After a touch of “buyer’s remorse” over the URL of this blog, I’ve decided to change over to a new URL.  All blog posting will be continued on The Feminist Texican from here on out!

The new name is more me, what can I say?  So please (continue to) check me out, in all my indecisive glory!

via NY Times

It’s official.  The U.S. death toll in Iraq has hit the 4,000 mark.

At this rate, if John McCain wins and we’re there for “100 years if necessary,”  that’ll bring our tally up to at least 80,000 deaths in this hundred-year war (and probably just wipe out all of Iraq, seeing as how iraqbodycount.org has a minimum of 82,349 documented civilian deaths to date).

I wonder where the candidates stand on repealling that ban the Bush administration put back into effect that bars photos of soldiers’ coffins from being published.  Anyone know?  Hit me up.

Because we all know PMS-ing women are brujas. *eyeroll* 

And as Jezebel pointed out, aren’t women of color more prone to lactose intolerance?  Nice research there on your sexist ad, California Milk Processor Board.

It’s a no-brainer that women of color often don’t receive a high standard of health care in the United States, but it’s not often that the United Nations chimes in on that fact:

[O]ne day before International Women’s Day, a United Nations committee expressed concern about “wide racial disparities” in sexual and reproductive health in the United States. The Committee was responding to pervasive and dramatic disparities between the reproductive health of women of color and white women…

The Committee’s conclusions were issued at the close of a two-week session in Geneva, Switzerland, during which it reviewed the U.S.’s compliance with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), a human rights treaty which requires that countries take pro-active measures to address racial inequalities. It was no surprise that during the session the U.S. was grilled about the persistence of racial segregation in public schools, the dismantling of affirmative action, and racial discrimination in the criminal justice system.

Some of their findings:

African-American women are nearly four times more likely to die in childbirth than white women, 23 times more likely to be infected with HIV/AIDS and 14 times more likely to die from the disease.

American-Indian/Alaskan Native women are over 5 times more likely than white women to have chlamydia and over 7 times more likely to contract syphilis.

The unplanned pregnancy rate among Latinas is twice the national average; and Latinas are much more likely to contract human papillomavirus, the infection that leads to cervical cancer.

More young African-American females and Latinas than white women are given abstinence-only instruction in school, instead of comprehensive sex education. This means they aren’t taught about contraceptive use to prevent pregnancy or protect against HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Abstinence-only programs have proven ineffective, and in some cases counter-productive, but every year the government has increased their funding dramatically, now totaling $176 million annually.

Although the U.S. has the resources to reduce maternal deaths and has acknowledged the importance of prenatal care to prevent them, it has adopted policies which force women to delay pregnancy-related care or forego it altogether. Unreasonable requirements for Medicaid like the 5-year bar on benefits for legal residents prevent many immigrant women from receiving even basic services.

The Committe recommended that, ” In order to address these needs, the Committee recommended that the U.S.: (1) improve access to pre- and post-natal care, including by eliminating eligibility barriers to Medicaid, (2) facilitate access to contraceptive and family planning methods, (3) provide adequate sexual education aimed at the prevention of unintended pregnancies and STIs.

Yeah, good luck with that (especially the sex ed bit)…

Via Alternet

I love this man (Colberto, not The Raging Racist…although I of all people should appreciate that Dobbs is answering to Spanish questions in English.  heh).

Okay, so I know this is all late and that the V to the 10th events were last week and everyone is over all the Vagina Monologues talk and the fact that Jane Fonda said “cunt” on live TV (oh, the horror.), but I wanted to post some of this Virgen de Guadalupe art as a belated Chicana homage to Vagina Power.  I first came across it while I was working on my MA thesis last year, and ever since then I’ve wanted to show it off to the world.  So here goes.

We’re all familiar with the iconic Virgen de Guadalupe imagery, right?

“Goddess” by Alfred J. Quiroz: “As a teenager I was perusing a sex education book and there was a full-page image of a medically anatomic vagina. The first thought that entered my mind was that it looked like the Virgen de Guadalupe…My composition is one of a stereo-optical illusion, the Virgen image painted in vaginal colors whilst a vagina is painted in the colors of the Virgen. They superimpose each if one stares at it stereo-optically. The background is the image of Coatlicue, the mother of the Aztec gods, a goddess on her side as a disposed icon and the new “Goddess,” La Virgen.”  (FYI: that’s not a vagina, it’s a labia, but whatever…)

Then of course is the infamous Alma Lopez with her badass feminist Virgen art that takes into account race, gender, sexuality, and transnationalism:

Coyolxauhqui Returns as Our Lady Disguised as La Virgen de Guadalupe to Defend the Rights of Las Chicanas

And finally, let’s take it back to the women’s lib/Chican@ rights movements, when Chicana artists in the 70s were painting La Virgen in empowering positions (click to enlarge):

“Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe” by Yolanda Lopez

“Margaret F. Stewart: Our Lady of Guadalupe” by Yolanda Lopez

“Victoria F. Franco: Our Lady of Guadalupe” by Yolanda Lopez

Pretty cool, huh?

via Texas Observer

Melissa del Bosque has a terrific article up at Texas Observer about how the government is taking away land and property from homeowners and the University of Texas at Brownsville (who depends on federal funding) to build the border fence in the Rio Grande Valley.  Meanwhile the wealthy surrounding areas go untouched:

[Eloisa] Tamez, a nursing director at the University of Texas at Brownsville, is one of the last of the Spanish land grant heirs in Cameron County. Her ancestors once owned 12,000 acres. In the 1930s, the federal government took more than half of her inherited land, without paying a cent, to build flood levees.

Now Homeland Security wants to put an 18-foot steel and concrete wall through what remains [a whole three acres].

While the border wall will go through her backyard and effectively destroy her home, it will stop at the edge of the River Bend Resort and golf course, a popular Winter Texan retreat two miles down the road. The wall starts up again on the other side of the resort.

The government is also trying to run through Daniel Garza’s property–a whole mile north of the river–and is leaving the land owned by Texas billionaire (and $35 million contributor to Dubya’s presidential library) Ray L. Hunt untouched.

Garza stands in front of his modest brick home, which he built for his retirement after 50 years as a migrant farmworker. For the past five months, he has stayed awake nights trying to find a way to stop the gears of bureaucracy from grinding over his home.

[...]“I don’t see why they have to destroy my home, my land, and let the wall end there.” He points across the street to Hunt’s land. “How will that stop illegal immigration?”

Most border residents couldn’t believe the fence would ever be built through their homes and communities. They expected it to run along the banks of the Rio Grande, not north of the flood levees—in some cases like Tamez’s, as far as a mile north of the river.

Just another reason why the border wall isn’t intended to stop undocumented immigration.  All the government wants to do is take more land away from lower class people through Eminent Domain, and line the pockets of private corporations profitting from the building of the fence (such as Boeing).  If they actually gave a shit about stopping undocumented immigration, they’d reform their bullshit foreign policies such as NAFTA and CAFTA.

Tamez on Lou Dobbs: