Roberto Lovato

Last week, local media was abuzz with news of President Obama’s visit to San Francisco. Unfortunately for immigration policy and for the noble cause of immigrant rights, the media coverage didn’t reflect the problems brewing for the President in Latino America. Instead, the media coverage of his visit reflected the pro-immigration positions put out by…

While English language television in the United States mined the minutiae of Michael Jackson’s upcoming funeral, millions watching Spanish, Portuguese and French language media in the rest of the Americas were transfixed by live broadcasts of the Honduran military shooting and killing a 10 year-old boy and other protesters. From the U.S.-Mexico border to the…

Viewed from a distance, the streets of Honduras look, smell and sound like those of Iran: Expressions of popular anger- burning vehicles, large marches and calls for justice in a non-English language- aimed at a constitutional violation of the people’s will (the coup took place on the eve of a poll of voters asking if…

At a time when racial conflict and discrimination are on the rise around the world, the Administration of the world’s first black U.S. president will not be attending the world’s most important conference on race and racism. In what may signal a dangerous new, “post-racial” approach to global race relations, President Barack Obama’s Administration announced…

This just in from the Great Beyond: Barack Obama has been hiding secretly in the heart and soul of Latino, African and Afro-Latino América all along. This most recent Good News bodes badly for the purveyors of the media’s urban legend about Latino’s near-genetic predisposition not to vote for a black person ; Speaking of…

Denver, Colorado – On the eve of the official nomination of Presidential candidate Barack Obama, the son of an immigrant, some of the leading voices shaping the Democratic Party’s immigration reform platform reveal a mix of reserved optimism and pragmatism. While the Blue Dog Democrats – a group of 47 moderate and conservative Democratic Party…

[This commentary was originally published in New America Media.] A recent story by Maribel Hastings of La Opinión newspaper provides the most comprehensive analysis yet of the similarities and differences between John McCain and Barack Obama around immigration policy. According to Hastings, “Both candidates support construction of a wall at the southern U.S. border. But…