Skip to main content

Finally! The San Antonio Express-News BBguns the Guadalupe Center

My friend, journalist Elda Silva interviewed me some weeks ago about the Guadalupe Center, and today the story ran on the front page of the San Antonio Express-News.

In private, she expressed much she couldn't say in the story, because she has to be "balanced." She's not the only journalist who's concerned about the Guadalupe, dismayed at what they've witnessed, but who can't "say anything."

But I can.

Look, there's no Guadalupe Bookfair in San Antonio anymore. The Cinefestival was a washout this year, and the Conjunto Festival was three days when it's been five days long in the past. How do you think I feel?

The Guadalupe Cultural Center Board must resign. A key member of the Westside Coalition, the coalition of non-profit art and cultural organizations representing San Antonio's oldest barrio, has told me off-the-record - that they have not "invited" the Guadalupe Center to participate. They are also dismayed and offended by R. Bret Ruiz, the Guadalupe's President.

But they are even more afraid of losing city funding, since all are up for review on May 19th of this year. In San Antonio, the struggle for city funding for raza programs continues, and a harsh spotlight on the Guadalupe, necessary as it is, means to the Westside Coalition even more scrutiny, questions, and possible loss of funding.

The Guadalupe Cultural Center is the largest latina/o cultural center in San Antonio, and one of the biggest players in the city's artscene, receiving approximately $450,000 for 2006.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Mary Alice, wife of Henry Cisneros, finds her voice in San Antonio as women battle for Free Speech in the Streets

She's a delicate bird of a woman, petite and beautifully apparelled. I know her husband, and she looks up to her supremely intelligent, charismatic, but scared of the status-quo husband. I suspect that she became a San Antonio councilwoman as a result of his lanky shadow. No matter. Yesterday, la Mary Alice stood up to the Man along with Councilwoman Lourdes Galvan and voted on the side of the Constitution and women's rights as one of two women on the San Antonio City Council who recognizes that anti-war or anti-immigrant protestors should be able to march on the streets without having to pay thousands of dollars for the privilege. While the city-wide Fiesta! bacchanal takes over the streets for weeks. With a vote of 9-2, the San Antonio City Council overwhelmingly voted to pass a new "Parade" Ordinance yesterday despite the organized protest of free speech advocates - mostly women - who believe that the City Council is violating the First Amendment of its citiz

A battered woman from San Antonio loses her reporting job

Gina Galaviz , 43, KSAT-TV's I-love-the-police reporter, "has been fired" from the television station , according to the San Antonio Express-News, and I'm quoting verbatim here from Jeanne Jakle's byline, "after she was charged with assault following a fight with her boyfriend," Ronald Aguillen, 46. Ok, so we in San Antonio know about the time in 2004 when Gina filed charges against another boyfriend, the former SWAT cop, who was a councilman at-the-time, Ron Segovia . There were allegations of an apple being thrown at her nalgas, which humiliated her, and that he also pointed a gun at her. It was not the first time, she told me. Tough-guy Segovia got off - I think he had three attorneys representing him if I remember correctly, and in this city, like too many, the cops are in bed with the grand jury - they need and depend on each other, and this grand jury decided there "wasn't enough evidence to pursue a criminal case against him." Seg

Jerry Pittman: The Worst Cop, but there's more in San Antonio

Part II of the Pittman Story ( click here for Part I of the story of San Antonio's badddddest cop) But let’s go back to the beginning of Pittman’s triumphant arc as a black role model, endorsed by white leaders and officially commended by the state’s black legislators. If you were a black nobody cop in the seventies, well, what would it take for you to get promoted? You’d have to be Superman, wouldn’t you? And in a city that sells itself on a myth of cultural fusion, then who would you arrest if you wanted a chance at getting promoted? Hmmmmm? His name was Big House. Real name, Willis Sterling, and he was one of those benevolent drug-dealer types, who’d get arrested, make bond, then go home to the Eastside in the 1980s. A non-violent man. “He was like a modern-day Robin Hood,” says T.C. Calvert, a well-known community activist who doesn’t do drugs himself, only hamburgers. He was so well-liked, say my elder sources, that all sorts of politicians liked hanging out a