My assignment today was to get people's comments on President Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court.
My editor asked me to talk to some regular folks -- not just the politicans and legal experts. She said it would be particularly good if I could get some Hispanic people on record.
I figured I'd try to talk to a couple of local Puerto Ricans, which is Sotomayor's ethnicity. Since taking the easy way out is pretty much a way of life for me, I checked in with a few Puerto Rican acquaintances in downtown York. To my surprise, they told me they felt they couldn't comment because they don't follow politics.
The reason that surprised me is because a few years ago, I visited a friend of mine in Puerto Rico. He told me that people there are acutely interested in politics. Elections there tend to draw nearly all the qualified voters.
So why weren't the local Puerto Ricans interested in politics? Maybe they're becoming assimilated in United States culture. If so, that's a shame.
Before I leave this topic, I'd just like to say one more thing. It's not related to Sotomayor's nomination, but I've been waiting for a long time to get a soapbox where I can mention this.
When the Puerto Rican friend I mentioned earlier visited me, he went to a few job interviews. At more than one, they asked him about his immigration status.
One time here at the York Daily Record, I did a story about a program that specializes in rehabilitating Spanish-speaking juvenile offenders originally from Puerto Rico who now live in York County. I got a call from a local woman who was furious over what she considered to be my sympathetic portrayal of the program. She demanded to know why those Puerto Rican teens couldn't simply be "deported" back to "their country."
I'll assume that most, if not all, of my readers already know this. But if this is the first time anybody has informed you of this, please try to remember it.
Ready? PUERTO RICO IS PART OF AMERICA!
Got it?
To be fair, it does occupy kind of a legally ambiguous area. It's a commonwealth with its own constitution, but it's officially a U.S. territory.
Earlier in this entry, I myself differentiated between Puerto Rico and the United States. That's because my friend told me that they do that in Puerto Rico.
So yeah, there's a geographic separation, and a linguistic and cultural difference. The important thing to remember is that anybody from Puerto Rico has a legal right to be here, as much as you have a legal right to travel or move to another state.
If you want to get huffy about it, like that angry caller I mentioned, you might want to consider that betraying ignorance about your own country isn't the best way to assert your status as a "true" American.
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