Biography

Gregory Rodriguez is an Irvine Senior Fellow and Director of the California Fellows Program at New America Foundation, a non-partisan public ...

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Gregory Rodriguez

Gregory Rodriguez

The American way: Smile if you're insecure

The American way: Smile if you're insecure

November 16, 2009

Six years ago, during a trip to the Middle East, I asked an Israeli playwright what his country's cinematic equivalent was to the American happy ending. He immediately understood what I meant. No matter a plot's twists and turns, Hollywood won't end things on a sorrowful note.

  • Cold War nostalgia

    November 9, 2009

    The global celebrations marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall aren't entirely about commemorating the rebirth of freedom or reliving those thrilling moments when a perverse and repressive system collapsed. Listen closely to the exalted commentary recounting the events of those historic days and you're also likely to hear the subtle intonations of regret and nostalgia.

  • Don't count illegal immigrants? That doesn't add up

    November 2, 2009

    Sen. David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, has introduced legislation that, if passed, would instruct the U.S. Census Bureau not to take into account illegal immigrants and other noncitizens in the 2010 census. I'm all for it. Furthermore, I propose that the government no longer recognize deficits in budgets, record violent crimes in police reports, acknowledge casualties of war or count -- let alone give proper names! -- to hurricanes in weather reports.

  • Romania's amnesia-induced ambivalence

    October 26, 2009

    Three weeks ago, when the Nobel committee awarded its literature prize to Romanian writer Herta Muller, it lauded her courageous and unflinching fictional portraits of "daily life in a stagnated dictatorship" in communist Romania. What they did not mention, however, was Muller's ongoing nonfictional critique of the leadership of post-communist Romania.

  • The many meanings of a cross

    October 19, 2009

    I'm all for the separation of church and state. I believe that government endorsement of any particular religious sect or tradition has a corrosive effect on both the state and the faith in question. But I also think the attempt to separate religion from government is veering toward a foolish, parochial and ultimately impossible quest to separate religion from culture.

  • Dudamel's great, but he's not the whole show

    October 12, 2009

    It's not unusual for a global city to recruit an international talent like Gustavo Dudamel to conduct its symphony orchestra. (Alan Gilbert, the new conductor of the New York Philharmonic, is the first native New Yorker to hold the post since the institution was founded in 1842.) What is unusual is how the Los Angeles orchestra is using the high-culture, Venezuelan-born wunderkind to build a rapport with this city's native-born Latino masses. Gauging from the widespread, deliriously upbeat hoopla -- and taking into account Dudamel's exceptional qualities and charisma -- maybe it'll even work.

  • What America needs is a good enemy

    October 5, 2009

    Where is Osama bin Laden when we need him? Don't get me wrong; in no way do I wish death and destruction on our country. But as I listen to the increasingly vitriolic and even seditious rhetoric coming from the political right, I can't help thinking that we need a threatening external enemy to help us cohere as a nation -- a more looming threat than the almost vanished Al Qaeda leader or even his recently arrested alleged minion from Denver.

  • One man's rumor is another man's reality

    September 28, 2009

    Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that someone's not after you. Over the last few months, a lot of writers have dusted off Richard Hofstadter's classic 1964 essay on the paranoid style in American politics just so they can explain away the loony rumors and conspiracy theories coming from the far right. But no amount of intellectual condescension is going to make those powerful untruths go away.

  • Obama's shunning response to the racism debate

    September 21, 2009

    Barack Obama had no choice but to disagree with Jimmy Carter. Carter called some of Obama's most hysterical critics racist. But our first nonwhite president once again tried hard not to be sucked into a racial uproar. As much as he and his liberal allies like to declare that Americans need to hash out racial issues publicly, the subject of race can only damage his presidency.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • Mexico's drug war fallout

    April 6, 2009

    Mexico's drug war is bound to have a profound effect on the lives of Mexican immigrants in the United States. On the one hand, the image of Mexico's chaos as a spreading contagion most likely will strengthen the hand of anti-immigrant forces. On the other, as Mexican newcomers look back at their increasingly dangerous homeland, they will -- consciously or unconsciously -- set down deeper roots in the United States.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Punishing scavengers? It's un-American

    March 16, 2009

    In the same week that the media reported on a burgeoning tent city in California's capital, Sacramento joined Los Angeles and other cities in making it a crime to scavenge in recycling bins placed in front of homes. A staff report for the Sacramento City Council argued that such scavenging "can result in identity theft, injuries to the scavengers, waste being strewn about the surrounding areas, containers being left open to emit foul odors [and] attract animals and pests, and theft of recyclable material."

  • 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.

  • The millennial generation test

    March 2, 2009

    Many generations test their mettle in a crisis that defines them through the ages. The "Greatest Generation" had World War II. The baby boomers had Vietnam. Now the millennial generation -- the computer-savvy, coddled and cocky children of the 1980s -- may find that the current financial crisis is their crucible. If they survive it.

  • Loneliness is a pain

    February 23, 2009

    Are you feeling lonely, disconnected or alienated? It could be making you sick, and, ironically, you're not alone.

  • 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?

  • 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."

  • 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."

  • Fortune cookie makeover

    January 26, 2009

    My buddy Kenny Yee wants to be the Barack Obama of the Chinese food industry -- purveying fortune cookies you can believe in.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Big Mac politics

    August 25, 2008

    Don't do it. Don't tune in to this year's political conventions.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • King would be proud

    January 21, 2008

    Is Barack Obama a crossover candidate? And, if so, where is he crossing over from and to?

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • We're on the brink of apocalypse! Again!

    December 3, 2007

    The sky is falling! The end is near!

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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?"

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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."

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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."

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • 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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