Biography
Gregory Rodriguez, founder and executive director of Zócalo Public Squarein Los Angeles, is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation ...
Rodriguez: Demographics isn't destiny
January 7, 2013
Eight years ago, after former California Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg was knocked out of the L.A. mayor's race in the primary, urban critic Joel Kotkin and political consultant Arnie Steinberg bravely predicted that the chances of a Jew ever being elected to the mayoralty had been greatly diminished.
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Rodriguez: What Twitter can't tell you
October 15, 2012
I've finally stopped believing the tech gurus in skinny jeans and hipster glasses who preach about the glories of the new networked world in which everyone and everything are connected all the time. They make it sound as if the Cloud and Twitter are the answer to all our problems, social or otherwise. I don't buy it.
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Bringing out our inner bear
August 28, 2012
By all rights, I should hate coyotes. When I was 14, one ate my charming pet cat, Spike Liebowitz (sometimes known as Vasco de Gama), as if he were nothing more than a Vienna sausage.
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New wave of immigrants — a new target too?
June 25, 2012
It's official! A new study by the Pew Research Center proves the old trope true: Asians are the new Jews. All those essentially positive stereotypes you've heard about — the hard work and the Tiger Moms — have made Asian Americans the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States. Not only that, in the last few years, Asians have overtaken Latinos as the largest group of new immigrants to the U.S.
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Rodriguez: Vandalized by speech
March 26, 2012
Hate speech is a form of vandalism. It defaces the environment, and like a broken window, if left untended, signals to other hoodlums that the coast is clear to do more damage.
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Why Arizona banned ethnic studies
February 20, 2012
It's more than a little ironic that the same Arizona Legislature that spearheaded a ruthless, racially charged campaign against illegal immigrants also banned K-12 ethnic studies classes on the grounds that they promote hatred and division. Who knew Arizona's Republican majority, as expert as it is at hyperbole and invective, was so committed to fostering healthy race relations in the Grand Canyon State?
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Rodriguez: Homesick for the holidays
December 19, 2011
Irving Berlin wrote "White Christmas," one of the biggest-selling songs of all time, with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Although the wistful tune soothed homesick soldiers in such God-awful places as Guadalcanal more than half a century ago, and no doubt it still plays in Kandahar today, Berlin most likely wrote what he called "the best song that anybody's ever written" somewhere in the sunny Southwest, probably while sitting by a swanky hotel swimming pool.
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Rodriguez: Can the American empire fight back?
November 21, 2011
The Redcoats are coming! The Redcoats are coming!
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Rodriguez: The 'Mad Men' mystique
October 10, 2011
Who the heck would want to be like Betty or her ad man ex, Don?
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Rodriguez: A cultural civics lesson
September 5, 2011
Politics is making Americans dumb and mean. It's turning a generous, forward-thinking people into glib, defensive, narrow-minded bores.
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Rodriguez: Zero-sum games in an interconnected world
August 1, 2011
What's wrong with this picture: Even as the world is becoming increasingly interconnected and interdependent, we seem to be approaching conflicts more in zero-sum terms and with all-or-nothing politics.
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Rodriguez: White flight — to the city
July 25, 2011
For nearly half a century, the term "inner city" has been code for poor and minority. But now white flight — the decades-long trend of affluent Anglos leaving the urban core for leafier suburban cul-de-sacs — has run its course. And "inner city" is about to take on a whole new meaning.
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Rodriguez: L.A.'s way is the freeway
July 9, 2011
Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky's office released a mildly amusing list of 53 suggestions for surviving "Carmageddon," one for every hour the 405 will be closed this weekend between the 10 and the 101. In the hope that you'll stay off the streets — please! for God's sake! — the list suggests planting a tree, shopping online (from county-based stores, of course), throwing a block party. What it doesn't do is encourage Angelenos to appreciate our freeway system and to imagine for a moment what the city would be like without what historian Kevin Starr has called "absolute masterpieces of engineering."
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Rodriguez: Land of the free, home of the fake
July 4, 2011
Kim Kardashian's butt is real. Some haters said it was fake. To prove them wrong, she had a doctor take X-rays to show that it was implant-free.
