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“Urgente y original, la historia de Randy Jurado Ertll nos obliga a resolver algunos de los problemas más urgentes e importantes de nuestros tiempos.”—Matt Rothschild, editor de The Progressive Magazine Randy Jurado Ertll, un salvadoreño americano, creció en el Sur Centro de Los Ángeles a fines de los años 1970 y durante los 80, y también vivió en El Salvador cuando era un niño, así como en Rochester, Minnesota, Washington, D.C., y en Alexandria, Virginia. En cada una de estas ciudades presenció la dinámica y retos de la comunidad Latina. Porque ha vivido y trascendido las luchas, es capaz de captar una imagen realista y compasiva de la comunidad Latina a través de esta experiencia convincente narrada en este poderoso libro.
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YOU CAN PRE-ORDER BOOK: UPCOMING SPANISH LANGUAGE EDITION OF HOPE IN TIMES OF DARKNESS
July 25th, 2010 by Randy Jurado Ertll Add Your Comment »NAACP retracts criticism of USDA worker
July 20th, 2010 by Randy Jurado Ertll Add Your Comment »NAACP leaders called Tuesday on the Obama administration to reconsider its ousting of a black Agriculture Department worker, saying that a conservative website edited her comments to make them seem racist.
NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous said in a statement that the group was “snookered” into believing that USDA employee Shirley Sherrod expressed racist sentiments at a local NAACP meeting in Georgia earlier this year. Jealous said conservative activist Andrew Breitbart, whose website posted video of Sherrod’s remarks, deceived millions of people by releasing only partial clips. He said the full video makes clear that Sherrod was telling a story of racial unity.
“The tape of Ms. Sherrod’s speech at an NAACP banquet was deliberately edited to create a false impression of racial bias, and to create a controversy where none existed,” Jealous said Tuesday afternoon. “This just shows the lengths to which extremist elements will go to discredit legitimate opposition.”
The Obama administration said it was standing by its decision to oust Sherrod, despite evidence that her remarks were misconstrued and calls for the USDA to reconsider.
The controversy began Monday when the conservative website biggovernment.com posted a two-minute, 38-second video clip of Sherrod’s remarks to a local NAACP chapter. The Huffington Post said a YouTube video was then aired on Fox News. The footage has stoked racial and political tension amid allegations by the NAACP that the Tea Party movement is bigoted.
Newsvine: Was USDA official unfairly forced out?
Sherrod said she was on the road Monday when USDA deputy undersecretary Cheryl Cook called her and told her the White House wanted her to resign because her comments were generating a cable news controversy.
“They called me twice,” she told The Associated Press in an interview. “The last time they asked me to pull over to the side of the road and submit my resignation on my Blackberry, and that’s what I did.”
‘It hurts me’
Sherrod said administration officials weren’t interested in hearing her explanation. “It hurts me that they didn’t even try to attempt to see what is happening here, they didn’t care,” she said. “I’m not a racist … Anyone who knows me knows that I’m for fairness.”
The administration gave a different version of events.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack — not the White House — made the decision to ask Sherrod to resign, said USDA spokeswoman Chris Mather. She said Sherrod willingly resigned when asked.
In a statement, Vilsack said the controversy surrounding Sherrod’s comments could, rightly or wrongly, cause people to question her decisions as a federal employee and lead to lingering doubts about civil rights at the agency, which has a troubled history of discrimination.
But Sherrod, in an interview with CNN, said her remarks to the NAACP were being intentionally misconstrued by conservative groups stoking racial tensions.
“I was speaking to that group, like I’ve done many groups, and I tell them about a time when I thought the issue was race and race only,” Sherrod told CNN. She said the incident she described in her speech occurred some 24 years ago, when she worked for a nonprofit aid group. “I was telling the story of how working with him helped me to see the issue is not about race. It’s about those who have versus those who do not have.”
