“Are you Hispanic?” isn’t supposed to be a tough question. Yet every time I meet it while completing a census form or medical history, my pencil hovers between “Yes” and “No” and my eyes search for the most accurate answer, which is never there: “Sort of.”
I’m one of the millions of Americans who occasionally change their ethnic designation. It’s complicated. My mother’s father emigrated with his family from Mazatlán, Mexico, when he was in his teens. He married my grandmother — not Hispanic — in Los Angeles in the late 1920s, and they had two daughters. My grandfather’s family was big, noisy, and still firmly tied to the Mexican state of Sinaloa. When my curly-haired Aunt Gloria was a little girl, the family took her there at festival time and dressed her as an adorable señorita. My mother and Gloria grew up in southern California in the 1940s and ’50s with a Spanish surname and were sometimes told, in those racist “good old days,” that they were “not like the other Mexican girls — you’re clean.” How could that history not be a part of our heritage?read more
Do tax cuts for the wealthy create new jobs? In fact, the exact opposite is true, and well illustrated in recent history.
Raising tax rates for the wealthy creates new jobs.
Why? When rates are raised, the value of a tax deduction is increased in real terms. Hiring a new employee or buying a new piece of equipment is a new business expense. At higher tax rates, the wealthy, and businesses small and large, look to offset taxable profits.
When rates are low, there may be little incentive to hire or replace older equipment because taxes are not perceived as a burden. When rates are high, those same increased expenditures provide a bigger economic benefit through tax savings, thereby creating an additional incentive to spend. High tax rates provide an incentive for expansion, in order to shelter profits from taxes. Higher rates provide an added benefit for risk-taking.
When I graduated high school in 1963, the individual tax rate on married couples was 75 percent on income over $100,000. It was 91 percent on income over $400,000. This was during the Kennedy/Johnson administration.
When I graduated college in 1969 the rates had declined only very modestly to 70 percent on joint incomes over $200,000. This was the beginning of the Nixon Administration. These rates remained relatively unchanged for the following 12 years, through 1981, including the Ford and Carter administrations. The Reagan years followed, lowering individual tax rates throughout his eight years in office.
Looking at the issue historically, how did the extremely high rates of the 1960s through 1981 affect job growth?
In the eight years of the Kennedy/Johnson era, job growth averaged 3.25 percent annually.
In the eight years of the Nixon/Ford era, job growth averaged 2 percent annually.
The four Carter years again provided 3.2 percent annual job growth.
Then came the reduced tax rates of the eight-year Reagan Administration term. Job growth averaged 2.1 percent.
Two Bush presidencies sandwiched the Clinton administration. The combined 12 years of the low tax rate of the Bush presidencies showed the lowest job growth in modern times. Annual rates of job creation averaged less than one-fourth of 1 percent, while the highest individual rates were dropped to 35 percent.
In between the two Bushes, the Clinton Administration raised tax rates on the wealthiest Americans.
The eight Clinton years showed average job growth rebounding to 2.5 percent, a dramatic difference from the lower tax rates of both Bush administrations.
How did the economy thrive during periods of seemingly confiscatory tax rates? It seems likely that the wealthy did not actually pay those rates. With rates that high, individuals and small businesses scrambled to avoid paying those rates by reducing income and profits. Increased tax deductions and business expenses were used to reduce taxable income. Hiring additional employees, buying new equipment — expanding — caused reduced tax liabilities.
When rates are low, the wealthy seek to maximize income. It is good tax planning to report (“bunch”) high income in low tax years. Expansion years are not normally high income years. It takes time for investment in plant, equipment, new employee hiring and training to pay off in higher earnings. Therefore, low tax rates invite complacent, non-risk taking behavior. Raising rates provides the incentive to take action to shield profits from these new higher rates.
The historical record clearly does not support the claim from The Right that, “lowering taxes on the wealthy, creates job growth.” But the truth of the matter is that the exact opposite is the case. It does make sense that The Right would not want to disclose this economic reality.
