Hispanic vs. Latina/o—Which Term is Preferred?

By Christopher Beam
with the help of Jeffrey Passel of Pew Hispanic Center, Ilan Stavans of Amherst College, and Brent Wilkes of the League of United Latin American Citizens.

Barack Obama announced Tuesday that he would nominate 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. The New York Times wrote that Sotomayor, if confirmed, would be "the nation's first Hispanic justice." But Sotomayor has referred to herself in the past as "a Latina judge." Do Hispanic and Latina mean the same thing?

Not exactly. Hispanic is an English word that originally referred to people from Spain and eventually expanded to include the populations of its colonies in South and Central America. Latino is a Spanish word—hence the feminine form Latina—that refers to people with roots in Latin America and generally excludes the Iberian Peninsula. For many, Hispanic has negative connotations because of its Eurocentrism. Others prefer it because it's gender-neutral. Latino, meanwhile, is perceived as a more authentic-sounding, Spanish-language alternative. Generally speaking, Democrats use Latino more often than Republicans, who favor Hispanic.

For years, Spanish-speaking people in the United States were identified according to their ancestral nationality. In the 1970 U.S. census, for example, people were asked whether they were Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American, or "other Spanish." (The question caused much confusion because many Americans from the middle or southern regions of the United States identified themselves as "Central or South American.") The word Hispanic was not used until the 1980 census, after the Office of Management and Budget imposed rules standardizing ethnicity statistics. (The change came after a federal committee on minority education complained about the lack of useful data.) In 1997, the OMB changed its classification to "Hispanic or Latino," explaining that "Hispanic is commonly used in the eastern portion of the United States, whereas Latino is commonly used in the western portion."

Some commentators have wondered whether Sotomayor would really be the first Hispanic justice. After all, Benjamin Cardozo, who was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1932, had family who originated in Portugal. But most Portuguese speakers—whether from Portugal or Brazil—do not consider themselves Hispanic or Latino. Furthermore, Cardozo identified as a Sephardic Jew. That said, former Rep. Tony Coelho and Rep. Dennis Cardoza, both of whom have roots in Portugal, have been members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

Ultimately, there is no strict definition of Hispanic or Latino. The College Board, which administers the SAT, leaves it up to the student to self-identify. The U.S. Census Bureau makes no distinction between the two terms. It defines Hispanics and Latinos as "persons who trace their origin or descent to Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Spanish speaking Central and South America countries, and other Spanish cultures." But if someone from Brazil says he's Hispanic, the census doesn't say, No, you're not.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Jeffrey Passel of Pew Hispanic Center, Ilan Stavans of Amherst College, and Brent Wilkes of the League of United Latin American Citizens.
Christopher Beam is a Slate political reporter.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2219165/

Queen Mary 2 This Summer!

I will take two (back-to-back) cruises on the Queen Mary 2, the most elegant oceanliner of all, this summer.

1) 6-night transatlantic crossing that departs New York on July 6 and arrives Southampton, England on July 12. I will be in balcony stateroom 4038.

We will remain on the ship for:

2) 8-night, roundtrip from Southampton that departs July 12. I will be in balcony stateroom 6081.

It will make stops in Cherbourg, France, Lisbon, Portugal, Vigo, Spain, Bilbao, Spain, LaRochelle and Brest in France. We will disembark day #5 (July 17) in Bilbao to visit my brother, his wife, and 2 sons. They live in Bilbao. We will spend July 17-20 at the Sheraton Bilbao.

On July 20, I will return to Miami (from Bilbao) via Madrid on American Airlines.

I am so excited!

Egypt considers official national dress for men

By Waleed Badran BBC Arabic
The galabeyya, a traditional ankle-length gown worn by Egyptian men, may be about to get official status if an Egyptian MP gets his way.
Mustapha al-Gindy wants the simple galabeyya, until now more associated with men in rural areas or manual labourers, to be promoted as the national costume of Egypt.
"Everywhere, except Egypt that is, people have their national dress," Mr Gindy protests.