The farmer’s wife, Eloise Spooner, 82, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Tuesday that Sherrod helped save their land. Spooner, who considered Sherrod a “friend for life,” said that “the federal official worked tirelessly to help” the couple hold onto their farm as they faced bankruptcy in 1986, the Atlanta newspaper reported.
“Her husband told her, ‘You’re spending more time with the Spooners than you are with me,’ ” Spooner told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “She took probably two or three trips with us to Albany just to help us out.”
In the video, Sherrod is shown talking about “the first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm.” Her remarks came at a local NAACP Freedom Fund banquet, which the video says took place in March this year.
She said in the clip that the farmer had tried to show he was “superior” to her.
“He had to come to me for help. What he didn’t know, while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me, I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him,” she said in the film.
theGrio: USDA official’s punishment doesn’t fit crime“I was struggling with the fact that so many black people have lost their farmland and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land — so I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough,” she added.
USDA
DOCUMENTARY “VOCES INOCENTES” TO BE FEATURED AT THE ARMORY CENTER FOR THE ARTS THIS FRIDAY
July 13th, 2010 by Randy Jurado Ertll Add Your Comment (4) »LATINO HERITAGE PRESENTS “Voces Inocentes” (Innocent Voices documentary) this Friday July 16 at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena. A film about children in El Salvador’s civil war, the summer film series that features documentaries and feature films about Latinos. The Armory Center is located at 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena 91103. Their will be a pre-film panel discussion that will begin around 7:00 p.m. at The Armory. It will be Ena Alcaraz and myself. Please join us.
UNIVISION INTERVIEW WITH NEWS ANCHOR RAUL PEIMBERT – REGARDING BOOK
July 10th, 2010 by Randy Jurado Ertll Add Your Comment (1) »Thank you to Western Justice Center Foundation and all of my friends who attended
July 9th, 2010 by Randy Jurado Ertll Add Your Comment (1) »We had a great, in-depth, thoughtful book related discussion at the Western Justice Center Foundation. Thank you to Monya Kian and Angela Oh. Truly appreciate your help and kindness in sharing your beautiful building space. Will post soon my upcoming book presentation…that will be awesome…
Saludos.
Let’s have a productive discussion Wed. July 7 at 6 p.m. – Western Justice Center Foundation
July 6th, 2010 by Randy Jurado Ertll Add Your Comment (3) »BOOK PRESENTATION AND DISCUSSION AT WESTERN JUSTICE CENTER FOUNDATION THIS WEDNESDAY JULY 7 AT 6:00 P.M.
Location: Western Justice Center Foundation – 55 South Grand Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91105rusted Source of News & Info
Please RSVP to Monya Kian at: monya@westernjustice.org
News Link:
http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/american-life/people/Book-Recalls-Troubles-Promise-of-Salvadoran-Immigrant-Life–97869459.html
People
Book Recalls Troubles, Promise of Salvadoran Immigrant Life in US
Mike O’Sullivan | Los Angeles 06 July 2010
Photo: M. O’Sullivan – VOA
Randy Jurado Ertll
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At least one million people from the Central American nation of El Salvador have made the journey northward to the United States, where they often face hardship in places like inner-city Los Angeles.
Randy Jurado Ertll says the Salvadoran immigrant story is not often heard, “Because there’s not much literature. If you really look at it, you go to the bookstores, the libraries, you rarely find any books that speak of the Salvadoran-American experience,” he explained. “It’s usually Mexican-American, Cuban-American, Puerto Rican; so I felt it was about time that we started telling our own story too.”
El Salvador is a small Central American nation of six million people. It was torn by civil war in the 1980s and hundreds of thousands headed northward to escape the turmoil and poverty. Many entered the United States illegally, and few were granted political asylum.
The U.S. Census Bureau says that in 2007, there were 1.5 million people of Salvadoran background in the United States. Two-thirds were foreign-born, and nearly 40 percent lived in California. Ertll wanted to write a book that tells their story through his own experience.
