|
|
|
NEWS ARTICLES OF INTEREST TO AMERICANS
OF LATINO DESCENT COLLECTED FROM AROUND THE WEB: updated 05-03-10
|
|
FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR ALL THE NEWS UPDATES, INCLUDING NEWS ABOUT THE ARIZONA IMMIGRATION BILL HOTEL OWNER ORDERS LATINOS TO CHANGE NAMESThe Associated Press December 10, 2009 (AP) Larry Whitten marched into this northern New Mexico
town in late July on a mission: resurrect a failing hotel.
The tough-talking former Marine immediately laid down
some new rules. Among them, he forbade the Hispanic workers at the run-down, Southwestern adobe-style hotel from speaking
Spanish in his presence (he thought they'd be talking about him), and ordered some to Anglicize their names.
No
more Martin (Mahr-TEEN). It was plain-old Martin. No more Marcos. Now it would be Mark.
Whitten's management style
had worked for him as he's turned around other distressed hotels he bought in recent years across the country.
The
63-year-old Texan, however, wasn't prepared for what followed.
His rules and his firing of several Hispanic employees
angered his employees and many in this liberal enclave of 5,000 residents at the base of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, where
the most alternative of lifestyles can find a home and where Spanish language, culture and traditions have a long and revered
history.
"I came into this landmine of Anglos versus Spanish versus Mexicans versus Indians versus everybody
up here. I'm just doing what I've always done," he says.
Former workers, their relatives and some town residents
picketed across the street from the hotel.
"I do feel he's a racist, but he's a racist out of ignorance. He
doesn't know that what he's doing is wrong," says protester Juanito Burns Jr., who identified himself as prime minister
of an activist group called Los Brown Berets de Nuevo Mexico.
The Virginia-born Whitten had spent 40 years in the
hotel business, turning around more than 20 hotels in Texas, Oklahoma, Florida and South Carolina, before moving with his
wife to Taos from Abilene, Texas. He had visited Taos before, and liked its beauty. When Whitten saw that the Paragon Inn
was up for sale, he jumped at it.
The hotel sits along narrow, two-lane Paseo del Pueblo, where souped-up lowriders
radiate a just-waxed gleam in the soft sunshine as they cruise past centuries-old adobe buildings. One recent afternoon, a
woman slowly rode her fat-tire bicycle along a cracked sidewalk, oversized purple butterfly wings on her back and a breeze
blowing her long, blonde dreadlocks.
The community includes Taos Pueblo, an American Indian dwelling inhabited
for over 1,000 years, and an adobe Catholic church made famous in a Georgia O'Keeffe painting.
After he arrived,
Whitten met with the employees. He says he immediately noticed that they were hostile to his management style and worried
they might start talking about him in Spanish.
"Because of that, I asked the people in my presence to speak
only English because I do not understand Spanish," Whitten says. "I've been working 24 years in Texas and we have
a lot of Spanish people there. I've never had to ask anyone to speak only English in front of me because I've never had a
reason to."
Some employees were fired, Whitten says, because they were hostile and insubordinate. He says
they called him "a white (N-word)."
Fired hotel manager Kathy Archuleta says the workers initially tried
to adjust to his style. "We had already gone through four or five owners before him, so we knew what to expect,"
Archuleta says. "I told (the workers) we needed to give him a chance."
Then Whitten told some employees
he was changing their Spanish first names. Whitten says it's a routine practice at his hotels to change first names of employees
who work the front desk phones or deal directly with guests if their names are difficult to understand or pronounce.
"It has nothing to do with racism. I'm not doing it for any reason other than for the satisfaction of my guests, because
people calling from all over America don't know the Spanish accents or the Spanish culture or Spanish anything," Whitten
says.
Martin Gutierrez, another fired employee, says he felt disrespected when he was told to use the unaccented
Martin as his name. He says he told Whitten that Spanish was spoken in New Mexico before English. "He told me he didn't
care what I thought because this was his business," Gutierrez says.
"I don't have to change my name and
language or heritage," he says. "I'm professional the way I am."
After the firings, the New Mexico
chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens, a national civil rights group, sent Whitten a letter, raising concerns
about treatment of Hispanic workers. Whitten says he sent them a letter and posted messages on the hotel marquee, alleging
that the group referred to him with a racial slur. LULAC denied the charge.
The messages and comments he made in
interviews with local media, including referring to townsfolk as "mountain people" and "potheads who escaped
society," further enflamed tensions.
Taos Mayor Darren Cordova says Whitten wasn't doing anything illegal.
But he says Whitten failed to better familiarize himself with the town and its culture before deciding to buy the hotel for
$2 million. "Taos is so unique that you would not do anything in Taos that you would do elsewhere," he says.
