He'll deliver it for you (Rebel Girl)

.    (A REBEL GIRL post.)
.    She doesn't know about you, but Rebel Girl sure got inspired when she received this email:

.    On Monday, April 21 your district news update included a request for letters of support. The letter you received with suggested copy has been revised. If you are interested in writing a letter for Chancellor Mathur to deliver to the Governor's Office on May 8, you may use the sample letter, or you may wish to customize it with personal stories about your students or your programs. This letter was intended only as suggested copy. Please transmit your letter (by campus mail or attached to an e-mail) to Tracy Daly in the district office by Friday, May 2.
.    If you have any questions, please contact Tracy Daly at tdaly@socccd.edu.

.    It's not often that we in the district have an opportunity to have voices and stories heard directly by the state legislature and the governor. As numerous emails attest, Chancellor Mathur plans to carry our letters with him when he travels to Sacramento!
.    We here at Dissent encourage our readership to write letters and let the Chancellor deliver them for you. While the district has provided sample copy, please note that we're also encouraged to "customize it" and tell our own "personal stories." We here at DISSENT know we all have stories to tell. You tell them to us all the time. Now's the time to share them with a wider audience!
.    It is true that our district is threatened with proposed budget cuts and that we should lobby against fee increases and for increased funding. But we're also threatened by forces much closer to home. Some people may even suggest that the board and Mathur are greater threats. We suggest that you write letters addressing the nature of both threats and asking for relief. (See RG's customization below.)
.    So, do write your letters and send them on to the district.
.    Consider this: If you all seal the envelope, they'll have to cut them open to decide which letters will actually make it north!

Ruben Salazar gets a stamp!

From today's Los Angeles Times:

It is not every day that we have the opportunity to celebrate a colleague whose work for this newspaper stands the scrutiny of history. Journalism, by its nature, tends to focus on the immediate. Only a few of any generation leave a bold enough mark to be visible over generations. One such journalist was Ruben Salazar, whom we honor today as the United States Postal Service issues a stamp to commemorate his life and work.

To many, Salazar is recalled largely for his death. He was killed at the age of 42 by a tear-gas canister fired by a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy during a Chicano antiwar protest-turned-riot in East Los Angeles in 1970. It is right and important that we remember Salazar's death. His clear-eyed, unflinching journalism impelled him to places of danger and made him enemies, some in law enforcement. But his contribution exceeds his sacrifice. In the 11 years that his work appeared in these pages, Salazar was a voice of the people—la voz de la Raza, some called him.

Salazar was an early and eloquent explorer of the Mexican American experience. He chronicled that experience around the world, reporting from Mexico, of course, but also the Dominican Republic and Vietnam. His greatest work was done in Los Angeles, where Salazar refused to accept the pathologies of immigrant life. He covered schools and police-community relations. He rightly complained about a system of political representation that denied Latinos any place on the City Council or county Board of Supervisors. He refused to accept that Mexican immigrants, whose contributions were forming the city we now inhabit, were to be treated as somehow outside it. He wrote from the ground up, which is why he found himself in the Silver Dollar Cafe on Aug. 29, 1970, as the rioting churned through the neighborhood and as that deputy fired the canister that killed him.

Much has changed in the years since Salazar died. He would surely be pleased to see a Mexican American mayor and other elected leaders; he would welcome the signs of political cohesion among Latinos. But he would find Los Angeles schools painfully familiar, and he would have no trouble recognizing the often shrill debate over illegal immigration. As Los Angeles enjoys "Ruben Salazar Day," we, his proud former colleagues, rededicate ourselves to the city that he imagined, one where we recognize and celebrate our varied heritages and set aside those differences in order to build a society together.

While others have noted this elsewhere, Rebel Girl would like to point out the incomplete phrase that adorns the stamp, how it begins abruptly with the preposition: "during Chicano protest rally in East Los Angeles." Point of fact: Salazar was not killed during the rally—he was killed miles from the rally, in the aftermath of what many, Rebel Girl included, would characterize as a police riot.

Rebel Girl, ever the English major and activist, also wonders about the absence of the only verb that fits: killed.

Then there's the rub—as Michael Sedano over at la bloga points out: "There's something more, yet less, in the stamp story. It's "good" only for the next twenty days. The USPS issued the stamp at the current first class standard, 41 cents. On May 12, you’ll have to add a one cent mark-up if you want to honor Salazar with his stamp, since the first class rate goes up to 42 cents."

Rebel Girl hears the little voice in her head: Shut up and be grateful.

Never.

From the USPS site: Note: When reproducing the Salazar image, please include the following: Ruben Salazar, from the Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive (Collection 1429), Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA

UPDATE: A quick perusal of today's OC Register brings to light two things: a 42 cent version of the stamp (!) and an IVC link. Credited with lobbying for the stamp is one Olga Briseno, currently director of the Media, Democracy and Policy Initiative at the University of Arizona at Tempe and onetime founder of the journalism program and newspaper at IVC, a program since beaten to a bloodly pulp by the powers that be and continue to be.