Debbie Nathan

( Almost all illustrations in this post, including the black-and-white nude, are computer generated and do not portray real people. Some virtual images are reproduced from work published by Dartmouth College Professor Hany Farid … see below for more about him.)

More of the latest sex-pol research and news: from studies of young people and sexuality, to Constitutional controversies about pornography record keeping, virtual vs. real child porn, and sex offender civil commitment law

According to a Nov. 11 Washington Post article, a new study from the University of Virginia finds that youngsters who have consensual sex in their early-teen or even preteen years are less likely to end up delinquent than those who lose their virginity later. In part, say the researchers, this could be because sexual relationships may offer an alternative to trouble.

Virtual clothing mannequins from H&M

The Virginia study will appear in the March 2008 issue of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence.

The study’s investigators acknowledge the dangers of having sex early. For example, young adolescents are less likely to use condoms than older people, which puts them at risks for STD’s and unwanted pregnancy. But, the researchers note, other nations mitigate these risks through sex education. Meanwhile, U.S. sex ed funded by the federal “abstinence only” budget must hew to a curriculum that links sex to delinquency, and allows no talk of birth control.

Speaking of America’s anti-sex-ed political culture, Advocates for Youth reports on its blog that the Democrats have been utterly craven lately. A recent report, from the Democrat-controlled Labor Health and Human Services Appropriations conference committee, includes the full $28 million increase requested by President Bush for abstinence-only-until-marriage-programs. “The Democrats have now granted the president and his anti-sex education zealots a whopping $141 million dollar budget for abstinence-only programs — something they could never achieve even under a conservative Republican Congress!” Advocates for Youth notes.

“Never mind the congressionally-mandated evaluation released in April showing abstinence-only programs have ‘no impact on adolescent behavior,’” Advocates continues. “Never mind the 2006 study by the Society of Adolescent Medicine which stated that these programs ‘threaten fundamental human rights to health, information and life.’ Never mind the 2004 report from Congressman Henry Waxman’s (D-CA) oversight committee demonstrating that 80% of abstinence-only programs contain ‘false or misleading information.’ Never mind the 13 governors who have refused abstinence-only dollars because they see no reason to use precious state dollars to match federal funds for programs that simply do not work.

“With one breathtakingly cynical move,” says Advocates, “the Democratic leadership has now stamped its brand on one of the biggest ideological boondoggles in congressional history.”

Meanwhile, the kids keep on trucking, doing who knows what? Do we really want to know? — God forbid, it might turn out to be boring! That’s the suggestion of yet another new study, of 18 to 24 year olds. It was reported on by Adult Video News (AVN) — the trade mag of the porn biz. According to AVN, which cannot possibly be happy about this, the research finds that young adults’ visits to internet porn sites over the past couple of years have been decreasing.

Visits to porn sites dropped from 16.9 percent of all site visits in the U.S. in October 2005 to 11.9 percent as of the same time this year. That’s a 33 percent decline.

Why the drop? Members of the Gen Y demographic, one researcher says, are increasingly hanging out in social networking sites. They’re probably “too busy chatting with friends to look at online skin.”

Of course, some young adults (not to mention their elders) are taking pictures of their own skin and posting the results to amateur porn sites, or just stashing the product in their sock drawers. Until this month, anyone who took photos or videos such as these was supposed to go through an elaborate legal process, defined by a federal law popularly called 2257. That process involves inspecting the models’ and performers’ IDs to confirm they’re over 18, making copies of the IDs, and keeping them on file for government inspection. But due to a recent higher court ruling, 2257 has just been struck down in several states.

For years, 2257 has taken up a lot of the adult porn industry’s time and resources. In addition, the law theoretically applies to amateurs – even to husbands and wives out to spice up their conjugal fun. As technology and law writer Declan McCullagh, of CNET, explains: Under 2257, “An adult couple taking a single erotic photo of themselves with a digital camera in their own bedroom is required to (a) inspect their own government-issued photo identification; (b) ascertain that they’re at least 18 years old; (c) photocopy their own IDs; (d) photocopy the erotic image; (e) file this information in physical form; (g) display the date and a street address “prominently” in their files; (g) open these files to agents of the Justice Department without advance notice. If they don’t take each of those steps, both members of the couple, according to the law, are subject to a federal felony–up to five years in prison, as well as fines.

Whew!

But in November, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down 2257, ruling that its record-keeping requirements are overly broad and violate Americans’ free-speech rights.

The ruling covers several states, including Tennessee. This is where one of the defendants uncovered by Kurt Eichenwald’s work on the Justin Berry case was doing business when he was charged with helping Berry run a porn website that contained illegal images of a 14 year old. The defendant, Timothy Richards, was charged with and convicted for crimes including violations of 2257. In his defense, Richards claimed he didn’t know that the 14 year old was underage, because Justin Berry posted a fake 2257 disclaimer, asserting that the model was over 18 and he had records to prove it. The government didn’t buy Richards’ claim about being duped by Berry. Neither did a jury.

