text:
[Letter from the United States]
by Héctor Tobar,
What does it mean to be Latino?
"Ramona Gardens Projects, Boyle Heights, Los Angeles," by Gregory Bojorquez. Courtesy Galerie Bene Taschen, Cologne, Germany
49% hispanic
biden 71%, trump 27%
When I was growing up in Los Angeles, I didn't call myself "Latino," and neither did anyone else I knew. My father was born in a verdant village in Guatemala's banana-growing region; my mother was raised in Guatemala City. In the California of the Seventies, when hyphenated ethnic identifiers were all the rage, I described myself as Guatemalan-American. In 1980, I marked the box labeled "Hispanic" on my family's census form, attaching that term to my name for the first time. In college, I took a course called Spanish for Spanish Speakers, placed an accent over the e in my given name, and hoped to embrace my inner guatemalteco. Later I lived in Mexico City and learned how to cuss like a local chilango, which mortified my mother. I became the editor of a bilingual newspaper, and then a novelist preoccupied with all things Latin American. Only after I published my third book did my father reveal that my late grandmother, a lifelong domestic worker, had never learned to read or write. By that time I was Latino, at least according to the house style adopted by my then employer, the Los Angeles Times.
The many English dictionaries I own tell me that the term "Latino" refers to a person who has roots in Latin America, but that's a huge spectrum of humanity: descendants of more than a dozen countries and territories; Jews, Catholics, Muslims, and Mormons; people with blond hair and those with dark skin; folks whose first language might not be Spanish but Quechua, K'iche', or even English. It's a term so capacious that it can mean almost anything, and it can feel empty to those of us forced to use it. If you ask so-called Latinos about their ethnicity, they'll usually say something like "I'm Mexican" or "I'm Cubano," or use any number of other national or regional identifiers.
But when you hear a label repeated so often, you can't help but get used to it. I married into a Chicano family, and my wife and I have three children. For them, Latino or Latinx makes more sense than Mexican-Guatemalan-Chicano-American. In fact, in this age of resurgent white supremacy, I've begun to wonder whether Latino might have more significance than I'd understood. As with this country's other major ethnic and racial labels, its true definition was born not of biology or geography but of a common experience relative to white identity. Latino was coined to describe something a white person wasn't. Today, a certain kind of white person attaches a sense of foreignness to us; we, in turn, continue to resist the cultural erasure that accompanies assimilation.
In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, a cast of mostly white commentators struggled to define the term in an attempt to make sense of Latino voting patterns. According to one national exit poll, the shift in the Latino vote was modest: 31 percent of us voted for Donald Trump, three percentage points more than in 2016. But in Florida and southern Texas, Trump gained ten to twenty points or more among Latino voters, and those dramatic swings dominated the postelection conversation. In the days after the election, whenever I opened a web browser, I could hear the annoyance, feel the condescension. Black people voted overwhelmingly for Biden because they could see that Donald Trump was a racist, the pundits argued. But more of you Latinos voted for Trump than in 2016, even though it was your children he rounded up, your fathers he labeled rapists and murderers. Even Barack Obama called us out, saying that "evangelical Hispanics" had given more consideration to "their views on gay marriage or abortion" than to Trump's racism or his "undocumented workers in cages." Following the election, several outlets sent reporters to interview Latino voters. After listening to our conflicting points of view, journalists threw up their hands and declared us a mystery, a conundrum, and a nonentity. As more than one commentator put it: "There is no such thing as the Latino vote."
In one sense, this is unquestionably true. Like all labels, Latino is to some extent a fiction, a story we tell about ourselves. But what, if anything, does this story mean? In December, I set out on a nine-thousand-mile road trip across the country, aiming to visit as many Latino communities as I could, a solitary trek that would take me across the Snake and Mississippi Rivers, through icy deserts and over lonely mountain ranges, and into quarantined cities where various dialects of Spanish and Spanglish were spoken. I wanted to find out whether a term that describes so many different people in so many different circumstances still had something to say.
A family gathering at Echo Park Lake in Los Angeles © Pablo Unzueta
"Oye mi amor ¿y esto qué chingados?" by Ingrid Leyva, from the Border Diaries series © The artist
Jose Mendez, a Cuban-American Trump supporter, outside a polling place in Miami-Dade County, Florida, October 24, 2020 © Saul Martinez
woodburn, oregon
I left Los Angeles with an ample supply of face masks in my glove compartment and headed north on Interstate 5, along the same route countless farmworkers take to the Pacific Northwest, following the harvest of strawberries, lettuce, and hops. Not long after I entered the San Joaquin Valley, signs in support of the forty-fifth president began to appear along the highway. I considered pulling off the road to seek out one last meal of good Mexican food before leaving California, but there seemed to be nothing but Taco Bell on offer. A fog began to roll in after I crossed into Oregon. As night fell, a full moon rose over a tableau of misty mountains and the silhouettes of tall Douglas fir trees. It looked to my weary guatemalteco eyes like a strange, menacing land.
I headed to the farm town of Woodburn because it's a small island of Mexican culture in the great white sea of Oregon. The nineteenth-century pioneers who founded Oregon barred black people from settling in the state, and even now it is just 2 percent black and 13 percent Latino. Portland, thirty miles to the north of Woodburn, is one of the whitest major cities in the country. The Mexican families that first came to Woodburn and the surrounding Willamette Valley in the Forties were itinerant farmworkers. During World War II, the Mexican laborers of the Bracero Program were hailed for rescuing the state's wheat and fruit crops. Today, an estimated 98 percent of farmworkers in Oregon are Latino.
Woodburn is a town of humble wood-frame and brick structures. Teresa Alonso Leon and her family arrived in the late Seventies and early Eighties, after long journeys from the mountains of Michoacán, Mexico. I first met her in 2019, in an old office building that had been converted into a food court. On my return, with the pandemic at its height, we spoke on the phone. Alonso Leon was born into an indigenous Purépecha family, and Spanish was her family's second language. Some of her earliest childhood memories are of dancing in Purépecha festivals. "My mom said I learned to dance at a super young age," she said. Latino and Latinx, terms whose etymology is European, erase the indigenous identity of people like her, and of millions more people, like me, with hidden indigenous roots. But Alonso Leon has learned to embrace the term: when we spoke, she was organizing a meeting of Latino elected officials.
I asked Alonso Leon if there was a place in Woodburn that was special to her, and she directed me to the oak trees growing on Settlemier Avenue, near downtown. Then she told me the story of how she first came to see those trees. Her mother had immigrated to Oregon, leaving Teresa behind in Michoacán. A few months later, an aunt took Teresa north, but the authorities in Tijuana separated them, and Teresa ended up in the back of a patrol car. "I've never shared this publicly before," she said, fighting back tears. When she finally arrived in Woodburn, she looked out another car window and saw the trees on Settlemier Avenue. "Those trees meant I was closer to my mom, who I loved more than anything in the whole world."
In Oregon, her parents picked berries and other crops, and the family lived in a ramshackle home on the edge of town. The possibility of detention and deportation hung over her childhood. "We've been traumatized even before the Trump Administration," Alonso Leon told me. Starting in the Fifties with Operation Wetback, immigration agents chased workers through the berry fields, and in 1978 they conducted a five-day raid during the local cauliflower harvest. As a young girl, Alonso Leon learned English and acted as an interpreter for her parents, and she saw them humiliated and exploited by white people. "I chose what to translate back to my parents," she said. "Because there was so much racism." Like countless immigrant children, she absorbed the sting of the insults directed at her mother and father.