Whitten grew subdued as a two-hour interview with The Associated Press progressed. He said he was sorry for the misunderstanding
and insisted he has never been against any culture.
"What kind of fool or idiot or poor businessman would
I be to orchestrate this whole crazy thing that's costed me a lot of time, money and aggravation?" Whitten said.
Whitten should have dealt with the situation differently, especially in a majority Hispanic town, said 71-year-old Taos
artist Ken O'Neil, while sipping his afternoon coffee on the town's historic plaza.
"To make demands like
he did just seems over the top," he says. "Nobody won here. It's not always about winning. Sometimes, it's about
what you learn." HERE IS THE LINK TO THE ORIGINAL STORY, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/10/26/national/main5422261.shtml
|
|
DALLAS POLICE TICKETED 39 DRIVERS IN 3 YEARS FOR NOT SPEAKING
ENGLISH 07:11
AM CDT on Monday, October 26, 2009Dallas police wrongly
ticketed at least 39 drivers for not speaking English over the last three years, Police Chief David Kunkle announced Friday
while promising to investigate all officers involved in the cases for dereliction of duty. Pending cases will be dismissed,
and those who paid the $204 fine for the charge, which does not exist in the city, will be reimbursed, Kunkle said. "I was surprised and stunned
that that would happen, particularly in the city of Dallas," Kunkle said. "In my world, you would never tell someone
not to speak Spanish." The citations were issued in several different
patrol divisions by at least six different officers. One of those officers was responsible for five of the citations, Kunkle
said. The case that led to the discovery of all the others
occurred Oct. 2, when Ernestina Mondragon was stopped for making an illegal U-turn in the White Rock area. Rookie Officer
Gary Bromley cited Mondragon for three violations: disregarding a traffic control device, failure to present a driver's license
and "non-English speaking driver." In that
case and perhaps the others, officials said, the officer was confused by a pull-down menu on his in-car computer that listed
the charge as an option. But the law the computer referred to is a federal statute regarding commercial drivers that Kunkle
said his department does not enforce. Bromley, 33, is
a trainee officer in the northeast patrol division, meaning he still works with a training officer during every shift. His
training officer on that day was Senior Cpl. Daniel Larkin, 53. According
to department policy, a sergeant must also sign off on all citations. The supervisor who signed off on the Mondragon ticket
was Sgt. David Burroughs, 50. "In this case, the
field training officer was aware of ultimately what the recruit officer had done," Kunkle said. "The field training
officer is going to bear more responsibility than the recruit officer." Mondragon,
a native Spanish speaker, challenged the charge in court and it was dropped, her daughter said. Dallas police said they will
drop all charges against Mondragon, who speaks limited English and does have a Texas driver's license. Police officials did not release the names of the officers and supervisors
involved in the other cases. Kunkle said he expected the investigation to last at least a few weeks and could reach back several
years. "An officer has to know the elements of an
offense or what's necessary to constitute a crime," Kunkle said. "In this case it appears that officers did not
understand." It is unclear whether the erroneous
tickets were reported by the courts. Administrative Judge C. Victor Lander said Friday afternoon that he would be surprised
if such charges got past a judge. He said he would conduct a review. "If
there are any outstanding warrants as a result of these kinds of cases that have been inadvertently written, I'm going to
direct that they be immediately held," Lander said. "If there are any cases in the prosecutorial pipeline, I'm going
to request the city attorney to hold the case." The
citations amount to a small percentage of the roughly 400,000 tickets issued by Dallas police each year. But the total is
large enough to have possible legal ramifications, said George A. Martinez, a professor at the Southern Methodist University
Dedman School of Law. "It sounds like a policy,"
Martinez said. "Discrimination on the basis of language ability, and that's targeting Latinos, and so that sounds pretty
serious to me." Attorney Domingo Garcia said he
has been hired to represent the Mondragon family. "The
issue has nothing to do with whether people should learn English or not. I believe they should," Garcia said. "It's
about not following the law and issuing citations against a law that doesn't exist, against a fairly voiceless and helpless
population." Beyond potential legal problems, some
said the tickets send a troubling message to Hispanics. "It's
the principle of the matter that there are police officers out there representing our city who actually think that it's a
crime not to speak English," said Brenda Reyes, a political consultant and member of the League of United Latin American
Citizens. Kunkle, who apologized repeatedly, said he
recognized the incidents probably would damage the department's relationship with the Hispanic community. "When we deal with crime victims ... our interest is not their immigration
status," Kunkle said. "It's not something that we concern ourselves about. We want to serve all people."
|
| |
|
|
|
