of Latin America. In fact, it's new Governor, who is tied to the U.S.'s Republican party, recently named the assistant director of Puerto Rico's branch of the FBI as the island's police commisioner) perhaps.

Connely, however, should probably be commended for mentioning Puerto Rico at all. The rest of the media acts as if Ortega never mentioned it in the most soundbite-worthy comment of his peripatetic speech. Take Fox News.com's dispatch, "Obama Endures Ortega Diatribe." It ends with this strangely edited, peripatetic quote:

"This summit and I simply refuse to call it summit of the Americas. Yes, we are gathered here, we have a large majority of presidents, heads of state of Latin America and the Caribbean," Ortega said, lamenting the lack of Cuban participation in the summit due to it exclusion since 1962 from the Organization of American States. "They're absent from this meeting. One is Cuba, whose crime has been that of fighting for independence, fighting for sovereignty of the peoples. I don't feel comfortable attending this summit. I cannot feel comfortable by being here. I feel ashamed of the fact that I'm participating at this summit with the absence of Cuba."

"They're absent from this meeting?" "One is Cuba"? Somehow I'm not seeing Puerto Rico in here. I think I'll have better luck checking the travel section.

Open Ignorance of Gringo-America

Whether you like Hugo Chávez or not, you have to give him some credit on this one. He has exposed Barack Obama, emissary of hope, as a straight-up Gringo. In the middle of a meeting with Latin American heads of state, Chávez got out of his seat, and with cameras flashing, he gave him a copy of Eduardo Galeano's "Open Veins of Latin America." While it was clearly a move designed to embarrass Obama, neither the president nor his handlers were able to manage an equally clever response.

Maybe that's because when it comes to Latin America, the less said the better. Neither The New York Times nor NBC News, two of the bastions of the "liberal media" establishment, had anything to say about the significance of the book, which is a painstakingly crafted account of the exploitation of Latin America by the U.S. and Europe. The NBC Nightly News report on the incident filed by Chuck Todd, rumored to be on the verge of getting his own show, didn't even mention the title of the book (Journalism 101?). An AP report suggested that Obama may not read the book because of his "crowded night stand." "I think it's in Spanish, so that might be a tad on the difficult side," said White House portavoz Robert Gibbs.

Sure, if you zoom in on the above photograph, it's fairly clear that the edition Chávez gave Obama was the Spanish one, "Venas Abiertas de América Latina." But the English translation of this 35-year-old text, (called obscure by CNN.com) widely assigned in universities all over the U.S. since its publication, is ridiculously easy to obtain--while much has been made that it's #2 on amazon.com as I write this, Galeano is a star in North America.

Obama, who had never been anywhere in Latin America (unless you count Puerto Rico, which was absent from the agenda, elided by the fuss over Cuba despite this announcement that the U.S. was going to begin to "re-evaluate" the enchanted island's status beginning in mid-May) until last week, believed that Chávez had given him one of the Venezuelan president's own books. "I was going to give him one of mine," Obama said.

So, the leader of the free world is assuming here that anyone who gives him a book is automatically just engaged in self-promotion, and he had missed the chance to self-promote back. This is what must have been front-and-center on his mind, since he had recently disclosed that the bulk of his income from 2008 was attributable from sales of "one of mine."

There's little left to say but, "Que gringería!" (Pardon my temporary inability to figure out how to put an upside-down question mark into this blogger interface.) It's obvious that any serious discussion of Latin America's role in the world economic system is so subversive to GringoAmerica's project of liberal democratic benevolence that even an administration as seemingly enlightened as this one can't help but come off decidedly Bush-like.

As my tocayo Evo put it so eloquently to Obama, "I can see publicly that there has been a change, that you've learned--but the actions on the ground of your people in my country are no different."