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Rodriguez: The virtue of 'I don't know'
June 27, 2011
In a world overrun by half-truths and wall-to-wall opinion, the simple words "I don't know" might very well become the most valuable phrase in any language.
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Gregory Rodriguez: Why social media isn't
June 20, 2011
Mexican food and beer. That's what retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor suggests might pull this fractured nation back together again. Those were the tools she used to reach consensus in the 1970s when she was a leader in the Arizona Legislature.
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Gregory Rodriguez: A political history lesson
June 13, 2011
God bless the American media. Over the last two weeks, thousands of well-educated journalists and political experts have made their mortgage payments by commenting on the antics of an idiot congressman who tweeted a picture of his genitals, and an idiot ex-governor who sloppily manipulated history for ideological ends.
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Gregory Rodriguez: The unhappy white majority
May 30, 2011
"White Americans See Anti-White Bias on the Rise." That was a headline in the Wall Street Journal this month, and more than any other domestic index or statistic, it's that sentiment that should worry you about America's future.
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Gregory Rodriguez: The old taboos, back in the news
May 23, 2011
Sex, power, class and race. The scandals encircling French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who is accused of sexually assaulting an African-born maid in New York, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has confessed to having a child out of wedlock with a Latina housekeeper, for all their differences, conjure major taboos.
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For Americans, to infinity and beyond
May 9, 2011
President Obama tried to use the announcement of the death of Osama bin Laden to get Americans to think big again. The successful end of a 10-year manhunt, he declared last week, was a "testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people."
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Compassionate consumerism? Don't buy into it
May 2, 2011
Compassionate consumerism — as some critics describe today's hottest trend in philanthropy — encourages people to feel socially conscientious while guiltlessly enjoying the good life. The idea is that you "give" by buying or selling a product, a portion of whose proceeds go to the needy. I don't think so.
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Gregory Rodriguez: The war between the whites
April 25, 2011
The fourth-grade teacher in Virginia who performed a mock slave auction in her classroom April 1 — with the white kids pretending to buy and sell the black kids — was duly chastised by school officials for her racial insensitivity. Given that she meant to be giving a lesson on the Civil War, she should also have been scolded for pedagogical inaccuracy.
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Gregory Rodriguez: Our civility deficit
April 11, 2011
Last week, after the brutal beating of a Giants fan in the Dodgers Stadium parking lot, Los Angeles and San Francisco officials issued a public plea for more "civility and common decency" among sports fans. In January, the shootings in Tucson in which six people were killed and 13 wounded, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, sparked a national conversation on civility in politics. The following month, the University of Arizona established the National Institute for Civil Discourse to advocate greater civility in all corners of the public square.
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President Obama: At odds with clear demographic trends toward multiracial pride
April 4, 2011
It could have been a historic teaching moment. Instead, President Obama, the most famous mixed-race person in the world, checked off only one race — black — last year on his census form. And in so doing, he missed an opportunity to articulate a more nuanced racial vision for the increasingly diverse country he heads.
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New Orleans' rich history of mixing races
April 20, 2009
Four years after New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin tried to endear himself to black voters by playing to their fears that they were about to be "overrun by Mexican workers," things have and haven't changed.
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As American as Little Bangladesh
April 13, 2009
How much is your ethnicity worth? In hard cash. Dollars and cents. How much do you think you can get for it?
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Antonio Villaraigosa -- where have you gone?
March 30, 2009
Ihave finally let the cat out of the bag and publicly confessed that I'm nostalgic for the first years of Antonio Villaraigosa's mayoralty, when His Honor seemed to be everywhere all at once.
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Obama and immigration reform
March 23, 2009
Ithought U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. was a little over the top last month when he called us "a nation of cowards" for our collective failure to adequately discuss our troubled racial past.
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In hard times, what's-his-name could be your best friend
March 9, 2009
You've got to look out for No. 1. It's a dog-eat-dog world. Everybody's in it for themselves.
