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15/07/2011 / USA
Look out Tea Party, here comes the Tequila Party
Photo originally posted on the online magazine ‘Being Latino’
While you might not drink any shots at the Tequila Party, you may well walk away with a voter registration form. Behind this festive name lies a new grassroots effort to get US Latinos to vote. Though the United States’ Latino population has soared 43 percent over the last decade (today, one in six Americans is Latino), they still vote in proportionally low numbers.
The Tequila Party, launched by an activist in Arizona, is an attempt to make Latinos’ voting power reflect their demographic force. To do this, the Tequila Party plans to get more Latinos registered to vote and keep them up-to-speed on key legislation affecting their community - especially with respect to immigration.
It is little surprise, then, that the movement’s launch party was held in Arizona, which passed the nation’s toughest anti-immigration laws last year. The most controversial parts of Arizona’s law, which would require police to quiz anyone they suspected to be in the U.S. illegally about their immigration status, were blocked by a federal judge; however several other states have followed suit with crackdowns on illegal immigration.
Unlike the Tea Party, the Tequila Party is non-partisan. This reflects a growing frustration among Latino activists, many of whom feel neither side is taking their community’s concerns seriously. The Tequila Party’s leaders say they’re not planning on attacking Barack Obama or other elected officials, Tea Party-style; their aim is simply to turn Latinos into a voting force to be reckoned with, in Arizona and elsewhere.
“It’s pretty hard for politicians to ignore 50 million people”
Gus Garcia is the Tequila Party’s national spokesman. He served as co-chair on Hillary Clinton’s National Hispanic Leadership Council during her 2008 presidential race.
The Tequila Party is really a response to unjust laws, a lack of social conscience in this country, and a lack of enforcement of anti-discrimination laws.
We’re the fastest-growing segment of the US population. We’re now 50 million strong.
As long as Latinos were a small minority and stayed in certain areas of country, we weren’t perceived as a real force in the US population. As we grew, became stronger consumers, received educations, we became vital force in American policy.
Our party is not about drinking tequila, but the name quickly caught on because it’s catchy. We’re not anything like the tea party. They’re based on exclusion; we believe in inclusion. We’re ying and yang.
The Tequila party is non-partisan. We’ve got people who are known democrat activists, others who are republican. DeeDee Garcia Blase [the Tequila Party’s president], was a Republican organizer for many years. Me, I’m a Democrat. This is not about an ideology, it’s about a culture and a community.
The Latino community votes on issues, and will respond politically when it feels threatened.
The primary goal is to motivate Latinos to vote, make them part of the process, to get them to sign up to vote in the primaries.
It’s pretty hard for politicians to ignore 50 million people. And everything is moving very fast now. The Latin media is growing; you’ve got CNN in Spanish. Every major corporation has a budget for Latino outreach. The United States has become a multilingual, multicultural country. We don’t need a revolution; the evolution is there.
Mariachis playing at the Tequila Party's kickoff party on June 4. Photo courtesy of the Tequila Party
“When it comes to culture, party labels disintegrate”
Take the DREAM Act last year. [The DREAM Act is a bill that would have allowed undocumented college students who came to the U.S. as children to apply for citizenship. It was blocked in the Senate in 2010]. All the senators who were non native-born, whether they were Democrats or Republicans, voted in favour of the DREAM Act – so you had Republicans going against their party line. When it comes to culture, party labels disintegrate. Culture is stronger than politics.
Latino voters tend not to vote on ordinances or referendums, when in fact most anti-immigrant measures are born through these. But we’re learning. We won’t be endorsing any candidates, but we’ll be encouraging people to register to vote, we’ll be educating them on the issues, and on how to confront social injustices and mobilize.
For too long, our community has been approached very simplistically. Political parties aren’t educating voters. They’re just saying “vote for us.” But what we want is to give them the tools: explain ‘this is how you register, this is how you vote, this is how a recall works’.
