Roberto Lovato: No Laughing Matter: Anti-Latino Humor Has Entered the Mainstream

Late night funny man Conan O’Brien recently tickled his studio audience as he touched on immigration, a hot button topic heard with growing frequency on late night talk shows: “A man in Mexico weighing 1,200 pounds has lost almost half that weight and might enter the Guinness Book of World Records for most weight lost. The Mexican man lost the weight when the family inside him moved to America.” Then at the Emmys on September 16, O’Brien, who won an award, provided a clip of his writing team depicted as Latino day-laborers.

During a “New Rules” segment of his show broadcast in late August, liberal late nighter Bill Maher went to the well of immigrant humor: “New Rule: No more produce-scented shampoo: avocado, cucumber, watermelon. Gee, your hair smells like a migrant worker.”

Jay Leno, who has gone out of his way to tell people, “I’m not a conservative,” has also joined in. During a show in mid-September, he joked, “Well, police across the country now say they’re arresting more and more illegals who are prostitutes. But proponents say, ‘No, no. They’re just doing guys American hookers will not do.’”"*

• Interview with Children’s Author Lucia Gonzalez – Gonzalez’s latest children’s book, The Storyteller’s Candle, is dedicated to Pura Belpre
• Police in Peru say gang members killed people to drain their fat for cosmetics
• Mexican authorities predict fewer Mexican immigrants will be back home for Christmas
• Interview with Aurora Anaya-Cerda, owner of La Casa Azul Bookstore – NYC
• Mapping Out Mexico – Navigating your way through Mexico can be tricky business sometimes – MexicoMaps.com
• Mexico City Noir and the Six Word Story
• Do Long Island Police Ignore Hate Crimes?
• Mexican migrants are spending more money on taxes in the United States than on the remittances they send home to relatives, according to a new study by Mexico’s largest bank, BBVA Bancomer.
• Ana Maria Perez Gonzalez, said to be the oldest woman in the world, died in Mexico this week. She was 119.
• Welcome Ceremony for José Hernández Moreno, NASA Astronaut in México
• My Latino Book Review: Belinda Acosta’s “Drama, Damas and Ana Ruiz”
• Mexico’s Drug Violence Gives Rise To Vigilantism
• The wave of crime besetting Puerto Rico seems to be out of control with 800 murders being committed here so far this year, but the island’s top police official says the problem does not fall exclusively within his department.
• The first two volumes of the “Nueva gramatica de la lengua española” (New Grammar of the Spanish Language) will go on sale in Spain and Latin America on Dec. 4, the Association of Spanish Language Academies and Espasa publishing house announced Wednesday.
• The University of Panama indefinitely suspended classes on Wednesday after confrontations between students and police during a protest against alleged U.S. involvement in plans to build new military installations.
• Mexico anti-abortion fight moves to federal level
• From the Bookshelves: And You Welcomed Me: Migration and Catholic Social Teaching
• Pennsylvania State Police officials meet with Chambersburg Area Hispanic leaders about traffic stop procedures
• Impremedia to Outsource Editorial and Ad Page Production to Mexico
• A New United Movement Stops Mexico for a Day