“You know you’re a pendejo/a when…”

You’re celebrating your national organizations’ 5^th, 10^th, 15^th, 20^th, 30^th and 70^th annual conferences and your main goal is still to discuss understanding of critical policy issues affecting Latinos.

Most national Latino organizations annual conferences happen in the spring and summer to gather large groups of wanna-be Latino (a) movers and shakers to do the same old nothing including, the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, National Association of Hispanic Journalists, National Council of La Raza, League of United Latin American Citizens, and so forth.

If you read their workshop descriptions on their web site, they are extremely irrelevant and disconnected from whom they claim to represent. You can see why their trickle-down conferences politics have no noticeable impact in the Latino communities across the United States, because there is minimal grassroots participants, nothing on building a movement, and no plans for new voter turnout.

It’s mostly intellectuals mental-masturbating. Sorry if I offended anyone, but these national organizations need to close the gap between their conference organizers and their real constituents, the grass-roots folks. It’s the Juan’s and María’s who never get a knock on their door that are missing at these conferences again, and again, and again. We have become what we have criticized the government of doing when it comes to the census under-counting—we walk right pass our gente’s neighborhoods. Shame on you!

Ramón Pérez
Toledo, Ohio