Los Angeles' MacArthur Park is the most-populated Central American community and most densely populated immigrant community in the U.S. One of my goals in programming the concerts there is for the music to represent what is happening in the community. Finding new artists from Central America has, however, been a...

By Javier D. Martinez, Deputy Director of Legislative Affairs, NCLR, U.S. Army veteran

As millions of Americans plan their Memorial Day weekend activities, NCLR would like to take the time to remember our Latino men and women currently serving in the U.S. Armed Forces.

We also commemorate...

I grew up on a street with prostitutes on the corner. The Cove Motel on Cicero Ave. teemed with ragged-looking women and unctuous, terrifying men. At the time, I had no idea who these people were or what they did. All I knew is that white people were rare in...

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) thinks U.S. immigration policy should be like picking dogs. "You want a good bird dog, and you want one that's gonna be aggressive?" Rep. King said last Tuesday. "Pick the one that's the friskiest, the one that's in games the most--not the one that's...

In a unanimous decision penned on May 21, 2012 by Justice Elena Kagan, the U.S. Supreme Court addressed whether a person in removal proceedings must qualify for the benefit of cancellation of removal by meeting the statutory requirements on his own, or whether some of the requirements may be imputed...

One morning fifteen years ago, I woke up choking. Days later I dreamt I was drowning and woke up gasping for air. After that, I occasionally would wake up deprived from the respiratory reflex: I had to make a voluntary effort in order to breathe.

The doctor diagnosed me with...

Last week, the Census Bureau released updated population numbers affirming once again that Latinos are America's largest and fastest-growing minority. There are now 52 million of us residing in the U.S.--nearly one in five Americans. Perhaps the most striking statistic is that more than half of...

SB 1070, the promised DREAM Act veto, and "Self-Deportation". These are immigration stances Mitt Romney's has embraced in the primary and, needless to say, also three big problems that he has with Latino voters, problems which he cannot Etch-A-Sketch his way out of. But what makes Romney's immigration stances perilous...

Yes, this is yet another article about immigration. However, this isn't about immigration policy. Or the economic benefits of immigration or whether immigration is a drain on America. I'm not even trying to the argument that immigration bolsters the workforce. This isn't about the practicality of deporting 10 million people....

Award-winning broadcaster Tavis Smiley and one of the nation's leading intellectuals, Dr. Cornel West, recently released a new book called The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto (SmileyBooks, April 17, 2012), which challenges our assumptions about poverty. I got a chance to listen in on a...

The recent controversy surrounding a visa for Fidel Castro's daughter to visit the U.S. is another example of the obvious: the United States' embargo of communist Cuba is a failure.

Fifty-two years after U.S. policy first sought to break the communist dictatorship with an economic embargo, the Castro regime is...

As soon as President Obama announced his support for marriage equality earlier this month, pundits and Republican strategists started speculating that the president's pro-equality stance would cost him among Latino voters. They figured that most Latino voters are Catholic, therefore they must be willing to vote against the President because...

Take a closer look at Picasso's Guernica. Let its powerful images of the ravages of war confront you: the screaming man engulfed in flames, the bewildered horse, and the howling mother carrying the dead body of her child--all forever unable to escape an unseen horror.

The chaos unfolding seems to...

The ability of a person with modest means to build their assets and achieve economic mobility is at the core of our nation's values and economic success. The ability of citizens to build assets has taken on an even more fundamental importance in the wake of the Supreme Court's Citizens...

With the advent of new media and advances in access to technology the internet is supplementing, complimenting and slowly siphoning viewers from television. While the delivery mechanisms for viewing video are changing, mainstream content providers remain frustratingly rooted in a world which ignores the demographic changes...

Chanclaso

I'm sending two flying chanclasos to Sherriff Joe Arpaio and to those that continue to elect him into office. Sheriff Joe is back in the news because the Department of Justice - gracias a dios - filed a lawsuit on May 10 against him and his racist Maricopa County...

If Latinos are to fully recover from the ravages of the Great Recession, they will need not simply jobs, but jobs that lead to increased earnings over time and that also have good benefits. In short, they will need what we call "good jobs." Recent evidence from the Economic Policy...