Aprovecho

Leo R. Chavez writes on Latinas and how they are viewed and judged on their reproduction rates in his book Latino Threat. Americans see Latinas as a group of women that have a lot of children. The mothers often, if not majority of the time are undocumented and have come to the U.S. for better opportunities, they now have U.S. born citizen children, that cannot be stripped away of their citizenship to the U.S. and there is this idea of anchor babies. Where the child is an anchor to the mother, hold her down in the United States, undocumented, until the U.S. born citizen child is 18 and can file a claim for their mother, so she can obtain residency and work her way to citizenship. However this is still tricky and takes a very long time for the paperwork to go through and for the parent to gain residency. In other cases sometimes the mother is caught driving or doing something illegal, and is automatically noticed for being undocumented and this puts them at risk for deportation, and them having to leave their children here in the United States, or worse, the whole family returns.

This is interesting because this is a view of Latina women and how they are viewed and antagonized. These are kind of threats that the U.S. makes on Latinos and especially those that are undocumented. These threats also include rights, where these people are entitled to certain human rights but lose them all just based on their legal status. They also lose out on the bill of rights entirely. These include simple rights that any other citizen takes for granted but these Latinos who are undocumented wish to have these rights but that reality is never reached unfortunately. This is an image of the struggle these individuals have to go through every day while others live freely. These undocumented people have marched and made stands for their government to allow them some rights, but very little has been done. Finally in Illinois, undocumented individuals can obtain a drivers license and drive with no worry of getting stopped and deported. This is helpful and a big gain for these people who have struggled so much.

A strong point among the Latino community is communication and mobilization. The importance of this, is the circulation of education on certain laws or current events regarding Latinos and legal status. If one considers in the past with immigration marches against Sensenbrenner and politicians like him who are against undocumented individuals in this country. Or in Alabama with the tomato pickers, who were also undocumented fled Alabama in fear of being deported. But when the tomato farms began to waste product and pay expensively to those who could not pick tomatoes like the undocumented workers who earned cheap labor. That is when these farmers began to complain and beg their state to remove the threats on the undocumented workers. Sad that the only good Latinos and undocumented Latinos do for the U.S. are the jobs that Americans do not want to take.