The Media Silence about LA Dodging Anti-Immigrant Laws & The Cone at Shadowbox

Amigos and virtual community:

Today, July 29, 2011, marks the first year anniversary of Arizona's infamous SB 1070 officially becoming a law, and since, it has spawned other states to follow. The new confederacy of Southern states signing harsh anti-immigrant laws has grown considerably this summer, and Tennessee is expected to join South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia with similar Arizona copy-cat laws that demonize Latino immigrants. In Louisiana, the great news is that two such laws, not one but two, were actually voluntarily withdrawn by their respective legislators. A highly effective grass roots campaign and coalition to oppose the passing of these bills was formed by local organizations such as the Congress of Day Laborers, PUENTES New Orleans, Catholic Charities, and the Jesuit Social Research Institute of Loyola University.

Representative Ernest Wooton, an Independent from the Belle Chase area, was forced to voluntarily withdraw his bill called The Louisiana Citizen’s Protection Act or H.B. 411 in a legislative session on June 6 in Baton Rouge. Wooton made a show of continuously identifying "illegal aliens" with exaggerated emphasis on the word "illegal". Had it passed, his bill empowered local and state police to detain anyone they suspected of being undocumented. The $11 million fiscal expense to implement his bill was not received favorably by Louisiana legislators already grappling with a $1.6 billion budget deficit. However, even the state's conservative lawmakers did not exhibit a bloodlust to criminalize Latino immigrants who have been vital to the recovery of this Gulf State post-Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and post-BP oil spill. I filmed three legislatives sessions in Baton Rouge, and while I am no fan of this state's red conservative tendencies, I have to confess that Wooton's colleagues did not exhibit his outrageous passion in trying to pass his odious bill.

In May, Representative Joe Harrison, a Republican from Houma, was forced to table his bill H.B. 59, and in the Judiciary committee I filmed, he encountered strong opposition to his anti-immigrant law by Representative Joey Bishop, Democrat from New Orleans, and Representative Walker Hines, a New Orleans Republican who in late 2010 switched ranks from his previous Democratic affiliations. Both were critical and unsupportive of a bill that criminalized Latino immigrants who had helped to reconstruct the devastated city after the flood. It was grand political theater indeed, as befitting the inherent drama of Louisiana politics, but the biggest headline that this Gulf State has resisted drafting a despicable anti-immigrant law is nowhere to be found in local, statewide, or national media news. This great good news story has been flying below the media radar, and outside of a short Associated Press article that followed the initial deferment of HB 411 in mid June, there has been nothing. Simplemente nada!

The New Orleans Times-Picayune daily hardly mentioned it and public radio stations have been silent as well. One would think that this would be great news to profile for the local and statewide Latino community and for the national community in general. Unlike its neighboring states of Alabama and Georgia, Louisiana has not joined in passing another Juan Crow law.

For those of you who may not know, the 2011 summer marks the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Riders, a heroic coalition of racially integrated black and white students who risked their lives riding on Greyhound and Trailways buses into the segregated Deep South. In Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, they encountered terrorist-like attacks by Ku Klux Klan members, local and state police, and white residents opposed to their commitment to desegregate public facilities, restaurants, and buses. The Freedom Riders challenged the racist Jim Crow laws that kept the South in an officially condoned state of apartheid. Fifty years later, this hatred has been reborn in Juan Crow laws that openly demonize a new race of color. Fear in the Deep South is rearing its ugly face again. We must not relent in defeating this new cancer! Adelante MI Gente!

WHEN AN IMMIGRANT DIES IN NEW ORLEANS…
Also, on July 29, 2010, the Congress of Day Laborers held a vigil and protest that took place in New Orleans. Latino immigrant activists and their allies took to the streets to protest the mysterious death of José Nelson Reyes-Zelaya, a twenty-eight year old El Salvadorean immigrant. He died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents after 24 hours of being in their detention facility. Members of the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice filed a Freedom of Information Act petition that was handed to ICE agents in front of their offices on Poydras Street (across from City Hall). To this day, the NOWCRJ and the Congress of Day Laborers have not received any further information. Shortly after his death on July 17, 2010, ICE authorities released a statement that the death of Mr. Reyes-Zelaya was a result of "apparent asphyxiation" from suicide. He was the eighth immigrant to die in ICE custody by July 2010, and customarily, ICE classifies these deaths as "suicides".

Sadly but not surprising, there was hardly any news coverage in the local media or public radio station about this tragedy, and it exemplifies how little immigrant lives matter in New Orleans, a city that has been rebuilt by thousands of Latino immigrants after the storm. Currently, Latino immigrants are fighting for the right to remain in a city that they have reconstructed, but they live in a parallel universe where their suffering goes unnoticed.