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America needs heroes, flaws and all
February 16, 2009
Michael Phelps smokes pot. A-Rod took steroids. What's next? Will US Airways Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger get busted too?
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Slavery's legacy in West Africa
February 9, 2009
If a 10-year-old boy in Benin, in West Africa, wants to describe someone he doesn't trust, he's likely to use one of these two roughly translated phrases: "He will sell you and enjoy it" or "He can make you disappear."
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Rat race update
February 2, 2009
In 1930, even as the world was mired in the Depression, John Maynard Keynes published a jaunty little essay that predicted the emergence of post-materialist angst. In a piece titled "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren," the world-renowned damn-the-deficit interventionist economist, whose star has been rising again along with that of the Obama administration, wondered how humans of the future would react once they had transcended the "struggle for subsistence."
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Romanced by Falun Gong
January 12, 2009
Perhaps it's because I look gullible, confused or in special need of spiritual guidance. Maybe it's because I hang out alone in public places. But, since I was a teenager, I have been a prime target for proselytizers of all stripes.
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The dangers of romantic comedies
December 29, 2008
Ithought it would be the other way around, that my tastes would become more refined as I grew up. But I confess that the older I get, the more stupid movies I watch. I mean, the other day I sat through Adam Sandler's "You Don't Mess with the Zohan" on pay per view. Was it good? Not really. But it made me chuckle a few times, and it was cold outside and, most important in this economy, it was only $3.99.
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Recession's silver lining
December 15, 2008
Call it the gospel of hard times. With all this bad economic news, we're starting to hear a chorus of voices preaching the cultural benefits of financial crises.
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What terrorists want
December 8, 2008
Remember when your high school teachers tried to give their lessons more urgency by repeating the old adage that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it? Well, those days are over, or at least they should be. That's because in today's hyper-connected world, oblivion and forgetting are no longer options. The much greater danger today is our postmodern penchant to watch, replay, fixate and fetishize history even as it's happening.
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The economy and us
December 1, 2008
The economic sky might be falling, but here I am at Starbucks in Koreatown fretting over the death of the cafe. Really. Last Sunday's New York Times had a story about the decline of traditional cafes and bars in France -- there were 200,000 in 1960 and today there are only 41,500 -- and it made my heart sink. I mean, if the French are losing the art of sitting around in public doing nothing together, what hope do we Calvinistic Americans have?
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A 'mutt' could make us purer
November 24, 2008
Al Qaeda's No. 2, Ayman Zawahiri, made a lame attempt to invalidate the idea that Barack Obama's victory is a symbol of American racial progress. It's not a surprise really. The United States' enemies long have used racial inequality as the stick with which to beat us. And unfortunately, it's a stick that we've handed them over and over again. Domestic discrimination has been at odds with our national mission of democratizing the world.
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The ugly side of 'beyond race'
November 17, 2008
The chattering classes on the post-racial right say Barack Obama's win is one more nail in the coffin of affirmative action. It proves blacks are equal, they say, and therefore they don't need "special considerations" anymore. Abigail Thernstrom wrote it in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.
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The meaning of Obama
November 10, 2008
There's little doubt that Barack Obama's redemptive message of change grabbed Americans by the throat. After all, it's in times full of fear and despair that people are hungry for hope. Obama's triumph and victory speech were moving not only because they reminded us that this country is based on the idea of possibilities but because, for at least a moment, much of the nation believed that hope was reborn. And that raises a question: Why are Americans so obsessed with hope?
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South Korea's kimchi deficit
November 3, 2008
There's probably no nation in the world more emblematic of the pitfalls and challenges of rapid modernization than South Korea. South Korean society is a caldron of competition and contradiction, caught between respecting the past and striving for the future.
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Proud Americans
October 27, 2008
Americans like a little cockiness. We implicitly know that you've got to act like a winner to be a winner; you've got to fake it to make it. In our market-driven worldview, we tend to think that we're all pretty much worth what we say we're worth. Anyone who's ever been on a date or worked in retail knows that a little bravado can go a long way. I'm not talking about tacky post-touchdown victory dances, but more on the level of self-assured pride and confidence. Think Gary Cooper.
