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More over @MexicanMitt, your new rival speaks French – sort of

Photo by Alexandra Moss/Flickr (Creative Commons)

The "attack croissant" of the Twitter parody?

Move over, @MexicanMitt. There’s another bilingual Mitt Romney parody on Twitter now, and this one speaks (quelle horreur!) French. Sort of.

@LeVraiMitt (“the true Mitt”) joined the Twitter meme ranks this morning and, like @Mexican Mitt, is steadily gaining followers and press coverage. Why French, one might ask?

Unlike the former meme, which seizes on Romney’s Mexican roots (his father, a descendant of American Mormons who moved south in the 19th century, was born in the state of Chihuahua), this one seizes on the GOP presidential primary front-runner’s limited command of French, picked up while living briefly in France as a Mormon missionary.

But just the fact that Romney made attempts at using French publicly has been enough for rival Newt Gingrich’s campaign to blast him for it. In a recent ad painting the former Massachusetts governor as yet another too-liberal politico from that state, the voice-over says ominously: “and just like John Kerry…he speaks French, too!”

Enter @LeVraiMitt, who responds in pidgin French:

Monsieur Gingrich est tres unfair pour me attacker. Aussi il est un gros attack muffin. Ou peut-etre un attack croissant.

The translation, courtesy of The Atlantic Wire:

(That’d be, “Mr. Gingrich is very unfair for attacking me. Also, he is a large attack muffin. Or maybe an attack croissant.” (Finally, we discover why studying Baudelaire was useful to our career.)

Aaaahh, please make it stop! @LeVraiMitt is an amusing read even for non-Francophones, as it’s fairly easy to pick up comic bits and pieces. But there’s one thing he hasn’t said yet: AJUA!!!

As for @MexicanMitt, he’s now on el Feisbuk.

‘A crime to dream the American dream?’ Reaction to ‘Dreamers’ and their support network

A poster at a pro-Dream Act student gathering place in Los Angeles, December 2010

A post from last Friday detailing how undocumented youths have been using social media to build a support network – and in some cases, to fight deportation – was  widely circulated over the weekend. It also drew a very long string of comments, a mix of cheers and outrage.

Here are just a few, unedited. John Collins wrote:

Isn’t that sweet. Those young activists are giving away something which doesn’t belong to them to illegals. That something is OUR country, which rightfully ought to preserved for OUR children. How generous.

Overpopulation is not just an issue for developing countries. Own own resources are running out rapidly, ad we will have a sharp drop in our standard of living and quality of life as a result.

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The cultural mashup dictionary: Twittear and Feisbuk

Photo by TexasT

A recent post on the neologism Googlear has inspired two related entries to Multi-American’s evolving cultural mashup dictionary: The social media mashup terms Twittear and Feisbuk.

First, the Wiktionary definition of twittear:

Etymology

From the online microblogging website, Twitter.

Verb

twittear (first-person singular present twitteo, first-person singular preterite twitteé, past participle twitteado)

1. (Internet) to tweet

I’ve used and heard “twittear” among Spanish-English bilinguals for quite a while, but there’s also this adaptation below, as posted in the comments under the “googlear” post by ar2ro:

more than likely i see “el twitter” being used more in time than “twittear.”

ex: ya mandaste el tweet? (did you send the tweet?)
mire tu mesaje en el twitter. (i saw you message on twitter)
me gusta el twitter (i like twitter)

twittear somehow does not sound right. even googlear sounds a bit funky, but does roll off the tongue in spanish rather well.

Then there’s Feisbuk, which began as a Spanish-friendly unofficial phonetic spelling for “Facebook” but has taken on a life of its own. There are Feisbuk Facebook pages, a spoof analog version, even a page inspired by an alternate pronunciation (“Feisbul”) called “mi mama dice feisbul,” or “my mother says feisbul.”

“Twittear” has been similarly inspirational: There’s a Twittear.com, described in Spanish as “a place where people can meet and leave their ‘twitts.’ ”

The cultural mashup dictionary kicked off earlier this month with the etymology of the term 1.5 generation. Have suggestion for an entry? Feel free to post it below.

