Fuck Nickel-Bag Joe
I love Sheriff Joe! Yeah, he might be waging a scorched-earth campaign against Mexicans of all legal statuses, an effort so brutal it recently inspired a thousands-large march against him, but the man some call Arpayaso (payaso meaning "clown" in the tongue of Cervantes) is a wonderful tool for immigrants-rights activists because he exposes the easy hypocrisies of Know-Nothings. Arpayaso is a hero to them, earning book deals, a television show on the Fox News Channel and so much veneration you'd figure he was a living, lard-lad Lourdes. But these self-professed law-and-order types conveniently ignore the tens of millions of dollars in police-brutality and wrongful-death settlements won against the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office under Arpayaso, dismiss criticism from immigration officials for Arpayaso's abuse of 287(g) as Aztlanista guff, and wholeheartedly agreed with his decision to jail my mick bosses at New Times two years ago in a chilling effort to quash the First Amendment.
Who cares? All this is fine for the Know-Nothings as long as Arpayaso persecutes Mexicans. The same thing happened in the Mexican's home base of Orange County, California, where our felon of an ex-sheriff, Mike Carona, became a Know-Nothing hero after proposing that his agency become the first in the country to receive migra training — never mind that Carona had multiple mistresses, gave badges to political donors, and nicknamed his penis "The Little Sheriff." On that note, it's with a heavy corazón that I now anoint wherever Arpayaso's shadow lies as the Mexican-hating capital of America, supplanting my Orange County, which birthed the Minuteman Project, Mendez vs. Westminster, anti-immigrant propositions copied nationwide, and currently houses Taco Bell. Chinga tu madre, Arpayaso: we'll get that title back eventually . . .
Over here in the East Coast (the only coast that counts), I've noticed that due to the recent slowdown in the economy, more and more of my Hispanic hermanos in the construction business have begun to lay off jodidos Mexicans and replaced them with their cheaper, non-union Guatemalan and Bolivian equivalent. Are my panas guilty of some sort of Hispanic-on-Latino discrimination, or are they just capitalistas puros by taking advantage of the free and unfettered flow of arriving illegal Maya and Aymara indios to increase their profit margin?
Cuban Pete
What do you think? Sure, the housing crash has affected construction workers — the Pew Hispanic Center's "Latino Labor Report" last year estimated Latinos lost nearly 250,000 jobs in the industry, with about 152,000 of those laid off being wabs — but captains of industry have always tried to undercut the American working man by hiring lower-wage workers. If it wasn't Chinese, it was Polacks. Once African-Americans, now Mexicans. Moral of the story? Workers of the world, unite against the Guatemalan menace!