R. G. Rich is a retired IRS agent living in Tucson, Ariz. He can be contacted at richsqrd@gmail.com
Gubernatorial candidates Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown
by Dave Waddell
Given the nauseating, demoralizing politics that overshadow the complex family issues of illegal immigration, I was heartened to read of the Obama administration’s intentionally laissez-faire treatment of students who were brought to the United States unlawfully as children.
To me, the best way to counter the demonization of all illegal immigrants, including these students, is to put a human face to their plight. So I’d like you to meet “Alicia,” my student.
I put quotation marks around the name because it is an alias. I would prefer to use her real name, but she fears being identified, despite the fact that students like her are increasingly stepping up and speaking out. Alicia was conditioned by her family to not “rock the boat.” That’s understandable when a wrong move could result in detention and deportation.
Alicia is a private person, so I’ve learned only in bits and pieces of her origins in Mexico. Alicia’s father died before she was even a year old, and her mother, who is also deceased, left Alicia in the care of her grandmother at an early age. Even though she lived in Tijuana, Alicia began attending California schools in kindergarten.
When the grandmother became too sickly to care for Alicia, she asked Alicia’s uncle, who is a U.S. citizen, and his wife, who is not a U.S. citizen, to raise her. They relocated Alicia to be with them in the San Diego area, which I assume was the best–if not only–option for the family.
After high school, Alicia went on to become an honor student at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, where she was editor of its nationally-acclaimed student newspaper, The Sun. I recruited Alicia to attend California State University, Chico, some 600 miles from her home. Today, she is one of the top students in our journalism program and an editor for The Orion student newspaper.
One sound bite that I’ve heard from those who would want to send Alicia south across the border goes like this: “What is it about the word illegal that you don’t understand?” In contrast to the Obama Administration, which has the basic common sense to differentiate between students and the criminal elements that it has, in fact, aggressively deported, this sort of rhetoric seeks to portray all undocumented residents as out of the same mold.
Well, they’re not. It was not Alicia’s idea to sneak into the country to take dirty, low-paying jobs away from Americans. She was only about 7 years old when family members brought her to this country to live. She had no choice in the matter.
The politicians who rail against illegal immigrants tend to be the same folks who promote their narrow type of “family values.” Is there a family value of more importance than the willingness of Alicia’s aunt and uncle to care for their orphaned niece, despite their own very modest circumstances? The reality is that Alicia has nothing and no one to go back to in Mexico.
While I tend to be cynical when it comes to politicians of all stripes, it does matter who we elect to high office to the Alicias of our nation—and there more than 700,000 undocumented students in the U.S., according to the New York Times. Would a McCain-Palin administration have decided against deporting undocumented students who arrived in the U.S. as children? I don’t know, but I’m fairly sure that any government initiative to deport them would tear this country apart.
It’s certainly not my purpose here to tout the California gubernatorial candidacy of Democrat Jerry Brown, who has been missing in action on the immigration issue and whose website is still spinelessly silent on the subject. However, this much I know: His mega-rich Republican opponent, Meg Whitman, would bar Alicia and every other undocumented student from admission to all public institutions of higher education in California, a position Brown has been quoted as calling “horrible.”
I know this is Whitman’s position because it’s on her campaign website, while she is simultaneously trying to cozy up to the Hispanic community whose votes she will most likely need to win election. It’s little wonder that I’m politically cynical and that Alicia does not want her real name printed here.
It’s worth noting that Alicia has been married to a U.S. citizen since 2006. In Chico, they live in an apartment they share with other college students. Money is tight because higher education is expensive, and Alicia receives no financial support from her family and is not eligible for student loans. Her husband, who has only a GED, works two part-time jobs to support them. He also has been taking community college classes with the hope of enlisting in the Navy after he’s accumulated a certain number of credits.
One might think that being married to a U.S. citizen who has served in the nation’s armed services would eventually bolster Alicia’s chances of gaining citizenship, but that is by no means a certainty, according to an immigration attorney that I have consulted. So her future is very much in the hands of the politicians that we elect.
As her teacher, I can see that Alicia has much to contribute to our society—yours, mine, and, yes, hers. But it will be impossible to be all she can be when she can’t even obtain a driver’s license or board an airplane. The thought of her having to spend the rest of her days unable to gain legal employment while cloistered in society’s shadows is a very disturbing one to me.
