Axel Caballero is well known in the world of Latino and international political organizing. He’s an advocate for multiple causes, including nuclear disarmament, environmental protection, immigration, and human rights. He’s the founder and director of Cuéntame, a news and organizing site for Latinos and a general audience. He has also worked with and been featured by Brave New Films. Axel and his work to provide the public with information and a platform for dialogue represents a true modern day Revolucionario, and for this work he’s nominated for The Mobilizer award. Cheers, Axel!
The Mobilizer Award is sponsored by Univision News, MTV tr3s, MarketWire, Latino Metro, Hispanicize, iNDIGO Project Media. The awards show will take place at SXSWi on March 12, 2012.
Some Latino activists are taking the old saying “Honesty is the best policy” and acting on it in a thoroughly modern way.
Cuéntame, a project of the social justice-oriented Brave New Foundation, is a social media group whose name translates as “count me” or “tell me your story.” Based in Culver City, Calif., the project is using Internet videos to let Latinos tell their stories and raise awareness of a variety of issues. Its video series An Honest Conversation deals with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender issues, including HIV, which disproportionately affects gay men, Latinos, and gay men who are Latino.
It’s not easy to raise awareness when people are reluctant to discuss these matters, which is common among Latinos, says Jessica McMunn Macias, a story and content producer for Cuéntame. “It’s very taboo in our community,” she says of LGBT topics and HIV. “An Honest Conversation’s goal is to open up the conversation with families.”
Last October, at the first gay pride event ever held in conservative Lubbock, Texas, Macias found a Latino gay man willing to open up about being HIV-positive. “It was just fate,” she says of encountering Ronnie, a 42-year-old nurse now living in Los Angeles. From an event stage, she asked if anyone would like to share a story. He tapped her shoulder and said he would.
Con su esposa Magdalena, Arturo de Los Santos ha estando luchando por largos meses para conserver la casa en Riverside, California, en donde criaron a sus cuatro hijos y en donde tejieron sus sueños y esperanzas.
Pero a menos que ocurra un milagro de ultimo momento, el sheriff del condado de Riverside podría en cualquier momento evacuar a la familia de la casa que ya reocuparon una vez después de haber sido expulsados anteriormente.
De Los Santos dice que no se van a ninguna parte, que se quedan hasta que negocien con ellos. Toda vez que a diferencia de muchos dueños de casa que simplemente abandonaron sus propiedades porque no los podían pagar, ellos sí pueden. Solamente que el banco no está dispuesto a recibir su dinero.
“Si tanto quiere [el banco] vender la casa, ¿por qué no la vendió durante los seis meses en que estuvo desocupada completamente?”, pregunta Peter Kuhns, organizador del grupo ACCE, que asiste a De Los Santos en su lucha.
Robert Greenwald and Ed Schultz discuss the recent decision by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta that combat troops in Afghanistan will come home a year earlier. The two then dive into what the future holds for Afghanistan after combat troops leave and how Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney needs to get educated about the Afghanistan war.
Is it tougher to be gay or undocumented? This is what Jorge Gutierrez—who is young, gay, Latino and undocumented— discusses in the 4th video of Cuentame’s “An Honest Conversation” series, which focuses on LGBTQ issues in the Latino community.
Gutierrez offers up his inspiring story of breaking through numerous barriers through activism, and how he is now unafraid to open up and give people his honest opinions on all these topics. Through this video you see one young man breaking taboos, challenging conventions and shifting paradigms within and outside of the Latino community. Brave, courageous and up front, Jorge’s “honest conversation” will surprise and inspire you.
LOS ANGELES — Arturo De Los Santos and his wife Magdalena have been fighting to keep the home in Riverside, California, where they raised their four children and on which they have pinned their hopes and dreams.
Barring a last-minute miracle, the sheriff is set to evict them Tuesday morning. But De Los Santos and his family say they are not going anywhere.
Chase’s foreclosure department put the house, located at 3270 Layton Court, up for sale, even as the bank’s own loan modification department was finalizing an agreement that would have allowed the family to stay put.
“They have a department of loan modification and a department of foreclosure, which is stronger,” Arturo De Los Santos told The Huffington Post this weekend, switching back and forth between English and Spanish. He says he is both upset and disgusted because two weeks after receiving an eviction notice, his request for a loan modification was approved, but by then, he was unable to get his house back.
Robert Greenwald and progressive radio host Stephanie Miller, of the Stephanie Miller Show, discuss how deeply invested the Koch Brothers are in the Keystone XL pipeline and how they are trying to influence the 2012 presidential election.
Even in an Occupy world, most Americans don’t know exactly how the 1 percent does what it does. The money media haven’t explained it, and the 1 percent likes things that way.
That’s how Robert Greenwald explained why he and the Brave New Foundation created a new video series. Each short video—one minute apiece—lays out the truth about a different one-percenter. They let their audience choose the subjects. They solicited suggestions on nominees, narrowed them down to thirty, and let their audience vote. The new videos represent five of the top vote-getters, with more videos on the way.
Jorge Gutiérrez, 27, was addressing a hall packed with almost 200 young people in Memphis, Tennessee.
Like him, they were brought to the United States as children. Like him, they grew up as Americans. Although they were bilingual, English was their first language.
Their parents came illegally, so they too, are undocumented.
Then, he told them that he is not only undocumented, but also gay. He asked the pro-immigrant organizations represented there to be inclusive. If there were others who, like him, were undocumented and LGBT, he asked them to stand up and come down to the front.
One by one, more than 20 activists stood up and approached. Some of them were revealing their sexual identity for the first time. Some were well known activists in the DREAMers movement.
Gutiérrez, currently lives in Santa Ana, California. At the age of 10, he arrived illegally from El Cora, Nayarit, Mexico, with his mother, two brothers and two sisters. In 2008 he graduated from Cal State University – Fullerton with a BA in English.
He is undocumented and queer, one of many.
“Some of the most recognized leaders of the DREAMer movement, who never talked about it, are now out of the closet, and are calling on others to do the same,” he told The Huffington Post in a series of phone calls.
Read the full story at Huffington Post’s Latino Voices.
If you happened to watch the Super Bowl in Washington, D.C., Northern Virginia or Maryland, you may have seen an anti-union ad. It was paid for by a nasty little front group called “The Center for Union Facts,” which, as you can guess, lies about unions.
This video exposes the ‘union’ worker as Richard Berman, head of the Center for Union Facts. Here’s what you need to know about him: His own son calls him a despicable person.
Axel Caballero is well known in the world of Latino and international political organizing. He’s an advocate for multiple causes, including nuclear disarmament, environmental protection, immigration, and human rights. He’s the founder and director of Cuéntame, a news and organizing site for Latinos and a general audience. He has also worked with and been featured by Brave New Films. Axel and his work to provide the public with information and a platform for dialogue represents a true modern day Revolucionario, and for this work he’s nominated for The Mobilizer award. Cheers, Axel!
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Some Latino activists are taking the old saying “Honesty is the best policy” and acting on it in a thoroughly modern way.
Con su esposa Magdalena, Arturo de Los Santos ha estando luchando por largos meses para conserver la casa en Riverside, California, en donde criaron a sus cuatro hijos y en donde tejieron sus sueños y esperanzas.
Jorge Gutiérrez, 27, was addressing a hall packed with almost 200 young people in Memphis, Tennessee.
