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Jewish World Review July 6, 2005 / 29 Sivan , 5765 Time to boycott boycotts By Ruben Navarrette Jr.
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Latino activist Enrique Morones' heart is in the right place, but there are times when I wonder where his head is.
Morones has been a guest on CNN's "Lou Dobbs Tonight," and I get the feeling that he'd like to be invited back. If so, the San Diego native has come up with an odd way to get on the host's good side: He recently fired off a letter to CNN President Jonathan Klein demanding the network take Dobbs off the air for constantly — in Morones' words — "slamming Latinos."
About that, we disagree. It's true that Dobbs has become a darling of the cultural right, the anti-globalization movement and the nativist fringe, but what Dobbs slams are illegal immigrants. He doesn't seem to have any beef with U.S.-born Latinos or those who enter the country legally.
And yet Morones, a Mexican-American with a genuine love and affinity for Mexico, sure has a beef with Dobbs. The activist thinks that Dobbs — through his show's recurring feature of immigration-related stories, "Broken Borders" — is helping fuel the xenophobic mood in this country. You know, where everyone seems convinced that taco trucks and Spanish-language billboards and Mexican laborers standing on street corners are signs of the apocalypse.
Morones insists that CNN's credibility is at stake. He even manages — somewhat artfully — to make his case with a backhanded compliment for the cable network by referring to its archrival.
"If you're looking at Fox News," he told me, "you already know that those guys are way out there, that they're extremists. But CNN is a serious network seen all over the world, and, up until Lou Dobbs, it was a respected network."
So what if Klein doesn't go along? After all, with Fox News getting three times as many viewers as CNN, there are worse things than having one of your hosts described as being crazy like a Fox.
"If they're going to continue with Lou Dobbs," said Morones, "then I think we need to boycott the advertisers that advertise on that show and on CNN, but especially on the Lou Dobbs show."
There it is. I knew that, sooner or later, we'd get around to the b-word. You've just heard the extent of the Mexican-American political vocabulary for resolving conflict: boycott, boycott, and boycott.
Of course, the idea of a boycott is not unique to Mexican-Americans. It's an American thing. In fact, it's a pre-American thing.
You could say that the history of the boycott in the United States goes all the way back to Dec. 16, 1773, when about 200 colonial American "insurgents" boarded three British ships and dumped crates of tea into Boston Harbor.
Yet many Mexican-Americans — especially baby boomers who lived through the 1960s and '70s — do seem to have an emotional bond with boycotts, which they see as an effective tool to bring about change when all else fails.
And much of that can be explained with three letters: U-F-W.
Now the UFW is at again. It's going after its old adversary, E&J Gallo Winery, and this time it's going high tech. Last month, the union launched an Internet-based campaign to urge consumers not to buy Gallo wine. The UFW is trying to pressure the giant winery to negotiate better pay and benefits for about 85 Gallo employees and 200 seasonal workers hired through labor contractors. The union says it hopes to partner with liberal groups such MoveOn.org, and — through the Internet — spread its message far and wide.
I'm so tired of this routine, whether the target is CNN or Gallo wine or the man in the moon. Look, there's no denying that boycotts have a long and proud history in this country. But, to my mind, that's exactly where they belong — in the history books. Times change, and if you don't change with them and come up with new ways to achieve your objectives, you become outdated and obsolete. Trust me, that's not how the UFW wants to be remembered.
So, if it's all the same to my fellow Mexican-Americans, I think I'll boycott the boycotts.
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Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
