Today Feet in Two Worlds introduces a new feature, La Ruta del Voto Latino – Road to the Latino Vote, which will tell the story of Latinos in the 2008 election. Independent journalist Diego Graglia is taking a two-week road trip from New York City to Mexico City, stopping in urban, suburban and rural communities along the way for an in-depth and intimate look at Hispanic voters in an election year when the Latino vote is expected to be crucial in many states and many regions of the country. You can follow Diego here on the Feet in Two Worlds blog and on his bilingual blog www.newyorktomexico.com. In addition to regular blog posts, Diego will be producing audio and video podcasts and radio stories about his trip. I invite you to check back frequently to see what Diego discovers during his travels. You can leave comments for him here or contact him directly at nydf@diegograglia.net. As Diego and his girlfriend Amy leave New York we wish them buen viaje.

John Rudolph – Executive Producer, Feet in Two Worlds

Monday morning, as you wake up and make coffee, I’ll probably be driving under the Hudson River, having my morning mate and exiting New York once more. After five and a half years there, I moved to Mexico City, el D.F., at the beginning of this year. Now, I’m uniting the two cities in a roadtrip that will take me through the nation’s capital and the Mid-Atlantic region, the Deep South, Texas and the desert of northern Mexico.

While this trip was born as a private adventure, my journalistic genes could not let such a big opportunity to tell good stories pass without doing something about it. Of course, the biggest story in the land right now is the presidential election, with two candidates whose life stories could not be more compelling, and several issues –the war, the economy, immigration, the environment- triggering the most passionate opinions.

The Latino population in the U.S. has been growing for decades, and Latinos recently became the biggest minority in the country. Of course, this categorization is a little weird, since Latinos can be black, white, Native American, and a lot of other things – sometimes belonging to more than one minority at a time. (I, for one, am quite Caucasian, bear an Italian last name and speak English with a pree-ttee strong Latino accent.) Nevertheless, the existence of Latinos as a group does count, big-time, in terms of the ballots that will be added up on November 4.

By now, American politicians know that badmouthing Fidel Castro –who’s pretty much retired, anyway– is not going to cut it in terms of winning over Latinos. A visit to the Basílica of Guadalupe in Mexico City may help (right, Senator McCain?), since Mexicans are a majority of the people of Latin American descent in this country. But it has become quite clear that the Latino electorate is too diverse to be put into one big grab bag, una bolsa de gatos. (Yep, that is “a bag of cats.”)

As soon as our gallant 1992 Subaru Legacy station wagon, El Rayo Blanco (uh-huh, that’s The White Lightning) exits the Jersey City side of the Holland Tunnel, I will start bringing you the faces, voices, ideas and feelings of that diverse Latino population. The Dominicans who live in the neighborhoods above 137th Street in Manhattan, the Mexicans who work in poultry factories in rural North Carolina, the few Hispanics that remained in a Florida Panhandle town after an immigration raid, the Texan families who’ve been Americans for several generations, Hispanic last names and all.

I will visit Prince William County in Virginia, where the debate over undocumented immigrants has been intense, and where local authorities are enforcing federal immigration law. I will talk to a Mexican activist in Greenville, N.C., who’s been advocating for the rights of rural workers in the area for 20-plus years. I will watch party activists working hard everywhere at registering Latino voters, trying to woo them to one side or the other.

The site where all this will go up, www.newyorktomexico.com, has many interactive features, so I hope to hear from readers from all over the country – and from abroad, too. We want to know what people – Latino and non-Latino – think about the election, what issues they care about, and their opinions of the two candidates. By the time we finish the American leg of this trip, entering Mexico from Laredo, Texas, we should have some clearer – and distinctly grass-roots answers to those questions.

Oh… if you’re along our route, please don’t forget to recommend the best Latin American eatery in your town – this is going to be hard work and we will need to replenish our energy often.

* Diego Graglia is an Argentinean journalist with a strong interest in the relationship between the U.S. and Latin America, and Latino culture and society in the United States. He can be contacted by email at nydf@diegograglia.net, on Twitter at @nydf, and through Live Chat and comments on www.newyorktomexico.com.

Operation Scheduled Departure, a new federal initiative that ‘encourages’ illegal immigrants to voluntarily step forward and leave the country without being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), will launch August 5^th in five cities across the United States.

The initiative was labeled as part of the “theater of the absurd” by pro-immigration reform groups, who noted that ICE seems unable to understand that illegal immigrants are in the U.S. because they wish to live here and that few would come forward.

Nonetheless the program may provide ICE with a PR advantage as they escalate the pace of raids across the country and detain more undocumented immigrants.

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Could the nation’s undocumented immigrants please stand up? The government will be happy to deport you.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) will encourage the nation’s roughly 12 million undocumented immigrants to voluntarily turn themselves into immigration authorities for deportation in the coming months in an unorthodox new program designed to help the agency combat unauthorized immigration.

ICE Director Julie Myers leaked the new federal effort on Univision this past Sunday at the end of an interview with Jorge Ramos, the anchor of the popular public affairs show ‘Al Punto’ and in advance of an anticipated formal announcement next week.