“One of our biggest challenges is getting comprehensive immigration reform”
Politicians try to ignore our specific movement. They need our votes, so they meet with Latino celebrities rather than activists to try to avoid tough political questions. [Ed. Note: In April, President Barack Obama met with several Latino celebrities, including actresses Eva Longoria and America Ferrera, to discuss immigration.] But celebrities aren’t the ones who are really going to get people out to the voting booths on voting day.
One of our biggest challenges is getting comprehensive immigration reform. Right now there’s not just one frontline; it’s a political battle scattered all over the country.
Every state that has passed anti-immigration legislation is being challenged in federal courts. But the states that have approved in-state tuition [which is cheaper than tuition for out-of-state residents or foreigners] for undocumented students, none of them are being challenged in court. So that shows somewhere that we’re gaining ground.
We’re now planning rallies throughout the country. But it’s more than just rallies and concerts – those are to grab public attention. We’re also holding meetings, sending emails, doing a lot of social networking… It’s going to be a long battle. Can the political process ignore so many voters, or will somebody try to address them?”
AGUSTIN "GUS" GARCIA GIVEN CERTIFICATE OF RECOGNIZATION FOR HIS HUMAN RIGHTS WORK-GUS GARCIA
MIAMI,FL. - On 2/1 Mr. Agustin "Gus" was given a certificate of recognization for his work on behalf of achieving respect for the 30 articles of "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Cuba by "Comite Cubano Pro Derechos Humanos" (The Cuban Commitee por Human Rights). This recognization was given to him by Ricardo Bofill Page Founding President, Oscar Pena Martinez and Adolfo Rivero Caro of the Executive Board.
Many others were honored with this recognization for example Senator Robert Menendez, Ramon Saul Sanchez and members of the human rights community as well as the press.
When Mr. Garcia, President of Garcorp International, Founder of Lambda Theta Phi and National Chair of Lambda Theta Phi Foundation was asked what this recognization meant to him. He advised, "that where one man or woman are denied ithe rights of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights then all human beings are being denied their rights. I have felt and witnessed the sting of tryanny, discrimination and in just. Thus I refuse to live on my knees and thus my head is bloody but never bowed. We have a global task of assuring the quest of human rights for our global community."
For further information you can contact Mr. Garcia at 305-859-7741
OPINION
Published Sunday, June 11, 2000, in the Miami Herald
BY ALAN FARAGO
EMPTY HEARTS, EMPTY ROOMS
For exiles, the pain of what they left behind stays with them forever.
Alan Farago, conservation chairman of the Sierra Club Miami Group, lives in Coral Gables.
The polarization and distress in Miami answer the question; What good are parables? Stories told about others, from another time and place, provide distance to reflect on the meaning of words and events that capture them.
It is slowly becoming clear to most people that our upheaval in Miami has very little to do with Elián, the boy, as it does with Elián, the symbol of suffering endured by hundreds of thousands of Miamians born in Cuba. As a symbol, he is not yet a parable because his story is not yet told.
I will tell you a parable, a true story. As a young man, I did business in communist China, frequently entering China through Hong Kong, then a British protectorate. This was in the mid-1970s when the eastern version of the Iron Curtain was solid: We saw very little of what went on in China because very little escaped. I lived in Hong Kong at the time, a Western city shut off from the rest of Red China by barbed wire, machine-gun emplacements and a world of mutual suspicion and hostility. There, a Shanghai-born woman asked a favor of me that turned into a remarkable test.
The woman was from a mainland Chinese family that, before the communist revolution, had been very wealthy. I knew that the communists seized everything before she and her family escaped in the early 1950s. While her side of the family became exiles, the other side decided to stay in Shanghai. For a year or two, the ones who stayed in Shanghai were left alone, then they were dispassionately sucked into the revolution’s whirlpool of persecution that destroyed millions of lives.
My contact made it clear that her family in Hong Kong had managed to rebuild its wealth, but was helpless to assist the Shanghai relatives. The test she put to me was this: Would I take money into China—because neither mail nor travel were then available to exiles—and buy her 14-year-old cousin a bicycle?