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Finding Mexico -- in Detroit
October 20, 2008
You don't expect to stumble into a little piece of Mexico right on the U.S.-Canadian border. But after I crossed the bridge from Windsor, Canada, into southwest Detroit, that's exactly what happened. I saw a "mercado" sign, and then a few blocks on there was La Jaliscience tortilla factory, the Mexican Village restaurant and La Colmena/Honey Bee grocery store.
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The GOP and the perils of populism
October 13, 2008
If Barack Obama wins the presidency next month, Republican strategists probably won't waste too much time deconstructing the pros and cons of John McCain's candidacy. McCain is clearly a figure of the past, and that's most likely where he will remain.
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Asking the right God question
October 6, 2008
Forget Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. These atheists du jour have nothing on the most famous anti-theist of all time. Good old Karl Marx is still the most eloquent and thoughtful nonbeliever, and his "religion is the opium of the masses" is still the best one-liner in the business.
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When all truth is relative
September 29, 2008
Birds fly, tortoises crawl and politicians lie, particularly when they feel cornered. That's the natural order of things. Big deal. I don't waste too much indignation on it.
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The GOP plays the victim card
September 15, 2008
Do you remember that old joke about conservatives being liberals who'd been mugged by reality? Well, it was funny largely because it was true. Conservatives fancy themselves as hard-nosed realists. Unlike fluffy-headed liberals, who spend their days dreaming of a perfect world, conservatives are suspicious of utopian schemes. They know quite well that life is hard, and they disdain few things more than whiners and complainers. That's why more than a handful of conservative critics -- from Michael Medved to Rush Limbaugh -- have condemned what they call America's destructive culture of victimhood.
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We love 'em just the way they are
September 8, 2008
For all her talents and accomplishments, it is clear that Sarah Palin became the Republican vice presidential candidate more on the merits of who she is and where she came from -- an identity that is partly real and surely carefully constructed -- rather than on what she has done or promises to do. The same can be said to a lesser extent for the other hit persona of the season, Barack Obama -- at the least, he ran his own successful campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
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America's 'identity' blind spot
September 1, 2008
As a nation and as individuals, we tend to view the world through the prism of our own experiences. Over the last few weeks, Russians, Georgians, Abkhazians and South Ossetians have reminded us that ethnic nationalism and secessionism are on the rise around the globe. I worry that the American experience leaves the United States and its citizens unprepared to confront it.
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Big Mac politics
August 25, 2008
Don't do it. Don't tune in to this year's political conventions.
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A middle road in Azerbaijan
August 18, 2008
There's probably no country in the world watching the Russia-Georgia conflict more intently than this small, energy-rich nation to the south and east of the turmoil. It too leans toward the West. Its oil runs through the pipeline that crosses Georgia. And it too wants to know how far Russia will go to keep its former vassal states within its sphere of influence.
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The other Olympic gold
August 11, 2008
'One World, One Dream" -- that's the slogan the Chinese Olympic Committee chose for the 2008 Games in Beijing. But don't let the idealism fool you. This year, beneath the roar of the high-minded sloganeering, you could hear the same twin engines that have powered all modern Olympiads: nationalism and capitalism.
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Go to where the people are
March 10, 2008
All right, I admit it. I sold out. Last Wednesday night, I went on “The Colbert Report,” and I can't quite shake the feeling that I made a pact with the devil.
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Rally 'round the flag, Dems
March 3, 2008
If Barack Obama really wants to rise above the "old politics of division," he might want to start by putting that American flag pin back on his lapel and retracting his all too earnest explanation as to why he took it off in the first place.
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White like us
February 25, 2008
Six weeks ago, 29-year-old Culver City Internet copy writer Christian Lander started a blog, stuffwhitepeoplelike. wordpress.com, on a whim, thinking he'd poke fun at himself and fellow white people. Spending roughly two hours a day writing satirical posts about "stuff white people like," Lander had no idea how much his little inside joke would catch on. In the first week, the site received about 200 hits a day. The next week it jumped to 600, and then 4,000 the next. By last week, he was averaging 300,000 daily hits.
