Fusion’s Jorge Ramos travels to Puerto Rico to explore the island’s culture, food, music and politics. Ramos ventures out and does everything a tourist is warned not to do — he visits the infamous La Perla community, dares to zip line on “the Beast,” and learns all about cooking pork. And when it comes to island politics, he quickly learns that being a territory of the United States is a touchy subject.
Directly below the famous touristy Old San Juan streets in Puerto Rico is La Perla — a community with a tainted reputation of drug trafficking and crime — rarely visited by outsiders. Although he was warned not to go there, Jorge Ramos decided to explore what La Perla has to offer, guided by local artist
Chemi Rosado Seijo
and community residents.
From the famous “arroz con gandules” to “mofongo” (mashed green plantains with garlic and pork cracklings), the delicious parcha (passion fruit) ice cream sold in street corners– it’s hard to keep a diet. Jorge Ramos takes us through “La Ruta del Lechón,” or the pork highway in the mountains of Guavate, in the town of Cayey, to try traditional Puerto Rican delicacies– including pork intestines “gandinga,” and blood sausage, or “morcilla,” and even the precious “pitorro,” homemade moonshine rum that is a holiday treat.But Jorge then headed to Santurce to
El Departamento de la Comida
, where owner Tara Rodriguez talked about the nascent locally-sourced, organic food movement shaking up the island. After years in New York City, Tara moved back to Puerto Rico to start her restaurant and work with farmers to offer her customers
healthy, affordable produce
that honor culinary traditions.
More: How innovation is bridging the gap between Puerto Ricans in the island and the diasporaThe Heated State
Defining Puerto Rico is not an easy task. It’s a Caribbean island that has somewhat of a “friends with benefits” type of relationship with the United States. Being a U.S. territory can have some perks — but not everyone on the island finds the status to be beneficial. And when Jorge Ramos started asking about it, he learned that talking politics can get heated very quickly there.In front of the Capitol building in San Juan, he spoke to young people who have different points of view when it comes to status: Valerie Rodriguez, from the New Progressive Party; Manuel Natal Albelo from the Popular Democratic Party; and Adrián Gonzalez, part of the Puerto Rican Independence Party.
More: Young Puerto Ricans don’t care about status, we care about opportunityMore: To restore prosperity, Puerto Rico should look to IrelandJR on PR
Fusion’s Jorge Ramos started his trip to Puerto Rico with a lot of advice, but decided to ignore all of it. Overall, Puerto Rico feels very different from the United States– it feels like an independent nation, with its own language, culture, food and geography. Although people on the island share a passport and a past with the U.S., it’s still very complicated to understand why one nation would want to be part of another. To define Puerto Rico continues to be a difficult task. It’s really up to its people to decide what they really want. But we’ll be back to the enchanted island… because it’s simply too tempting to ignore.
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The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center and Mark Twain House & Museum present an Author Talk & Book Signing with Maria Acosta Cruz, author of Dream Nation: Puerto Rican Culture and the Fictions of Independence, (Rutgers University Press, 2014), on September 23 at 7 PM at the Stowe Center. Buy the book at the Stowe Museum Store and save 10% (15% savings for Stowe Center members).
Over the past fifty years, Puerto Rican voters have rejected calls for national independence. Yet the rhetoric and iconography of independence have been defining features of Puerto Rican literature and culture.
Bringing together texts from Puerto Rican literature, history, and popular culture, Dream Nation shows how imaginings of national independence have served competing purposes. They have given authority to the island's literary and artistic establishment but have also been a badge of countercultural cool. These ideas have been fueled both by nostalgia for an imagined past and by yearning for a better future. They have fostered local communities on the island, and helped define Puerto Rican identity within U.S. Latino culture.
In clear, accessible prose, Acosta Cruz takes us on a journey from the 1898 annexation of Puerto Rico to the elections of 2012, stopping at many cultural touchstones along the way, from the canonical literature of the Generación del 30 to the rap music of Tego Calderón. Dream Nation thus serves both as a testament to how stories, symbols, and heroes of independence have inspired the Puerto Rican imagination and as an urgent warning about how this culture has become detached from the everyday concerns of the island's people.
For reservations, email info@stowecenter.comThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. call 860-522-9258, ext. 317.
