Thread: Here it is folks the "Smoking Gun" Spanish officia

Mexico, China, Bush & Betrayal

This is in the News Stories section

None of this should seem new to anyone. When President George W. Bush was still Texas Governor George W. Bush, the Texas border town of El Cenizo (ironically near Laredo and Nuevo Laredo) publicly declared in 1999, that the municipal government was no longer accepting US immigration policy and would actually give aid to illegal Mexican immigrants entering that town. The town also declared Spanish as the official language. That situation still continues today. Such action borders on insurrection. Governor Bush's response? Dispatching National Guard Troops? Criminal arrest? Neither. He looked the other way as he himself spoke Spanish while stumping to be President.

http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-7886.html

This is what I was talking about with the Texas county and Spanish being declared the offical language. Did the county that El Cenizo is in also declare these changes?

That is why I posted it, isn't it funny we were looking for it yesterday and someone writes about it today. I knew I read it a while back. The link takes you to the article in the News section Chris. It's a long article.

Mexico, China, Bush & Betrayal

Great find! I spent a few hours Sunday looking but I couldn't find anything about the city using Google. Now with the name it makes it easy to find information. Here's some more articles.

http://www.englishfirst.org/elcenezo/elcenizoglobe.htm

Texas town makes Spanish official, stirs war of words

By Lynda Gorov, Globe Staff, 08/28/99

This story appeared in some editions of the Saturday Globe

EL CENIZO, Texas - Right away, the nasty letters and cuss-filled calls began pouring in to this parched border town. One after another, they reminded residents where they live, and their cumulative vitriol confused the three officials who constitute local government.


The officials say they do not understand why the rest of the country cares how they conduct city business. What matters is that the people who live in El Cenizo participate. So with little discussion and no dissension, the City Commission voted this month to hold its monthly meetings and all official functions in Spanish.


The decision made this tiny town along the Rio Grande the first to declare an official language other than English. It also put El Cenizo at the center of the debate over government's role in helping - or forcing - immigrants to learn a language other than their own.


''I understand it is the United States, but what happens if people want to know what is going on?'' said Mayor Rafael Rodriguez, elected in November along with the two city commissioners. ''I don't want to create problems with the federal government, because we have enough problems. But this is right for our community. It will give people more confidence and help them communicate if they can do it in Spanish.''


Even before this month's vote, Spanish was the language of El Cenizo, a smattering of ramshackle houses and dusty roads about 15 miles downriver from Laredo. Many of its 7,800 residents speak little or no English, among them the mayor, who concedes he crossed the border illegally 20 years ago and has since become a naturalized citizen. Children often translate for parents, and locals who are bilingual tend to prefer Spanish among themselves.


To them, the new policy makes perfect sense, as does another designating El Cenizo a ''safe haven'' for undocumented immigrants who make their way to the town.


That one sets precedent, too. Although some other cities such as New York and Los Angeles forbid their employees from turning in undocumented workers to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, only El Cenizo threatens dismissal or recall for assisting the agency.


Tomas Zuniga, an INS spokesman at the regional headquarters in Dallas, said he does not expect the new policy to interfere with US Border Patrol operations in El Cenizo, which he called part of a ''hot corridor for illegal immigration.'' The agency also has no plans to challenge the ordinance, which town officials said was intended to reassure residents that they were safe in City Hall rather than to condone illegal immigration.


'' Everything we've done is about making people feel more comfortable, more like a family,'' said Commissioner Gloria Romo. ''It's not our business to help the INS. ... And if you want people's participation, their cooperation, you have to speak in their language. You understand more in your first language even if you're bilingual.''


Added Christina Flores, who was at City Hall to help distribute sacks and boxes of free food to needy residents, ''This is the United States and people should speak English, but a lot of people don't. What I think is they're making a big deal out of nothing.''


Not everyone along the Rio Grande, however, considers the Spanish-only policy harmless. Although official documents will be printed in Spanish and English to comply with state and federal regulations - and meetings translated into English if a resident so requests - some worry about the message being sent to Mexican-American youngsters.


As a teacher at nearby Kennedy-Zapata Elementary School put it with a shrug after asking not to be identified, ''The only thing I can tell you is that the kids' attitude is: If our official language is Spanish, why do we have to learn English?''