Alonso Leon, now forty-six, transformed this humiliation into the kind of hypercitizenship I've seen before among the progeny of Mexican immigrants. She went to college, became a U.S. citizen, and landed a job at an Oregon state education commission. She was appointed to the Woodburn City Council in 2013, and later persuaded her family to dance in Woodburn's annual Fiesta Mexicana parade. "We're going to showcase our cultura," she told them, and they performed the baile del torito, the bull's dance, as her brother played music from the back of his pickup truck. In 2016, she was elected as a Democrat to the Oregon State Legislature.
Her parents are nearing retirement age, but still do farmwork in nurseries. They became U.S. citizens "because they both wanted to vote for me," she said. "When they saw me win, that was huge."
Ismael Fernandez, a city councilman in Wilder, Idaho, 2014 © Kyle Green
"Saint Louise Ascends," by Star Montana © The artist.
Trump supporters at a demonstration in Beverly Hills, California, on November 7, 2020, the day Joe Biden was declared the winner of the presidential election © Ryan Christopher Jones
wilder, idaho
trump 62%, biden 28%
The road to Idaho took me through the woods of central Oregon, past the ashy ruins of dozens of homes destroyed by recent wildfires, then across the sagebrush of the eastern Oregon desert and into decaying, one-stoplight towns with billboards offering help to the agnostic and the suicidal. After eight hours of driving, I reached the town of Wilder, in western Idaho. The same circuit of itinerant work that brought Alonso Leon's family to the Northwest brought Mexican families here as well.
Back in 2015, Wilder elected an all-Latino city council, but no one really noticed—until a reporter from Boise visited and told them they were the first municipality in the state to do so. Latino people in this part of the country are proud of their roots but eschew identity politics. Wilder, a town of about 1,500, is far away from the urban centers of Latino political power and expression. Their neighbors are, generally speaking, a deeply conservative lot. "I know that not everyone agrees with me being here," the town's Mexican-American then mayor, Alicia Almazan, a beautician by trade, told me in 2017. "But it's not because I'm Hispanic—it's because I'm a woman." After a slew of stories in the national media about Wilder's all-Latino city council (including one I wrote), Almazan was trounced in her 2019 bid for reelection.
Near the hop fields on the outskirts of town, I met a twenty-eight-year-old employee at an auto-parts store, Gerardo Anguiano, whose family came to the United States from Colima, Mexico. Anguiano told me he couldn't vote because he was "only a resident." But if he could have voted? "Trump," he said. It seemed he'd been influenced by his friends, many of whom own small construction businesses and feared a Democratic tax hike. "I would admit he's racist; he talks a lot of smack. I don't think he's fit for office," Anguiano said. "But the way the country is, you never want a lot of money taken out of your paycheck. I guess everyone is looking after themselves."
American individualism is a powerful thing: You can use it to fill your wallet with honestly earned U.S. dollars, and own a pedacito of the American dream. It can even persuade a Mexican immigrant to support a man bent on deporting as many Mexican immigrants as he can. Latino identity, like those of other American ethnic groups, is created by the attraction to and repulsion from self-interested Anglo-Saxon Protestant values. We see white people living an orderly, safe, and affluent existence, and many of us want to be like them. According to a Pew survey, 11 percent of people who could identify as Latino choose not to.
Anguiano told me there was one thing that bothered him about the Trump years: more people in Idaho telling Latinos they shouldn't speak Spanish in public. Why should it concern them? When you live with the contradictions of being Latino, it's possible to be an individualist immigrant and still take pride in your culture. Anguiano was proud of Mexican cooking, as I learned when I told him I was going to have dinner at a restaurant two blocks away. He frowned. "That's more of a white Mexican" place, he said, suggesting one on the other side of the railroad tracks instead. When I visited this eatery a few minutes later, I discovered it was a restaurant, grocery store, and meat market all in one. A black road worker who entered remarked, "They've got real chicharróns here."
Reies López Tijerina with New Mexico State Police officers after protests at Abiquiu Dam, June 1969 © Mark Bralley
San Isidro, by Nicholas Herrera © The artist. Courtesy Evoke Contemporary, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
"Unidentified Woman at Descanso Site, New Mexico," circa 1930, by John Candelario. From Latinx Photography in the United States, which was published in January by the University of Washington Press. Courtesy the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA/165857)
tierra amarilla, new mexico
What to call the people now known as Latino has been debated for more than four hundred years. The Spanish settlement of what is today the Southwestern United States in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave birth to ethnic identifiers such as Tejano and Californio. Then the United States conquered the territory in the Mexican-American War. "Mexican" became an insult used by English speakers to denigrate the locals with Spanish surnames, denying them the social status of white Americans. In 1929, the first major national organization of Mexican-American activists took the name the League of United Latin American Citizens precisely because they wanted to distance themselves from that label.
"Mexican" became a racial category for the first (and only) time during the 1930 census, as officials grappled with what to call the darker-skinned people with Spanish names living in the United States. Many Mexican Americans, meanwhile, were ambivalent about their own racial identities. Latin American people have never quite fit into the country's established legal racial categories. In the landmark 1946 school-desegregation case Mendez v. Westminster, a lawyer for a group of Mexican-American families argued that children of Mexican descent were white and therefore could not be separated from white children. (The judge ruled in their favor on different grounds: the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause.)
My birth certificate lists both of my parents as "Caucasian," because in the thinking of the Sixties, there was no other category in which to put them. That same decade, the term "Chicano" (an old pejorative) was gaining currency as a hip alternative to Mexican-American, much as Latinx is spreading among young people today. "A Chicano is a Mexican-American with a non-Anglo image of himself," the columnist Ruben Salazar wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 1970.
Ten years later, in the aftermath of social movements during which Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans and other Spanish-surnamed people demanded civil rights, the Census Bureau created the pan-ethnic category "Hispanic," an English adjective that describes Spanish-speaking people. Around the same time, activists started using the term "Latino," a Spanish word derived from the longer latinoamericano. Hispanic became a box you checked on a form, whereas Latino rolled off the tongue and was a statement of unity among immigrant groups.
In New Mexico, however, where Spanish identity predates the immigrant flows of the twentieth century, Hispanic is still the preferred term, because it expresses the cultural ties locals have to Spain. New Mexico was the region of the modern-day United States most incorporated into the Spanish Empire, and Hispanos was the term the conquerors used to distinguish themselves as a race apart from the Zuni, Acoma, and other indigenous peoples living among them. Many property deeds in northern New Mexico can be traced back to the vast land grants the Spanish crown issued to Hispano settlers. After the U.S. conquest, the land grants were systematically taken over by Anglo settlers and the federal government. More than a century later, the charismatic, Texas-born preacher Reies Lopez Tijerina arrived in New Mexico to demand that the United States government restore the land to the descendants of the original Hispanos. His movement climaxed with a brief takeover of hundreds of thousands of acres, followed by an armed raid on a courthouse in Tierra Amarilla in 1967.
When I arrived there, I found a ghost town of locked government buildings and crumbling stores. The poverty rate in the surrounding county is 22 percent, double the national rate. It was a Sunday, but the Catholic church had been shuttered because of the pandemic. I knocked on a few doors, rattled a few gates. I found a faded tribute to the TA Raiders—Tijerina's vigilantes—painted on the wall of an abandoned storefront, but no one was around. Finally, on the highway at the edge of town, I saw cars pulling up to Henry's True Value, an all-in-one liquor, hardware, and fishing-supply store. Inside, I found a young clerk with tousled hair standing behind the counter, brown eyes visible above his face mask. In between customers, we fell into a conversation about local history.
"There are still people pretty animado about the land grants and all that stuff," C. J. DeYapp told me, speaking in a warm and lilting New Mexican accent. "It doesn't turn into a big thing like it did, but they still have that emotion." DeYapp, twenty-six, works at the store his family owns and is the grandson of its founder, the late Henry Ulibarrí, who was a leader in the community. "There was a time he was considered the godfather of TA," DeYapp said of his grandfather. He told me that the TA Raiders tried and failed to persuade his grandfather to join their cause. Tijerina went to prison; the elder Ulibarrí stuck with his store.