Yes, as a child, she was brought to this country illegally, but she has stayed out of trouble here and worked extremely hard to be an excellent student and to become a professional journalist. In this great nation of immigrants, providing Alicia and others like her with a path to citizenship seems like nothing more than the American way.
Dave Waddell teaches journalism and is faculty adviser to The Orion at California State University, Chico. Respond to this column by writing to chicosol@sbcglobal.net and let us know if we can publish your comments
Chico writer Alexa Valavanis wrote the following column in response to the Aug. 4, 2010 ruling by a federal judge overturning California’s gay-marriage ban.
by Alexa Valavanis
Judge Vaughn Walker doesn’t know my name. I’ve never written him a letter or rang his smart phone. We’re not colleagues or acquaintances or even Facebook “friends.” In fact, there’s a strong possibility the judge and I would defy the theory of “six degrees of separation.”
Which is a long way of saying the chief judge of the U.S. District Court in California, nominated by George H.W. Bush, doesn’t know anything about me. He doesn’t know I value my family and faith above all else. He doesn’t know how deeply I cherish being an American and the individual rights and freedoms both of my grandfathers fought for.
If Judge Vaughn Walker doesn’t know those things, he couldn’t possibly know I would be a loving wife and mother. The kind of wife who will listen and be patient. The kind of mom who will lift her children up to reach life’s joys or hold them close when life hurts. He couldn’t know I’ll teach my children to trust, to be generous and to see the good in things. Nor could he know I’ll do my best to love them unconditionally just as my mother and father have loved me. How could he know I’ll be the grandmother with warm cookies always waiting?
But Judge Walker doesn’t need to know about me. There is no reason for him to know my name. Nor do the thousands of people who have fought for marriage equality in the United States need to know it. They know something far more important — that the rights of American citizens are not determined by a majority vote. They know that under our state and federal constitutions citizens are equal regardless of our leaders, our majorities’ or our minorities’ preferences. Our internal and external differences do not dictate our civil rights in America, and they know that, too.
Today I want to make this pledge to Judge Walker and all those who have fought for marriage equality. I am not making it because they’ve asked or even want me to. It’s not because I think it is their business or anyone else’s business whom I love or create a family with. I make this pledge simply because it is the best way I can think of to say THANK YOU.
I was introduced to flamenco by a blood-letting, like a tailored and sharply-cut red dress whipping out from the back of my head. I was introduced by a woman who had my name, who called herself La Tania, who marked the end of the time when the purity of ballet was enough to contain my six years of age. I watched her dance in Chico State’s Laxson Auditorium, my head wrapped in a turban of white bandages. Wearing my ballet tights and leotard, I had cracked my head open earlier that afternoon on a cold, metallic bathtub rim. La Tania’s resounding footwork helped stem the flow of the hysteria and screams, and transform them into echoing syllables.
That night, the steps of the woman who shared my name told me that I would learn their art – that I would learn to channel emotion into distinctive patterns on a wood floor, into the positioning of my hands, my expressions, my voice. Her steps told me that my passion would not be uncontrolled and explosive, that it would be both ambiguous and exact. Her steps told me that I would have to wait to learn, and I did. For years, a La Tania poster that my mother salvaged from that night hung on my wall, while life accumulated in my body. I gathered wells of experiences I would later draw upon for the development of my own style in flamenco.
Few people in this college town know what flamenco is, and even fewer understand it. It is exotic, an eccentricity, and the mouths and brows of the people I meet pucker slightly when I tell them I am a flamenco dancer. More often than not, all they know is a TV special they saw once on PBS, voluptuous women wearing flamboyant dresses and using those clapper things belly dancers use – what are they called? Oh yes, castanets.
I want them to understand. Flamenco is intensity; concentrated solos when even the guitarist’s dexterous fingers cannot keep up and instead mark time on the guitar’s belly, when even the singer’s haunting melodies, rising up and expanding from the breastbone, cannot hold enough within them. Sometimes the intensity of the steps is harsh and unforgiving. Other times, it is hurt and wounded, playful and caressing, questioning and answering, or wondering and softly loving. The steps speak of unarticulated longing. As flamenco is defiance and pride, it is also vulnerability.
