Latinopundit

From LatinoRebranded:

By looking at traffic data to Twitter.com, we’ve identified several countries where Twitter is currently growing rapidly (this year). These are not necessarily countries that have a ton of Twitter users yet, but rather places where the traffic curve is pointing sharply upwards.

Latin America coming strong

One interesting thing we noticed when going through the traffic data is that Twitter seems to be growing rapidly in several Latin American countries (links below lead to each country’s traffic page on Google Trends for Websites)

Loretta Sanchez Infuriates the Left, Leaves Dems Mystified With Her Waldo Act on Health-Care Bill

Donate ONLINE through to benefit Latin American Children this 3 Kings Day http://bit.ly/7B8yL0 

Read More:

Latinos in Social Media and Being Latino presents:

Our 1ST ANNUAL THREE-KINGS DAY ONLINE TOY DRIVE & FUNDRAISER to benefit The Children’s Aid Society’s Latino Outreach Initiative
[http://www.childrensaidsociety.org] and the United Nations Children’s
Fund [UNICEF] [UNICEF: http://www.unicef.org/]

January 6th, the traditional day for gift-giving in Latin American tradition, to bring joy to disadvantaged Latino children in the US and Latin America.

The Toy Drive & Fundraiser will have two levels:

1st Level: Thanks to generous donations from our sponsors Time To Play,
Ingenio and Discovery Toys we will be donating new unwrapped bilingual Educational toys to the Latino Outreach Center of the Children’s Aid Society, located in Washington Heights, New York City. The toys will be distributed to poor Latino children in the area.

2nd Level: We will be collecting donations from our growing online
networks. This monetary donation will benefit UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, and be distributed through UNICEF to centers aiding disadvantaged children in Latin America.

LAUNCH DETAILS:
• WHAT: Live Twitter Party
• WHEN: December 30th 2009, 8pm – 10pm EST
• WHERE: Twitter (use hashtag #latismtoydrive or enter latismtoydrive in
TweetChat.com – you must have a Twitter account).

HOW YOU CAN HELP:
• Donate ONLINE through our Chipin/PayPal account (http://bit.ly/7B8yL0).
Donations accepted until January 3rd, 2010. Donations accepted until January 3rd, 2010.

• Make a toy donation by sending new, unwrapped toys to: The Children’s
Aid Society -105 East 22nd St. Please use codename: LATISMTOYDRIVE. Toy donations will be accepted until January 4th, 2010.

• Follow and Retweet our Toy Drive message using #latismtoydrive on Twitter

• Write about it on your blog

• Post up toydrive widgets on your blog (http://bit.ly/5urQXF) and social networks.

All Toy Drive, Donations totals and ceremony pictures will be posted on
our Latism.org and Being Latinos website on January 6, 2010.

We thanks our sponsors Time To Play, Ingenio and Discovery Toys for
their generous toy donations, and our social media community for their
support!!

If your wondering where I've gone, you can find most of my activities either at my other blog Latino Rebranded or the LATISM blog.

More written about this at my other blog.

I'll be posting very lightly here over the next week.  In the meantime, please, go over to my other blog for updates on Latinos and everything social.

Just like in politics, in business.  If you want to participate or not, the conversations in business and consumers are taking place.  You decide your level of involvement, or not. 

I've decided to move into the realm of business and new media.

This is part of our Latinos In Social Media Initiative.

Dear Friends,
It’s a great honor to invite you to our first #Latism Party to launch our LatISM Heritage Tour! It will take place tonight at 9:00 pm EST on Twitter.

Please join us to meet the event organizers:

Nancy at @nancyperez – for LATISM-FL
George at @urbanjibaro – for LATISM-NY
Juan at @juantornoe – for LATISM-TX

Then Louis at @louispagan and Pedro at @latism – from LATISM Headquarters.

We’ll tell you all about the event and the LATISM concept during the party while you win Great Walmart Prizes:

- 2 Ipod Shuffle

- 2 $50 Walmart Gift Cards

- 1 $50 iTune Card

no need to RSVP for this one. Just show up invite as many friends as you can. Whoever brings the most friends from 9 to 10 PM will win the prize of his/her choice. Just ask your friends to tweet the following:

“I’ve been invited to #Latism by @yourTwitterUserName”

We’ll do the head count at 10:00 pm and announce the winner by 10:15
All other winners will be announced during the party. Usually we give a prize every 10-15 minutes. Only LATISM group members will be eligible to win, so remember to tell your friends to join this group if they also want to participate in the giveaway!

I’ll be announcing the prizes, so follow my tweets at @anarc

If this is your first Twitter Party, a great way to follow will be using a TwitterChat application like: http://tweetchat.com/room/latism

Hasta Pronto!!!

Find my other blog: Louis Pagan

As I steep more into social media, I am blogging more and more about it.  Here are some highlights from my other blog:

• The Want Of Latinos In Social Media
• Social Media Update Methods
• Social Media Solves Latino Assimilation Problem  (follow up to this post on this blog)
• 'Getting Facebook'
• And a couple of ReTweet posts

Obviously, I think social media is important.  It puts the gauntlet in the average person's hand.  However, at a higher level there are better practices.  That's part of the aim over at the other blog.  Hope to see you there.
 

I wonder who the lucky bloggers are:

The debate over healthcare reform is getting so ugly that President Obama has resorted to using his weapon-of-last-resort -- bloggers!

In a morning email, Latina Lista was notified of an afternoon blogger-only conference call with the President and his senior healthcare advisors. There was nothing new revealed on the call. The President basically delivered the same talking points we've heard him address since the debate began and which will probably be continually addressed until the bill is passed.

