Faced with the lingering war and unrelenting sectarian violence, [Iraqi] students by the thousands have been leaving campuses to return home or enroll at universities in other countries. Enrollment fell by more than half at some colleges in the past year alone, education officials said.

Meanwhile, Iraqi professors continue to be targeted for assassination and intimidation. According to Iraq’s Higher Education Ministry, insurgent and militia groups have killed at least 280 academics since 2003, and 3,250 others have fled the country. The violence also has caused as many as 40 percent of Iraq’s professionals to flee the country since the U.S.-led invasion nearly four years ago, according to the Brookings Institution, an independent research group in Washington.

Iraq’s higher education system was once considered the most advanced in the Middle East. Tuition is free at 20 government-run public universities, such as Baghdad University, and 47 technical institutes. Private colleges charge between $114 and $305 annually. But the system has declined dramatically in the past 20 years.

—more at the SF Chronicle

Medicaid Wants Citizenship Proof for Infant Care

Under a new federal policy, children born in the United States to illegal immigrants with low incomes will no longer be automatically entitled to health insurance through Medicaid, Bush administration officials said Thursday.

Doctors and hospitals said the policy change would make it more difficult for such infants, who are United States citizens, to obtain health care needed in the first year of life. More at New York Times

Webjefa’s prerogative/Occasional nuggets found on the web:

A brief statement from Elisa Facio’s faculty bio

Works by Gloria Anzaldua, Ana Castillo, Emma Perez, and the anthology, Building with Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies, have been most influential in my development as a Chicana sociologist. As racial/ethnic women scholars, I feel our works are attempts to explore our realities and identities (since academic institutions omit, erase, distort and falsify them) and to unbuild and rebuild them. Our writings and scholarship, built on earlier waves of feminism, continue to critique and to directly address dominant culture and “white” feminism. However, our works also attest to the fact that we are now concentrating on our own projects, our own agendas, our own theories, in other words on our own world views. This process is recognized by racial/ethnic scholars as “de colonization of the voice.” For others, it is considered unscholarly, unscientific; words of colonization associated with a monocultural society.

Chicana scholarship reveals our struggles as Chicanas in the United States, and expresses in a society which attempts to render us invisible. Historically, Chicana voices have not been chronicled. They have gone largely unnoticed and undocumented. In spite of the academic claims of “value-free inquiry,” Chicanas have not been deemed worthy of study. When they have been studied, stereotypes and distortions have prevailed. Yet Chicanas have spoken out around kitchen tables, in factories, labor camps, in community and political organizations, at union meetings. Rooted in the political climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s, our scholarship, like other currents of dissent is a Chicana critique of cultural, political, and economic conditions in the United States. It is influenced by the tradition of advocacy scholarship, which challenges the claims of objectivity and links research to community concerns and social change. It is driven by a passion to place the Chicana, as speaking subject, at the center of intellectual discourse.
[Read more…] about What is Chicana scholarship?

This is another overdue post asking for good thoughts and prayers for MALCSista Luz Calvo and her partner Catriona Esquibel as they deal with Luz’s now-vanquished breast cancer. In recent months, Luz has been diagnosed with breast cancer, had a double mastectomy, undergone chemotherapy, and is now taking tamoxifen. Luz and Catriona have made it through with the support of family, friends and their own chingona personal strength.
Luz writes:

I am doing so much better now that I am done with chemo. I’m on medical leave until Winter Qtr. so I am really trying to come up with a good plan for self care and rebuilding… Thanks for offering to post on the MALCS blog. I am totally OK with people knowing what I have been thru

If you’d like to send Luz a note, email ten.sclamobfsctd-7e49b3@zul and your note will be forwarded to her.

You all probably know that Latinas and lesbians are at significantly higher risk of developing breast cancer, and cervical cancer, and significantly less likely to have health insurance (only 51% of Latinas had it in 1998). See “A National Latina Agenda for Reproductive Health” (pdf file) at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, and the Mautner Project at the National Lesbian Health Organization.

Have you done your breast self-examination (video) today? Had your mammogram lately?

Q: Chicana is one of those words that not all Mexican Americans claim. Why do you?

A: It’s like the word “feminist.” You’re not born with it. You have to understand the political history of the word. Just because you have a uterus does not a feminist make you. The same thing with Chicano. My father feared the word. He used to associate it with World War II and zoot suits.

Chicano is being used for picking up the struggle for people on both sides of the border. It became a political term, the same way feminist did. You have to understand the history of the movement before you can claim the word. People can’t pick up a word just because it’s dumped on them.

Read the rest of the interview here at the Detroit Free Press.  (Alt link here)

[Read more…] about JOB: Postdoc, Developmental Research, UCSC / NIH

Newly tenured Associate Professor Dionne Espinoza writes of her recent tenure decision at Cal State L.A. in the department of Chicano Studies. She is also Director of the Center for the Study of Genders & Sexualities at CSULA. She is also awaiting publication of her new book, co-edited with Lorena Oropeza, titled Enriqueta Vasquez and the Chicano Movement: Writings from El Grito Del Norte, in the Hispanic Civil Rights Series of Arte Publico Press (forthcoming Nov 2006). Congrats Dionne!!

Across town at the University of LaVerne, Claudia Huiza is very excited about an upcoming artshow by Martin Durazo.  She writes that “Martin’s work is extremely relevant to the era we live in and offers a piercing commentary on human nature, our tendency to turn to harmful living in pursuit of an alternative spirituality, and explores themes such as perceptive manipulation and perceived control through organizational systems.”  The show runs from Sept 12 thru Oct 20 at Harris Art Gallery at the Univ of LaVerne.  You can also see Martin’s work at his website.