Media Watchate! The San Antonio Current, the "alternative newspaper," attacks me when I challenged their dictionary understanding of "rasquache"

On March 30, 2006, The San Antonio Current, the city's "alternative" newspaper, published a cover story about the Guadalupe's new President, R. Bret Ruiz.

Alot of my friends took issue with the friendly tone of the story toward the Guadalupe Cultural Center. Isn't an alternative newspaper supposed to ask hard questions, they asked? Apart from the journalistic problems with the story, i.e. quoting from Ruiz's former employee instead of the Anita Martinez Board which hired him, as I did - or checking his resume, as I did).

Most of all, I was dismayed by the writers' texbook understanding of the word rasquache.

I wrote both of the writers and told them the story was a good beginning, but that Ruiz's use of rasquache - in the context that he made it in the story, referring to the Guadalupe community, was derogatory - one word that says everything about his qualifications for leading the Guadalupe Center. (And that's why I began to scrutinize him and the Guadalupe Cultural Center Board who hired him).

I also told him that this detalle was the reason that the San Antonio Current needed bilingual/bicultural journalists in a city like San Antonio.

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Below is San Antonio Current writer Michael Cary's email answer to me about the word "rasquache":

Why don't you think up some more ignorant remarks and email them

to me?

I need column fodder for next week, and would be happy to analyze
your racist attitude toward San Antonio Current writers, and toward
people who are not like you.
I grew up on the South Side of San Antonio.

No amount of classes can teach YOU what it is to be from that side
of town.
And I bet you don't go over THERE anymore.

I take exception to your bigotry - as you know absolutely nothing
about me.

Bring it on!!!

(email above from Michael Cary of the San Antonio
Current). 

Below is the link to the San Antonio Current story that he and Catherine Walworth, wrote, misunderstanding the word "rasquache."

http://www.sacurrent.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=16085899&BRD=2318&PAG=461&dept_id=484045&rfi=6

Culture war

By Catherine Walworth and Michael Cary

02/08/2006

Are complaints against Guadalupe President Bret Ruiz valid or are people simply resistant to change?