Here's a highlight from WaPO:

The House bills and the Senate bills will not be identical. We know this. The politics are different, because the makeup of the Senate and the House are different and they operate on different rules. I am not interested in making the best the enemy of the good. There will be a conference committee where the House and Senate bills will be reconciled, and that will be a tough, lengthy and serious negotiation process.

I am less interested in making sure there's a litmus test of perfection on every committee than I am in going ahead and getting a bill off the floor of the House and off the floor of the Senate. Eighty percent of those two bills will overlap. There's going to be 20 percent that will be different in terms of how it will be funded, its approach to the public plan, its pay-or-play provisions. We shouldn't automatically assume that if any of the bills coming out of the committees don't meet our test, that there is a betrayal or failure. I think it's an honest process of trying to reconcile a lot of different interests in a very big bill.

Conference is where these differences will get ironed out. And that's where my bottom lines will remain: Does this bill cover all Americans? Does it drive down costs both in the public sector and the private sector over the long-term. Does it improve quality? Does it emphasize prevention and wellness? Does it have a serious package of insurance reforms so people aren't losing health care over a preexisting condition? Doers it have a serious public option in place? Those are the kind of benchmarks I'll be using. But I'm not assuming either the House and Senate bills will match up perfectly with where I want to end up. But I am going to be insisting we get something done.

The man who called Spanish the language of the ghetto, now has a Twitter account in Spanish. From the Newt himself:

"The American people believe English should be the official language of the government. … We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto."

My question:

My previous post "Social Media Solves Latino Assimilation" was either loved or hated.  Unbelievably, this is due to one word.  If the assimilation was replaced with acculturation, the attitudes would drastically change.  That's the power of words. 

Guess what?  I purposely, chose to use the word assimilation instead of acculturation to make the point that I will now make in this post:  the futility of fighting over a principle first and giving the goal a back seat is an exercise in epic failure.

Let's see why.

Assimilation is a negative, almost derogatory term one can use towards Latinos and American culture.  "Cultural assimilation is the adoption by an individual of some or all aspects of a dominant culture."  There is no better way to piss off, or put a Latino into a defensive mode.  All you have to do is suggest that he/she is of a sub-class, and you lost them. 

Conversely, acculturation "is the exchange of cultural features...the original cultural patterns of either or both groups may be altered, but the groups remain distinct."  Ah, the best of both worlds.  No one feels threatened, there are no converts, no fanatics, and best of all no one is better than the other.  Happy Latinos.

This debate sidetracks the progress of Latinos from the main goal of success and prosperity.  The effort to benefit by adapting to one's environment is put into a schism and suffers progress.  Latinos are duped into a discussion instead of concentrating their energy on the goal.

It's unfortunate that this topic is framed as it is, but I refuse to engage the press and politicians in this chatter.  Say Latinos should assimilate...say American culture is dominant...say whatever you want.  I don't really care, because my eyes are on the prize.

When Sanchez, 36, arrived back in Central America recently, after living a third of his life as an illegal immigrant in suburban Washington, he stepped off the flight from Dulles International Airport into a cultural no man's land. He had been an outlaw migrant in one country; now he was a native-born stranger in the other.

For years, Sanchez had worked all the overtime hours he could handle as a supervisor for a granite counter contractor in Springfield. Last year, overtime slipped to part time and then almost no time. After months of looking for work, he started looking at airfares.

An expatriate's longing for his native land is often searing. But Sanchez, like thousands of Latino immigrants forced back across the border in recent months by the sinking economy, is learning sooner than he wanted to that going home again can be even more complicated.

Source:  MSN

It's America's birthday!
Have a safe and happy 4th of July.

Have you joined?

This is something I've addressed again and again over the years:  keeping one's traditions vs. assimilation.  With most 'hot buttons' this topic follows suit and lines up the ranks either for or against.  While I never understood why the lines had to be so trenched in the ground, it seems to me that both sides are skewed and serve to only slide it's proponents into a hole instead of maintaining a plateau.  Thankfully, there is now proof to support why Latinos should embrace US culture.

In a recent study, we see what does work is a revolving acceptance of the former and new, namely keeping one's Latino culture while embracing US culture.  This not-so-common, common sense method maximizes the benefits of both cultures and let's one successfully apply themselves in the real world - a world of diversity.

These same thoughts can be found at the heart of social media.  To limit oneself in social media to their own natural tendencies, one would have to put up many safe guards, namely locking their account from general public view and filtering content to select friends.  This is not what social media is and works against the social media movement.

How can one possibly restrict themselves to their limited sphere of influence and not expect to understand and grow with the world around them?  Social media breaks down real and perceived barriers.  It gives people the chance to softly engage other cultures and pursue new connections.  It is through social media that one gets exposed to the fast track of what being social is all about, and have the ability to connect to one's peers, both upwardly and laterally.  For Latinos, who are culturally social, I have hopes that social media can help bridge the gap between the traditional and the new without losing the essence of either.

(This is cross-posted at LouisPagan.com)

Update 07/01/09:  This was posted in the comments section by me in the cross-post site - see above:

...the term of ‘cultural assimilation’ with it’s allusion of domination, superiority and displacement forces some Latinos to take a rebellious stance instead of incorporating an advantageous tool to better fare in society that we consistently find ourselves at a disadvantage economically, as well as other vital areas.

I for one, by no means wish for anyone to abandon their language, food, music, customs and traditions. What you read here is not a call of abandonment, but a push towards adoption and utilization.