He runs a social agency called El Centro de Accion Social in the small city of Pasadena, which operates programs for low-income residents, including after-school tutoring and English classes.
Most who take part are Hispanic and some, like Ertll, are Salvadoran-American.
The writer is the product of three cultures. His father was born in France and his mother was Salvadoran. They met in the United States, where Ertll was born.
Because he is U.S.-born, he is an American citizen. But his mother, a Salvadoran who had overstayed her visa, was deported when he was two years old, and he went with her to El Salvador.
When Ertll was five, his mother was able to return to the United States. They settled in a minority neighborhood in south-central Los Angeles plagued by crime and violence. When he was just six-years-old, Ertll recalls a young man across the street being fatally shot. His mother tried in vain to stop the bleeding.
There were racial tensions between African-Americans and Latino immigrants. He says many friends joined gangs, and some would later be killed or wind up in prison. He says the pattern has continued with the younger generation.
“You don’t get an education; you drop out, then you join a gang; and then you live by selling drugs, by hurting your own community,” he said.
Ertll was lucky to get some help along the way, in one case, from a concerned Irish-American teacher who spoke fluent Spanish and helped him learn to read and write, first in Spanish, then in English.
When Ertll was a teenager, his life would change when he was chosen for a program that sends inner-city youngsters to small American cities to pursue their schooling. He left south central Los Angeles to live with a host family in the north-central U.S. city of Rochester, Minnesota. It was home to a large computer manufacturing plant and a world-renowned medical clinic.
“And I would say it was great there because [it was a] different city; it was beautiful; you have IBM, you have the Mayo Clinic, great schools there,” he recalled. “And that was, I would say, a wonderful experience because I was able to focus on studying without all of the hassles of south-central [Los Angeles]; because, believe me, you’re not safe there.”
Returning to Los Angeles, Ertll focused on his studies at Occidental College, where a young Barack Obama had spent two years as a student a decade earlier.
Ertll studied political science and Spanish and then spent a year in Washington. He worked in the office of California Congresswoman Hilda Solis, who has since become the U.S. secretary of labor. Returning to Los Angeles, he worked with the Latino community.
He says inner-city Los Angeles remains a place of hardship with too few jobs. He fears violence that erupted in the city in the 1960s and the 1990s could happen again.
“Those areas can’t continue to be neglected, because otherwise you’re going to have the same problems. You had the Watts riots, you had the L.A. riots; and it’s just a repetitive cycle of violence,” he said.
Randy Jurado Ertll says that immigrant stories are complicated, and that life for new arrivals is difficult. He says for him and many others, the way to a better future is through education.
He believes that big cities should improve their schools. He also says Washington needs to tackle the difficult issue of immigration reform, and resolve the plight of millions of mixed-status families, composed of both American citizens and illegal immigrants.
BOOK PRESENTATION AND DISCUSSION AT WESTERN JUSTICE CENTER FOUNDATION THIS WEDNESDAY JULY 7 AT 6:00 P.M.
Location: Western Justice Center Foundation – 55 South Grand Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91105rusted Source of News & Info
Please RSVP to Monya Kian at: monya@westernjustice.org
Upcoming Book Presentation on Wed. July 7 at 6 p.m. – Western Justice Center Foundation
July 3rd, 2010 by Randy Jurado Ertll Add Your Comment »Book Presentation, Discussion, & Signing at Western Justice Center Foundation
Please join me at Western Justice Center Foundation this coming Wednesday, July 07, 2010 at 6:00 p.m.
Location: 55 South Grand Avenue Pasadena, CA 91105-1602
Please RSVP to Monya Kian: monya@westernjustice.org
or you can reply to this post or e-mail me at: randyertll@yahoo.com
Thank you.
El Centro de Accion Social’s Summer School in the Park
June 29th, 2010 by Randy Jurado Ertll Add Your Comment (1) »Summer School in the Park survives funding challenges
Brenda Gazzar, Staff Writer
Posted: 06/28/2010 08:52:49 PM PDT
PASADENA – Thirteen-year old Maria Rincon of Altadena can’t imagine spending her summer anywhere else.
