I watched a woman be sacrificed by my community, and I felt betrayed. As Cleveland draws its lines around race, power and reputation, I wonder if girls there—white, black, Latina and Asian—feel like I once did, scrutinized by outsiders looking in, but abandoned at home.

A magazine cover shows a marijuana leaf and a stiletto heel in the shape of a gun. One newspaper regularly divides its front page with a preening bikini clad woman and cadavers.

The game just ended. Uruguay vs Mexico, the score 1-0. For women, there are other terrifying numbers, one in four South Africa men admitted to having raped a woman. How about 40,000? That was the estimated number of prostitutes expected to travel to South Africa for the month-long global sportsfest.
I might not […]

To be honest, if I didn’t know Rose Arce, the senior producer of CNN Presents’ Her Name was Steven, I probably would not have watched the television documentary. And that would have been a shame.
(Be forewarned, this isn’t a post about how media cover transgender people. For such analysis, see these related posts, this […]

Sotomayor’s elevation to the high court should inspire the many she is said to represent –women, Latinas/non-whites– and the nation that has presumably been enriched by the social advancement that her confirmation heralded, to embrace the challenges that were left in the wake of “progress.”

We all wanted love, validation, to feel special. And typically we sighed, picked up the phone, mustered our courage and dialed our pimply-faced puppy love interest. Carolina phones her pimp, a man she calls ‘daddy.’

Clearly one of the biggest challenges in relating this story is that the “border” is but a distant place, an idea, if you will, in the minds of most people in the U.S. But the laws of the land have a tendency to bend and falter when on the margins of this nation.

Road trip across South Texas in my pick-up truck, a run-in with Border Patrol agents and sniffing out the Texas Ranger myths, as I followed the trail of the bloody oppressive south Texas history to frame the current issue…My feelings about this border wall, the reasons why this report had to go “personal” spring from stories embedded in the land, family stories, stories of men and revolution, of the Rangers and vigilantes who slaughtered thousands of Tejanos. Those stories mostly published in books by men are preserved in families like mine by the women, dogged researchers who flock to genealogy conferences and knit together the quilt of my past, my heritage.

Even so, the blogger-journo relationship presents an interesting opportunity as we face a dark moment in terms of the economy and the shrinking world of journalism. How this synergy develops might take us to another interesting level of media in this country. For now though, we’re living and working in a closet of chaos.

And now, now, the burning question rising above the horizon like a shining beacon of the sad state of racial-political analysis: Will Latinos vote for Obama? Can Latinos vote for a Black man?
Can Latinos overcome “long simmering tensions” with Blacks to vote for Obama?