THE CONE OF UNCERTAINTY: New Orleans after Katrina
We rarely hear enough about the Latino connection to New Orleans, and in the many post-Katrina narratives, our stories of trauma and displacement were practically non-existent in the mainstream media. Even in the more thorough National Public Radio coverage, Latinos and the large Vietnamese community were missing in action. Fortunately, NPR's Latino USA did cover our stories, and I did an interview with them days after I escaped the flooded city on a stolen school bus, which was rescuing African American families. I was on the same bus that the iconic composer and musician Allen Toussaint was riding out of the social storm, and I intuited that if Mr. Toussaint was getting on that bus I needed to hop on as well.

Also, the rebuilding of the city owes much to the Latino immigrant work force that was brought in by the thousands, and they cleaned out the Superdome and the Convention Center, salvaged the city's many hotels to reignited the tourism engines, and repaired churches, hospitals, schools, and many homes. As an immigrant myself, it is my rightful duty to tell this untold story of the Katrina experience.

The Cone of Uncertainty is my multimedia show that chronicles my escape, and it's informed by the dramatic film footage captured by Afro Cuban filmmaker Williams Sabourin O'Reilly, who began filming at five in the morning on Monday morning as the storm was still passing through. For the 6th Anniversary, The Cone will be remounted in full for the first time since it was shown in New Orleans in March 2006 for three shows only at the Ashé Cultural Arts Center, as a work-in-progress when the city was still fragile. The Cone will be presented at the latest alternative theater venue in the Big Easy called the Shadowbox Theatre, which is located on Saint Claude Avenue. It runs Thursdays through Sundays from August 25 - September 11. The exact dates and more details are below.

Make art that matters!

José Torres-Tama
ArteFuturo Productions
2426 Saint Claude Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70117
www.torrestama.com
504.232.2968

http://elbigeasyamigoblogger.blogspot.com

NEW ORLEANS FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR
OGDEN MUSEUM ART BOOK available at
http://www.torrestama.com/ogdenbook/index.html

ArteFuturo Productions Presents
The Cone of Uncertainty: New Orleans after Katrina
José Torres-Tama’s Critically Acclaimed Post-storm Multimedia Solo

WHERE: Shadowbox Theatre @ 2400 Saint Claude Ave. (in the Marigny)
For tickets call 504-298-8676 or go to www.theshadowboxtheatre.com.

WHEN: Thursdays - Sundays, August 25-28, Sept. 1-4 & Sept. 8-11, 2011
All shows @ 8PM - $10 at the door & 2 for $16 (All Students $8)

"Cone pulls no punches in describing ‘the apocalyptic abandonment’ of New Orleans’ people." ---American Theatre

"But like the best performance artists, Torres-Tama seduces his audience through humor and the ability to play disparate characters." ---Theater Journal

ABOUT THE CONE: José Torres-Tama was a firsthand witness to the apocalyptic abandonment of a city whose people were made to beg for water and buses before television cameras. He offers a politically provocative and moving work that sheds light on the Latino immigrant experience of post-Katrina narratives, where Latinos were rendered invisible in all the mainstream media coverage. Performed with a magical realist Latino voodoo aesthetic, The Cone is an inventive fusion of personal stories, exaggerated characters, and dramatic film footage of the storm. Torres-Tama plays five distinct characters and invokes the spirit of a nearly three hundred year-old city that has engaged in an arduous reconstruction process.

SHOW’S HISTORY: The Cone of Uncertainty debuted at Highways Performance Space in Los Angeles in November 2005 with support funds from the National Performance Network www.npnwqeb.org. The Cone script was further developed through a ‘05/’06 Fellowship award from National Association of Arts and Culture www.nalac.org, as part of a Ford Foundation initiative to support Latino artists. The Cone has toured extensively across the country with performances at LSU, Ohio State University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Maryland, and numerous art centers. In January 2011, it was staged at the prestigious National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque.

In May 2009, The Cone made its European debut in the United Kingdom with performances at Roehampton University in London, the Bluecoat Arts Centre in Liverpool, and the Centre for Performance Research in Aberystwyth, Wales, as part of an international tour that was profiled in American Theatre magazine’s March 2009 issue.
http://www.torrestama.com/cone/index.html

RE: Anti-Immigrant Hysteria Overshadows 4th of July Freedom Celebrations

Amigos and virtual community:

"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless …

--Frederick Douglass
(an excerpt from a speech at an Independence Day rally in 1852)

I have come across this Frederic Douglas quote a number of times before, and with another Independence Day passing over us, let’s address the hypocrisy of celebrating freedom while anti-immigrant hysteria is sweeping the country. For those of you who may not be counting, Utah (March 15), Indiana (May 10), Georgia (May 13), Alabama (June 9), and South Carolina (June 27) are the most recent states that have joined Arizona in passing harsh legislation that demonizes Latino immigrants.