The Washington Middle School eighth-grader is one of about 150 students participating this year in Summer School in the Park organized by the Pasadena-based nonprofit El Centro de Accion Social.
“I enjoy having summer school in nature,” said Rincon, who attends the program each summer. “It’s something unique.”
El Centro de Accion Social began its annual summer school program Monday at El Centro Park. But this year, the organization had a particularly challenging time with fundraising, securing enough money just weeks before the program’s first day.
“It was really close,” said Randy Jurado Ertll, executive director of El Centro de Accion Social, who said the voluntary program cost about $104,000 in total donations. “It’s like cutting it to the wire.”
The program’s continuation is particularly significant since Pasadena Unified School District – citing a $23million funding gap – canceled much of its summer programming this year.
Summer School in the Park, which offers five weeks of instruction in English, math and social studies “is providing a service to the community here in Pasadena,” said Leo Magallon, who teaches in the El Centro program.
“It’s a great opportunity for students to really interact with each other,” he said.
But PUSD board member Renatta Cooper says she is concerned that existing summer school programs may not be able to accommodate all the students that the district would have served.
“I don’t think there’s anything that fully takes up the slack for us not being able to offer a full plate of summer programs,” she said.
The city of Pasadena has not cut any summer day camp programs for children or increased fees, said Kenny James, the city of Pasadena’s recreations supervisor.
In addition to Summer School in the Park, other summer school opportunities being offered include PasadenaLEARNs and the Pasadena Educational Foundation’s Summer Enrichment Program.
Scholarships are available for some of these programs.
David Montes, a Baldwin Park resident who works for the city of Pasadena, is sending all three of his children to Summer School in the Park.
“Two months of vacation and having them at home, I don’t think that would be OK,” he said.
brenda.gazzar@sgvn.com
, ext. 4496
Books documenting the immigrant experience
June 20th, 2010 by Randy Jurado Ertll Add Your Comment (5) »Books documenting the immigrant experience
By Luis Torres, Correspondent
Posted: 06/19/2010 08:04:57 PM PDT
Updated: 06/20/2010 02:19:14 AM PDT
Today’s headlines are filled with back and forth arguments over Arizona’s controversial new immigration law, SB 1070. The law allows local law enforcement to question suspected illegal immigrants about their status and demand proof that they are either U.S. citizens or legal resident aliens. They risk being deported if they can’t provide such proof.
Civil rights groups have called the law pernicious and have launched a boycott of all things Arizonan. They claim the law invites unfair racial profiling.
Supporters insist the Arizona law does not encourage racial profiling and claim the state is taking necessary steps that the federal government has neglected to take to stem the tide of illegal immigration. It’s against this backdrop that two new books about the immigrant experience have just been published.
One deals with Mexican Americans and the other with the Salvadoran immigrant experience, and by extension, the experiences of recent arrivals from other Central American countries such as Guatemala and Nicaragua.
“Hero Street USA” by Marc Wilson spotlights the remarkable story of a small town in Illinois that has the dubious distinction of being the home of a disproportionate number of its residents who died for their country in World War II and the Korean conflict – all of them Mexican Americans.
“Hope in Times of Darkness: A Salvadoran American Experience” by Randy Jurado Ertll is a slim and pithy
memoir by a Pasadena
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resident who overcame the kinds of obstacles that are common to recent immigrants from Central America.
Both books chronicle the challenges facing new immigrants and both subtly document the contributions immigrants have made to this country, in spirit and in practice.
Marc Wilson writes, “In a nutshell, the story is this: In a 15-month period ending in April 1945, six men from this once unpaved street in Western Illinois were killed in action in World War II. Two more men from the same block were killed in action in the Korean War. That may be the most killed in war from any one block in the United States. But the story runs even deeper.”