About the Author
Maria Acosta Cruz is an associate professor of Spanish at Clark University. Her work has appeared in the journals Hispanófila, Revista Iberoamericana, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and Chasqui Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana.
Born and raised in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, Cruz received a B.A. from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in comparative literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1980 and 1984, respectively. Her main research interests are Caribbean and Latino cultures. She explores issues such as the making and marketability of identities, Puerto Rican cultural history, and national and gender-based stereotypes.
The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, a museum, program center and research library, is located at 77 Forest Street in Hartford, CT. The Stowe Center is open year round for tours and programs. The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center uses Stowe's story to inspire commitment to social justice and positive change.
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· · ·
In “Sandra Day O’Connor: How the First Woman on the Supreme Court Became Its Most Influential Justice,” Joan Biskupic tells how President Reagan tapped Sandra Day O’Connor, a little-known state court judge from Arizona with neither experience on the federal bench nor a professional profile traditionally associated with a distinguished legal career. Noted for her pleasingly feminine presentation that set men at ease, she was the right woman at the right time.
Reagan’s White House was also a beachhead for the Federalist Society, a growing movement of conservative lawyers and legal scholars whose mission was to shift the federal courts to the right. Antonin Scalia, one of its ideological generals, rode the Reagan counterrevolution to the Supreme Court with his scorched-earth opposition to the Warren Court legacy. His nomination, reported in Biskupic’s “American Original: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia,” was bolstered by Italian and Catholic constituencies that urged his confirmation, an affair that was surprisingly unanimous given Scalia’s agenda. (But then, no one was going to vote against the first Italian-American nominee to the Supreme Court.)
In “Breaking In: The Rise of Sonia Sotomayor and the Politics of Justice,” Biskupic tells a similar story about Sotomayor, the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice, but she frames the narrative in such a way that most readers are unlikely to see the parallel. Her treatment is not a biography, she writes, but one that “examines the cultural and political shifts that merged with Sotomayor’s life and led to her appointment.” These shifts — euphemisms for growing demands of Hispanics for a piece of the integrationist pie — provided the political wave upon which Sotomayor’s extraordinary determination crested.
Suffusing the account of “Breaking In” is the constant theme of Sotomayor’s disruption of the status quo — as fueled by personality, politics and affirmative action. A key element is ethnicity or, more specifically, race, which Biskupic tell us is “in part” the reason Sotomayor was appointed to the federal bench. The old-fashioned dynamics of preferential treatment for insiders, ethnic and religious politics, and organized advocacy are all magically swept under the meritocratic rug by Biskupic. Accordingly, “Breaking In” not only elevates the ways that Sotomayor is widely seen as a justice unlike the others, but it also magnifies these differences by erasing the “special doors” that have taken whites and men to the legal heights.
Without question Sotomayor’s unlikely rise to the highest level of the legal profession was made possible by the emergence of policies that opened doors for disadvantaged high achievers like her. The problem with the way in which Biskupic presents Sotomayor’s story is that this rise is contrasted with the ethnic, gender and racial politics at the heart of other appointments. References to Scalia’s Italian heritage, for example, were repeated so often during his confirmation hearings that they became a running joke. And O’Connor’s gender was a selling point that overcame the fact that there were plenty of male nominees more traditionally qualified than she was. By comparison, Sotomayor’s membership on the board of directors of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund set off such a backlash that Sotomayor’s supporters simply distanced her from the organization rather than try to defend it.
Readers may find “Breaking In” a conventionally balanced narrative, but convention in this case fails to fully capture the complex contours of Sotomayor’s life story, or the deeper element of racial politics that exists under its surface. Biskupic reveals but does not address how the intersections of race, gender and class continue to drive skepticism about her competence and performance. Nor does she examine how judicial politics have become ground zero in the struggles to demonize integrationist visions of diversity.