"In Egypt, if you wear a galabeyya, you might find yourself barred from 70% of public places. This is both unconstitutional and inhuman."
“ People can wear what they like. The galabeyya should just not be off limits ”
Doaa Saleh, civil engineer
"'This is particularly ironic in a country where close to three quarters of our male population wear galabeyyas."

"In a galabeyya, you can't tell a George from a Muhammad," Mr Gindy adds, referring to the country's religious make-up in which Muslims outnumber Christians by 9-to-1.
What he calls "the war against the galabeyya" has resulted in other costumes coming to prominence and he believes threatening the national identity.
"You get Saudi, Afghan, Pakistani, Omani galabeyyas instead. The list goes on," he says.

And he wants Egyptians to wear their own national galabeyya with pride when they travel abroad, instead of adopting the local variations.
While some MPs wear the galabeyya in the Majlis or parliament, Mr Gindy says you will only see Saudi tourists in their national dress at places such as the opera house or up-market hotels.

'Just for show'
But some residents from poorer neighbourhoods of Cairo are not as sympathetic as you might think.

Abdessalam Munir, a teacher, told the BBC: "I wouldn't like to be judged by something I wouldn't like to wear".
"The galabeyya is not synonymous with men of Egypt's poorer backgrounds. We have our shirts, trousers, suits and all," he said.
Meanwhile, journalist Heba Qudsi thinks the idea of a national identity is better served by things other than a clothes.
"Our identity as Egyptians goes far beyond the galabeyya. This is an organic identity; it keeps with the pace of life, it evolves," she says.
"A normal dress or suit is not a blind imitation of the West. The whole world dresses this way," she adds.

Businessman Sherif Saad is far from impressed. "The less said about that the better. Everyday, people come up with that sort of nonsense. You'd do well to ignore it."
But Doaa Saleh, a civil engineer, thinks the idea is not a bad one.
"When Jamal Sleiman (a well-known Syrian actor) donned the galabeyya, he looked quite dishy, didn't he?" she says.
She hopes the Egyptian galabeyya will enjoy the same cultural status as the Jilbab in the Gulf countries.

"In the end, it's a matter of personal preference. People can wear what they like. The galabeyya should just not be off limits, if people choose to wear it."

(Translated from Arabic by Saher Fares)
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/8039876.stm

Published: 2009/05/12 06:31:42 GMT

© BBC MMIX

Global Entry--New Expedited US Customs Entry Process

The Global Entry program (tinyurl.com/cwolxh) is a new program managed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection which allows pre-approved, low-risk travelers expedited clearance upon arrival into the United States, utilizing automated kiosks located at JFK, Dulles, Houston, LAX, Atlanta, O’Hare, and Miami airports. Applications must be completed online (goes-app.cbp.dhs.gov). A non-refundable $100 per-person fee is payable at the time of application. The pass is good for five years.

China’s Graduates Face Grim Job Prospects

NBC news reports that graduation is just a month away and millions of college students in China are expected to hit the streets during what is the country’s tightest job market in decades.

In anticipation of keen competition, most of this year’s 6.1 million graduates have been searching high and low for work the past few months. But they join an estimated two to three million graduates from previous years who still haven’t found jobs.

The graduate glut isn’t simply the result of a slowing economy. It’s the product of increased college enrollment and the expanding number of campuses. In 1998, there were 3.4 million college students in China. Last year, there were just over 20 million.

It’s been a tremendous investment in human capital, as one economist put it, but it hasn’t quite turned out the way the government’s hoped. Aside from unemployment concerns, many students – and prospective employers – complain that the new graduates haven’t got the right training or skills.
And for the millions of parents who save and scrimp to put their child through university, it’s hard for them not to wonder whether it was worth it – would their child have been better off entering the job market straight out of high school?