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A critical time of our sign
February 18, 2008
Idon't know about you, but I'm proud of the fact that the most celebrated symbol of our city isn't a statue that was a gift from the French. I also think it's fitting that it isn't burdened with heavy ideology, profound symbolism or deep meaning. Nobody ever accused the Hollywood sign of inspiring high-minded musings about the essence of our city, let alone the exalted mission of our nation. If anything, it evokes a sordid lust for fame and fortune.
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Monterrey U.S.A.
February 11, 2008
When the Kentucky-based Yum Corp. was looking for a city in Mexico in which to open a Taco Bell, it must have figured it couldn't go wrong with this ultramodern, hyper-Americanized metropolis 125 miles from the Texas border in the northern Mexican state of Nuevo Leon. Regiomontanos, as Monterrey residents are called, wear their pro-Americanism on their sleeves and see little shame in the fact that their streets are as overrun by corporate American retailers as any suburban town north of the border.
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King would be proud
January 21, 2008
Is Barack Obama a crossover candidate? And, if so, where is he crossing over from and to?
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Keeping it real, kind of
January 14, 2008
Paul found God on the road to Damascus. Columbus discovered America on his 32nd day at sea. Now, after decades in public life, Hillary Clinton has gone and found herself among the voters of New Hampshire.
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France has banned its Frenchness
January 7, 2008
The reams of news stories on the new French ban on smoking in cafes, restaurants and night spots have invariably focused on the aura of glamour those little death sticks once conveyed. In newspapers around the globe, nostalgic descriptions of the likes of Coco Chanel or Albert Camus taking a luxurious drag on a cigarette have been, um, de rigueur.
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All politics is personal
December 24, 2007
What do the Hillary Clinton campaign and comedian Michael Richards have in common? When feeling insecure, both appeal to social prejudices to delegitimize their adversaries.
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New Hampshire's missing Yankees
December 17, 2007
Every four years, critics from across the country grouse about this tiny state's disproportionate influence on the presidential election. And it's hard to ignore the fact that New Hampshire, whose population is 96% white, does not look like a lot of the country when it comes to race and ethnicity. But it also isn't some pristine, untouched New England of your imagination, full of hidebound, Protestant Yankees, those mythic descendants of the early colonists from the British Isles.
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Greenness is next to godliness
December 10, 2007
Is your marriage on the rocks? Are you and the spouse always fighting? Is the passion gone? A new study published by the National Academy of Sciences suggests that you should think twice before considering divorce. No, not because of the negative effects it may have on the children or even on your pocketbook, but of what it'd do to your poor mother. Mother Earth, that is.
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We're on the brink of apocalypse! Again!
December 3, 2007
The sky is falling! The end is near!
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My tio's secret of life
November 19, 2007
Imagine this: I was 14 , seated at the dining room table with my Uncle Francisco in the Madrid apartment he shared with my Aunt Marie. A refugee from a miserable suburban adolescence, I had persuaded my parents to send me to Europe for a year to live with these relatives I barely knew.
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Gay — the new straight
November 5, 2007
Last Tuesday, the New York Times ran a front-page story on the diminishing allure of gay enclaves in the United States. The next day, the San Francisco Chronicle published a Page 1 story explaining how same-sex couples in California are a lot more socioeconomically and ethnically diverse -- read: less white and less wealthy -- than you might believe. The Williams Institute at UCLA Law School will release a report today by demographer Gary Gates that all but poses the question: Is gay the new straight?
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Acts of God, and man
October 29, 2007
There's nothing quite like the sight of massive destruction to elicit talk of God. We heard it last week out of the mouths of fire victims and evacuees from Canyon Country to Escondido. "I hope God is good to you, Don," said one man in Santa Clarita to a neighbor who had lost his home. "I think it's God's deal," said a San Diegan who had just escaped what he described as a wall of flame. As she was being evacuated from the small town of Julian, one woman said she guessed it was "all in God's hands" now. Another, whose home burned to the ground, plaintively asked, "OK, God, what else?"
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Where did Mexicans come from?
