CELEBRATE! CELEBRATE! WE'RE HISPANIC! (CALL SECURITY!)

By Juan Montoya

Q: What's Hispanic?
A: When her father finds out she has a Mexican boyfriend.
Q: What's Herpanic?
A: When her mother finds out.

This joke used to make the rounds at the time I was in grad school in Madison, Wis., and the guys and gals from the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (Mecha, for short) used to hang out in the Rathskeller in the student union on the shores of Lake Mendota.
It is, I suppose, rather ethnocentric now that I think bout it, but hey, everyone has to sow their oats in college at least once.
This memory comes to me as I scan the papers and the cyber news and notice that we're smack in the middle of Hispanic Heritage Month. Between September 16th (Day of Mexican Independence) and October 12 (Columbus Day or Dia de la Raza), Hispanics are supposed to be appreciated.
There's the perfunctory grito celebrations, the mariachis playing and the dancers in their Aztec getup reminding those that don't know that Hispanics are A-OK.
But Hispanics are already on the U.S. mindset, I'm reminded as I scan through the media's offerings. President Obama promised to make immigration reform a "top priority" but now laments the fact that he can't fix immigration all by his lonesome and plaintively speaks across the aisle looking for Republican leadership to he'p him.
"Only a few years ago you had some Republicans who recognized that we needed to fix our immigration system," he said last month.
That was the same day that presidential wannabe Texas Gov. Rick Perry was implementing his "strategy" to woo Hispanics.
He supported a law in 2011 that allowed undocumented immigrant children to receive in-state tuition at Texas universities and has made sympathetic noises against the Border Wall, even as the state refused to go to court to support border residents against it. Now his supporters are wondering whether those indiscreet acts that got him elected governor in Texas could cost him the support of the rabid Right of his party at the national level.
Just down the Gulf of Mexico, in Alabama, the good folks there passed state laws that make no bones about getting rid of the offending Mexes. A federal judge ruled that police can question motorists and students about their citizenship, denied bond to suspected illegal immigrants, allows courts from enforcing contracts involving illegal immigrants, makes it a felony for an illegal immigrant to do business with the state, and makes it a misdemeanor for an illegal resident not to have immigration papers on them.
Y aun hay mas!Still under her consideration are parts of the law that make it a crime for an illegal immigrant to ask for work, make it illegal to transport or harbor an illegal immigrant (out you go, tio!), and prohibis companies from taking tax deductions for wages paid to workers who are in the country illegally.
The Washington Post reported last year that five states – South Carolina, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Michigan – are looking at Arizona-style legislation, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. NDN, a Washington think tank and advocacy group, said lawmakers in 17 other states had expressed support for similar measures.
And voters in little rural Fremont, Neb., narrowly passed an ordinance that would outlaw hiring illegal immigrants or renting property to them.
"In the first three months of this year (2010), legislators in 45 states introduced 1,180 bills or resolutions dealing with immigrants, an unprecedented number, according to the NCSL. By the end of March, 107 laws and 87 resolutions had been adopted by 34 states, with 38 bills pending," the Post reported.

There's also the move to make English the official language of the United States (What would England say?), to grant citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants born here, rent housing to them and basically deny their reason for existence.
Obviously, not everyone in the United States has the same warm fuzzy feeling about Hispanics that some advocacy groups wish we would have. "Way can't we all just get along?" wailed Rodney King, and you know what happened to him.
When a friend of mine in the group at the U. of Wisconsin student union was told that we would get a whole Hispanic Heritage Month, he thought it over and said: "One month? Just one month? We've had to put up with them for the last 500 years and they just want to give us a month? I want a whole century, bato!"
The way the demographics are going, if they don't deport a whole lot of us in a hurry, that must just happen.