When I visited, beer and shooters of Jack Daniels, 99 Cherries, and other liquor made up most of the sales. DeYapp seemed to know everyone in town. His roots run wide and deep. "As far as my nana's side, they for generations have been in Cebolla," a town twelve miles to the south, he said. "My tío Rick is the local electrician," he added, and his tías live and work in the surrounding settlements; one does nails in Santa Fe. His grandfather's surname is Basque; a Juan de Ulibarrí led a Spanish expedition to the area in 1706.
DeYapp didn't want to tell me how he had cast his presidential vote. But when I pressed him about the issues that defined the campaign, he expressed concern about Biden's economic plans. "You look at the taxes part of it, it'll impact even the store." DeYapp said he'd heard that Biden wanted to raise the federal minimum wage "to like seventeen bucks or something." (The figure Biden proposed was $15, but that's still far above the $10.50 New Mexico adopted at the beginning of the year.) "We would have to close. We couldn't pay out seventeen to everybody . . . That's just too much." DeYapp didn't mention Trump, but it's clear that some of his arguments have resonated. I left Henry's True Value and stepped back into the piñon-scented desolation of Rio Arriba County.
Ultimate Flavor, by Narsiso Martinez © The artist. Courtesy Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, from Washington's State Art Collection
The Rio Grande flows south from Rio Arriba County toward El Paso, my next destination. Trump last visited El Paso in August 2019, days after a twenty-one-year-old man from the suburbs of Dallas murdered twenty-three people at a local Walmart. In an online manifesto, the shooter said he feared the power of the "Hispanic voting bloc" and the "great replacement" of white people. The Walmart reopened three months later. I stood in the parking lot where the shooter had begun killing brown-skinned people and watched as a steady stream of shoppers filed through the same entrance he had used. Inside, just past the glass doors where security cameras captured him carrying a WASR-10 semiautomatic rifle, I found racks of women's polyester parkas and boxes of doughnuts for sale. The light was fluorescent and stark; it seemed to mock the dead.
I first witnessed the resurgence of anti-immigrant ideas in the Nineties, when California voters approved Proposition 187, a ballot initiative that denied nearly all public services to the undocumented. Since then, a discourse of white fear has spread across the United States. In the eyes of a certain kind of white American, Latinos have become a darker and more menacing people. The right-wing media equates Latino immigrants with criminals. The border wall has become a central element in the construction of modern white American identity. To be white is to live on this side of the border—and to need the wall to protect you from the non-white masses to the south. Dreams of the border wall gave birth to Trumpism, and helped fuel the growth of the white supremacy that was on display in Charlottesville, Virginia, and during the Capitol insurrection.
After the El Paso shooting, the historian David Dorado Romo, who lost a friend in the attack, wrote a piece for the Texas Observer that contextualized the massacre within the state's long history of racial violence. Romo suggested that I meet him in the old El Paso neighborhood of Duranguito. "This was the First Ward, the Mexican quarter," Romo told me. We stood next to a fenced-off stretch of buildings. Four blocks had been slated for demolition to make way for a new arena. Crews had punched holes in the century-old brick walls. "Part of what they're doing here is eliminating those roots," Romo said. "You erase history, then you can deport bodies."
One of the last holdouts in Duranguito is ninety-three-year-old Antonia Morales; nearly everyone else has been evicted or accepted payments to move out. She is white-haired, spry, and sometimes salty of speech, and like many locals, she is a true child of border culture. Morales was born in Columbus, New Mexico, twelve years after that border town was raided by Pancho Villa, then moved to Ciudad Juárez, and finally to El Paso. Duranguito was a tough neighborhood when she arrived in the Sixties. "I'm going to fight for my community, because I worked hard to live in a clean and safe community," she told me. "I'm not moving from here." When she first got to the area, El Paso and Ciudad Juárez formed a single town with a river running through the middle, and people crossed the border bridges with ease. Sometimes the border agent didn't even bother to check your papers, she told me. "He would say, 'Hi, how are you?' "
Romo told me he isn't particularly fond of the term "Latino"; he prefers to call himself fronterizo, a person of the border. "We're not immigrants; we're transnational residents," he said. "We've been going back and forth for more than one hundred years. That's the nature of this place. You're a hybrid of sorts." Over the past two decades, however, the border has become less fluid, as one crackdown after another has filled El Paso with officers working for the Border Patrol, the DEA, and other law-enforcement agencies. The Trump Administration opened a large migrant detention camp near El Paso that held more than six thousand children, which became a focal point for the city's immigrant-rights movement.
El Paso has a long history of Mexican-American activism and cultural pride; "pachuco," a term used to define a style of clothing and an attitude that defies Anglo mores, was invented in El Paso–Juárez. The lawyer-activist Oscar Zeta Acosta and the journalist Ruben Salazar were born here, and both became Chicano martyrs after they died under suspicious circumstances in the Seventies. El Paso's us-against-the-world temperament has long been used to support progressive and Democratic causes.
Migrants en route to the U.S. border aboard a freight train known as La Bestia © Verónica G. Cárdenas
"Rompecabezas" by Ingrid Leyva, from the Border Diaries series © The artist
Objects left behind by a woman named Alida and her nine-year-old daughter, after they were detained and deported by the U.S. Border Patrol at the Juárez–El Paso border crossing. Photograph from the What Remains series, by Monica Lozano and Samuel Rodriguez © The artists
starr county, texas
I drove more than six hundred miles to the southeast, past brushland and dry riverbeds, across one of the empty quarters of Texas, a region without cattle or even roadkill. The border was to the right, and sometimes I could glimpse it, or sense it in the landscape: a green canyon with a brown stripe running through it. This scrubland was largely unpopulated when the border was drawn more than one hundred and seventy years ago, and it remains hostile territory today.
After two days, I reached the oasis of the Rio Grande Valley, and the metropolis of Laredo, where fleets of tractor trailers line up at massive, multilane border crossings. The valley is a deeply segregated place, and suddenly the faces on the side of the road were almost entirely Latino, or Tejano, as the locals would say. Two more hours on the road and I was in Starr County, which hugs the border. In 2020, it made the largest swing to Trump of any county in the United States.
Many people in the Rio Grande Valley believe the region's well-being is tied to the state's oil and gas industry. Nearly everyone I talked to in Rio Grande City was afraid that Biden's environmental policies would wipe out their livelihoods. I stopped to get my car serviced, and the man running the shop mentioned the plight of the oil industry. Another customer who worked in the oil industry told me he was worried about Biden's policies. Neither one of them had voted.
In Rio Grande City, I came across a home with a large Trump banner attached to a flagpole, flapping loudly in the breeze. As Maria Cruz opened her front door, I heard the voice of a Fox News anchor coming from the living room, and I saw the glow of a television nearly as tall as I am. Nancy Pelosi appeared on the screen. "There's that lady," Cruz said. "She doesn't think about the people. Es puro hate." In the days after the 2020 vote, she told me, "I even cried every time I saw Trump. Because they stole the election from him . . . There's no way that man could ever beat Trump. No tiene gente. He had to beg people to go see him."
Cruz, sixty-two, is a teacher at a local high school where most of the parents and other staff members are Democrats. "They call me Mrs. Trump." All her siblings are Democrats, but her views evolved. "I want someone that has the same values I do. That's pro-life and all that. That actually wants to build up our nation, not ruin it." There are conservative Latina voters like Cruz all across America. Every big, extended familia Latina has at least one. They helped propel the simpatico George W. Bush to victory. Twice. When the subject turns to Trump's immigration policies, Cruz told me she feels little affection for Mexico. "I don't even go there. The only thing they have good is the avocados . . . And I don't like chili or cilantro either. I'm not missing anything." Cruz told me that she watched Fox News religiously, and it had clearly given her an explanation for all that was wrong in her world. After hours and hours of its programming, she had come to internalize a dark, unflattering vision of Mexico.