October 21, 2007
You've heard the old saw: You can't get to where you're going unless you know where you've been.
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A good citizenship quiz
October 8, 2007
Some immigrant rights activists are afraid that the new citizenship test unveiled by the government two weeks ago will create a new and higher barrier for people who want to become Americans.
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The fantasy of L.A.'s 'race war'
October 1, 2007
Get this: A new study by three UC Irvine criminologists has concluded that Los Angeles is not on the brink of a major interracial crime wave. Surprised? That's understandable. Because for the last several years, the media have been increasingly fixated on the specter of black-versus-brown violence.
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Doubting God but still doing good
September 10, 2007
Last week's posthumous publication of Mother Teresa's private letters has sparked a debate on the nature of saintliness and, by extension, what it means to be good. The letters, which she had asked to be destroyed, reveal a complex woman who was tormented by her faith and suffered long periods of religious doubt and spiritual emptiness.
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Shades of Mexican
September 3, 2007
In Kansas, federal officials are investigating an Indian tribe for allegedly selling tribal memberships to illegal immigrants, along with the promise that the documents will protect them from the threat of deportation. By their spokesman's own admission, the Kaweah Indian Nation has sold more than 10,000 memberships for prices starting at $50 and, according to some reports, as much as $1,200.
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Trust your instincts?
August 20, 2007
In the raging pop culture battle between James Bond and Jason Bourne, I'm going to have to side with the latter. Not because Bond is "an imperialist and a misogynist"-- as "Bourne" actor Matt Damon has charged -- but because, debonair as he is, Bond is a hero of a different era, one in which we believed in the power of technology to do good. Sure, he had a way with people, particularly women, but the success of his exploits often relied on gadgetry that Q supplied back at headquarters, like the blue X-ray glasses in "The World Is Not Enough" or the underwater breather in "Thunderball."
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Diversity may not be the answer
August 13, 2007
People all over the planet are on the move, and whether anyone likes it or not, with each passing year Western nations will become more racially and ethnically diverse. But is that a good or a bad thing? According to most American politicians -- even Colorado's anti-immigrant zealot Rep. Tom Tancredo -- diversity is a national boon. You've heard the rap: Diversity is our strength. We should celebrate it, blah, blah, blah. But are they all protesting too much?
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YouTube vigilantes
August 6, 2007
Did you see that YouTube video of an Australian priest hurling abuse at a motley crew of skateboarders in front of Melbourne's St. Patrick's Cathedral? Well, his superiors did, and last week the Rev. Mgr. Geoff Baron was placed on indefinite leave.
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Academia's hidden crackpots
July 30, 2007
You don't have to be a crusading right-winger to recognize that University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, who compared the victims of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack to Nazis, is an extremist, an ideologue whose scholarship is less than objective.
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Where's the rose between his teeth?
July 16, 2007
LAST WEEK, I got a phone call from a television news producer who asked me what Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's extramarital affair revealed about the nature of Latino political leadership. I told her I'd agree to be interviewed on air only if we could explore what Bill Clinton's dalliances said about white people or Jesse Jackson's fling with an aide told us about black activists. Dumbfounded, she asked if I could refer her to someone else.
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Antonio's perfect storm
July 9, 2007
TOO BAD FOR THE philandering mayor. If he'd sold himself as an old-time pol, a hard-charging, foul-mouthed power broker with large appetites, maybe he wouldn't be getting so much flak for his latest marital infidelity.
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A community of fans
July 2, 2007
I WAS GOING TO WRITE about the grisly death of the Senate immigration bill, but there was other news that was just as senseless and inane: Paris mania.
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Migrate, then integrate
June 18, 2007
IT'S TOO BAD CONGRESS is still stuck on the issue of immigration because, here in Los Angeles, we're getting ready to move on to bigger and perhaps better things: the rise of the post-immigrant population.
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The hustler in all of us
June 4, 2007
AT FIRST YOU HAD to wonder whether she wasn't just a little bit nuts. But then as you thought about, it was hard not to admire her wiliness and sheer determination. The exploits of 18-year-old Azia Kim, the Fullerton woman who passed herself off as a Stanford student for eight months, is a fabulous story that strikes a chord in our national psyche.
