Bringing Policy Priorities to Capitol Hill: LGBT Latinos

Posted on 05/12/2016 @ 07:45 PM

Tags: blog, Advocacy

By: Mark Salay, LULAC National Communications Intern

In light of recent anti-LGBT laws sweeping the South, representatives from leading civil rights and public policy organizations convened on Capitol Hill last week to discuss the legislative priorities for LGBT Latinos, a population estimated to be around 1.4 million people.

The panel hosted by LULAC spotlighted the new public policy priorities of the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda (NHLA), a coalition of 40 Latino advocacy organizations that investigates some of the most pressing concerns of the Latino community and recommends policy solutions that will have a lasting impact on Latinos, including LGBT Latinos. The panel featured policy discussions on the anti-LGBT laws in Mississippi and North Carolina and reproductive rights with representatives from the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, True Colors Fund, National Center for Transgender Equality, and the National LGBTQ Taskforce.

Just as African Americans and Latinos were once forced to use segregated bathrooms, a new war on the right to use public facilities is now being waged against transgender people. Joanna Cifredo of the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) spoke on laws passed within the last two months in the South known as “bathroom bills”, which deny people the right to use bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity.

In Mississippi, an anti-LGBT law set to take effect in July allows organizations and businesses to deny services based on religious grounds. The law passed right after the North Carolina state legislature passed their own “bathroom bill”, HB 2. More than 50 people were arrested at the North Carolina state house in protest of the anti-transgender law. The Department of Justice has also sued the state for violating Title VII and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act — which prohibits discrimination in the workplace and in federally funded programs such as public schools — and for violating the Violence Against Women Act.

Supporters of the “bathroom bills” reason that women will be at risk of “sexual predators” posing as women; however, Cifredo said this conversation is not about bathrooms, but about a greater movement of policing bodies and limiting trans people from participating in public life.

“It is a fear tactic we’ve seen time and time again of certain politicians preying upon the ignorance of their constituency and feeding them fear of a marginalized population that they know little about,” Cifredo said.

The NCTE, the Human Rights Campaign, and the American Civil Liberties Union say no evidence supports the claim that women have experienced violence at the hands of transgender people in bathrooms. On the contrary, studies show transgender people are the ones most vulnerable to discrimination and violence when forced to use bathrooms that do not match their gender.

A reported seventy percent of transgender people in Washington D.C. say that they have been denied access and have experienced verbal harassment, or physical assault in public restrooms, according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law. Another study by the Journal of Homosexuality found nearly half of trans college students attempted suicide when denied bathroom access, a number that increases when students were of color or of lower income.

As panelist Sergio Lopez, Field Manager of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, pointed out, the Constitution has been a double-edged sword for advancing and limiting religious freedom because of how the First Amendment and Equal Protection Clause can conflict with one another.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) passed by Congress in 1993 also protects people’s practice of religion and has been used to preserve the rights of religious minorities, such as Muslims and Native Americans. However, a recent report by the Leadership Conference Education Fund, the research and education branch of the Leadership Conference, says the policy is being used by people and businesses to justify discrimination against the LGBT community and violates the Constitution.

“We feel that folks who are fighting for these liberties sometimes pervert that use in order to discriminate against other people,” Lopez said. “They’ve used that argument to discriminate against immigration, women, and people with disabilities.”

Zsea Beaumonis, a fellow at the National LGBTQ Taskforce, advocated for passing three policies to ensure LGBT and reproductive justice including the EACH Woman Act, Equality Act, and the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act.

The EACH Woman Act is based on protecting women’s reproductive rights, an issue that has been intensely contested in light of efforts to defund Planned Parenthood and the Supreme Court’s pending trial regarding the constitutionality of Texas’s HB 2 law, which has closed more than half of abortion clinics in the second largest state in the country; only 10 remain open to treat women seeking abortion.

Although the Equality Act and the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act address eliminating discrimination against the LGBT community and are distinct from the EACH Woman Act, Beaumonis said these issues need to be looked at from a communal lense, “We do see these as intersectional, interconnected issues for the LGBT community and the Latino community within our family.”

Mark Salay is the Communications Intern at the LULAC National Office in Washington, D.C. He is a senior at the University of California, Santa Barbara, majoring in communication with minors in history and professional writing, and will be graduating in the Spring of 2016.

The Rise of the 'School-to-Deportation Pipeline'

Posted on 05/03/2016 @ 07:45 PM

Tags: blog, Advocacy

Photo Credit: Nick Ut/AP

By: Mark Salay, LULAC National Communications Intern

A recent series of immigration raids has left undocumented Latino youth in Georgia and North Carolina afraid to leave their homes as communities fear that former safe havens such as schools and educational facilities are now high-risks areas for arrests and deportation.

While the Obama administration has tried to provide protection from deportation in the form of DAPA and DACA to immigrants who have resided in the U.S. for an extended period, it has turned a blind eye to extensive raids against recent arrivals–teens who are adults in age only and seeking refuge from Central America’s ongoing humanitarian crisis.