Posted: Monday, May 18, 2009 1:24 PM
By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer

Census predicts declining immigration slows Asian, Hispanic growth

Declining immigration slows Asian, Hispanic growth by Hope Yen, AP News

Deterred by immigration laws and the lackluster economy, the population growth of Hispanics and Asians in the U.S. has slowed unexpectedly, causing the government to push back estimates on when minorities will become the majority by as much as a decade.

Census data released Thursday also showed that fewer Hispanics were migrating to suburbs and newly emerging immigrant areas in the Southeast, including Arkansas, Tennessee and Georgia, staying put instead in traditional gateway locations such as California.

The nation's overall minority population continues to rise steadily, adding 2.3 percent in 2008 to 104.6 million, or 34 percent of the total population. But the slowdown among Hispanics and Asians continues to shift conventional notions on when the tipping point in U.S. diversity will come — estimated to occur more than three decades from now. Black growth rates remain somewhat flat.

Thirty-six states had lower Hispanic growth in 2008 compared with the year before. The declines were in places where the housing bubble burst, such as Nevada and Arizona, which lost construction jobs that tend to attract immigrants.
Other decreases were seen in new immigrant destinations in the Southeast, previously seen as offering good manufacturing jobs in lower-cost cities compared to the pricier Northeast. In contrast, cities in California, Illinois and New Jersey showed gains.

In Arkansas, manufacturing and poultry companies have cut hours and workers, leaving a growing number of Hispanics unable to cover their mortgage payments, said Maribel Tapia, a housing counselor in Fayetteville, Ark. Fathers are moving out of state, where other relatives have lines on menial jobs that support the families they leave behind, she said. Police in northwest Arkansas created an immigration task force with the help of U.S. immigration agents.

"I don't think it's more likely they're going back to Mexico or El Salvador or wherever they're from," she said. "They're just calling different family members in different states and asking around about work. They just pack up and move."
The political effects can be high. Minorities turned out in record numbers last November to vote, largely for Democrat Barack Obama, and Hispanic groups are now flexing their growing clout in future elections as they push immigration reform.
More than a dozen states also stand to gain or lose House seats after the 2010 census depending on last-minute shifts in population.

"Not just whites are staying put, but minorities are staying put and immigrants are staying put," said Mark Mather, associate vice president of the nonprofit Population Reference Bureau, citing in part a declining economy that has locked the U.S. population largely in place.

"I was surprised the drop in Hispanic growth rates wasn't bigger given the decline in immigration," he said. "Government policy will certainly have a major effect on future race and ethnic composition if Congress takes some action on immigration reform."

The Census Bureau projected last August that white children will become the minority in 2023 and the overall white population will follow in 2042. The agency now says it will recalculate those figures, typically updated every three to four years, because they don't fully take into account anti-immigration policies after the September 2001 terror attacks and the current economic crisis.

The new projections, expected to be released later this year, could delay the tipping point for minorities by 10 years, given the current low rates of immigration, David Waddington, the Census Bureau's chief of projections, said in a telephone interview.

"Policies changed," he said, in explaining why the scientific estimates were no longer valid.

According to the latest data, the percentage growth of Hispanics slowed from 4.0 percent in 2001 to 3.2 percent last year; their slowed population growth would have been greater if it weren't for their high fertility — nearly 10 births for every death.

Asians also slowed their population increases from 3.7 percent in 2001 to about 2.5 percent. Hispanics and Asians still are the two fastest-growing minority groups, making up about 15 percent and 4.4 percent of the U.S. population, respectively.
Blacks, who comprise about 12.2 percent of the population, have increased at a rate of about 1 percent each year. Whites, with a median age of 41, have increased very little in recent years due to low birth rates and an aging boomer population.
The migration shift could continue for a while, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, citing the bursting of an unprecedented housing bubble in 2005-2006 that is helping reshape the economy.

