Organizing

One of the peculiar things about living in Central New York is the utterly isolated quality to your life. Now that can be a good thing and it can at the same time be truly deleterious to your mind, body and spirit. I’ve managed to eek out a small niche here. Nonetheless, I’ve kept mi vida together because of technology. Por ejemplo, satellite TV which gives me access to the mana of a rasquache life – namely things like “Lucha Libre.” I can also at any moment switch the satellite TV to one of the audio channels and listen to mi musica. It is also nice to watch even something as infuriating as the news on say Galavision or Univision - at least you can get a gander about what is going on in the rest of the world unlike watching provincial worldnews channels like CNN.

As a pocho, I miss and have insane fantasies about things like being close to a taco shop or getting tamales on a daily basis. At those moments, I think about opening a taco/burrito wagon.I mean it is pretty weird to live in a place where it is totally impossible to get any Mexican food.When I return home to ‘Burque – my first stop is Garcia’s in la Plaza Vieja. The other thing that I miss the most is la vida politica. Everyone know that manitos are all born politicians and that is something that I miss. I participate in local Democratic Party politics, but, my thoughts are patronizingly viewed as mostly mad ravings to los bolillos. Por ejemplo, I kept telling the Deaniacs that Howard had a really serious issue with nuestra gente and wasn’t reaching out to that part of the Democratic Party. In fact, I had some serious e-mail exchanges with some of my colleagues. To this day, I’m told – “You should quit being so obsessed with Hispanic issues.” ROTFL, I always reminded my colleagues that they need to realize that the world is not simply the mostly Anglo world that they see in a rural place like Central New York.

The other thing that has recently been eating away at me is the total lack of formal community organizing for los Hispan@s in Upstate New York. We need to begin to comprehensively put together a program that teaches people how to organize nuestra community, build coalitions with other non-profits and the corporate sector, learn how to run organizations and above all deliver services to the plebe without constant internecine strife and bickering. Syracuse is one of the worst places to be a Hispan@ child in the entire United States. It is time we did something to intervene and alter that situation instead of fighting with each other.