The raids carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested and detained 336 migrant youths. Most of those detained came in an unprecedented wave of 66,000 unaccompanied minors detained in 2014 who fled violence in their home countries of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Even though ICE directed its officers to steer clear of targeting schools, churches, and other “sensitive locations” during the raids, the evidence tells a different story. In Georgia and North Carolina–both states with emerging Latino populations–stories have surfaced reporting that ICE is not following orders.

In North Carolina, a 19-year-old student who came to the U.S. to escape being killed by gang members in his native El Salvador was taken away at a bus stop going to school. The New York Times reported on an 18-year-old in Georgia who was deported while on his way to school earlier this month despite facing threats from a local Salvadoran gang.

Central America is struggling to stop drug trafficking and violence in its Northern Triangle region. El Salvador is the murder capital of the world with a death every hour because drug cartels and gangs have taken over nearly every aspect of civilian life, while Honduras and Guatemala suffer from the same conditions to a lesser extent.

President Obama said in 2014 that immigration detainment efforts would focus on immigrants with a criminal background, but ICE has been left unchecked. Unfortunately, this is having traumatic consequences for youth seized during these raids, and many face a disturbing potential scenario: death by deportation upon arrival in their home countries.

The Department of Homeland Security’s month-long campaign known as Operation Border Guardian, began in late January to crack down and curb southwest border crossing that spiked in 2014 and which saw an uptick again in late 2015.

The DHS said it would only target unaccompanied minors who crossed the border, have turned 18 years of age, and have not been granted asylum. Many of these unaccompanied youth, however, were already at a disadvantage in court proceedings because the U.S. government is not responsible for providing them with an attorney, leaving the minors–many with limited English-speaking abilities–without any legal help at their side.

ICE chose not to release the number of arrests of its raids by state, but by city field offices instead. The Atlanta field office responsible for Georgia and the Carolinas seized 127 individuals, more than one-third of all those apprehended in raids since the January enforcement period began.

These arrests have had alarming consequences on those students facing similar situations who fear going to school in the morning and potentially never coming back. One high school in Durham, NC saw attendance drop by 20 percent after one immigration raid detained a 19-year-old Honduran on his way to school. As Thinkprogress.org reported, teachers from Durham and Charlotte have noticed increased absences, dropouts, and students purposely trying to get suspended so they can stay home and be with friends and family.

In response to student arrests in North Carolina, the Raleigh School District issued a resolution opposing ICE’s actions, citing humanitarian principles, ICE’s policy not to target sensitive locations, and reiterating the students’ statuses as low priority for deportation.

The situation has developed into a humanitarian crisis for this administration. The Guardian reported 83 cases of death by deportation since January 2014, 45 in El Salvador, 35 in Honduras, and three in Guatemala. Of 16,077 women from the Northern Triangle and Mexico interviewed by U.S. asylum officers in 2015, 82 percent of them had a “credible fear of persecution or torture.”

As it stands now, more than 85 percent of mothers and children show up to immigration proceedings without legal assistance, a huge problem considering that Central American families with no counsel were allowed to stay in the country only 2.3 percent of the time. Meanwhile, when they are able to receive legal help, they are 14 times less likely not to be deported.

The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution entitles all people to due process of law, regardless of legal status. Rather than deportation, the better alternative is to protect these children’s right to seek asylum by providing access to legal assistance and information. The administration must dedicate itself to addressing why these children are leaving and not play politics with the lives of harmless immigrants trying to escape violence.

Mark Salay is the Communications Intern at the LULAC National Office in Washington, D.C. He is a senior at the University of California, Santa Barbara, majoring in communication with minors in history and professional writing, and will be graduating in the Spring of 2016.

Maids, Gangsters, and the Fiery Latina: Hollywood's Latino Diversity Problem

Posted on 04/27/2016 @ 07:45 PM

Tags: blog, Civil Rights

Photo Credit: Devious Maids Wikia

By: Mark Salay, LULAC National Communications Intern

Hollywood’s diversity problem has been subject to plenty of criticism since the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, but for the entertainment industry to make major headway it needs to take further steps than simply recognize the problem.

A letter sent out on April 18 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’ Board of Governors outlined new voter eligibility requirements to its members, and although the change does seek to bring new perspectives to a selection committee that is mostly made up of older white men, the issue is not about who gets an award and who doesn’t, but on changing an industry that still doesn’t reflect the country’s demographics.

The truth is that the dominant share of gatekeepers in Hollywood–executives, agents, and money backers–also look a lot like the voters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. With producers, financiers, writers, and directors having power over the type of content created, the absence of minorities in these positions only perpetuates exclusion on the screen.

According to a study by the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, minorities in television are underrepresented starting at the earliest stages of project development. Out of the 1,046 TV pilots in development for the 2015-2016 season, only 22 percent had at least one person of color on the development team. Of these pilots, only a select few get picked up. Hypothetically speaking, even if every single pilot featuring at least one person of color gets a greenlight, minorities would still be underrepresented at the development stage by a two to one margin.

When people of color are given the chance to write, the story comes out much differently. At Monday’s Pulitzer Prize announcements, Puerto Rican Lin-Manuel Miranda walked away with the prize for best drama for his Broadway hit, Hamilton, a telling of Alexander Hamilton’s life starring actors of color.