Photograph by Armando Alvarez © The artist
Demonstrators in Chicago take part in the nationwide Day Without an Immigrant boycott, May 1, 2006. Photograph © Carlos Javier Ortiz
Wandering Roots, by Melissa Misla, from the installation Bendita Casita, an interactive Nuyorican apartment interior © The artist. Courtesy Praxis Gallery, New York City
About 70 percent of Latinos are of Mexican and Central American descent; they have immigration stories that pass, for the most part, through the West. But about 15 percent of Latinos are of Caribbean extraction, and their journeys have often taken them to the East. After leaving the Rio Grande Valley, I entered East Texas and Mississippi, passing through cities and rural areas rich with African-American history. I wandered around the Ninth Ward in New Orleans, which reminded me of the sultry towns along Guatemala's Caribbean coast, where sea breezes flow through landscapes of tumbledown houses and palm trees. Finally, I reached the urban sprawl of Atlanta, stopping in a ranchlike suburb of curving roads and thin pine trees. A Mexican immigrant named Gustavo had recently purchased a home there, his own little piece of the South. (Gustavo also happened to be undocumented, which is why I'm using only his first name.)
Gustavo told me his friends had warned him that the subdivision would be filled with white people who hated Mexicans. But his new neighbors have given him a friendly Southern welcome. "I've accomplished a lot, considering the closed doors I had," he told me in Spanish. In Mexico, Gustavo was unable to pursue an education past high school. He brought his family to Georgia twenty years ago, when it was an exotic new frontier for Latino immigrants.
I visited Georgia as a reporter around the same time Gustavo arrived there. New Latino communities were popping up then across the heartland; the barrios of Los Angeles and other cities in the Southwest had become crowded, and the meatpacking and manufacturing plants of the South and Midwest were beginning to hire large numbers of immigrant workers. In the early Aughts, I wrote about the founding of a Spanish-language radio station in Liberal, Kansas, and of a Spanish-language newspaper in Dalton, Georgia. I have a distinct memory of driving through Dalton and seeing a pickup truck rolling through the center of town with a large Mexican flag flying in the back.
When he arrived in Atlanta, Gustavo started by taking jobs in construction, despite knowing nothing about the craft. Now he operates a small remodeling business. We stood on the back deck of his new home, and looked out at the small patch of Georgia forest that belongs to him; the sense of personal achievement was palpable. He is a fit man in his fifties who works with his hands but has a deep hunger for intellectual conversation; and he is, as we say in Spanish, un hombre realizado. A man of achievement.
This is the time-honored trajectory of immigrant success, but Gustavo wakes up every day with the knowledge that a mere traffic stop could get him deported. When his father took ill, Gustavo couldn't risk crossing the border to see him before he died. He hasn't seen any relatives in Mexico since he left twenty years ago. "I believe in God, and I always place myself in his hands," Gustavo said. "Whenever I leave my house, I don't know what might happen. If one day my status counts against me, so be it. I can't trust in men, or in politics."
Republican and Democratic administrations have come and gone, Gustavo told me, yet his situation has remained the same. "When Obama was in office was when the deportations here were the worst," he said. During the first three years of the Trump Administration, construction was booming, and so was Gustavo's business—he was able to buy his home. Here as elsewhere on my journey, U.S. politics look different when seen from the perspective of working-class people. But Obama did create DACA, which allowed his eldest child to go to Harvard, and Gustavo is grateful for that. Gustavo's two younger children, a nineteen-year-old son and eleven-year-old daughter, are both U.S. citizens. In November, Gustavo tells me with pride, his son went to vote.
A photograph by William Riera, from the Miami's Urban Shrines series
Photograph by Rainy Silvestre, whose monograph Little Havana was published last year by Peanut Press © The artist
little havana, miami
I left Georgia and drove down the Florida turnpike, a lighted corridor of long straightaways that guided me into the foreboding darkness of a moonless night, cutting through the habitat of feral hogs, bobcats, and wild turkeys. Cuban Miami was waiting for me. When I reached Little Havana, I shed my fleece and felt beads of sweat dripping down my temples. The last time I was there, I'd reported on the case of Elián González, the five-year-old Cuban refugee who arrived in Florida in 1999 after an ill-fated ocean journey. Now I discovered that the block where he had lived during the monthslong custody battle that ensued had been renamed in honor of his drowned mother. This seemed like a good place to find a passionate Cubano, and in mere minutes I met one. Across the street from Elián's old home, Santiago Faife snapped at me when I used the word "Hispano." "No soy Hispano!" he said. "Soy Cubano!"
Faife is a tough seventy-one-year-old former bus driver who was wearing an NYPD baseball cap. As a young man, he'd been arrested in Cuba for "counterrevolutionary activity," he told me. In 1980, Faife came to the United States. "I am a Republican since the first time I voted in this country, for Ronald Reagan," he said. "I can't betray the party, even if I didn't like Trump at first." Now he is a true convert. "Yo soy Trumpista," Faife said, noting that he thought Trump should "declare martial law."
A short walk from Elián's old home, in the small parking lot outside the Va Cuba travel agency, I found a group of senior citizens who were more ambivalent. They recounted a Cuban melodrama of need, bitterness, and family separation. "Cuba has suffered sixty years of poverty, tragedy, disaster, shortages," one woman told me. "Where Communism takes root, not even weeds grow." The woman, her husband, and her sister-in-law were all in their seventies, graying and dressed in the frumpy casual wear of the struggling South Florida middle class. They were planning a visit to their family in Cuba, and the woman was afraid the government would retaliate if their names appeared in print. She hated the dictatorship. And yet . . . "If it hadn't been for Fidel Castro, my children in Cuba wouldn't have studied," she said. All five of her kids were raised and educated under the Castro regime; three now lived in the United States, two in Cuba. "They did one good thing: they gave the people education. They taught the people to read and write." Her children and grandchildren all became doctors and dentists—but those who remained in Cuba now rely on American relatives' remittances to get by.
"Capitalism is hard," the woman's sister-in-law said. "You have to work, and sweat, and earn what you eat . . . But wherever they take freedom from you, no system works." In Cuba, she had been employed by a university and had seen bright people cowed into silence. "Every time someone raises a voice, they cut his head off. They put him in prison and disappear him. They say he's a 'terrorist,' a 'delinquent,' they shame him." Her son avoided a prison sentence by fleeing during the Mariel boatlift, in which he and more than one hundred thousand other Cubans were allowed to leave the island. But the Cuban government repeatedly denied her an exit visa, as it did nearly every average citizen who applied for one. She didn't see her son for twenty years, until she finally got an exit visa in 2000.
"Todo lo que he sufrido," she said. All that I've suffered.
I thought of the story I'd just heard from Gustavo, who was also separated from his family for twenty years. "To be latinoamericano is to suffer," I say.
"Seguro," she said. Without a doubt.
"Sunday Morning in Spanish Harlem, 1986," by Joseph Rodriguez © The artist
spanish harlem, new york city
A blizzard was striking the Northeast just as I left South Florida, so I took my time, stopping for two days in Savannah, Georgia, where I met a Puerto Rican art student working at a local museum. At a gas station in rural North Carolina, I ate lunch in my car for the umpteenth time and heard the singsong of Mexican Spanish being spoken by a guy filling up at a pump. The temperature dropped as I journeyed north, but the New Jersey Turnpike was clear of snow, and finally I saw a strange apparition on the horizon—the New York City skyline. After more than one hundred hours of deserts, forests, farmland, and swamps, the steel bridges and glass towers of Gotham gleamed with a supernatural aura.