In the name of liberty, these edicts usher in a new Juan Crow era. Like Arizona’s SB 1070, they employ flawed and broad language that makes all Latinos subject to detention if we look undocumented enough. As an Ecuadorian immigrant with a permanent suntan, the Fourth of July has always been a difficult holiday for me to fully embrace, as difficult as other U.S. holidays with historical baggage like Columbus Day and Thanksgiving.

One celebrates a so-called “discoverer” who mistakenly named the indigenous people of the Americas “Indians” because he thought he had landed in the Indian subcontinent of his original destination, and the other celebrates the beginning of genocidal practices to remove the American Natives from their land. For the uninformed, any questioning of the harsh historical realities that these holidays mask usually renders the inquirer unpatriotic.

That would be me, and when I bring up the inherent flaws of a holiday of gratitude for the slaughtering of American Natives celebrated by slaughtering millions of turkeys across the land, you can imagine that I may not be the most welcomed guest to this big eating party. In addition, I have been a vegetarian for more than thirty years. I do eat fish on rare occasions, but in general, the kill turkey day of thanks is a tough one for me on many levels.

However, I am inspired to question because I like to believe that questioning governmental injustices is the most patriotic exercise afforded by our constitutional rights. But myths that have been ingrained as truths are hard to crack in a country that readily sweeps its disturbing legacies under a carpet embroidered with popular and grand beliefs that portray its pursuits as the most noble. The political proclamations that we are the cradle of freedom in the modern world will be even more difficult for me to stomach this 4th of July in the wake of the many states, especially in the South, that have recently passed anti-immigrant laws.

South Carolina Republican Governor Nikki Haley is the latest Southern governor to enlist her state in the new anti-immigrant confederacy. Ironically enough, she is the U.S. born daughter of Indian immigrants, as in the India Columbus was looking for, and she rode a wave of Tea Party endorsements to the Governor's Mansion. Speaking at her signing of bill S 20, Republican Senator Grooms, a supportive colleague, identified the targets of this law with the usual hateful rhetoric Conservatives spew to demonize Latino immigrants. “They cling together in illegal communities and bring with them drugs, prostitution, violent crime and gang activity.”

If only the Statue of Liberty in far away New York Harbor could have heard him, and shouted back her compassionate and honorable petition, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” If only Lady Liberty could chime in on the immigration issue, maybe, she would point out that the persecuted immigrants of today are the “huddled masses” the poem below her colossal feet aspires to embrace.

Instead, my stomach turned while watching the YouTube press clip of a woman of color joining good ole boys in directing hatred towards my immigrant brothers and sisters. It’s so brilliantly insidious when Republicans conscript people of color to push their xenophobic agendas. We have seen this before and the GOP’s revered Ronald Reagan, who left us the first Trillion-dollar deficit, knew the valuable political trend he was initiating with the appointment of uncle Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court.

These are strange times, and like myself, I don’t imagine other Latino immigrants too eager to wave those ubiquitous U.S. flags made in China on the 4th. One hundred and fifty plus years ago Mr. Douglas pointed out the contradictions of Independence Day celebrations for enslaved black Americans in the South. Today, immigrants know too well that they live in a parallel universe where freedom remains an abstract ideology far from their reality of being proclaimed enemies of the state.

These laws implicate all immigrants, especially foreign-born brown people or people that can be perceived as foreigners because they speak with an accent. They exemplify a divisive surge of xenophobia that is not uncommon in times of great economical despair. We have seen this before, and it is a painful truth of the many paradoxes in the so-called land of the free.

Make art that matters.

José Torres-Tama
ArteFuturo Productions
2426 Saint Claude Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70117
www.torrestama.com
504.232.2968

http://elbigeasyamigoblogger.blogspot.com

NEW ORLEANS FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR
OGDEN MUSEUM ART BOOK available at
http://www.torrestama.com/ogdenbook/index.html

Juan Crow Laws Flying in the Southern Breeze

Amigos and virtual community:

In mid June, Louisiana recently dodged a grave anti-immigrant law that was deferred by a local legislator, and the statewide Latino community and the many immigrant families and workers who have been invaluable to the reconstruction efforts of New Orleans can sigh in relief. However, the real story is that this major news item has been flying below the local media radar. It has been barely covered in print and web media, and news radio stations have added to the silence of a tremendous victory for Latinos, especially since neighboring Alabama and Georgia have passed dramatic anti-immigrant bills that inspire racial profiling and make school teachers accountable for reporting foreign-born children, as in Latino boys and girls, to the authorities to verify their legality.