Now, Richards plans to return to court to argue that his 2257-based convictions should be overturned.

Interestingly, documents that emerged this summer in legal actions related to Richards’ case indicate that then New York Times reporter Eichenwald was using privileges as an administrator on the same illegal site that Richards was helping Berry operate – the one with the 14-year-old porn model (for details, see here, here, and here). According to his own statements, Eichenwald was involved in this child porn administrative role as a “private

Sex offender demographics map

citizen,” not a reporter doing research.

Because of the 2257 violation, he is theoretically also subject to being criminally charged — just as Tim Richards was. Earlier this year, a DOJ prosecutor and an FBI agent attended a court hearing related to Eichenwald’s involvement with the site, but would not say if he was being investigated. (Just after that hearing, Eichenwald retained a criminal defense attorney.)

Now, with the 2257 requirement overturned in Tennessee, anyone residing there who’s in Eichenwald’s shoes might breathe a little easier. On the other hand, Eichenwald lives in Texas, a state not currently subject to the circuit court ruling that overturned 2257. Time will tell whether 2257 is overturned nationwide.

And speaking of child porn laws – this is a little dated, in October October the New York Times interviewed Hany Farid. He’s a Dartmouth College professor who tries to do quantitative analysis to figure out whether photographs have been altered. Discussing his work (click here to see some), Farid remarked that he has “been an expert witness in several child pornography cases.”

Back in 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that possession of computer-generated child porn is protected under the First Amendment because it doesn’t depict real children, but instead is built by morphing adult bodies to look younger, or it’s made completely from scratch.

Images of children in sexual poses are repugnant to most people, to put it mildly. But so are many other images we all are legally permitted to view. (Personally, I get especially sick when I see pictures of sexual assault from Abu Ghraib, or the photo of the naked little girl running from the napalm attack during the Viet Nam war.) Those items are protected speech – covered by the First Amendment. Child porn is not protected because traditionally, in order to create the material, sex crimes have been perpetrated against real minors. The images would otherwise not exist. Child porn was outlawed to discourage manufacture of a product that’s predicated on actual minors being made to perform sexually — when by legal definition they cannot consent to such acts. The reasoning may be arguable to First Amendment absolutists. Still, it’s serious reasoning.

But what happens now that we’ve got technology to make “virtual” images of people, even children, doing anything — even sex? In other words, what happens when kiddie porn contains no kids?

It’s possible to produce fake but real-looking images, Farid told the Times. And now defendants in child pornography cases – particularly when they involve material from the internet – are arguing that what they got caught with is virtual. Which would make it not illegal. The government has the burden of proving otherwise.

“So now in these cases,” Farid continued, ”defense lawyers will sometimes argue that the images aren’t real. So far, I have only testified on the side of the prosecution.”

What Farid and the Times omitted is that a judge in at least one child porn prosecution has rejected Farid’s work and deemed it unreliable. CNET’s McCullagh reported several months ago about Massachusetts resident Rudy Frabizio. He was indicted after his employer found sexually explicit images on his computer that appeared to involve minors.

When Fabrizio contested the government’s claim that all the images portrayed real children, the FBI contacted Professor Farid and asked him to run one of his analysis programs on the porn. But Frabizio’s lawyers discovered that Farid’s program had a 30 percent error rate. The program often classified a real photo as computer generated. It also classified a cartoon image as real.

The government opted not to use Farid as a witness and tried to replace him with an FBI agent who said he could tell which imagery depicts real children, versus which is fake, simply by looking.

U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner rejected that claim. “In a world of rapidly changing technology,” she ruled, “where the availability and use of Photoshop and other, similar programs is widespread, substantial evidence suggests it may be possible to digitally create or manipulate photographs in a manner the naked eye cannot detect. The government has not shown otherwise.”

What we have here is terra that’s mostly incognita, in which we need to think and rethink our child porn laws. How do we protect real children from sexual exploitation, while also protecting free speech as much as possible? To figure this out, lots of questions need to be answered. But first, they have to be asked. And that can be unpleasant.

For instance, all those people who want to see child porn: can they be sated by looking at virtual imagery that doesn’t exploit actual kids? Or must they have “reality” to feel happy? (This is dark variation on the same question television and Hollywood execs happily mull when it comes to mainstream media desires. Witness the public’s fascination with “reality TV” and with trying to tell the difference between “truth” and mere “acting.” In response, witness also the mainstream’s ever more sophisticated attempts to play tricks with our perceptions…often to our great delight.) (By the way, the graphic to the left does represent a real person, a suspected sex offender. Interpol puts scrambled images such as this on the Net, with an unscrambler code to facilitate identification and apprehension of the suspect.)

We don’t know much about people who harbor fantasies about sex with minors. What in the world goes on in their heads? We don’t know what percentage act their fantasies out criminally, versus how many just keep everything in their imagination. If it were to turn out that most do the latter, then — creepy as it sounds to the rest of us — it might do the world some good to give them fantasy images in which no real children are victimized.

But if any kind of image, even virtual, tends to provoke illegal sexual behavior against minors, we would want to seriously consider outlawing even fantasy material.