When I was 12 years old, I began studying with Flamenco Andaluz, a small local dance troupe. Mónica, my teacher, has almond-shaped eyes, a small nose, a small mouth, modest and restless red lips, and curly red-blond hair. When she is not dancing, she is talking – telling a funny story in which is hidden some profound truth, singing me a song, or asking me probing questions. But when she is dancing, there is a distinct intensity, a hard stare in her eyes that does not see anything in the room, anything that I can see. She is suddenly fierce, a warrior not of this world. Her rapid footwork grows louder and faster, drowning out and flirting with the guitar. Our guitarist, Richard, stares at her feet, waiting for the signal to resume playing, and suddenly, with Monica’s familiar “Y…” and inflection of the ankle, he begins la llamada, the call to return, the beginning and middle and end of the dance.
When I joined Flamenco Andaluz, there were three experienced dancers in the group, all grown women who had been studying flamenco for three years or more with Mónica and Richard. Mónica would give me a 30-minute private lesson before the other dancers came for class, but I was nearly always following along behind them. Frustrated by my inability to keep up, there were nights when I left class in tears, and once or twice, I took a break of a few months, but I always returned.
In my third year, I began learning las bulerías, one of the fastest dances in flamenco. It is based on a 12-beat cycle with emphasis on certain beats, and so Mónica and Richard began by teaching me the rhythm through palmas, the hand claps that form an integral part of flamenco, with golpes, foot stomps, on the accented beats. As I practiced it, they refused to let me count out loud, and if they thought I was counting in my head, they would ask, “Are you counting? Are you counting? You shouldn’t be counting. Just feel it.”
But for almost a year, as much as I tried, I couldn’t feel it. My bulerías were off because I couldn’t grasp the rhythm, much less match my steps to it. I lacked compás – rhythm – one of the worst faults in a flamenco dancer.
One afternoon, after another unsuccessful attempt at the solo I had been assigned in las bulerías, I sat in a chair against the back wall, watching the other dancers and concentrating on the guitar. Someone performed the familiar steps to the llamada I had seen countless times before, and I had an epiphany. Instinctively and intellectually, I understood the compás. Outwardly, there was no instantaneous result. But over the course of the next few months, my steps gradually fell into the right places.
Feeling las bulerías was a breakthrough. When I began to feel the compás, the steps began to come naturally. When the steps began to come naturally, I began to feel the underlying emotion in the dance. And when I began to feel the underlying emotion, I began to develop my own style in flamenco, a process that now, at the age of 18, I know will be lifelong.
Flamenco Andaluz has evolved, and it’s just Mónica, Richard and me now. Beginning students come for a few weeks, give up, stop coming. At first, Mónica didn’t understand why no one ever stayed. But then, she realized that they don’t understand that passion is layered, that it is precise, that expressing it in flexible hands and ready feet is not any easier than expressing it in words. Now, when beginning students come, we try to explain. You will not learn this by next week, or by next month, or even by next year, we say. In flamenco, you need patience. You need endurance. It seems to help, but they stop coming anyway.
We want them to understand: flamenco is disciplined passion, marked precision, impossible to feign. The compás is not counted, but felt. The emotion is not defined, but open to the dancer’s interpretation. We want to tell them: flamenco is difficult; to have it, one must want it, and to want it, one must communicate with it. It is demanding. It speaks in the imperative. It took a long, long time, years, to trust me enough to live inside of me. But when it did, I began to feel it all the time and then had to learn to dominate it. It wells up from my center of gravity, runs wildly through my thighs, illuminates my power.
We want to tell them: flamenco is a paradox, it is about unrestrained control. We want them to realize: passion, as defined by flamenco, is not what you think it is. It is not what this culture says it is. It is not always loud noises and forceful motions and lots of stomping. Often, passion, as manifested through flamenco, is subtlety. It is theatrical in that it can be a facial expression. It is geometrical in that it can be the angle made by an arm. It is the way a shawl looks, tossed on the ground.
