Multi-Clutural Festival Draws Crowd & Comments

This past weekend, a multi-cultural festival was held in Sacramento (a city named as the most diverse in the U.S. by Time Magazine.) Latinos celebrated the 20th Festival de la Familia and Sacramento Bee reporter Steve Maganini interviewed some of the attendees. Elsy Gonzalez, a UC Davis student, expressed her pride and joy about her Mexican roots. She's identified as a mestizo in the story - a person who has a mixture of Indian, Spanish, French, African and/or Chinese blood. The article included information about discrimination and exclusion in Mexico and in the United States as well as the importance of festivals, like this one, to bring people together. As one attendee said, "We're here to celebrate each other." The following comments were posted on the web by readers after they saw the article. It's a very telling online debate and shows the challenges that children of immigrants and their families face. Here's a sampling - first from "Sherk" and the second from "ssmokeydoodles": Sherk: Are they celebrating illegal immigration or maybe the Hispanic drug cartels and their death network? Or maybe they should celebrate the immigrant drop houses and the illegal immigrant drug mules. What about the out of control Hispanic teen birthrate or maybe the violent gang activity in their community? Are they celebrating the high incarceration rate of Hispanics or the ghettos that they create where ever they choose to live? And surly (sic) they can celebrate how they have gamed the social system in California to the brink of insolvency. Maybe they should name their celebration, The Festival of the Losers and Leeches! smokeydoodles: Well when my family of Americans of Mexican descent get together, we celebrate with the food and music of our family members who came here from Mexico (in my case it was my great-grandparents.) We are not losers or leeches, in fact we have teachers, medical professionals, law enforcement officers (local, state and federal), attorneys, OMG we even have a federal judge! We don't live in ghettos, don't collect welfare, or have people in prison. Well, we do have people working in prisons. No teen moms, in fact my poor grandma only has one great granchild...