By repeatedly emphasizing the ways Sotomayor has been contrasted with others who have gained access to the pinnacle of legal authority, Biskupic reflects the way notions about ethnicity can blur into notions about race. Thus, Scalia’s and Alito’s Italian ethnicity was celebrated as an enhancing dimension of their belonging, while Sotomayor’s ethnicity is still viewed with skepticism. Biskupic’s attempt to maintain a neutral perspective on this is compromised in the first pages of her book. There we learn that Sotomayor’s “barrel-ahead style clashed with the usual order and predictability at the Supreme Court.” Elsewhere, Biskupic cites anonymous complaints about Sotomayor’s temperament and performance both on and off the bench; includes a snarky assessment of her intellectual capacity by an Obama adviser who has since reconsidered the comment; and repeats the subtle accusation of inappropriate judicial activism because of her role in Ricci v. DeStefano, a controversial decision handed down by a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Ricci was a flash point in Sotomayor’s nomination, and it remains one in “Breaking In.” Biskupic seems to join conservative critics in redefining judicial activism to encompass those decisions that take an interventionist approach to discrimination, whether consistent with precedent or not. The case against Sotomayor and the Ricci decision is blended with the case against disparate-impact law itself — that is, against modest efforts to ensure that tests and other practices represent accurate measurements of an applicant’s ability to do a job. Title VII requires such tests to be scrutinized to assess whether the racial disparities they produce can be justified; in Ricci, the city of New Haven, believing that they could not be, discarded the test for everyone. The Second Circuit, including Sotomayor, upheld the decision as consistent with existing law.
At the time, much of the public sympathy in the case went to the plaintiff, Frank Ricci, a firefighter who testified about his hard work and sacrifice. Presented as a victim of affirmative action (which was not at issue in Ricci), he embodied a narrative that Biskupic apparently continues to endorse, but that devotes too little attention to similar sacrifices made by other firefighters who also studied hard to pass a flawed test. The belief that tests are neutral arbiters of qualification is so widespread that it is often regarded as established fact. Yet Sotomayor’s story — one that is unusual only because the opportunities she received were in such short supply — is an antidote to those who place absolute faith in abstract exercises rather than in a proven ability to do a job.
The book does capture Sotomayor’s remarkable up-by-the-bootstraps performance that propelled her to the front of the competition. And it is her own story as a vision for affirmative action that Sotomayor offers as Exhibit A. “I am the perfect affirmative action baby,” she has declared. Other affirmative action babies have not been so willing to acknowledge the role that these policies have played in providing them with the educational and professional opportunities to compete, while still others have famously repudiated the policies — although not the positions they garnered along the way. At the same time, one sees in Sotomayor’s story a classic “intersectional” trap: Her robust questioning of the lawyers in oral argument might be read against the racially infused cloud of intellectual deficit, but instead she has been criticized in terms that seem obviously sexist.
That anyone can walk this walk under the scrutiny Sotomayor bears — as a Puerto Rican, as a woman and as a moderate constitutional thinker — is the real story here. Whatever her elixir, it should be bottled and sold.
BREAKING IN
The Rise of Sonia Sotomayor
By Joan Biskupic
Illustrated. 274 pp. Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.
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· · · · ·
WASHINGTON—A former Police of Puerto Rico (POPR) sergeant and a civilian have pleaded guilty for their involvement in a July 2012 robbery in Bayamon, Puerto Rico, and an additional POPR officer has pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents, announced Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney Rosa Emilia Rodríguez-Vélez of the District of Puerto Rico.
Jorge Fernandez-Aviles, 49, a POPR sergeant, pleaded guilty today to robbery and firearms charges for his role in a July 2012 robbery in Bayamon, Puerto Rico. On Oct. 3, 2014, David Figueroa, 32, a civilian, pleaded guilty to robbery and civil rights charges for his involvement in the robbery. Alexander Mir-Hernandez, 40, a POPR officer, also pleaded guilty on Oct. 3, 2014, to one count of false statements for lying to federal agents about his role in the July 2012 robbery and to a civil rights crime for an unrelated December 2013 robbery. Sentencing for all three is scheduled for Jan. 9, 2015.
Pedro Lopez-Torres, 35, and Luis Ramos-Figueroa, 38, were each POPR officers and were charged by information on June 25, 2014, for their roles in the July 2012 robbery and other crimes. Lopez and Torres pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge José A. Fusté the same day. Fernando Reyes-Rojas, a civilian, has been indicted for robbery, drug, and firearms charges for his involvement in the July 2012 robbery. Reyes-Rojas is scheduled for trial on Nov. 3, 2014.
According to court documents, on July 14, 2012, Sergeant Fernandez-Aviles and Officers Lopez-Torres and Ramos-Figueroa, armed with their POPR weapons, went with Figueroa, Ramos-Figueroa’s cousin, to the airport, where they picked up a marked patrol car from Officer Mir before a planned home robbery. They drove the patrol car to meet Reyes-Rojas and then went together to the location of the robbery.