"Latino" remains a big-city appellation with a West Coast slant; in New York barrios, you'll hear "Hispanic" just as often. When I crossed the George Washington Bridge and entered Manhattan, I found Spanish Harlem covered in snow. El Barrio is home now to a Latin American community composed of people with roots in the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Guatemala, and many other countries; for some, Latino best captures this ever-increasing diversity. Tony Rivera, a fair-skinned Puerto Rican, told me that he has come to embrace the term to describe himself and his neighbors. The importance of this pan-ethnic solidarity increased during the Obama and Trump eras. For Rivera, "the fact that Trump was so blatantly disrespectful to Puerto Rico and some other countries of color became personal for us. Obama was personal for us, because he was one of us." Obama was a man of color with mixed-race heritage making his way in a white-dominated world, and his story resonated in El Barrio. "We have brothers and uncles that look just like him. We run the gamut with color. Whether you're blanco, or caramelo, or prieto." White, brown, or black.
But there are still many who are perplexed by the term. I met a diesel mechanic named Rolando Cortez on a snow-covered sidewalk. "Latinos? What are you fucking talking about?" Cortez asked. He is a short and stocky man, and a voracious reader, and he said he found it frustrating that the media lumps so many different kinds of people together into one category, implying they're all the same. "Latino" means one thing in Spanish Harlem, Cortez said, and another thing in Queens, with its large Colombian and Ecuadorean communities. And then there's the mixture of races in an average Puerto Rican family. Cortez told me that his grandfather had the blue-gray eyes of the Canary Islands but that he lived in Puerto Rico in a bohío, the traditional thatch-roofed hut of the Taino people. And his father had high Taino cheekbones and curly hair, "as a result of being mixed."
I spoke to Cortez near White Playground, a park named after Walter Francis White, a civil-rights activist who was one of the early leaders of the NAACP. The bonds between Puerto Ricans and African Americans run especially deep in New York. Henry Comas, a sixty-two-year-old with Puerto Rican and Italian roots, told me that he grew up next door to a black family from South Carolina. "Our doors were always open," he told me. "We ate in each other's houses." (Mexican kids in South Central L.A. grow up alongside black kids, too, and there is an emergent culture there that can be described as "Blaxican," a term that originated in Los Angeles in the Eighties. My own godfather was an African-American neighbor of my Guatemalan parents in Hollywood.) Given this closeness, Puerto Rican voters in New York and elsewhere often see the world as black voters do. Among other things, they are more likely to support Democrats.
After more than six thousand miles on the road, I turned my car westward, toward home. I thought of the many Latino communities I had visited, and the people I had met, and the stories they had told me—about home and family, and the country we share. I could see that what binds Latinos together is that we have all been shaped by empire. We are brown, black, white, indigenous, European, and African; some of us speak Spanish and some of us don't. But all of us have roots in the upheavals set in motion by American imperialism. Our ancestors have seen borders redrawn and fortified by the United States, and they have crossed those borders, by land, air, or sea, in the near or distant past. The love, the divisions, and the regrets in our families reach across those borders. Our ancestors have escaped marching armies, coups, secret torture rooms, and the outrages of rural police forces.
Like many other ethnic identities, Latino is a way of being that is grounded in suffering. To call yourself Latino is to resist assimilation, and to be conflicted about who you really are. All the major racial and ethnic identifiers in the United States have been created as foils to whiteness. What makes people of Mexican descent non-white is the fact that they can be exploited. The militarized border created an idea of Mexicans (and all Latin American people) as inferior and exploitable. As Latinos have become essential to the U.S. economy, the notion of immigrants as "aliens" has spread, and immigration restrictions have become more and more elaborate.
As I drove across the United States, I felt as though I were watching different parts of my story unfold. I saw my ambitious father, my cheeky mother, and my angry conservative relatives. No Latino person was a stranger, even if there was something exotic (to my California-born eyes) about the different places they lived in. I found a little bit of myself in all the climates and time zones I visited. In a strange way, the trip made me feel more American than ever.
But I was eager to see my family after four weeks on the road, so I was not going to stop in Chicago, or Grand Island, Nebraska, or the many other places where I could talk to Latinos. I could spend a lifetime traveling through the cities, towns, and fields where we work and live. During six more days of driving, I saw an unending stream of billboards for personal-injury attorneys, not to mention some Trump signs that were starting to fade. At a convenience store in the Mojave Desert, just 163 miles from Los Angeles, I waited in line behind a woman speaking Spanish. She was taking her time, and making sure her relatives got enough cream and sugar in their coffees. I rolled my eyes, and resisted the temptation to say, "Please, señora, can you hurry?" I was nearly home.
Héctor Tobar
is the author of five books, including Deep Down Dark. He is a professor of journalism and Chicano/Latino studies at the University of California, Irvine.
Atlanta (Ga.) Cuban Americans Detention of persons Donald Trump East Harlem (New York El Paso County (Tex.) Fla.) Florida Gas industry Georgia Hispanic Americans Idaho Immigrants Joseph R. Biden Little Havana (Miami Mass shootings Mexicans N.Y.) New Mexico Oregon Petroleum industry and trade Political participation Puerto Ricans Right and left (Political science) Rio Grande City (Tex.) Social life and customs Starr County (Tex.) Teresa Alonso Leon Texas Tierra Amarilla (N.M.) Undocumented Undocumented immigrants United States Wilder (Idaho) Woodburn (Or.)
More from Héctor Tobar
False cognates: on the diversity and shared experiences within the Latino community Read More


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C. Warren Goldring Inducted into Investment Industry Hall of Fame
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Remembering a Titan
October 28, 2021 | By: David Pett
Blake and Judy Goldring remember their late father, C. Warren Goldring, ahead of his posthumous induction into the Investment Industry Hall of Fame.
To hear Blake and Judy Goldring talk about their late father is to know how much they loved and looked up to him. And why wouldn't they? He was the epitome of success and his influence on their lives was greater than any other man they've known.
But it's not the long list of accomplishments that stands out most to me in their recounting of C. Warren Goldring's legacy as co-founder of AGF Management Limited. Instead, it is what he stood for and how he treated others that makes the greatest impression.
"He was a very humble person and we admired him immensely," says Judy, while Blake, sitting beside her in one of AGF's boardrooms in Toronto, nods in agreement. "It's a quality that is often lost when people become successful, and he always remembered his roots and didn't take his success for granted.
To be clear, these aren't just the sentiments of a devoted son and daughter. To anyone who knew him, Warren without question ranks among Canada's most respected business and philanthropic leaders of the past 50 years. His posthumous induction into the Investment Industry Hall of Fame this month is only further proof of his considerable lifetime achievements.
Warren the Outstanding Student/Athlete
Born and raised in Toronto two years (almost to the day) before the stock market crash of 1929, his early years were marked by the Great Depression and deeply influenced by his parents' ardent support for the community they lived in. His father (Blake and Judy's grandfather), Dr. Cecil Charles Goldring, made a particular impression as Toronto's director of public education during the 1950s, and he was one of eight individuals who founded the charitable organization that would go on to become the United Way in Toronto.
Ken Gray, Allan Manford, Bruce Sutherland, C. Warren Goldring
AGF and the American Growth Fund
But Warren wasn't one to rest on his family's laurels. As a teenager, he was the quintessential student athlete, starring both in the classroom and on the gridiron for the Lawrence Park Collegiate Panthers. In his 20s, he went on to reach the heights of higher learning as a graduate of the London School of Economics. Of course, those accomplishments were only steppingstones on the way to more, including important stints at the beginning of his career with brokerage firm Fry & Co. and with Sun Life Assurance Company. Later, he helped to draft the Kimber Report, a set of recommendations from the Office of the Attorney General that remains at the heart of securities legislation in Ontario.
