HispanicTrending

July 27, 2016
By Lance Hernandez

Many Colorado Hispanics who have reached retirement age aren’t ready to stop working. Some want to continue contributing to their community, so they do volunteer work.

Pat Manalo is one of them. She’s a genealogist at the Colorado Society of Hispanic Genealogy.

“In the 1970s, you asked your aunties and uncles about your family,” she said. “Now, there are other resources available.”

Manalo told Denver7 that she never got to retire. She said she’s still a fulltime homemaker, but added that that job gave her the opportunity to go to libraries and to other people’s homes, to learn about family histories.

“Back then, you did everything by charts,” she said.  “Now, it’s a little easier because we have more resources and we have a computer.”

The society maintains a library at Christ the King Lutheran Church in Southwest Denver.

Society President Joe Gallegos said most of the reference materials are church records.

“They include baptisms, marriages, deaths and confirmations,” he said. “A lot of information is also available on the internet.”

Gallegos said Ancestry.com includes all U.S. census information starting in 1790.

“We’re only concerned with 1850 and later,” he said, “because that’s when New Mexico (and a large portion of the Southwest) came under U.S. control.”

He said FamilySearch.org is another online research tool.

“The LDS church has done a fantastic job of recording church records and civil records for hundreds of years, worldwide,” he said.

He also said many of the old records, which were on microfilm, are now being digitized, making reading much easier.

“You had to learn how to read the Spanish cursive, which sometimes can be very difficult,” he said. “The image was often of poor quality.”

He said the LDS church has developed software which enhanced those images and made them very readable.

When asked why he got involved with the society, Gallegos said one of his cousins helped found the society.

“When she died, somebody had to carry the baton forward,” he said. “Somehow, I got roped into being the president and I got roped into being the editor of the journal. I actually enjoy both jobs.”

Bertha Gallegos, the society’s vice president, volunteers with Manalo to man the library on Saturdays for members who want to do research.

“We put the meat on the bones,” she said. “We not only help find names and dates, but we try to find what they did for a living.”

Bertha Gallegos (no relation to Joe) told Denver7 that most Hispanic families with roots in the San Luis Valley or in New Mexico had soldiers in their families.

“I have one ancestor, Hernan Marin Serrano, who came in the 1500s with Cortez,” she said. “He was just 15 years old and he was a soldier.”

Bertha said she helps others because she’s intrigued by history.

“I thank God every day that I didn’t live in that day and age,” she said. “I couldn’t do without my dishwasher and my television.”

But she said it’s fascinating to learn about that period and to help others.

“Just to see the look on their faces, it’s exciting,” she said.

Manuel Salazar feels the same way. Salazar, the society’s librarian, said it’s a great feeling helping others learn about their lineage.

“When I find that connection and I see the glow in their eyes and how happy they are, they’ll say, ‘Oh, there’s my grandfather, you confirmed my grandpa.’ That’s a wonderful feeling for me,” he said.

Salazar wrote an article about Ken Salazar when he was first elected as Attorney General. He said they have the same ancestors.

Ken Salazar went on to become a U.S. Senator and Secretary of the Interior.

“I’ve got a picture of his parents, a picture of my grandparents and his great grandparents,” he said.

He said the society’s work brings history to life.

Click on the following links to learn more about the Colorado Society of Hispanic Genealogy.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/CSoHG/

http://www.hispanicgen.org/

Denver7 has partnered with La Voz newspaper to better focus on local issues affecting Colorado’s Hispanic community.

This week’s edition of La Voz focuses on senior citizens.

Source: 7News Denver

July 27, 2016
By Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo & Walter Thompson-Hernandez

Which way is South LA heading? As Latinas/os have become a numerical majority in what was recently an African American neighborhood, do we see tensions, collaborations or segregation? Together with our team at the USC Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration, we spent the last year interviewing one hundred Latina/o residents in the Watts, historic Central Avenue, and Vermont Square neighborhoods for the Roots|Raíces research project. While there is no one monolithic portrait of Latino South LA, we are finding common stories and struggles—and also some key generational differences.

In the 1980s, thousands of Mexican and Central American immigrants began setting down roots in South LA. Some had just crossed the U.S.-Mexico border, fleeing Civil Wars and economic devastation, and others moved here after living in crowded neighborhoods near downtown and MacArthur Park; But they all came looking for the same thing: a better life. These were tough times in South LA. During the 1980s, South LA, was reeling from the aftermath of deindustrialization, with gang wars, a crack epidemic, and impoverished neighborhoods featuring more liquor stores than grocery markets. One of our respondents drew a mixed portrait of neighborhood life when asked to recall what it was like in the late 1980s. “Mira, hay cosas que eran buenas…Look, there were things that were good, and bad things. At that time we were about the only Latinos on the block…Everyone else was Moreno (Black). But the majority of those who lived there were older people, and they were very nice. We never had any problems with any Black neighbors.”

Many of these first generation Latina/o arrivals found a kind of next door neighbor civility (even if relations stayed somewhat superficial) with their older African-American neighbors, but on the streets they often encountered hostility from youth gangs, street crime, over-policing, and a climate of violence and racialized resentment that was very particular to the 80s and early 90s in South LA. Pushed inward also by the language barrier, the work of daily survival, and the street violence, most Latina/o newcomers responded by “shutting in and shutting out,” basically keeping to themselves. As one Mexican man, now a 35 year-long resident of the historic Central Avenue neighborhood reflected on his family’s early days here, “No eramos personas de la calle…We weren’t people of the street. We were people who went to work, the laundry, the market, and to work. Well, we would visit family (elsewhere)…but to go to the parks? You couldn’t. People just didn’t feel safe.” Anti-Black racism brought from Latin American countries and nurtured in the U.S. by our own color line—as well as language barriers—helped foster social distance. As one woman said when asked what was her biggest challenge living in South LA, “El desafio, casi siempre….The challenge, almost always and to this day has been the language. That’s been my challenge. For my kids, no, because they were little and they acquired the language quickly.” In our interviews, we heard this over and over again. Consequently, Latino interactions with African-American neighbors and local civic associations remain limited. As a result, racially segregated niches formed, especially among this older group.  

But our interviews also highlighted another important aspect of South LA racial dynamics: Generations think about race in different ways. While the first generation migrated to South LA with anti-black racist ideologies—which were often hardened in the tough street climate in the 1980s and 1990s—the second generation Latinas/os who were raised in South Los Angeles related starkly different racial experiences with African Americans. While some had faced racially motivated tensions in the schools or the street, a large majority of the second generation expressed an affinity for African Americans that was almost non-existent among their parents’ generation. The Latina/o second generation grew up with Black friends, attended the same schools, played on sports teams together, and followed similar styles and music. These generational differences were due to a series of factors but none were more important than the ability to speak English and communicate with their African American peers and neighbors. Shared school and employment experiences also gave second-generation Latinos the opportunity to engage with African Americans in a way that their parents simply could not.

One of our interviewees expressed her views about the interconnectedness of South LA African American and Latino identities this way: “We grew up together. You know, they fed us collard greens; we fed them beans. You know, we grew up in each other’s homes, and we grew up together. So to us, it’s a similarity. They’re our people. We struggle, we consider them our people.”

What to make of these generational racial differences? When thinking about the future of South LA—particularly the face of leadership—we are left with the almost inescapable reality that the face of future South LA leadership will be a cohort of young leaders who will have grown up in a community that was predominantly Latino but with a strong inclination towards the African-American political and cultural legacy of South LA. These will be leaders who will have been impacted by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta as much as they will have been impacted by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Source: KCET.org