A Thanksgiving retweet

Photo by Lane & Anne/Flickr (Creative Commons)

The table is set, November 2007

RT @NeffStarr Turkey with my white family @1pm Then my mexican family @6pm

I caught a retweet of this little gem from someone in Houston yesterday. I liked it because it captures, in less than 140 characters, the transitioning between cultures that is also a big part of Thanksgiving Day for many in Southern California, where families are of mixed ethnicity, mixed race and mixed status.

For recent immigrants who celebrate it, the holiday is part of their adaptation to a new culture. For those who have been here a long time and have raised children here, it is a tradition that captures a cross-generational blend of voices, attitudes and languages at the table.

And for those of us raised here, the second and third generations (and the 1.5s like me), it’s a day of transitioning between the old and the new, the families that raised us and the families we have perhaps married into, which, in this part of the country, might be from a different culture altogether.

It’s a big table that we set in Southern California, with meals that can bear little resemblance to traditional turkey and stuffing (turkey with mole, anyone?), and new Americans who bear little resemblance to the passengers of the Mayflower. It’s a table that I’m proud to sit at.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Now I’m off for the rest of the day to cook and eat.

Quote of the moment: The Reid DREAM Act tweet

“I will move the DREAM Act as a standalone bill in the lame duck. It’s good for the economy & Pentagon says good for natl security.”

- A tweet from @SenatorReid, posted this afternoon

The tweet came from a verified account of the office of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in Nevada. The advocacy group America’s Voice has posted on its website that a Senate vote on the DREAM Act, proposed legislation that would create a path to legal status for undocumented youths who attend college or join the military, is likely to occur after the Thanksgiving break.

A short blurb on the CapitolWirePR site yesterday afternoon noted that during a speech before Latino political leaders yesterday, New York Democratic Rep. Nydia Velasquez announced that House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi had announced a tentative vote date of Nov. 29.

Earlier this year, Reid attached the measure to a defense spending fill that failed to win enough votes in September. Shortly afterward, the Development, Relief and Education of Alien Minors (or DREAM) Act was re-introduced as a stand-alone bill.

The proposed legislation has the support of both the Pentagon and the Obama administration; Politico posted a readout from a meeting yesterday between Obama and three members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, where Obama reiterated his support for comprehensive immigration reform.

Versions of the DREAM Act have come and gone for close to a decade, and speculation is that its chances of making it through Congress are slim. Still, the measure has led to unprecedented activism this year, especially from college students who have participated in rallies, sit-ins and hunger strikes. Today a “die-in” protest was held in downtown Los Angeles, while military hopefuls camped out at Sen. John McCain’s office in Washington, D.C.

Quote of the moment: On the need for Asian voices in the immigration debate

“It is really frustrating to be mostly left out of the conversation. Mostly it’s because the Asian-American vote is missing — the media do not sample the Asian vote to tell what we’re really voting on.”

- Karen Narasaki, president and executive director of the Asian American Justice Center in Washington, D.C., quoted in an opinion piece in the Seattle Times

Syndicated columnist Esther Cepeda’s piece from yesterday has hit a nerve, making the rounds extensively on Twitter today. The column begins: “If I were a member of the third-largest minority group in the United States, I’d be really frustrated that the immigration issue continues to be discussed almost exclusively with Latin Americans in mind.”

Too true, for a number of reasons. Narasaki, whose civil rights organization advocates for Asian and Pacific Islander immigrant communities, estimates that the Asian vote represents only about 5 percent of eligible voters, while Latino voters represent about 9 percent. Both political parties have failed to invest in Asian voters and don’t understand them very well, Narasaki said.

But the “Latino-centric immigration narrative” that Cepeda criticizes stems from a number of causes, among them limited community outreach in Asian communities (compared with Latino communities) and, on the media side, mainstream-media laziness and a general dearth of minority journalists who know better.

Yet one of the biggest immigration stories of the past week, the pending (and now postponed) deportation of San Francisco college student Steve Li, involves a young Chinese-American man born in Peru. Like the mostly Latino kids who have been the subjects of media coverage surrounding the DREAM Act, proposed legislation that would give undocumented college students and military recruits a path to legal status, Li was also living in the shadows unable to adjust his status, along with his family.

It’s all the more reason to bring the voices of these immigrants and their families into the conversation.