"I remember reading about the Kimber Report when I was in law school and realizing my dad was part of the committee that wrote it," Judy says. "Until then, I'm not sure I really appreciated the scope of his influence on the financial industry."
I remember reading about the Kimber Report when I was in law school….Until then, I'm not sure I really appreciated the scope of his influence on the financial industry
Judy Goldring, President and Head of Global Distribution, AGF Management Limited
Warren's philanthropy, meanwhile, was just as impressive. Alongside significant contributions over the years to organizations such as the United Way and World Wildlife Fund Canada, he sponsored the Goldring Chair in Canadian Studies at the University of Toronto and supported the Canada Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington and the C. Warren Goldring Annual Lecture of Canada-U.S. Relations.
Still, Warren's crowning achievement was most obviously AGF, the asset management firm he co-founded with Allan Manford in 1957 and quickly built into a mutual fund powerhouse. AGF now boasts more than $41 billion in global assets under management and celebrates 65 years in business this coming April.
Blake describes his father as a "man of action," but says Warren's impact on the firm's growth had just as much to do with his foresight and commitment to innovation. At the time the firm's namesake American Growth Fund was launched, for instance, the idea of investing in a managed portfolio of stocks and/or bonds was hardly mainstream, and Canadians who did have exposure to financial markets mainly owned domestic assets and nothing more.
"He was a real visionary," Blake says. "He was constantly surveying where the industry was headed next and was ahead of his time when it came to investing in international markets. And not only with respect to our flagship fund. AGF was also the first Canadian firm to offer an All-China fund and we were among the first to launch an Asia fund. In addition, we were active in Europe back at a time when some people may have gone there for vacations, but most weren't looking at it as an investment opportunity."
Warren Goldring the Visionary
The second oldest of Warren and wife Barbara's five children, Blake took over from his father as AGF's chief executive officer in 2000 and learned firsthand what it means to run a successful business – while never losing sight of the importance of family and friends. It's a balanced approach to life and business that he got from his father, and Blake recalls two stories that stand out during our conversation as testaments to his dad's firm sense of priorities.
The first, as Blake tells it, took place on a family vacation to Portugal in 1971. Just as they were about to pile into a bright orange Volkswagen van and drive south to the Algarve from Lisbon, Warren received an urgent call from one of his colleagues back in Toronto. As it turned out, AGF's stock was plummeting on the news that U.S. President Richard Nixon was severing the link between the U.S. dollar and gold as part of his broader economic plan.
"I was only 13 years old, but I remember how dire it all seemed and my dad explaining to me that some people who had invested in the American Growth Fund were worried about the underlying value of the companies it owned," Blake says, noting his father's colleague wanted him to fly home immediately.
"His response was something to the effect of 'I can't change the U.S. President's mind and if you can't hold the fort while I'm on vacation with my family, we may have much bigger problems to deal with when I do get back.' That might sound harsh, but my father always had great faith in the people he worked with and wanted to empower them as much as possible. At the same time, he clearly wasn't willing to sacrifice his time with us, either."
Blake shares another story, about Warren's 60th birthday lunch at the revolving restaurant near the top of the CN Tower in Toronto. This was on Oct. 21, 1987, two days after Black Monday, the worst one-day selloff in equity market history.
"We rented an airplane to fly around the Tower with a banner saying, 'Happy 60th, Dad. Love, the Kids,'" Blake says. "All the while, you can imagine the anxiety he was feeling given all the tumult that week. You'd never know it, though. He wasn't going to miss that lunch and we watched this plane go round and round at least five times, if not more."
Judy also remembers that birthday lunch fondly, but she has her own stories of Warren, both as a father and as a mentor during the early part of her career. She says his impact on her professional future was almost instant once she started working at AGF during summer break as a teenager.
"I worked in the mail room, also in accounting and even tried my hand at the trading desk," she says. "But what I remember most about the summers I worked here growing up was how much Dad loved his work and how passionate and proud he was of AGF. I knew then that I wanted to be a part of it when I got older."
That wasn't a given, Judy adds. Despite what some might believe, it was never pre-destined that Warren's kids would succeed him at the firm, and both she and Blake earned their stripes elsewhere before joining AGF. Even then, Judy jokes, her father wasn't the one who hired her. It was Blake who finally did.
"I said to him after three years in a private law practice, 'Dad, I'm ready to join AGF,' and he said, "We don't have any need for in-house counsel and never will — it's too expensive.' Fortunately for me, securities regulations only continued to grow more challenging over the next few years and soon enough Blake was the one who brought me in. And the rest, as they say, is history."
W. Robert Farquharson, C. Warren Goldring, Blake C. Goldring and Judy G. Goldring
Nowadays, as AGF's President and Head of Global Distribution, Judy finds herself right in the thick of the business, playing a key role on the executive team led by Kevin McCreadie, AGF's CEO since 2018, and on the Board of Directors, chaired by Blake. She believes AGF operates in a much different environment today than it did when her dad was in charge, but one thing that hasn't changed since then is the company's adherence to the virtues that he held most dear.
"Whether it's our seminal move into alternative assets during Blake's time as CEO, or our current expansion into private credit and venture capital under Kevin's leadership, it has always been an imperative that we continue to innovate just as our father did," Judy says. "It's the right thing to do for the company, and it's the right thing for our investors."
Blake agrees wholeheartedly, and he's pretty sure Warren would, too.
"We've had a lot of great people work here through the years, but the group we have today, starting from the executive management team right down through the rest of the organization, has a great sense of unity, drive and purpose," says Blake. "If our father was alive today, he would be absolutely thrilled and cheering us on. That was just his nature."
If our father was alive today, he would be absolutely thrilled and cheering us on.
Blake Goldring, Executive Chairman, AGF Management Limited
Ultimately, Warren Goldring was the kind of man that people, even 11 years after his passing, still can't say enough good things about. He left an indelible mark on his family, his friends and his community, all while building a reputation as one of the Canadian investment industry's true titans. A Hall of Famer, indeed. Only a child's love for their father may be more obvious than that.
The Goldring Family
David Pett is Director, Investment Communications. He serves as editor of the AGF Perspectives blog and hosts Inside Perspectives, AGF's podcast on financial markets and investing.
The commentaries contained herein are provided as a general source of information based on information available as of October 20, 2021 and should not be considered as investment advice or an offer or solicitations to buy and/or sell securities. Every effort has been made to ensure accuracy in these commentaries at the time of publication, however, accuracy cannot be guaranteed. Investors are expected to obtain professional investment advice.
The views expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the opinions of AGF, its subsidiaries or any of its affiliated companies, funds or investment strategies.
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By the late 1940s the urban district council acknowledged the need to improve infrastructure and attract new industries if Witney was not to become largely a dormitory town, a recurrent theme in the second half of the 20th century. (fn. 1) The arrival in 1950 of the engineering firm Smiths' of England, attracting both local employees and large numbers of incomers, began a fundamental and long-term shift in the town's social and economic structure. Such changes were subsequently accelerated, and often led, by planning decisions to promote large-scale housing development, partly to reduce growing pressure on Oxford; that in turn created an increased need for local employment, particularly during the national recession of the 1970s and 1980s, which affected Witney seriously, slowing but not reversing its industrial and commercial development. (fn. 2) The break with the town's pre-War economy was completed by the rapid decline, from the 1970s, of the blanket industry, already employing fewer people after technical innovations in the 1950s and 1960s, (fn. 3) and by the end of the 20th century Witney had been transformed into a substantial and still expanding town of over 20,000 people, with a diverse range of light industrial and retail firms located, for the most part, in industrial estates established since the 1960s.