Few expect the policy to stand without challenge, and El Cenizo's commission is bracing for a lawsuit. Officially, Texas Governor George W. Bush has noted his belief that government business should be conducted in English ''as a general principle.'' Unofficially, his administration considers it a local matter and has no plans to intervene.


To Jim Boulet Jr., executive director of the Virginia-based advocacy group English First, that hands-off policy could encourage other cities with large immigrant populations to follow El Cenizo's example. Calling the town America's ''very own Quebec,'' he added that it only encouraged a separatist attitude among non-English speakers.


''In a nation of immigrants, we have to be able to communicate with each other...,'' Boulet said. ''This is a wake-up call, first to George W. Bush, who seems to think that being against English-only will get him Hispanic votes but who doesn't mind this, and then to our own federal government, because if we're not going to insist on a common language, we can expect more like this one.''


But the people who oversee El Cenizo insist they are not out to set a trend, or to help residents avoid learning English. As Romo said, English classes for adults are held at the local community center. Many attend.


Along with plans to push economic development and bring some jobs home, Romo and Rodriguez said the town's progress depends on overcoming the same citizen apathy that plagues most anywhere in America. In the past, maybe a dozen people typically crowded into the converted house that passes for City Hall each month. At least twice that number is expected at the meeting in September.


At City Hall the other day, Ildalia de Leon was a center of the conversation.


She has lived most of her life in El Cenizo, and she prides herself on knowing everyone and everyone's business. She also speaks no English, and the commission's recent decision heartens her.


''It will make me more a part of things,'' she said.


The younger generation applauds the decision, too. But several of them said they know better than to shun English, unless they want to spend the rest of their lives in low-paying jobs in southern Texas.


''Everyone knows they still have to learn English,'' said Rene Gonzalez, a high school freshman and aspiring computer programmer who came here from Mexico when he was a small boy and mastered English in less than two years. ''At any job, the manager always speaks English. My parents don't speak it, but they made sure I did.''


This story ran on page E08 of the Boston Globe on 08/28/99.



http://www.englishfirst.org/elcenezo/el ... p81999.htm

Border City Goes All-Spanish
By Madeline Baro Diaz
Associated Press Writer
Thursday, August 19, 1999; 4:28 p.m. EDT

EL CENIZO, Texas (AP) -- Habla espanol?

If not, you might walk into an El Cenizo city meeting and wonder what side of the Rio Grande you're on.

Two weeks ago, commissioners in this small working-class community along the Mexican border passed an ordinance declaring that all city meetings and functions would be held in Spanish. They also passed a measure forbidding city employees to turn in illegal immigrants.

El Cenizo is believed to be the only U.S. city with an all-Spanish policy. English translations of meetings are available but must be requested 48 hours in advance.

``It's not because we don't speak English,'' said City Commissioner Flora Barton. ``It's because we're doing it for those that speak only Spanish, and we want everybody to be comfortable and to understand and to be aware of what's going on here in El Cenizo.''

El Cenizo is a largely blue-collar town of 7,800 about 10 miles outside Laredo. Its main streets are paved, but dirt roads also run through the city. Well-kept, modest houses exist side by side with ramshackle homes and buildings. For years, the city had no garbage or ambulance service.

Ms. Barton estimates that more than 90 percent of El Cenizo's residents speak Spanish, though many also speak English. A few people, particularly younger ones, speak only English.

For several years, meetings have been bilingual, since residents routinely asked commissioners to explain things in Spanish, she said. But some Spanish-speakers wouldn't attend city meetings because of the language barrier and were surprised by commissioners' decisions.

The most recent city council meeting, on Aug. 12, was conducted in Spanish after passage of the measure. Ordinances and resolutions still will be written in English, but the city will translate them upon request.

English First, a Virginia-based organization working to make English the official language of the country and to undo bilingual education, was troubled by the city's actions.

``El Cenizo is the canary in the mine,'' executive director Jim Boulet Jr. said Thursday. ``I think this is a wake-up call to this country, where in a land where 328 different languages are spoken, that we either are going to speak in one language in this nation of immigrants or we are going to be speaking in many.''

In addition to the language measure, El Cenizo passed a Safe Haven Ordinance, forbidding city employees and officials to ask residents whether they are legal immigrants or citizens or to help an agency like the Border Patrol and the Immigration and Naturalization Service find illegals. City employees who violate the ordinance can be fired.