Upon entering the house, the officers identified themselves as police, falsely claimed they were executing a search warrant, and ordered several individuals in the garage to the ground and searched for weapons. While Figueroa watched the occupants, Sergeant Fernandez, Officer Lopez-Torres, Officer Ramos-Figueroa, and Reyes-Rojas searched the property, and Reyes-Rojas found cocaine in a shed in the backyard. A few days later, Reyes-Rojas met with Lopez-Torres and gave him money from the proceeds of the sale of the cocaine he took on the day of the robbery. Officer Lopez-Torres split the money with Sergeant Fernandez-Aviles and Officer Ramos-Figueroa.
In June 2014, Officer Mir was interviewed by Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and falsely claimed that he did not recognize a photograph of Officer Lopez-Torres; that he had not met with Officer Lopez-Torres in more than six months; and that he did not provide the patrol car that was used to commit the July 2012 robbery.
An indictment is merely an allegation, and a defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.
This case was investigated by the FBI’s San Juan Division and is being prosecuted by Trial Attorney Heidi Boutros Gesch of the Criminal Division’s Public Integrity Section and Assistant U.S. Attorney Mariana Bauza of the District of Puerto Rico.
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Doral Financial Corp. (DRL:US), the holding company for Puerto Rico’s second-largest lender, rose as much as 50 percent in after-hours trading following a San Juan judge’s ruling that it’s entitled to a $229.9 million tax refund.
The Puerto Rico Department of Treasury (0111961D:US) will be required to refund the full amount over five years under the ruling yesterday by Superior Court Judge Laureana Perez Perez.
Doral hasn’t posted an annual profit (DRL:US) since 2005 and has been under pressure to collect the tax refund that the firm said was due under a 2012 agreement.
The bank sued the Treasury when settlement talks over the refund broke down this summer. San Juan-based Doral claimed the government reneged on a promise to return the overcharge.
The tax dispute arose amid a slowdown in Puerto Rico’s economy, which has struggled to expand since 2006, and financial difficulties for both for the island’s government and the San Juan-based lender. Puerto Rico’s credit rankings were dropped to speculative grade in February by the three largest credit-rating companies as concerns rose over whether the U.S. commonwealth and its agencies will be able to repay their combined $73 billion in debt.
Perez said she couldn’t consider the condition of the economy in deciding the case. The Treasury didn’t prove Doral had misrepresented or falsified facts related to an agreement in the tax dispute, according to the judge.
Appeal Vowed
Puerto Rico Treasury Secretary Melba Acosta Febo vowed to appeal the decision.
“We respectfully disagree with the court’s ruling in this matter, which is inconsistent with the Internal Revenue Code, applicable laws and regulations,” she said in a statement.
Doral fell 24 percent on Oct. 1 when it disclosed in a regulatory filing that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. had downgraded it to “significantly undercapitalized.” The bank must “immediately” increase capital to the minimums required in a 2012 consent order or submit a contingency plan for the sale, merger or liquidation of the bank, according to that filing.
“The court carefully listened to all the evidence and has ruled definitively that Doral’s tax agreement is valid and effective,” the company’s chief legal counsel, Matthew McGill, said yesterday in a statement. “It’s a great day not just for Doral but also for the rule of law in Puerto Rico.”
The refund stems from the company’s overstatement of earnings from 1998 to 2005, an attorney for Doral said in June.
Earnings Restated
Doral announced in September 2005 that it would restate earnings before taxes as of the end of 2004. The following year, it agreed to pay a $25 million fine to settle an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission into whether it had overstated earnings from 2000 to 2004. The company didn’t admit or deny regulators’ allegations in the settlement, the SEC said at the time.
The excess tax payment on the overstated earnings was memorialized in an agreement that Doral alleges the treasury department wrongfully voided. In its lawsuit, Doral said that the agency’s actions were “unlawful and beyond its authority.”
The Puerto Rican government maintained that it didn’t owe the money. In May, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York told Doral to write off the refund as a loss on its balance sheet (DRL:US) after Puerto Rico’s Treasury ruled that the company wasn’t entitled to payment.
The case is Doral Financial Corp. v. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, KAC2014-0533, Civil Court of First Instance, San Juan Superior Division.
