[ilbegone]

Originally Posted by Greg in LA

Yuck! what a truly horrible person your Congressmen is.

You must have a stomach of Iron to spend one minutes dealing with him.

If the amnesty passes the House, your Congressmen is the prime example of the future political leadership of our country. It's unbelievable that so many Americans are so asleep about this!

Just reading the quote from Raul Ruiz make me want to reach for the Pepto Bismol, and I'm not joking.

I don't know Ruiz personally. As individual to individual, he might not be a bad person. He is a product of his background and experiences.

There are people who judge me as a racist based on my convictions concerning illegal immigration without any knowledge of whom I associate with and my further convictions.

Raul's parents were immigrant Mexican farm workers, My Elena's father was an immigrant employed in one of the first industries to exploit immigrant Mexicans, her mother was also born in Mexico. Elena herself worked in the fields during the summer to earn money for school clothes, an adolescent and teenage girl might want something more than clothes stitched together from La Pina flour sacks and mom took a big cut of the cash. They were dirt poor.

I don't know the circumstances of the childhoods of either Ruiz or his parents, but Elena spent a significant portion of her childhood living in a dirt floor house with a wood stove and an outhouse right here in America. Water had to be carried into the house, the bucket that served as a night time chamber pot was carried out in the morning.

Ruiz was born in the Coachella valley in 1971, Elena became an adult in the barrio before the 1964 civil rights act. Ruiz might talk about white racism like it is still 1956, Elena remembers that year as a brown person with a Spanish last name living not all that far from the Coachella Valley.

When Elena went to school, the white kids often made fun of the fact that she had a quesadilla or rolled taco for lunch rather than a sandwich. Tacos and quesadillas are everywhere now.

Ruiz can babble all he wants about Thanksgiving as a day of minority repression, Elena's family ate turkey with the fixin's on Thanksgiving. It was the only day of the year they didn't have beans and tortillas with every meal, and they usually ate meat only once a month, couldn't afford much of it. The white butcher they patronized often gave them more meat than he charged them for. She jokes that she is a frijolera.

There were tamales and beans for Christmas, a ham at Easter.

A lot of kids are indoctrinated into brown ethnic nationalism in college, maybe Ruiz is one of those who believe that the Mexican American war garnered the US the best part of Mexico - the part that was paved and had all the modern conveniences.