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Amnesty isn't a dirty word
May 28, 2007
AMNESTY HAS become the political act that dare not speak its name. Nativists go wild when they hear the term. Mainstream immigrant advocates talk around it. Immigration-restriction fanatics have so poisoned and blurred the word's meaning that they see it lurking in any legislation that proposes anything less than jail time or mass deportations for illegal immigrants.
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Are protests always the answer?
May 14, 2007
BARELY TWO WEEKS after the May 1 melee at MacArthur Park, immigrant rights activists are already planning another demonstration, this one in Hollywood in late June. They should quit while they're ahead. Mass street demonstrations are a high-risk political strategy that quickly reaches the point of diminishing returns. Organizers should ask themselves whether they're really trying to appeal to the goodwill of the general public — and Congress, as it debates immigration reform — or simply grandstanding.
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Sun, surf and smog
May 7, 2007
JUST IN CASE you missed it, last week was National Air Quality Control Week. That explains why the American Lung Assn. released its new study announcing that Los Angeles is still the smog capitol of the United States.
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Disposable workers wanted in Colorado
April 30, 2007
Avondale, Colo. — SPRING IS about to spring up here in this high plains farming community just outside the old steel city of Pueblo, and Joe Pisciotta is still not sure whether he'll have enough of his usual workers to tend his crops.
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The kindness of Kurt Vonnegut
April 16, 2007
WHEN I heard that Kurt Vonnegut died, I immediately went to my bookshelf to search for my hardcover copy of "Hocus Pocus." No, it may not have been one of his greatest novels (I don't think I finished it), but just before it was published at the end of summer of 1990, Vonnegut had handed me a signed copy in which he had drawn one of his famous caricatures of himself — unruly hair, bushy eyebrows, cigarette dangling from his mouth — and dedicated it to "Good Old Gregory, My Co-Author."
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Illegal? Better if you're Irish
April 8, 2007
Woodlawn, The Bronx — IMAGINE HILLARY Clinton holding up a T-shirt that read: "Legalize Mexicans." That's not going to happen, right?
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Illegal immigrants -- they're money
March 4, 2007
DAN STEIN, the premier American nativist and president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, is shocked, shocked. He's mad at Bank of America for issuing credit cards to illegal immigrants. He says that to BofA "and other large corporations, illegal immigrants are a source of low-wage labor and an untapped customer market." You bet they are, and that's the American way.
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A town that wants illegal immigrants
February 11, 2007
Lindsay, Calif. — THE IMMIGRATION debate can get pretty sloppy and emotional in the abstract, but not here in this Central Valley town that can't afford to let simplistic rhetoric overshadow facts. Last month's devastating citrus freeze has put Lindsay, population 11,185, in dire economic straits; but its pragmatic response to the crisis sets an example for the rest of the nation.
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Harbor Gateway's commuter gangs
January 21, 2007
DON'T BE fooled by its name: The 204th Street gang, two of whose members have been arrested in connection with last month's racially motivated slaying of 14-year-old Cheryl Green, is what you could call a commuter gang.
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Is Obama the new 'black'?
December 17, 2006
WE KNOW this: Barack Obama is a rising star. He's a powerful speaker and a gifted writer. He is the only African American serving in the U.S. Senate. But is he black?
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Negotiating the black-white divide
December 10, 2006
IMAGINE LOS ANGELES had a black mayor. Now imagine she were white. Then ask yourself how each would have dealt with the black-white tensions that emerged during the debate over former firefighter Tennie Pierce's discrimination suit and the proposed $2.7-million settlement.
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Gregory Rodriguez: Look beyond the 'Latino' label
November 12, 2006
HOMOGENIZING the image of the "other" has always been a way for groups to marginalize undesirable minorities and foreigners. Two dozen centuries ago, Hippocrates wrote that the Scythians — nomadic people whom the Greeks considered barbaric — all looked alike. By contrast, the good doctor could discern that his own people came in all shapes and sizes.
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