"What this means is that the idea of creating new Asian and Hispanic enclaves in different parts of the United States will undergo a bit of a wall," said Frey. "Those staying in these enclaves will be competing for jobs with long-term residents, while others will return to social support systems in major gateways."
Six U.S. counties saw their minority populations become the majority, including Orange County, Fla., the nation's 35th most populous county that is home to Orlando. Webster County in Georgia was majority-minority in 2007 but reverted back to white majority in 2008.

In all, about 309 of the nation's 3,142 counties, or one in 10, have minority populations greater than 50 percent. Other counties that become majority-minority in 2008 were Stanislaus in California; Finney in Kansas; Warren in Mississippi; and Edwards and Schleicher counties in Texas.

Other findings:
_There are 48 majority Hispanic counties nationally; the top 10 were all in Texas. The gateway cities of Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Houston and Chicago had the greatest number of Hispanics.
_Seventy-seven counties are majority-black; all were in the South. Atlanta edged past Chicago in the number of blacks, ranking second after New York City. They were followed by Washington and Philadelphia.
_Honolulu County, Hawaii, was the only majority Asian county in the nation. New York City had the highest population of Asians, surpassing Los Angeles. Asians also numbered the most in San Francisco; San Jose, Calif.; and Chicago.
_California, the nation's most populous state, also had the most number of whites. Maine and Vermont had the highest share of whites at 95 percent each.

In Nashville, Tenn., Maria Lopez, a 49-year-old Mexican immigrant, said business is down 80 percent at the restaurant she runs, and 10 to 15 people come in a day asking for jobs, mostly Hispanics.
Lopez said she had to cut back on the amount of money she was sending back home to her family in Mexico. Although she's been in the U.S. for 13 years, she is thinking about returning to Mexico.

"I am just making enough to pay the lease and the bills," Lopez said through a translator. "If things continue like that, I will leave."

The 2008 census estimates used local records of births and deaths, tax records of people moving within the U.S., and census statistics on immigrants. The figures for "white" refer to those whites who are not of Hispanic ethnicity. Since the government considers "Hispanic" an ethnicity, people of Hispanic descent can be of any race.
___
Associated Press writers Frank Bass in East Dover, Vermont, Jon Gambrell in Little Rock, Ark., and Kristin M. Hall in Nashville, Tenn., contributed to this report.
Census Bureau: http://www.census.gov

May 14, 2009 05:38 EST
Imported from blog: http://www.karlascottspeaker.blogspot.com

Bhutan Knows Happiness

Recalculating Happiness in a Himalayan Kingdom By Mydans

If the rest of the world cannot get it right in these unhappy times, this tiny Buddhist kingdom high in the Himalayan mountains says it is working on an answer.
“Greed, insatiable human greed,” said Prime Minister Jigme Thinley of Bhutan, describing what he sees as the cause of today’s economic catastrophe in the world beyond the snow-topped mountains. “What we need is change,” he said in the whitewashed fortress where he works. “We need to think gross national happiness.”

The notion of gross national happiness was the inspiration of the former king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, in the 1970s as an alternative to the gross national product. Now, the Bhutanese are refining the country’s guiding philosophy into what they see as a new political science, and it has ripened into government policy just when the world may need it, said Kinley Dorji, secretary of information and communications.
“You see what a complete dedication to economic development ends up in,” he said, referring to the global economic crisis. “Industrialized societies have decided now that G.N.P. is a broken promise.”

Under a new Constitution adopted last year, government programs — from agriculture to transportation to foreign trade — must be judged not by the economic benefits they may offer but by the happiness they produce.

The goal is not happiness itself, the prime minister explained, a concept that each person must define for himself. Rather, the government aims to create the conditions for what he called, in an updated version of the American Declaration of Independence, “the pursuit of gross national happiness.”

The Bhutanese have started with an experiment within an experiment, accepting the resignation of the popular king as an absolute monarch and holding the country’s first democratic election a year ago.

