Remember how Governor Jerry Brown liked to bring up his days working with Cesar Chavez and the UFW in the 70s during his heated campaign with Meg Whitman last year? Well it seems that those ties with the UFW under current President Arturo Rodriguez aren’t as strong as they were back in the day when [...]

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In college, there were few Latino political scientists whose work I read. Like much of academia, Latino-Americans aren’t very well represented in the discipline. One Latino political scientist who I did read was F. Chris Garcia who went on to serve as the President of the University of New Mexico. He edited a popular book [...]

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Today was a big day in the immigration reform movement. CIR (comprehensive immigration reform) was introduced in the Senate again, and Pulitzer Prize Award winning journalist, Jose Antonio Vargas, came out as undocumented. You can read my quick take on the introduction of CIR here, but I want to focus a little more on the [...]

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Today Senator McCain is clarifying his statements about the Wallow Fire and undocumented immigrants starting it. He says that according to the Fire Service and Border Patrol that sometimes fires are caused by undocumented border crossers but that he wasn’t referring to this specific fire over the weekend. You can hear the Senator explain this [...]

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A year ago Senator John McCain was saying that undocumented immigrants were “intentionally causing accidents” on the freeways. Well, he’s up to making crazy assertions again without any evidence to back his claims. Now he’s telling us that undocumented people are causing the wildfires in Arizona: “There is substantial evidence that some of these fires [...]

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When I think of Texas, I tend to “think Mexican” especially if I have on my Latino politics lens. Obviously, the proximity to the border, the food, and Tex-Mex music evoke feelings of Mexican-American nostalgia. And I know that the Latino population is diverse beyond the large Mexican-American population and that citizens can be well [...]

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This week new E-Verify bills were introduced in the House and in the Senate, which would require all employers in the United States to utilize an electronic system to determine worker eligibility. In most states, the system is voluntary with some exceptions for work on federal contracts. The E-Verify system has already been criticized by [...]

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In case you have missed it, President Obama is scheduled to visit Puerto Rico tomorrow. He becomes the first President since John Kennedy to visit the island (aka the US’s colonial possession). Already the locals are criticizing his visit. You can read more about that here. Speaking of Obama, last week his campaign hired a [...]

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