To contact the reporter on this story: Phil Milford in Wilmington, Delaware at pmilford@bloomberg.net; Alexander Lopez in Civil Court of First Instance in San Juan
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael Hytha at <a href="mailto:mhytha@bloomberg.net">mhytha@bloomberg.net</a> Andrew Dunn
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· · ·
10 Oct ' 16:24
Court rules for Doral in $230 million tax fight with PR government
A judge in Puerto Rico has ruled in favor of Doral Financial Corp. in its $230 m ...
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La jueza Laureana Pérez Pérez indicó esta tarde que el acuerdo contributivo suscrito entre Doral Financial Corp.(NYSE:DRL) y el Departamento de Hacienda hace dos años, y que le concedió al banco un reintegro de $229 millones, es válido.
“Básicamente, Doral decidió litigar esto en los tribunales, frente a un tercero imparcial y siempre evadimos la tentación de litigar esto en los medios”, dijo a El Nuevo Día el abogado de Doral, Ramón Rosario. “Hoy tenemos una decisión de un tribunal, dando la razón a Doral como expusimos desde el principio”.
En una decisión de 48 páginas, la jueza Pérez Pérez dio con lugar el pedido de sentencia declaratoria que la institución financiera radicó contra Hacienda el pasado 5 de junio, indicando que el Estado “no probó el falseamiento de hechos pertinentes, según requerido por el Código de Rentas Internas”. La jueza agregó que tras analizar la prueba, “la intención evidente” de Hacienda fue conceder el millonario reintegro.
La decisión de la jueza Pérez Pérez tiene el efecto de dejar en vigor el acuerdo suscrito el 26 de marzo de 2012, en el cual, Hacienda se comprometió a que Doral continuara amortizando unos $766 millones en activos contributivos o en su lugar recibir un reintegro de $229 millones, pagadero a plazos en cinco años o de manera indefinida.
“La doctrina de justiciabilidad nos impide entrar a considerar si los funcionarios de Hacienda allá para el 2012 tomaron una decisión favorable a los intereses del Estado. Dicho asunto no está ante nuestra consideración”, indicó la jueza Pérez Pérez al subrayar que el Tribunal solo estaba obligado a evaluar “solamente” si conforme a la prueba estipulada y la prueba desfilada en la vista, medió un falseamiento de hechos, según la preponderancia de la prueba.
“Nos toca ahora unir esfuerzos con el gobierno para ayudar a la economía y al pueblo de Puerto Rico”, dijo Rosario.
Por su parte, el asesor legal principal de Doral en la disputa, Mathew D. McGill, dijo sentirse “profundamente complacido” con la decisión del tribunal.
“El tribunal consideró cuidadosamente toda la evidencia y ha determinado de manera definitiva que el acuerdo contributivo de Doral es válido y está en vigor. Es un gran día no solo para Doral sino para el sistema de ley en Puerto Rico. Doral está en la mejor disposición de dejar atrás este litigio y seguir adelante sirviendo al Pueblo de Puerto Rico”, indicó.
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By <a href="http://Primerahora.com" rel="nofollow">Primerahora.com</a> 10/10/2014 | 7:49 pm
The Colonel Carcaña was appointed by Governor Marta Alejandro García Padilla on an interim basis to lead the National Guard, following the resignation of Adjutant General Juan Medina Lamela, Fortress Reported by press release.
Carcaña, who Currently Serves as director of the Joint Staff, will assume the Duties of the Adjutant General to the Governor so directs, reads the letter.
Among His Duties was to supervise intelligence division, directorate of logistics, human resources, communications and community relations.
Lamela Medina resigned yesterday, Thursday the post of adjutant after Meeting with General Secretary of the Interior, Victor Suarez
His departure came after El Nuevo Dia published in Thursday edition ITS HAD That no longer the confidence of the governor for several administrative decisions it has made over the past year and Their complaints about the budget.
Medina Lamela Argued in a presentation to the Finance Committee in the House of Representatives Because Of The Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the National Guard lost $ 3.3 million in federal funds for failing to address with urgency the approval of several contracts.
But the director of OMB, Carlos Rivas D. Quiñones, I stepped out to His statements asserting That Other Contracts Were handled, while it NOTED for having executed Between 15 and 19 May Increases retroactive to May 1, even though, According to Rivas Quinones since February is a specific rather than general guideline That Increases Awarded collective.
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