This came right out of the mouth of a Betty Brown who couldn't for the life of her understand why Koreans and Chinese constituents insisted in making her life difficult with their not-in-English names. From Texas lawmaker suggests Asians adopt easier names :: Houston Chronicle:
"Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese-- I understand it's a rather difficult language -- do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here"
Arrogant idiots like Rep. Betty Brown have the nerve to suggest we go back to a time when English language tests were used by racists and bigots everywhere in the United States as a way to disenfranchise millions of non-English speaking Americans citizens, particularly Puerto Ricans.
You know, because people who don't speak English for one reason or another can't have the right to vote.
You know, because it's just not possible that the United States may be technically a bilingual country thanks to that little colony they keep in the Caribbean called Puerto Rico.
Yet what is shocking is this woman's complete lack of understanding of the laws of the land: It is illegal to deny voting rights to any US citizen regardless of their language dominance.
My mother who is a white Puerto Rican woman was told the same thing over 45 years ago when she tried to vote for the first time in the United States. As a Puerto Rican, she is a full citizen and yet was treated as if she were an "illegal immigrant". It's not just that we have a separate culture, the language was a huge issue. For a lower-class white Puerto Rican woman it meant being barred from colleges and literally pushed to work in sweat shops and work herself from the bottom until she could command the language.
Yet we Puerto Ricans are political animals and my mother was inspired by Kennedy, an Irish-Catholic who kinofsortof sold himself to Latino communities as an "immigrant in his own land". When she went to register to vote for the first time, the woman looked at her and said something to the effect that, since she was a white woman anyway, why keep her spic-sounding name. It was because of this experience that my mother not only was hell bent on voting, but became a civil and voting rights activist.
Someday I'll write my mother's story so you can understand the year gaps in what am about to say. My mother met back in the 1960s the guy who helped write the "Puerto Rican Amendment" to the Voting Rights Act. It took her almost 40 years for my to marry Gilberto Gerena Valentín. Although am kind of old for the term, he's technically now my stepfather --and ironically the man who introduced my mother to my father.
Yes, my life is like a friggin' telenovela; but back to the topic at hand.
The Voting Rights Act was amended exactly so that misguided linguists and bigots alike could not claim "but this isn't about race" and still discriminate against non-English speaking minorities. In effect, "linguistic minority" was coined as a way to point to language, not ethnicity nor race as the motive for exclusion. As Gerena tells me, the reason why this was called "The Puerto Rican" and not the "Hispanic" or the "Mexican-American" amendment was simple: New York City had a patter of not just chasing Puerto Ricans away from the voting booths but of "spontaneous" apartment fires, evictions and even imprisonment in districts with heavy Puerto Rican populations. Bobby Kennedy, who had integrated the Attoney General's Office during his tenure, understood the power of this constituency. As US Senator, along with Jacob Javits, they introduced this measure in Washington not only as a shrewd move in minority politics but because tactically, it was a genius : You had full American citizens who, instead of being discriminated by race proved that discrimination was rampant in northern states ALSO based on language.
From :
Section 4(e)cases led to the recapture of three counties in New York City under Section 5 of the Act – forcing the City to prove that all future changes would not discriminate. Section 4(e)cases also allowed the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund to convince Congress in1975 that English only election systems were just as exclusive as other tests for voting inthe Deep South. And Section 4(e) cases showed the country that if bilingual electionscould work for Boricuas in New York City – the biggest city in the U.S. – they could work anywhere. This led to the bilingual elections for all Latinos, and Asian Americansand Native Americans as well.Forty years ago Puerto Ricans demanded that Congress protect their right to vote againstpolitical interests that excluded them from realizing their full political strength.Democracy in New York and in the United States has been more open and improved ever since.
That this woman, with one of the largest Mexican-American voting blocks in the nation doesn't know it's illegal to even hint at denying the right to vote to US citizens who don't speak English is amazing to me. So here's the text from the "Puerto Rican Amendment" to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. She needs to get schooled:
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