The change is part of attaining gross national happiness, Mr. Dorji said. “They resonate well, democracy and G.N.H. Both place responsibility on the individual. Happiness is an individual pursuit and democracy is the empowerment of the individual.”

It was a rare case of a monarch’s unilaterally stepping back from power, and an even rarer case of his doing so against the wishes of his subjects. He gave the throne to his son, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, who was crowned in November in the new role of constitutional monarch without executive power.
Bhutan is, perhaps, an easy place to nimbly rewrite economic rules — a country with one airport and two commercial planes, where the east can only be reached from the west after four days’ travel on mountain roads.

No more than 700,000 people live in the kingdom, squeezed between the world’s two most populous nations, India and China, and its task now is to control and manage the inevitable changes to its way of life. It is a country where cigarettes are banned and television was introduced just 10 years ago, where traditional clothing and architecture are enforced by law and where the capital city has no stoplight and just one traffic officer on duty.

If the world is to take gross national happiness seriously, the Bhutanese concede, they must work out a scheme of definitions and standards that can be quantified and measured by the big players of the world’s economy.

“Once Bhutan said, ‘O.K., here we are with G.N.H.,’ the developed world and the World Bank and the I.M.F. and so on asked, ‘How do you measure it?’ ” Mr. Dorji said, characterizing the reactions of the world’s big economic players. So the Bhutanese produced an intricate model of well-being that features the four pillars, the nine domains and the 72 indicators of happiness.

Specifically, the government has determined that the four pillars of a happy society involve the economy, culture, the environment and good governance. It breaks these into nine domains: psychological well-being, ecology, health, education, culture, living standards, time use, community vitality and good governance, each with its own weighted and unweighted G.N.H. index.

All of this is to be analyzed using the 72 indicators. Under the domain of psychological well-being, for example, indicators include the frequencies of prayer and meditation and of feelings of selfishness, jealousy, calm, compassion, generosity and frustration as well as suicidal thoughts.
“We are even breaking down the time of day: how much time a person spends with family, at work and so on,” Mr. Dorji said.

Mathematical formulas have even been devised to reduce happiness to its tiniest component parts. The G.N.H. index for psychological well-being, for example, includes the following: “One sum of squared distances from cutoffs for four psychological well-being indicators. Here, instead of average the sum of squared distances from cutoffs is calculated because the weights add up to 1 in each dimension.”
This is followed by a set of equations:
= 1-(.25+.03125+.000625+0)
= 1-.281875
= .718

Every two years, these indicators are to be reassessed through a nationwide questionnaire, said Karma Tshiteem, secretary of the Gross National Happiness Commission, as he sat in his office at the end of a hard day of work that he said made him happy.

Gross national happiness has a broader application for Bhutan as it races to preserve its identity and culture from the encroachments of the outside world.
“How does a small country like Bhutan handle globalization?” Mr. Dorji asked. “We will survive by being distinct, by being different.”

Bhutan is pitting its four pillars, nine domains and 72 indicators against the 48 channels of Hollywood and Bollywood that have invaded since television was permitted a decade ago.

“Before June 1999 if you asked any young person who is your hero, the inevitable response was, ‘The king,’ ” Mr. Dorji said. “Immediately after that it was David Beckham, and now it’s 50 Cent, the rap artist. Parents are helpless.”
So if G.N.H. may hold the secret of happiness for people suffering from the collapse of financial institutions abroad, it offers something more urgent here in this pristine culture.

“Bhutan’s story today is, in one word, survival,” Mr. Dorji said. “Gross national happiness is survival; how to counter a threat to survival.”

Thimphu Journal May 7, 2009

Caramel Macchiato Conquers Mitteleuropa

Say hello to a new brand of Central European excess: Starbucks has arrived in Warsaw.