The small town, within the shadow of the broad shoulders of Chicago, is Silvis. Wilson traces the historical, economic and political circumstances that contributed to the migration of Mexicans to Silvis and the Midwest during the early part of the 20th century. His admirable research, as personified by these heroic families, reveals the “push/pull” factors that were the catalyst for migration from Mexico.
The Mexican Revolution – which began in 1910 and continued for nearly 20 years – created chaos and dislocation in Mexico. The revolution was a major factor in pushing immigrants across the border.
Simultaneously, there was a desperate need for cheap labor in the United States, because many young American men were in Europe fighting in World War I. That created a magnet for immigrants. Many of the families that eventually settled in the Midwest responded to fliers distributed by U.S. companies, urging Mexicans to come to the United States for jobs on the railroads and in the meat packing houses in and around Chicago.
Free train tickets were distributed to young men eager to work. Tens of thousands of Mexicans came to the United States. Their labor was welcome. Their presence was not.
It was the sons of these early migrants who, born in the United States and thus U.S. citizens, signed up to fight for their country: the USA. They fought valiantly for their country. Many were awarded the Medal of
Honor winners than any other ethnic group. Many were awarded the precious medal posthumously.
Eventually the little street in Silvis (originally Second Street) was re-named “Hero Street USA” in honor of the Mexican Americans who died for their country.
The experiences of Salvadoran immigrants reveal how United States immigration policy and foreign policy are joined at the hip. Randy Jurado Ertll’s personal experiences exemplify that.
The United States government’s unbridled support for the despotic Salvadoran government during the civil war of the 1980s created exiles of thousands of innocent Salvadorans caught in the cross fire of violence. Yet, the U.S. government’s policy of support for that regime made it contradictory for the U.S. to readily grant political asylum to Salvadorans. A pernicious “Catch 22″ for many Salvadoran immigrants.
The author of “Hope in Times of Darkness” followed an arc typical of tens of thousands of Salvadoran Americans. There is a twist to his personal story, however. He was actually born in the United States. His mother had come here without documentation. When Randy was an infant, his mother was deported back to El Salvador. And that’s where he grew up. Eventually, his mother was able to return to the United States with Randy. He was 8 years old. Monumental personal challenges lay ahead.
In his gritty little memoir, Ertll chronicles the trajectory of his life in Los Angeles and Pasadena. Living first in South Los Angeles, he struggled to survive elementary school because he didn’t speak English. Eventually, a love of learning and a few caring teachers helped him turn away from the lure of drugs and gang violence that permeated his neighborhood.
Many of his friends weren’t so fortunate, ending up dead or in prison. Ertll writes: “Poor minorities went on being innocent victims of drive-bys, armed robberies, beatings and murder. Those who suffered the most were beaten by both the police and gang members. They were scared to report crimes because they feared they would be deported or accused of the crimes. Unable to speak English, they had no way to defend themselves.”
Ertll found ways to defend himself – first, on the streets and eventually, through education. He graduated from Occidental College and worked for Congresswoman (now U.S. Secretary of Labor) Hilda Solis. Then he worked for Pasadena (now LAUSD) Superintendent Ray Cortines and eventually became executive director of Pasadena’s nonprofit El Centro de Accion Social. He is now devoted to helping other immigrants overcome the obstacles in their way to becoming productive, contributing Americans.
Both the tales of the Mexican-American veterans documented by Marc Wilson and the trajectory of Randy Jurado Ertll’s life story are reminders of the complexities and subtleties of the immigrant experience in today’s America. It has become a cliche, but it remains true: this is genuinely a nation of immigrants.
Luis Torres is a veteran journalist living in Pasadena who is a contributor to these pages.
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HERO STREET USA
By Marc Wilson
University of Oklahoma Press, $20
HOPE IN TIME OF DARKNESS: A SALVADORAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE
By Randy Jurado Ertll
Hamilton Books (Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group), $19
Please visit the following news links:
http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/weekend/ci_15335590
http://www.dailynews.com/lalife/ci_15335590?source=rss
