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Axios Latino is published every Tuesday and Thursday.
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You will always find it in Spanish on Noticias Telemundo.
1 topic to highlight: The advancement of Latino rights thanks to Asian Americans
Behind pivotal advances in civil rights for Hispanics
A number of people of Asian and Pacific Islander descent also played a role in the United States, though that role has largely gone unnoticed.
Why It Matters
: People of Asian descent in the US face increasing discrimination.
In addition, there is often little awareness among the public about their contributions.
That includes the little-known fact that a Chinese man helped make citizenship a constitutionally protected birthright, benefiting millions of immigrants for a century.
Larry Itliong (center) and Cesar Chavez (right) at a march in San Francisco in 1966. Gerald L French/Corbis / via Getty Images
Details
: Wong Kim Ark, a cook of Chinese roots and a native of San Francisco, took his case to the Supreme Court in the 14th century: he had traveled to China and returned to the US and was denied re-entry.
The Supreme Court ruled in 1898 that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution guaranteed US citizenship to Wong and anyone else born on US soil.
Although César Chávez and Dolores Huerta
are known as leaders of the movement for the labor and civil rights of agricultural workers —sparked by a strike among those who picked grapes for the Delano company in 1965—, it was Larry Itliong, a Filipino immigrant, who promoted them.
Itliong organized farmworkers of Asian descent who worked for Delano and led a strike on behalf of 2,000 employees asking for more pay (their initial demand was to go from $1.25 to $1.40 an hour).
Itliong asked Chavez to join and encourage farmworkers of Latino origin in Delano, so that the strike would not be broken.
Chavez joined, and he and Huerta founded the United Farm Workers union, gaining international recognition for calling attention to unfair firing conditions for Latino farmworkers.
2. Dancing to the top
Isaac Hernández, an internationally renowned Mexican dancer, will join the San Francisco Ballet as a featured member.
In addition, his brother Esteban, who is a principal dancer (the highest rank), is already in that city.
"No one believed me that I am Mexican": Isaac Hernández leaves his mark on classical ballet
April 15, 202202:37
Big Picture
: Isaac, 31, is one of the few Latinos and Latin Americans to have made it big in dance globally.
And he's not the only internationally recognized talent in his family, given how his younger brother has also made his way.
Isaac Hernández has participated in the Paris Opera and was a prominent member of the national companies of the Netherlands and England.
He won the international Benois de la Danse award —known as the Oscar of ballet— in 2018. He was the first Mexican to achieve it (Elisa Carrillo was the first Mexican, a year later).
They thus joined the Argentines Ludmila Pagliero (2017) and Herman Cornejo (2014), and the Uruguayan MarĂa Riccetto (2017) as the only Latin Americans recognized by that institution as the best in the world.
The story
: Hernandez's parents taught their children ballet at a makeshift barre in their Guadalajara home.
A prestigious dance school in Philadelphia, the Rock School of Dance, took note of the family's talent and awarded scholarships to Isaac and later to Esteban Hernández.
"Since I was a child, when I went to competitions, no one ever believed that I was Mexican, that I took classes in the patio while my mother hung out the clothes and that this was how my education was until I was able to access these international opportunities," he told Noticias Telemundo.
News Momentum
: Hernandez will finish a seven-year stint with the English National Ballet and move to the US in June.
She will join Tamara Rojo, the Spaniard who will become the first woman to artistically direct the San Francisco company.
Hernández and Rojo are married and have a son.
Esteban Hernández is also there;
he has been a principal dancer with the San Francisco Ballet since 2019.
The Hernandezes are trying to create more opportunities for dance in their home country with a festival called
Despertares
that has a gala of international talent (this year it will be in August in Mexico City) and has helped Mexican dancers audition for dance companies. of all the world.
3.
Googling
a complexion with more color
Google is adopting a data model
that takes into account a wide range of human skin tones, it announced this month.
Why it matters
: Google is the main point of access to the Internet for many people around the world, and its attempts to offer more equitable services affect billions of people.
Details
: The tech company says it has started using the Monk Skin Tone Scale (MST) as a guide to assess its products.
The Monk scale, developed by Harvard professor Ellis Monk, has 10 complexion tones.
In contrast, the other most widely used phototype model, the Fitzpatrick scale, only takes six into account.
The skin tones on the Monk scale that Google will use from now onGoogle
Now, for example, more skin tones appear when doing an image search related to makeup, and the filters are more sensitive to different skin colors in Google Photos.
Google touts its Real Tone feature, intended to help its Pixel phone cameras better capture people with darker skin tones, as Axios' Ina Fried reported.
Big picture
: Equitable technology development helps counteract discrimination in the most widely used tools.
In addition, it is a way to prevent bias between humans from being transferred to and encoded in computer algorithms.
Much of the technology, including photography, was designed with light-skinned users in mind.
The company Snapchat recently launched an "inclusive camera" program that seeks to remedy the legacy of analog photography, whose chemical processes to reveal images were optimized without taking into account different skin colors.
Yes, but
: The problems of bias in technology go far beyond skin tone.
There are also harmful trends regarding who is shown in images and how they are shown: studies show that if someone searches for "young Latina" they are more likely to return results of sexualized images.
"The web itself has had a history of bias in terms of who we take photos of, who we post," Google's head of inclusion and artificial intelligence told Axios.
4.
Summary of key news in Latin America and the Caribbean
Costa Rica
is trying to free thousands of government computers from a
ransomware
attack for more than a week, which can lead to data loss in key departments such as the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Finance.
The group that has claimed responsibility for the attack, Conti, said this week that it seeks to oust President Rodrigo Chaves from power.
A complaint by Brazilian President
Jair Bolsonaro against a judge of the country's Supreme Court was dismissed on Wednesday.
Bolsonaro accuses Judge Alexandre de Moraes of affecting his image in the face of the presidential elections in October;
De Moraes is investigating claims of abuse of authority involving Bolsonaro.
Herlinda Bobadilla escorted by police officers on May 15, 2022STR / AFP via Getty Images
Honduras and the United States
collaborate
to capture Juan Carlos Montes Bobadilla, son of Herlinda Bobadilla, the woman accused of leading the largest cartel in the Central American nation, and who was arrested on Monday.
Bobadilla, nicknamed
Chinda
, was arrested in an operation carried out days after the US increased the reward to $5 million.
Chinda
's extradition
to face drug charges in the United States is discussed.
5. đź“– Farewell smile: The pleasure of reading
A non-profit organization in San Salvador wants to offer an alternative to children who are spending more and more time in front of the screen due to the pandemic: living together and reading printed books.
In El Salvador they 'throw' the library out the window to encourage reading in children
May 11, 202201:45
Details
: The campaign called
We throw the library out the window
has held monthly events since the end of last year, seeking to encourage children and young people to spend time outdoors reading.
There are free (physical) books for them to immerse themselves in various stories by themselves or with their parents, as well as read-alouds and games, in various squares in the capital of El Salvador.
The project was devised by the Salvadoran group ConTextos.
Pachanga Thursday:
Congratulations to Elizabeth de Leon Bhargava! She was just
sworn in
as Assistant Secretary for Management at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
She was previously a deputy commissioner in New York and has more than 20 years of experience in the public sector.
If you want to be included in the Pachanga, where we highlight the achievements of our readers every Thursday,
send us an email.
Thanks for reading us!
We return on Tuesday.
Do you want to see any of the previous editions?
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Why More and More Latinos Buy Guns
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Afro-Latinos: new data on the changing identity among the community