46. Smiths' of England Engineering works (top) and Curbridge Downs Farm in 1970, looking east along Burford Road.
1. Ibid.; cf. Oxf. Mail, 7 Aug. 1964; Witney Gaz. 20 July 1978.
2. Oxf. Times, 28 Sept. 1962; Oxf. Mail, 7 Aug. 1964, 27 May 1977; Witney Gaz. 16 Aug. 1979; 27 Oct. 1983; 'Witney: Options for New Industrial Estates' (West Oxon. District Council, 1980), copy in COS.
3. Below (decline of blanket ind.).
4. Plummer and Early, Blanket Makers, 167.
6. Plummer and Early, Blanket Makers, 135–7, 154.
7. Financial Times, 9 Oct. 1952.
8. Plummer and Early, Blanket Makers, 137–40; Oxf. Mail, 29 Nov. 1951; Financial Times, 9 Oct., 25 Nov. 1952; ORO, B1/C4/4.
9. Plummer and Early, Blanket Makers, 138–47, 156–7.
10. Ibid. 161–72; Early's of Witney: 300 Years of Blanket Making (1974), 17–18: copy in COS; Oxf. Times, 10 Aug. 1973; Witney Gaz. 6 June, 5 Sept., 7 Nov. 1974; above, intro. (bldgs).
11. S. C. Jenkins, 'Blanket Mills of Witney' Archive, 30 (2001), 21–2.
12. Plummer and Early, Blanket Makers, 167; Early's of Witney: 300 Years of Blanket Making (1974), 21; Witney Gaz. 20 July 1978.
13. Oxf. Times, 30 Jan. 1970; Oxf. Mail, 17 Oct. 1975, p. 1; Anson, 'South-West Oxon.' p. 51.
14. Oxf. Times, 30 Jan. 1970.
15. Witney Gaz. 8 Aug. 1974; Oxf. Mail, 17 Oct 1975, p. 1; Jenkins, 'Blanket Mills', 18.
16. Witney Gaz. 13 Jan. 1977; 'Witney Par. Diary', p. 177.
17. Witney Gaz. 14 Aug. 1980; 28 Apr. 1983.
18. Early's of Witney: 300 Years of Blanket Making (1974), 18–19: copy in COS; Oxf. Mail, 25 Jan. 1971; Oxf. Times, 10 Aug. 1973; Witney Gaz. 14 Aug. 1980; inf. from J. B. Crawford (formerly of Early's).
20. Spectator, 17 July 1993, pp. 21–2.
21. Witney Gaz. 4 July 2001, 3 July 2002; Oxf. Times, 5 July 2002.
22. Financial Times, 9 Oct. 1952; Oxf. Times, 28 Sept. 1962; Oxf. Mail, 7 Aug. 1964; Anson, 'South-West Oxon.' 55–6; Cross, 'Ind. of Witney', 131; above, intro. (origin and devpt).
23. Witney Gaz. 17 Mar. 1977; 7 Nov. 1978; 4 June 1980, suppl. re Smiths'.
24. Anson, 'South-West Oxon.' pp. 54–8; Cross, 'Ind. of Witney', 131.
25. Wesley Barrell Catalogue (1977): copy in COS; Oxf. Times Suppl. 25 Nov 1983.
26. E. B. Taylor, 'Bartlett Bros Ltd' [c. 1962]: photocopy in COS.
27. M. Bee, 'Clinch and Company, Brewers', Oxon. Local Hist. vol. 2, no. 3 (1985), 79–83; Witney Gaz. 14 Sept. 1978.
28. Cross, 'Ind. of Witney', 130. For a blacksmith in 1976, West Oxon. Standard, 20 Feb. 1976, p. 15.
29. Oxf. Mail, 7 Aug. 1964; cf. Witney Gaz. 23 Oct. 1975.
30. Anson, 'South-West Oxon.' p. 50; Cross, 'Ind. of Witney', 131.
31. Oxf. Mail, 27 May 1977.
32. Oxf. Mail, 14 July 1972, 17 Oct 1975, 27 May 1977; Witney Gaz. 13 Jan. 1977, 20 July 1978, 14 Aug. 1980.
33. Witney Gaz. 27 Oct. 1983, 6 Oct. 1988; West Oxon. Standard, 11 Mar. 1988, p. 1. Smiths' hydraulics closed in 2001.
34. Witney Gaz. 14 Aug. 1980, 20 June 1985, 5 Sept. 1985, 30 Nov. 1989, 26 Apr. 1990; Oxf. Mail, 6 July 1985; West Oxon. Standard, 22 Sept. 1989; COS, Witney planning briefs prepared by West Oxon. District Council (1980 and later).
35. Witney Gaz. 20 July 1978, 14 Sept. 1978, 16 Aug. 1979.
36. Ibid. 24 Nov. 1994; Oxf. Mail, 11 Dec. 1999.
37. Oxf. Jnl. 5 Jan 1984; West Oxon. Standard, 11 Mar. 1988; Witney Gaz. 6 Oct. 1988.
38. Witney Gaz. 27 Oct. 1983; Oxf. Jnl. 5 Jan. 1984; Oxf. Mail, 26 Mar. 1998.
39. Witney Gaz. 27 Feb. 1992, 16 Feb. 2000; Oxf. Mail, 28 Nov. 1996.
40. Witney Gaz. 23 Oct. 1975, 24 Nov. 1988; COS, Witney town centre development plans prepared by West Oxon. District Council (1981 and later).
41. Witney Gaz. 7 Mar., 4 July 1974; Oxf. Mail, 4 June 1990, suppl. re Witney Trade Fair.


With around three decades tyre industry experience between them, Jamie Nicholson and Michael Clark are the proud franchisees of the JAXQuickfit Tyres Smithfield store.
"Jamie and Michael came out of our Mosman store in August 2009, so they are vastly experienced and the perfect people to run such a key store," JAXQuickfit Tyres CEO Jeff Board said.
Needless to say both Jamie Nicholson and Michael Clark are enjoying the Smithfield opportunity.
"The store is in tremendous condition, it's a great business and an exciting opportunity for us," Jamie Nicholson said.
"We both live close to this area so we understand quite a bit about the market."
"It's a mix of old and new suburban areas, and there's a big industrial part of the region as well. So we've got the usual passenger tyre customers, plus the young blokes looking for big wheels, low profile tyres and suspension work, and there's lots of demand for light truck tyres."
"There's even a bit of rural demand from four-wheel-drive tyre customers in the outlying areas," Michael Clark explained.
The two partners are both married with children and also share a common interest in family and motorsport, with Jamie competing at drag racing events when business allows.
The store provides the right tyres for your vehicle and services those living close in Smithfield, Greystanes, South Wentworthville, Pemulwuy, Wetherill Park, Merrylands West, Woodpark, Guildford West Guildford, Bossley Park, Greenfield Park, Wakeley, Prairiewood, Fairfield West, Fairfield Heights, Fairfield, Canley Heights, Edensor Park, Abbotsbury and Prospect.
JAXQuickfit Tyres Smithfield store is located at cnr Long St & Gipps Rd, Smithfield. Phone (02) 9725 2522.


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Making the Web Work for Brand Marketers
In the 1950s, brands slowly moved to TV, just as they have started to move online today. In both instances, buying and selling systems improved; audiences and new content quickly moved to the new medium; and the creative possibilities inspired great ad campaigns.
However, a key moment for TV came in the 1950 with dramatic improvem
ents in measurement—like ratings and quantitative market research. Once major brands could see who they were reaching and what impact their campaigns were having, they fully embraced the medium, creating a multi-billion dollar industry...and TV's golden age began.
Making better decisions with actionable brand metrics
Unlike the early days of TV, digital advertising is already incredibly measurable. The only problem is a very old and well-known one: the standardized metrics today are largely clicks, user interaction rates and conversions.
