Outis

I drove over to Galería de la Raza today, to pick up a painting I’d bought at their fundraiser auction a few weeks back and found almost all the stores on 24th St. in the Mission district shuttered. I’m going to assume it was 60% Our Lady of Guadalupe and 40% boycott.

But even 40% would be too high — at least, over the repeal of this specific version of the licenses for undocumented residents bill. Because, really, there’s a much more citical issue around which to organize a boycott on a religious holiday: the loss of college outreach programs.

A few weeks ago, I started dropping hints to my friends that the first of the new Governor’s budget cuts for college outreach programs would adversely affects hispanics. Today, I was reminded of just how focused these cuts are going to be — by default if not design — when I came across this quote from the historical record:

“We can fix this mess without hurting the schools. For me, children come first. Always have, always will. ”

My english as a second language apparently isn’t as good as it should be — I didn’t catch the word “anglo” modifying the noun “children” when this commercial ran continuously during the campaign. And I watch a lot of television.

But then, it doesn’t really matter just how much television I do watch since they’re likely not going to be talking about this issue very much:

US TV news ‘fails Hispanics’ (BBC, 12/16/2002)
An average of one in every 160 stories on ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN in 2001 were about Hispanics - despite the fact that one in eight people in the US are Hispanic.

Sure, that story is a year old — almost to the day — but is it any less valid? I don’t think so. There’s no better explanation for the misguided effort of today’s boycott than the relative lack of news available to Californians about the issues that affect Hispanics most. How are we, Hispanics, supposed to respond to a threat we can’t see or hear?

From a strategic, political standpoint: our ignorance makes us easy prey.

Hispanics are plausibly second only to the physically handicapped when it comes to communities unlikely to mount a successful counter to the governor’s new budget cuts.

The driver’s license bill is a controversial issue because it is popular to bash illegal immigrants in California — always has been and always will be. Yet, in terms of its impact on the quality of life of the state’s Hispanic population — and, more importantly, the future of their economic and political role in California society — this issue is over a mere technicality compared to the broader crisis of the budget cuts cited above.

First, as you may know, the current head of the Department of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge (R), was quoted a few days ago as saying that some form of documentation should be provided for the nation’s undocumented (illegal) immigrants. California’s love-affair with this pointless political controversy would end rather quickly when that happens — or, at least, when a better version of this driver’s license bill is introduced (why not? they had introduced two earlier, failed versions before Gov. Davis signed the now repealed iteration).

Second, at most there are 2 million illegal immigrants in California. At most. Of those 2 million, not all — and, probably, not more than half — will stay in California permanently.

That 1-2 million pales in comparison to the millions upon millions of Hispanics who stand to benefit, either directly or indirectly, from college outreach programs such as those now being gutted by the governor who puts (all) children first:

In the 2001-2002 school year, Latinos constituted more than two in five (44.2%) of the approximately 6.1 million students enrolled in California public elementary and secondary schools, the largest segment of the student population. From 1981 to 2001, the percentage of students enrolled in public schools who are Hispanic more than doubled, accounting for 79.6% of the overall increase in California’s student population between those years.

So, just what do such outreach programs mean to California’s substantial and growing population of Hispanic high school students? The difference between a light at the end of the tunnel and dropping out.

In fact, Hispanics have the second highest dropout rate in California and constitute the single greatest portion of the total dropout population: 24,976 in 2001 alone.

Even the most craven, self-interested member of California’s ruling elite would have to admit that this staggering but largely unreported crisis spells serious economic troubles for tomorrow’s California.

According to the Rand Corporation:

While the number of jobs filled by workers lacking a high school diploma remained unchanged between 1970 and 1990, the California economy created 6.9 million new jobs, 85 percent of which went to workers with at least some college education.

Lest we forget, the “trickle” in “trickle down economics” also refers to the general cascading nature of economic phenomena: a growing sector of the population that cannot be hired for lack of a college education leads to all manner of horrible consequences, from economic (offshore outsourcing) to social (crime, mental illness) to fiscal (reduced tax revenues, increased demands for government programs).

I firmly believe the undocumented will get their driving papers.

I have no such hopes that today’s Hispanic high school dropouts will become tomorrow’s well-compensated labor pool — let alone captains of industry.

However, if you’re feeling hopeful, you can light a virtual candle to la Virgencita de Guadalupe.

I don’t know if that will help, but I’m sure it can’t hurt.