Entitled ‘Operation Scheduled Departure,’ the still-unannounced program would allow undocumented immigrants without criminal records to turn themselves in at Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices nationwide. In exchange for ‘self-deporting’, the immigrants would be processed and get a few weeks to pack their belongings and get their affairs in order before leaving the country – without being put in a detention facility.

The program does not provide any other incentive for undocumented immigrants to volunteer to leave the country through the program.

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Do the father of anti-affirmative action initiatives and Sen. Barack Obama have more in common than one would think?

According to Ward Connerly, a former regent of the University of California system and the force behind efforts to dismantle public affirmative action programs, Obama’s position on affirmative action is so nuanced that they agree on almost everything.

“I’ve read Mr. Obama’s statement that he believes his daughters should not receive preferential treatment over a poor white child,” said Connerly in an interview from the Sacramento office of his Civil Rights Institute. “I agree with him. In fact, I agree with a lot of the things he says about affirmative action, except his conclusion on the initiatives.”

The ‘initiatives’ that Connerly is referring to are the ballot initiatives Connerly has helped sponsor in Arizona, Nebraska and Colorado to end affirmative action in public university systems and government contracting.
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Feet in 2 Worlds doesn’t generally rely on the Daily News’ Rush & Malloy gossip page as a credible source, period, let alone on immigrant and ethnic media. But an election-related headline caught our eye yesterday.

When an Al Jazeera English reporter attempted last week to interview an Iraq war veteran running for Congress in Florida, the candidate called the FBI, saying he feared a potential terrorist hit. See the whole story here.

The candidate, Republican retired Lt. Col. Allen West, reported he was suspicious of Al Jazeera English’s request to interview him on the recent ‘perceived uptick in violence in Afghanistan’. West said he suspected the interview request was a ploy to kidnap him in the dangerous confines of South Florida, where he is hoping to unseat Rep. Ron Klein, a first-term Democratic incumbent in a district that is also home to Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter.

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This morning on The Takeaway, radio hosts Adaora Udoji and John Hockenberry spoke with Alvaro Fernandez, voter registration organizer for the National Latino Congreso in Florida, and Jaime Chavez, voter registration organizer for the National Latino Congreso in New Mexico about their efforts to get Latinos to the voting booths in November.

You can listen to the segment here:
[audio:http://audio.wnyc.org/takeaway/takeaway073008e.mp3]

Senator Barack Obama can’t seem to shake his “Jewish” problem.

He is perceived by many American Jews and a large part of the pro-Israel non-Jewish community as biased in favor of Palestinians, Iran, Syria, and Hamas. Despite his repeated statements concerning the security of Israel, Obama still has work to do in terms of persuading Israel and its supporters that as President he will not be another Jimmy Carter who believes that Israel is an “apartheid state” that terrorizes and bullies its neighbors.

Obama’s recent trip to the Middle East was in part intended to assuage these fears, but it was just another step down a long road of attempting to appeal to the Jewish community in the United States. Obama has not gained much ground in these efforts because his outreach has been haphazard and marked by missteps that make Obama look like he’s playing politics when he talks about his support of Israel.

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Sen. Barack Obama is back on American soil, but his tour through the Mideast and Europe cemented the presidential hopeful’s international rock star appeal.

Criticisms of Obama’s appearances abroad were few and far between. Foreign newspapers and journalists offered praise for Obama’s trip abroad and his speech to 200,000 Berliners at the Victory Column in Berlin.

Just how much did they like him?

Sixty-two percent of Germans approved of Obama’s appearance and praised his speech in Berlin, according to a poll conducted for the Sunday paper Bild am Sonntag by Emnid. Only 19 percent of Germans didn’t like Obama’s speech.  A whopping 63 percent think an Obama presidency would be good for Germany compared to 20 percent who don’t.

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Today, Feet in Two Worlds blog editor Aswini Anburajan appeared on the morning radio show, The Takeaway with hosts Adaora Udoji and John Hockenberry. Aswini talked about her recent article on undocumented immigrants in Connecticut receiving I.D. cards.

You can listen to the segment here.

The New Yorker published a letter from the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee on why the magazine’s controversial cover, which depicted Sen. Barack Obama as a Muslim, was so offensive.

“Why is the label “Muslim” such a powerful and popular weapon against Obama?,” Kareem Shora, the group’s executive director asked in the letter.

“And what should the Obama camp be doing, instead of denouncing a magazine cover? What needs to be challenged at full volume is the association between a man in Muslim clothing and terrorism, and the underlying assumptions that being Muslim is the same as being un-American, that being Muslim is the same as being violent, that being Muslim is the same as being Osama bin Laden,” writes Shora.

You can read the full letter here.

FI2W wrote extensively – when the cover first came out – on the larger question raised by Shora on why being a Muslim should be seen as a ‘smear’ .

Check out “Liberal Snobs and the Rest of Us: Arab Americans Respond to the New Yorker Cover.”