The Alabama and Georgia laws are disgraceful, and the media silence is just as shameful. Human justice for immigrants is the Civil Rights issue of our times. Below is my full essay.

--El JTT

Juan Crow Laws Flying in the Southern Breeze

Across the nation and here in New Orleans, cultural celebrations have been staged to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Riders, but in the wake of this legendary Civil Rights event that challenged segregation and institutionalized prejudices in the South, states like Alabama and Georgia have recently passed harsh anti-immigrant bills. Both laws empower state and local police to decide who can be considered “illegal or undocumented” and detain the suspects until they prove their legal status.

They open a racial profiling door that will undoubtedly lead to stopping people with a permanent suntan, brown looking Latinos and/or even light-skinned African Americans, who could be mistaken for Hispanic. As if we need more incentives given to police in Dixie who readily suspect anyone outside their Caucasian color line? It’s hard to imagine a blue-eyed Auburn quarterback or his Georgia State sandy-haired counterpart, both with their respective jerseys, arousing the suspicion of their local sheriffs.

It looks like a new millennium version of Jim Crow. These Juan Crow rulings tragically welcome another era of fear for the colored other, and while the illegal moniker is used like a new word for terrorist, it is all part of a strategic sideshow to direct the anger of millions of rural and small southern-town folks, many of whom are unemployed, towards another race that can be collectively criminalized.

In both Alabama and Georgia, Republican legislators have pushed anti-immigrant laws with the support of a predominantly white electorate being manipulated to hate immigrants today the same way two generations ago their fathers and grandfathers were taught to hate their black neighbors, who were supposedly taking their jobs back then. The more things change the more they remain the same, and even the infamous KKK is channeling their vitriol towards a growing population of Latino immigrants in the South—not just the undocumented.

In this Gulf State, Representative Ernest Wooton, Independent from the Belle Chase area, voluntarily withdrew his bill called The Louisiana Citizen’s Protection Act or H.B. 411. It proposed to make a criminal of anyone who transported an illegal alien to a hospital or church if the person knowingly knew the foreigner’s status was questionable. H.B. 411 passed the Labor and Industrial Relations Committee in late May, but in early June, its $11 million fiscal expense to implement precluded its passage in the House Appropriations chamber.

Louisiana has a $1.6 billion budget deficit, and any regulation carrying an additional financial burden had little chance of surviving a legislature grappling with dramatic cutbacks. The withdrawal of Wooton’s bill comes on the heels of a similarly deferred anti-immigrant bill called H.B. 59 by Representative Joe Harrison, Republican from Houma, Louisiana. Harrison was forced to withdraw his bill in May after New Orleans activists from the Congress of Day Laborers and PUENTES along with allies from Catholic Charities and the Jesuit Social Research Institute of Loyola University mounted a successful campaign against it.

The great news is that Louisiana has resisted the new confederacy of Southern states implementing laws that generally vilify all Latinos because of their inherent flaws in using broad language to detain anyone who may “look undocumented”.

I am a brown man, often mistaken for Creole here in New Orleans, and under such laws, a policeman can randomly decide that I look like an illegal alien. Wooton’s law would give the police the power to detain me, and if I did not have my U.S. passport to prove my legality, I could be jailed.

In an interview, I asked Mr. Wooton about this measure, but he emphatically replied that his bill was not a racial profiling initiative. For now, I am relieved that I do not have to contend with this scenario, but when I go on vacation and cross Alabama and Georgia on my way to the Florida beaches, I will have to bring my passport with me just in case.

My cafe con leche complexion generally inspires reasonable suspicion from most white officers in good ole Dixie. However, we may just need to stage a wave of immigrant freedom riders in Greyhound buses to converge en masse in Alabama and Georgia to challenge these Juan Crow laws against our people.

Make art that matters.

José Torres-Tama
ArteFuturo Productions
2426 Saint Claude Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70117
www.torrestama.com
504.232.2968

http://elbigeasyamigoblogger.blogspot.com

NEW ORLEANS FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR
OGDEN MUSEUM ART BOOK available at
http://www.torrestama.com/ogdenbook/index.html