There was a further complication: Because her relations in Shanghai were considered to be enemies of the state, any money I brought they could not themselves spend. I would have to buy a bicycle in a state-sponsored store and deliver it to people I had never met, all under the scrutiny of secret police. I succeeded in the test. And this is where the story begins.
When I returned to Hong Kong, a message awaited me. Would I have dinner with the patriarch of the family? I agreed and soon was escorted to their penthouse home in the most deluxe building in the wealthiest neighborhood in Hong Kong. I was greeted at their door by a butler who asked me to follow him into in vast room, walled with rare woods, but without a single partition and no furnishings except cheap lawn furniture made of plastic. Although the exterior walls were intact, exquisitely crafted, and the space commanded the most breathtaking views of Hong Kong and its famous harbor, the interior was barren.
At one corner, the family gathered at a large round table. My contact rose to greet me and, interpreting, introduced her father, mother and the rest of her family. We sat down together. Ever so briefly, her father thanked me for helping his family. He then dove into his meal, and we ate in silence punctuated occasionally by unintelligible dialogue.
I was astounded. Wasn’t anyone interested in the story I had to tell, how the secret police in Shanghai had questioned me, confused by a young American who refused to say on whose behalf he was performing an act of charity? After several courses, the dinner ended unceremoniously. As though on command, the family members rose to leave; all except for the patriarch, his daughter and me. I was too young at the time to know the long silences, the food and discomfort had been staged for this moment, quite necessary to the conclusion of the parable.
The patriarch spoke, and the daughter translated. He told me the story of his brother, father of the young boy I had visited in Shanghai. In the years of the Cultural Revolution, he said, the communists had imprisoned the boy’s father in a wooden cage the size of a cardboard box. He had spent four years there, fed daily, crouched in his own waste, hosed off like an animal. When he was released his bones had fused so that for the rest of his life he lived in a fetal position.
“Do you have any questions for me,” my host asked? All of my questions and discomfort had congealed into a solid block. My host, the patriarch, began without a response from me. He explained that his textile factories in Hong Kong made him worth close to a billion dollars. “I imagine,” he said, “that you wonder why a man as wealthy as I am lives in a place that looks like this”—and he cast his hand toward the empty reaches of his penthouse, worth millions, filled with plastic lawn furniture.
Of course I wondered, of course that was my first question hours ago, the question that had been buried by strangeness of the meal, my alienation as a foreigner and a guest at the same time and the growing sense that my act of charity was not a gift but the price for being allowed to see into this family’s pain and suffering.
The old man’s eyes welled with tears he held back. “Once,” he said, “I had everything, but I lost my nation. I lost my family. I lost my wealth. Though I have millions today, I keep my home empty, with nothing but plastic furniture to remind me of what I lost.”
And with that, the patriarch stood up and bid me well. My visit was over.
Sad to say, I neither heard nor saw any of them, again. The story and its worth as a parable did not surface until 25 years later when Miami, my adopted home, pushed it forward. So much pain is connected to it. The pain of my friend, Gus Garcia, whose grandfather was shot in 1959 by Castro’s army. Gus, who slept every night in front of Elián’s house, a Democrat among the first tear-gassed at 5 in the morning, passionate and unmoveable in his pain.
One story, hundreds of thousands more. The parable of my story is that reason and logic and all our tangible wealth are poor cousins to memory: Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, the Hutu, the Tutsi—and in the United States, the pain of African Americans and native Americans reverberates across centuries. Fidel Castro will die. His passing will be celebrated, to be sure, but it will not be anyone’s triumph. The wrongs of the past will not be righted. There can be no retribution for so much pain, even the death of a man singly responsible.
Our recent upheaval did not create the divide between ethnicities and races in Miami; it was a collective sob of suffering that was volcanic and affected us all. What would we not be capable of, if we could be the fathers and mothers to that pain and not the child? The answers for our community today lie within the souls and imagination of those whose hearts have been broken. What will the inside of our mansion look like?
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