After the new Starbucks opened, I walked by the place a couple of times just to see the crowds. Strategically located midway between the university and the stock exchange, the world's best-known coffee franchise immediately attracted a well-heeled clientele. Lines twisted around the shop and out the door. Up and down the street, bluejeaned students and dark-suited stockbrokers carried their white paper cups with pride, the famous green labels facing outward.

Yes, Starbucks has come to Warsaw, Poland, at last. The brand might be out of fashion in the United States; the company might be losing money. Its share price might be about one-third of what it was at its peak in 2006; it might have diluted its once-exclusive image through massive overexpansion. (After drinking the watery brew served by a sullen barista in a Starbucks at the Salt Lake City airport recently, I mentally cheered the chain's decision to shut 600 U.S. shops.) But here in Central Europe, the arrival of Starbucks has been greeted with undiluted enthusiasm—so much enthusiasm, in fact, that the phenomenon seems, to me, to require further explanation. Starbucks knockoffs have been available in most Polish cities for the better part of a decade. Older cafes, the kind that serve coffee in china cups, have been available for the better part of three centuries. Looking at that line of twentysomethings, all waiting patiently for the chance to pay twice as much for a cup of coffee as they would across the street, one had to wonder what was up.

The answer lies partly in the magic of brand names and status symbols—but also in the psychology of the post-Communist world. The arrival of McDonald's in Warsaw in the early 1990s signified for many the arrival of capitalism in Poland. The arrival of Starbucks in Warsaw, as in Prague, Czech Republic (it got there a few months ago), and possibly Budapest, Hungary (where it's been promised for years), signifies the entry of Central Europe not just into the capitalist world but into the world of 21st-century-style prosperity.

It also signifies a very real set of economic and psychological changes. After half a century of being told by their Communist governments that the future lay in factory jobs and mining (it didn't), upwardly mobile Poles now aspire to different sorts of jobs: in fashion, in courtrooms, in computers; jobs that require hardworking employees to drink their coffee on the run; jobs that also leave them with enough leisure to hang out at Starbucks, doing deals. Many already have such jobs. A couple of summers ago, I ran into an American who was scouting for Starbucks on a Polish beach. He was trawling Baltic summer resorts, trying to work out whether there were enough people around willing to pay $3 for a cup of coffee. Obviously, someone has decided that there are.

And if you haven't quite attained that financial latitude, you can at least pretend you have at Starbucks. If you are still a student, or if you are just starting out in stockbrokering or fashion, you might not have the money to buy designer shoes or a new car. You are probably more likely to indulge in small luxuries, such as overpriced coffee. (A Hungarian friend reports that business is booming in Budapest beauty salons for the same reason.)

By the same token, when you don't have an especially nice place to live—if you live, for instance, in a dormitory—you might well prefer to spend your afternoons in an attractive coffeehouse. And here is where the Starbucks ethos meshes so well with the cultural history of central Europe: At the height of their popularity, the coffeehouses of 19th-century Vienna, Warsaw, or Budapest were famously frequented by people who didn't live in particularly lush apartments and therefore preferred to spend their time in rooms decorated like the salons of the upper classes. Hence the association of coffeehouses with poets, literati, revolutionaries, and other assorted riffraff. Hence the attraction for students today. As for the stockbrokers, they are simply back where they belong: Some of the world's stock exchanges got their start in coffeehouses, since merchants and traders were once outsiders, too.

In fact, with the opening of a Warsaw Starbucks, one might even say the coffeehouse has reached the end of a certain cycle. Born in Central Europe, where it embodied an ideal of luxury and a set of aspirations; landing in Seattle, where it came to embody a different kind of luxury and a different set of aspirations; now imported back to Central Europe, aesthetically transformed but essentially fulfilling the same function, the coffeehouse appears to have come full circle at last.

By Anne Applebaum
Posted Monday, May 4, 2009, at 8:03 PM ET
Anne Applebaum is a Washington Post and Slate columnist. Her most recent book is Gulag: A History.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2217593/