Ms. Barton said the city will still cooperate with the Border Patrol on other matters, such as stopping drug smuggling.

She said the ordinance is not aimed at making El Cenizo a haven for illegal immigrants. She said residents simply resent constantly having to prove their status to the Border Patrol.

INS spokesman Tomas Zuniga warned: ``If there comes a time when we come into conflict with the city ordinances, we would pursue the matter at that time. I don't foresee it going that far, but the extreme level would be where we take action through legal means.''

Jessika Silva, director of the El Cenizo Community Center, which offers a basic English class taught by a volunteer, said the Spanish-language ordinance reflects a harsh reality for many people in El Cenizo: ``They have to work hard all day so they don't have time to learn English.''

But Virginia Salazar, an El Cenizo resident who teaches nutrition at a community clinic, believes the ordinance is wrong-headed.

``We want our children to get educated,'' she said. ``We want them to have better jobs, to progress. It looks like we're going backward instead of progressing.''




http://www.uta.fi/FAST/US8/SPAN/elcenizo.html

Spanish Becomes the Language of Government in a Texas Town
Claudia Kolker, Los Angeles Times, 14 August 1999

EL CENIZO, Texas - As ceiling fans puffed at the big U.S. flag on the community center wall, the dozen residents at the city council meeting here Thursday poised hands over hearts for the Pledge of Allegiance. Then they began their town's modestly historic council meeting, possibly the first in the United States to be conducted by city ordinance in Spanish.
Far-flung, sun-battered and mostly poor, this former colonia of trailers and frail bungalows found itself in the middle of a political vortex two weeks after enacting a pair of surprising new laws.

Under one ordinance, all city government business must take place in Spanish. And under the other, city employees - all six of them - are forbidden to assist the U.S. Border Patrol in catching undocumented immigrants. If they do so, they risk being fired.'

In a town of 7,500 where virtually every resident is an immigrant, married to an immigrant, or the child of immigrants, the laws reflect not so much a rejection of American culture but acknowledgment of a border culture dominated by Spanish and haunted by Border Patrol search vehicles.

Far from springing from any broad ideology, in fact, the motivation for the two laws was utterly local, said Mayor Rafael Rodriguez. ''About 75 percent of the people at meetings here only speak Spanish,'' he said.

Political rivals of city council members had accused them of turning in undocumented residents to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS, and the new law will help dispel such accusations, Mr. Rodriguez added. So far, residents of this depressed town of laborers and factory workers 10 miles (16 kilometers) down the Rio Grande River from Laredo, Texas, have praised the two ordinances.

''I'm for it,'' said Lupe Rojas, squinting in the sunlight alongside her 10-year-old son. ''Because in English, well - no! We don't understand it.''

But while several Latino advocacy groups praised the effect of the language ordinance in tailoring city services to constituents, the law drew the ire of immigration-reform activists.

''This is not a good idea,'' said Tim Schultze, a spokesman for U.S. English in Washington, a group devoted to making English the official language of the United States. ''We have long predicted that this sort of thing would happen in our country. And our opponents have said, 'You're insane. You're exaggerating. It will never happen.'''
But Lydia Camarillo, executive director of the San Antonio, Texas-based Southwest Voter Education Registration Project, called the statute sensible. ''It appears that these folks clearly understand these communities do not speak English and this is a way of providing a service,'' she said.
Under the ordinance, city council sessions and other official business will be conducted in Spanish, and English translations will be made available upon request within 48 hours.

While the language ordinance provokes strong debate, the ''safe haven'' rule apparently violates federal law, according to the INS. Safe haven ordinances in cities across the country have attempted to keep municipal employees from acting as immigration enforcers, but such measures, unlike the one here, typically include the proviso that they be enforced within the limits of law.

Immigration law forbids any federal, state or local government official from restricting government entities in giving or getting immigration information, said Bill Strassberger, an INS spokesman in Los Angeles. However, he added, the INS had no plans to challenge the El Cenizo law. ''Other types of criminal activity are our priority,'' he said.

http://www.lasculturas.com/lib/sd/blsd091099a.php


September 10, 1999



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Commentary
A Little Town In Texas Roars In Spanish
By Raoul Lowery Contreras
Originally published in La Prensa San Diego.

In a million years, the United States of America would have never heard of El Cenizo, Texas, if it hadn't been for the town's city council passing a municipal ordinance that has shaken the consciousness of the country's least desirable observers.