But as brand advertisers - such as movie studios or
consumer goods companies - know, it's a challenge to measure changes in brand favorability of a movie or whether an online campaign is driving more consumers to the store. And it's even harder to take quick action on any such insights.
That's why today, at the Ad Age Digital Conference I'll be introducing the Brand Activate Initiative, an ongoing Google effort to address these challenges and re-imagine online measurement for brand marketers. With this initiative we're partnering with the industry and supporting the cross-industry Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) initiative. We believe that the industry's significant investment in brand measurement efforts can substantially grow the online advertising pie, for all.
Is a particular ad in your campaign especially useful at improving brand recall in Illinois? You should be able to immediately increase your coverage throughout the Midwest. Is one ad slightly less effective at driving purchase intent and in-store sales? Tweak the creative, straight away.
The first Brand Activate solutions
We're working to build truly useful brand metrics into the tools that advertisers already use to manage their campaigns, so they'll be actionable within seconds, not months.
Here's a video describing the Brand Activate Initiative:
The first two Brand Activate solutions are rolling out today:
Active View: Advertisers have long looked for insight into whether consumers saw an ad on page 145 of a magazine, or switched the channel during a TV commercial break. It's similar online, so we're rolling out a technology, which will be submitted for Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation, that can count "viewed" impressions (as defined by the 3MS coalition's proposed standard, this is a display ad that is at least 50% viewable on the screen for at least one second).
Called Active View, this will first be available in coming weeks within Google Display Network Reserve. We'll also be making this metric a universal currency, ultimately offering it within DoubleClick for Advertisers, as well as to our publisher partners. Active View data will be immediately actionable—advertisers will be able to pay only for for viewed impressions. Going forward, we're working on viewed impression standards with 3MS, and our agency and publisher partners.
Active GRP: GRP, or a gross rating point, is at the heart of offline media measurement. For example, when a fashion brand wants their TV campaign to reach 2 million women with two ads each, they use GRP to measure that. We're introducing a new version of this for the web: Active GRP. Active GRP has two key features:
Built-in: Active GRP is built right into the ad serving tools that our publishers and marketers already use every day. Active GRP will enable real-time decision making, allowing advertisers to make adjustments to their campaigns at the speed of the web. We've kicked off a pilot program for DoubleClick for Advertisers clients as a first step, and will roll it out to other products, with brands able to specify a range of audience GRP segments.
Robust methodology: Active GRP is calculated by a statistical model that combines aggregated panel data and anonymous user data (either inferred or user-provided), and will work in conjunction with Active View to measure viewed impressions. This approach overcomes problems of potential panel skewing and reliance on a single data source. This approach also has the advantage of never using personally identifiable information, not sharing user data with third parties, and enabling users, through Google's Ads Preferences Manager, to opt-out. We will be submitting our methodology for MRC accreditation.
We look forward to bringing other measurement initiatives into our suite for brand marketers, including a brand impact survey pilot with Vizu, our brand lift measurement product (Campaign Insights) and various cross-media measurement research projects globally.
This is just the beginning of the Brand Activate Initiative, with much more to come for brands and publishers. We think that with brand new metrics comes a new brand moment - one that will encourage brands to invest in the web, help publishers show the value of their digital content, and stimulate digital media's own golden age.
Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President, Display Advertising


You are here: Home / Latest News / Use your super-complaint powers to help leaseholders, Sir Ed Davey tells Which?
Use your super-complaint powers to help leaseholders, Sir Ed Davey tells Which?
Sir Ed Davey, chair of the APPG on leasehold reform and co-patron of LKP, today criticises the Consumers' Association Which? for publishing a report (on Thursday) into the ground rent scandal that bears a striking resemblance to work already done by LKP.
Sir Ed, LibDem MP for Kingston and Surbiton, also urges the generously funded organisation to join efforts to mount a legal challenge against the abuses.
"I'm glad Which? has at last joined the long running campaign by cross-party MPs against shocking abuses of leaseholders.
"Now they are using a summary of the research by the excellent Leasehold Knowledge Partnership in their input to this campaign, I hope Which? will also now consider using their super-complaint powers, as they were requested to do last year.
A super-complaint is a complaint made in the UK by a state-approved 'super-complainant'/watchdog organisation on behalf of consumers, which was fast-tracked to a higher authority such as the Office of Fair Trading (prior to its dissolution on 1 April 2014). The official body now in charge of general consumer protection super complaints is the Competition and Markets Authority.
Super complaints have also specifically been introduced for the financial markets in the UK under the Financial Conduct Authority FCA. The Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (FSMA) provides that certain consumer bodies may complain to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) about features of a market for financial services in the UK that may be significantly damaging the interests of consumers. The Government first issued guidance for bodies seeking designation as super complainants and then received and ultimately approved the newly appointed bodies which can make super complaints to the FCA: Consumer Council Northern Ireland, Citizens Advice, The Federation of Small Businesses and Which?
The Which? report is embargoed until Thursday.
You're sitting in the pristine marketing suite of a new-build housing development, beaming with pride at having saved enough money to buy your very first home. But there's something the slick sales team aren't telling you. You may be able to buy one of their properties, but you won't ever truly own it.
New-build leasehold homeowners in England are trapped in a cycle of rising fees, punitive clauses, and unsellable homes, according to a Which? investigation.
After receiving almost 200 letters from leasehold property owners regarding 19 different housebuilders and housing associations, Which? launched an investigation into the deepening leasehold crisis.
"We found families facing onerous clauses from developers, being badly advised by lawyers and hit with spiralling ground rents that effectively rendered their homes unsellable.
"In some cases they were ordered to pay extortionate retrospective permission fees under threat of losing their home.
Peter Vicary-Smith, one of the voluntary sector's highest-paid people, will leave the charity in September Peter Vicary-Smith, chief executive of the consumer rights charity Which?, will step down in September, it has been confirmed today. Vicary-Smith, who has been criticised for his large salary of £462,000 and handling of its membership, will leave to "pursue a portfolio career", the charity said.
Filed Under: Latest News, News Tagged With: Consumers' Association, Sir Ed Davey, Which?
Apparently the Department of Communities call for evidence re onerous leases has only generated 600 responses.
I think the deadline is the 15th anyone who hasn't responded should take the opportunity to do so LKP did a helpful response template complete with link a few weeks ago.
Can't remember where it was though.
I'd like to know why the government have not made the fact that leaseholders with onerous leases are ABLE to email and tell of their horrors! why has it been left to Leasehold Knowledge partnership and National Leasehold Campaign to publicise this?
I am a 'member' of the Consumer Association and have written to them several times over the years, e.g. pointing out that their own articles about leasehold were inaccurate, so misleading, and asking them to write to the OFT. They have never replied.
My conclusion was that the CA is a business, not an association that represents its members. I keep my membership only to see what people think of their washing machines. That is about all Which? is good for. The lights are on, but no-one is home. A bit like Westminster, most of the time?


No matter what the project is, it's always fun getting to work with a brand that you enjoy shopping at multiple times per week, especially a place like Lowe's.
Like a lot of other people, Lowe's has been our place of zen. We walk around staring at things, dreaming up future DIY projects. So getting to make a whole series of videos where Lowe's teams up with homeowners, helping them learn the skills needed to do their own DIY projects… was pretty cool.
Lowe's started The Upskill Project a year or so ago and has been traveling to cities across the country, spending about a month in each. They pick a handful of entry winners to receive $5,000, help from a designer, a crew from a local Lowe's store, and a skilled Project Leader. The projects include some consulting, a store visit to show them around, and a day or two of work. We worked with Lowe's to pick a few select participants to highlight in different cities to show the range of help Upskill brings to DIY'ers.