Two years ago, Mónica and Richard performed at Chico’s largest annual dance event, Keeping Dance Alive. They performed a piece called las peteneras, a solo about a woman named Petenera. It is a subtle dance, alternately enraged and sorrowful, commanding and seductive. It is a dance that relents to tragedy. As I watched from the balcony, the boy sitting next to me, 10 or so years old, colored during their entire performance, looking up occasionally to return immediately to his drawing.
Halfway through the dance, he said to his father, “I don’t get it.” There was a pause. Then his father said, “Yeah, I don’t really either.”
In the most widely-read review of the event, the author commented that she expected “a fiery interlude from Monica Taboada…but her movements were too slow.” Mónica was more upset and disillusioned than I’d ever seen her. Las peteneras is heavily emotional, and the writer’s criticism came as an insult, even to me, though I had not danced. Sentiment, not speed, is at the very heart of flamenco, and the writer did not understand that.
It was then that both of us understood that in such a small town, flamenco could not easily be accepted. Popular culture condenses emotion, compartmentalizes it, in contrast with flamenco’s amplification and ambiguity of emotion. Popular culture hunts down emotion, seeks to carve out what is negative and pursue only what is positive, but flamenco wraps its limbs around every scrap of emotion it can find while never getting carried away with it. Popular culture seeks perfection, but flamenco requires imperfection. Popular culture favors choreography for synchronicity, but above all, flamenco favors improvisation for authenticity.
I know that for these reasons, people will continue to say that I dance “flamingo” and will continue to ask me what it is, why I do it. I will continue to hesitate, wishing to explain beyond recalling the TV specials, but also knowing that my only explanation is my ever-imperfect dance. My only explanation is that once, when I was six, I claimed flamenco, found it in my blood, my feet, my hands, my name.
Tania Flores is the former arts editor of ChicoSol. Contact her at taniaarabelleflores@gmail.com.
by Tania Flores and Oliver Wong | Posted June 1, 2009
People inhabit the Earth. These simple, inconsequential creatures mow lawns, collect knick-knacks, walk aimlessly, climb trees (sometimes even fall out of them), and bleed. Some people throw things, such as footballs, fits, and paper airplanes. They might also read books, pick flowers, or join gangs.
People love to run around and dance, create music and harmony. But they also enjoy making bombs and destroying lives. And for some unfathomable reason, they hardly ever use public pay phones anymore. People are obsessed with discovering the unknown, they are afraid to make mistakes, foolishly think that pillars can make them strong. They drink water, blow up balloons, laugh, and learn to recycle. Some people smoosh themselves under vending machines, others contract diseases. People create cures, and support groups. Sometimes people trip and fall flat on their faces, and sometimes they catch themselves before they make that fatal downward plunge. People tend to embarrass themselves more often than not, but they learn to laugh at themselves later in life.
People fly kites, have sex, and buy water. They enjoy light, and shy away from darkness. They pay lots of money for exotic bananas, and then they discard the banana peels. People do yoga, make friends and frenemies. They come together to support each other in times of badness. People create and collaborate. They have an innate desire to nurture and plant things. People talk to each other, or hide in their own solidarity. People create family, and most people tend to wear clothes. People like to feel a sense of self-fulfillment and purpose.
Oh look, here’s a penny! People dismiss pennies as insignificant, and people often feel insignificant themselves. After all, we are 435 students of life in a waxing world of 7 billion. And that makes our class add up to a grand total of… $4.35. What can you honestly buy for $4.35? Not a whole lot.
But from this point on, each penny will change hands, add up to other sums, be dirtied and wiped clean. Some pennies will find themselves on the ground next to discarded banana peels, and then will be picked up and seen as lucky. Some will travel the world on paper airplanes. Some, slipped into the machinery of public pay phones, will be converted to conversation. Some will go toward the development of a cure, others to the sustenance of clean water. Some will be spent on sports and physical well-being. Some will try to make it into a world of glamour and fame, but will fall short and land under the vending machine, to be discovered at some later date. And some will be recycled to make new pennies.
It is these experiences that make each penny worth something; it is these experiences that define individuals, give people value. With them, we learn to appreciate the smaller, seemingly insignificant things and see ourselves in them, as well as in the whole, the sum.
To the class of ’09, we hope you spend your pennies wisely.