The city council passed an ordinance requiring that city business be conducted in Spanish so all city residents can understand their own government. They also instructed city employees, all six of them, not to cooperate with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in searching for, or apprehending deportable people. They did not order that city business not be conducted in English with English speakers; they did not order that students be taught in Spanish-only in public or private schools. They did not order that Spanish be the only language spoken in the city.

It must be pointed out that El Cenizo is not a sophisticated modern meteropolis. In fact, it is a dingy dusty little town that was settled on terrible land with no amenities, no sewers, running water and electricity. What El Cenizo has become has come at the hands and hard work of the people who live there, almost all who have come from Mexico.

They don't like Anglos telling them what to do and they don't like the INS. They are not the only city in the country to not cooperate with the INS, but one would think so. At the opposite end is Chandler, Arizona where local gendarmes made the mistake of running amok through the streets of the city hassling American citizens and violating the Constitutional rights of hundreds and thousands of people. That's not just my opinion, but the opinion of the Republican Attorney General of Arizona and the INS Inspector General who cops to violations of policy, which, in bureaucratese means, they violated the law.

Is El Cenizo the first case of a foreign language being official in lieu of English in the USA? No. In 1919, the State of Nebraska, among other states, passed laws prohibiting foreign languages (specifically the German language) in schools as a medium for instruction prior to the 8th grade. Of particular interest is that the law said, "Section 1. No person, individually or as a teacher, shall, in any private, denominational, parochial or public school, teach any subject to any person in any language than the English language."

One should notice that the law specified "private" "denominational;" and "parochial", as well as public schools in its prohibition of the use of anything but English in the teaching of any subject. The Nebraska Supreme Court ruled the law Constitutional as an exercise in the State's "police power." Never mind that it shredded the 1st Amendment of the Constitution. Imagine a state passing a law today prohibiting the use of Hebrew in a private Jewish school, or the use of Arabic in a Moslem school, imagine that.

The Supreme Court of the United States disagreed with the Nebraska Court, as well they should have. In Meyer v. State of Nebraska (262 U.S. 390, 1923), the Court decided the issue using these words from the 14th Amendment as the base of their ruling: "No state...shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law."

"While this court has not attempted to define with exactness the liberty thus guaranteed, the term has received much consideration and some of the included things have been definitively stated. Without doubt, it denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint but also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and generally to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men."

The Court continued: "That the state may do much, go very far, indeed, in order to improve the quality of its citizens, physically, mentally and morally, is clear; but the individual has certain fundamental rights which must be respected. The protection of the Constitution extends to all, to those who speak other languages as well as to those born with English on the tongue. Perhaps it would be highly advantageous if all had ready understanding of our ordinary speech, but this cannot be coerced by methods which conflict with the Constitution, and cannot be promoted by prohibited means." (Emphasis added)

So, the El Cenizo issue boils down to a simple proposition. Have the town fathers coerced anyone into speaking and writing Spanish? Have they ordered schools to drop English? Have they ordered private institutions to use Spanish-only? Have they unleashed the language police on the poor English-speaking Anglos of Texas? Has the state coerced anyone here in this town? Have the city fathers of El Cenizo ruffled the feathers of those who would coerce people to speak English-only?

What, now, will happen in El Cenizo? Will the storm troopers parachute into the Rio Grande Valley to take El Cenizo back for the United States? Will the lawyers batter El Cenizo with writs and injunctions? I don't think so. El Cenizo has the best protection in the world, the United States Constitution.



http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/feder090199.asp

Sept. 1, 1999 /20 Elul, 5759
Don Feder
Texas town's Spanish-only policy unamerican


MY MATERNAL GRANDFATHER, Israel Whitman, came to the United States from the Pale of Settlement speaking very little English. He quickly learned.

Grandpa would never have dreamed of demanding that the city council of Troy, N.Y., conduct its deliberations in Yiddish. Then again, when he arrived, America was still united.

We may have been a nation of immigrants, but had yet to become a multicultural boarding house and land of language fragmentation.

Which brings me to El Cenizo, Texas, population 1,500, whose government has declared that henceforth all official business will be conducted in Spanish.

Mayor Rafael Rodriguez and one of two city commissioners entered this country illegally; both are now citizens (sort of). His position notwithstanding, his honor still can't speak English. The flag of Mexico flies over city hall, along with the Stars and Stripes (for now).

