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Thursday, June 10, 2004

Forgot to mention that I am set to interview Jorge Ramos tomorrow, who wrote The Latino Wave, about the huge impact Hispanics are going to have on the next presidential election. I have quite a bit more reading to do tonight. So far I'm just into the part where he establishes the growing number of Hispanics (there will be more Hispanics than whites by 2125, he says, and it's hard to argue with that, given that we'll all be dead by then providing "they" don't find a way to extend our lifespan). At any rate, I'm looking forward to getting into the parts where he discusses "Hispanic issues," and talking with him about that. I was interviewed, perhaps a month ago, by a writer for AAN about how our paper covers Hispanic issues. I said that we didn't really cover Hispanic issues per se, because most issues in our area aren't really divided along those lines, with the exception of immigration issues, which relate more to Mexicans than local Hispanics. I realized, though, that trying to make that distinction was difficult; it's not something that makes that much sense to people if they aren't from this area (I'm not saying he didn't understand, just that it wasn't obvious, perhaps). I think education is, perhaps, the greatest "Hispanic issue" here, because Hispanics regularly do much worse on the kinds of increased standardized testing in the schools, but that might be less a "Hispanic issue" and more a "George Bush's stupid education policy" issue.