The musical has proven popular with audiences–its website lists the chances of you getting a ticket as “extremely limited”–showing execs that diverse casts win awards and sell out theaters. In fact, increasing diversity in TV and film also shows to draw more people in. Films with balanced casting see the highest return on investment and for television, minority household viewership peaks when minorities makeup more than half the cast, according to the Bunche study.

Although we are starting to see television embrace diversity with casting minorities in lead roles and developing complex themes that break stereotypical depictions with shows such as Jane the Virgin, Black-ish, and Fresh Off the Boat, these offerings have been the exception, not the norm.

Another study by the Media, Diversity & Social Change (MDSC) Initiative at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism found that across all media platforms, only 28.3 percent of speaking roles go to minorities, and of that, only 5.8 percent go to Latinos. Furthermore, the study also found that when speaking parts were given to Latinas, they were in more sexualized roles than all other races and ethnicities.

With Latinos making up 17 percent of the population, such disparity in speaking roles grossly underrepresents Latinos and dilutes complex identities into nothing more than fiery Latinas with hot accents and gangbangers. I ask, why must Latinos still go on auditions and get told by white casting directors they need to act and speak “more Mexican” to get the part?

This speaks to the larger racial issues this industry has historically ignored and is especially problematic considering that many non-minorities may base their own opinions and perceptions of minority groups off of media portrayals. Typecasting Latinos and other underrepresented groups has the consequence of keeping people from seeing the important role minorities play in shaping the American experience.

Latinos buy 25 percent of movie tickets each week, the most out of any demographic, yet, they still see themselves portrayed one-dimensionally through the eyes of others whenever they purchase a ticket or watch television. Hollywood runs much like an exclusive fraternity, however, that doesn’t justify those select few from controlling and telling the narrative of what the Latino experience is. Audiences deserve better, Latinos deserve better.

Mark Salay is the Communications Intern at the LULAC National Office in Washington, D.C. He is a senior at the University of California, Santa Barbara, majoring in communication with minors in history and professional writing, and will be graduating in the Spring of 2016.

#40toNoneDay: Tackling LGBT Youth Homelessness

Posted on 04/25/2016 @ 07:45 PM

Tags: blog, LGBTQ

By: Jared Hernandez, LULAC National Youth President

It’s a statistic that may shock you: Approximately 1.6 million youth across the country face homelessness each year. Particularly shocking is that approximately 40 percent of these homeless youth identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT), when compared to only 7 percent of the general population. Such a large number can be primarily attributed to family conflict over sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression which often results in youth running away from home or being forced out of their home by their families. With such a disproportionate representation among the homeless population, it’s important to understand the reasons why LGBT youth are experiencing homelessness and what we as a community can do to help eradicate this epidemic.

Why is this important to LULAC, the nation’s oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization? Although it's hard to determine specific statistics, a study of New York City LGBT youth experiencing homelessness estimated that 26 percent of respondents were Latino. This translates to thousands of our Latino brothers and sisters who are experiencing hardship, increased risk of mental illness, sexual assault, and increased exposure to sexually transmitted infections. Throughout its long history, LULAC has defended the civil rights of Latinos and continues to advocate for their well-being—and this includes advocating for the LGBT Latino community. In 2006, LULAC started its first LGBT LULAC Council dedicated to fostering dialogue and understanding between the LGBT and Latino communities, and LULAC has continued its commitment by expanding the LGBT councils to 6 cities and collaborating with LGBT allies in 10 states to distribute over 10,000 pieces of LGBT Latino bilingual educational materials. In February, I joined 150 fellow LULAC National Board and LULAC Youth & Young Adult members to advocate for Latino issues on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., and part of our platform focused on speaking to congressional leaders about LGBT Latino youth experiencing homelessness.

On behalf of the LULAC National Youth Board, I am proud to join people across the country on Wednesday, April 27, 2016 for the second annual #40toNoneDay, a national campaign from the True Colors Fund that focuses on raising awareness about LGBT youth homelessness. The goal of the campaign is to ultimately reduce the disproportionate percentage of youth experiencing homelessness who identify as LGBT from 40 percent to none. In order to do that, we must raise awareness about the issue and encourage everyone to take an active role in ending it. On this important day, we stand with service providers, advocacy organizations, elected officials, celebrities, LGBT youth, and community members to bring visibility to our fellow youth in need.

How can you get involved with the #40toNone Campaign? Check out some ideas below to help us spread the word.
1. Promote #40toNoneDay with a Blog, email or on social media
2. Take an “unselfie” and post it on your social media accounts.
3. Host a film night + discussion
4. Ask local officials to declare #40toNoneDay by way of a resolution or proclamation

Visit the True Colors Fund for more information and ideas on how you can be involved.

Jared Hernandez serves as the LULAC National Youth President. He first volunteered with LULAC Youth at the age of 14 in Galveston, Texas. Currently, he is a freshman studying political science at the University of North Texas. Check out more information on LULAC Youth by following @LULACYOUTH on Twitter.