El Cenizo has also decided not to cooperate with immigration officials and to fire any municipal employee who does so.

Israel M. Reyna of the federally funded Texas Rural Legal Aid heartily endorses El Cenizo's Spanish-only policy. "It is a developing democracy, opening government's doors to people. Getting people involved is the primary mission," Reyna gushes.

But what of the future of democracy, not to mention the republic, in a nation of language balkanization -- where a significant segment of the population can't understand congressional debates or read the Constitution in the language in which it was written, and whose news comes exclusively from an ax-grinding ethnic press?

Rodriguez and Reyna want America to become a bilingual nation. After all, Spanish-speakers, as we are constantly told, are the fastest growing group in America.

To gauge bilingualism's stunning success, check out our neighbor to the north. Despite years of language pandering to the Quebecois, Canada is on the brink of dissolution. In the last plebiscite, secessionists lost by less than 1 percent of the vote.

Mario Obledo, co-founder of the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, told an interviewer that one day soon his compadres will control California's political institutions, and any gringo who doesn't like it should vamoose, pronto.

The racial/ethnic background of our leaders really doesn't matter, if they consider themselves Americans first. That the residents of El Cenizo don't is painfully apparent.

America accepts 1.2 million legal immigrants each year, and again that number of illegals. Many feel no obligation to learn our native tongue -- the language in which our national life has been conducted since the 17th century -- or our history.

They are coddled by bilingual education, dumbed-down citizenship tests, bilingual ballots, even driving tests in 20 different languages.

In El Cenizo, one glimpses a frightening future where pockets of Russians, Cambodians, Arabs, Koreans and others demand language separatism, where driving cross-country will be like traversing the European continent.

Texas Gov. George W. Bush, on whose watch this happened, has yet to be heard from on El Cenizo. Guess he's too busy addressing Hispanic groups in Spanish and denouncing California's now defunct Proposition 187, which tried to stop public expenditures on illegal aliens.

The Clinton administration is equally mute. On El Cenizo's decision to punish employees who insist the dreaded la migra, Tomas Zuniga, spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service's regional headquarters in Dallas, nonchalantly comments, "We are going to sit back and see how it unfolds."

One who hasn't lost his tongue (and whose native tongue happens to be Spanish) is Mauro Mujica, chairman of U.S. English. "This is what happens when the federal government refuses to patrol the border and politicians pander for the so-called Hispanic vote," says Mujica, who emigrated from Chile in 1965. "Let me be blunt: It is simply un-American for an American town to declare a Mexican identity."

If Andy Jackson -- Old Hickory, who faced down South Carolinians intent on nullifying federal law -- were president, he'd march an army down to El Cenizo, strike the Mexican flag, tell them, "You're Americans, damn it, start acting like it," and hang a few folks to make his point.

But in place of the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, we have a committed multiculturalist in the White House and Gov. Pander Bear leading the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

Originally Posted by Darlene

Mexico, China, Bush & Betrayal

This is in the News Stories section

None of this should seem new to anyone. When President George W. Bush was still Texas Governor George W. Bush, the Texas border town of El Cenizo (ironically near Laredo and Nuevo Laredo) publicly declared in 1999, that the municipal government was no longer accepting US immigration policy and would actually give aid to illegal Mexican immigrants entering that town. The town also declared Spanish as the official language. That situation still continues today. Such action borders on insurrection. Governor Bush's response? Dispatching National Guard Troops? Criminal arrest? Neither. He looked the other way as he himself spoke Spanish while stumping to be President.

http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-7886.html

It does not come as a suprise to me or the other citizens of TEXAS.
The article is exactly right about the events of 1999. Bush did nothing then and true to form he has not changed.
Jeb is married to a mexican and his child is half mexican. The bush family must be stopped at some point or we will become a state of mexico.

Thanks Brian for that research. El Cenizo. We'll have to remember that little place. Hard to imagine in our USA.

Originally Posted by Judy

Thanks Brian for that research. El Cenizo. We'll have to remember that little place. Hard to imagine in our USA.

You should thank Darlene since she was first to find the city name. That made finding the other articles easy.

Darlene!! Thanks so much for finding the name of the city where this ordiance was passed. You are a super researcher for ALIPAC!!