The problem is, we don’t know what’s what. There’s little research on the psyches or behavior of adults who are sexually attracted to minors (prison studies hardly count: incarcerated populations are notorious for telling researchers what they think they’re supposed to say, instead of what’s the truth).

Instead of high dudgeon and moralism, we need more and better research about people who are sexually attracted to those much younger than they, and what makes them tick. Until we know better, we won’t be able to help adults stay away from children And children will remain at unneeded risk for exploitation.

Professor Farid’s work has been funded by the federal government. No doubt he’s back at the drawing board.

Sex offender “buffer” map of Iowa City, computer generated

The rest of us should be, too. We should be pressuring the feds to fund scientifically sound, critical inquiry into human sexuality.

Don’t hold your breath. Let it out and let’s revisit the sex offender civil commitment controversy. The government was back in court in November in North Carolina, opposing a judge’s September ruling that sex offenders can’t be held in federal prison after they’ve served their sentences.

The ruling responded to a court order handed down on behalf of five convicts incarcerated at a federal sex offender prison. The feds said they were “sexually dangerous” and therefore needed to be civilly committed in mental hospitals – possibly for the rest of their lives. Civil commitment was approved under the federal “Adam Walsh” law, enacted last year.

But the judge said that to commit a person indefinitely, the government would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he or she is “sexually dangerous.” In an earlier order, the judge wrote that “there is serious question as to whether the federal government could ever prove beyond a reasonable doubt that an individual is both suffering from a mental illness or abnormality such as pedophilia and unlikely to refrain from sexually violent conduct in the future as a result of that illness.”

For now, the ruling affects only eastern North Carolina. But there’s a big prison there for sex offenders, Butner. It’s one of only a handful of such federal facilities in the nation.

Meanwhile, an inmate strike and protest is going on at a similar place in California. Sex offenders who’ve been civilly committed to a state hospital for sex offenders in Coalinga have been refusing food and engaging in other civil disobedience since the summer. According to a long article in the Los Angeles Times, they’re complaining of lack of psychotherapy services; many also feel it’s unconstitutional in the first place to be locked up after serving their prison time.

I still get asked about David, whom I wrote about in New York Magazine a couple of years ago. He’s the undocumented Mexican who was living in a basement with over two dozen other immigrants. People wonder how he’s doing. David and one of his former roommates, Jose, keep in touch because they live near me, in Washington Heights. So here’s the latest.

They got kicked out of the basement several months ago when the apartment building was sold and the new owner decided to follow codes. David’s girlfriend is still in Colombia, stringing him along, and he’s the patient type. For female companionship, he and Jose still hang out at that dime-a-dance place in Inwood, which just expanded into a bigger building but has the same girls working. One of them hooked up with a 60-year-old customer and they got married. David quit his restaurant job and now works as a truck mechanic. Jose is in construction and apartment remodeling, which he says are booming here in NYC. If you want to know the state of the economy go ask the illegals. Invite them to dinner.

David and Jose came over on Thanksgiving. Over turkey and trimmings with some Bailey’s, they also provided updates on the military aspect of life these days for the undocumented in New York.

Jose recounted being on the street in Queens last month and witnessing what he described as an immigration raid conducted on a main thoroughfare. He said police were involved. I found this hard to believe, since NYC has a policy prohibiting cops from checking immigration status. After David and Jose left and the dishes were washed, I got on the Net and did some checking.

First thing I found was a squib from the New York Post, describing an October 14 raid on a “phony-green-card ring” in Queens that netted some 40 suspects. The Post crowed that the raid “was kick-started by a story by Post reporter Douglas Montero,” who went undercover last year to show how easy it is to buy fake documents.

The Post article was short, sweet, and — of course — in English.

Over at the Spanish-language El Diario and other ethnic outlets, however, things were far lengthier and more distasteful.

Here’s my summary, translated:

It was less a raid than a dragnet: Police and FBI agents threw fencing around an entire block in Jackson Heights and started questioning people trapped inside. Yes, authorities were looking for sellers of fake drivers licenses and social security cards — items commonly purchased by immigrants so they can work. But the dragnet provoked rumors that other people besides forgery vendors were being busted, simply because they’d got caught up in the fencing and were undocumented. The operation took place on 84th Street and Roosevelt Avenue, a busy shopping area. It caused panic.

This was Sunday at noon. The 2010 World Cup Soccer playoffs were starting, and Roosevelt Avenue’s bars and restaurants were jammed with fans parked in front of teles. As rumors spread about the raid, frightened people streamed in, seeking refuge from the fencing and police.

The operation ended at 2 p.m., but for hours afterward Roosevelt Avenue was deserted. Even the 5 p.m. soccer match between Brazil and Colombia failed to re-enliven the street. Storekeepers complained that sales were down. “There’s a lot of fear,” said one business owner.

Jose was still frightened a month later, at my Thanksgiving table.

A few days after the dragnet, David said, he and Jose were in a cafe near the West Village. While they were waiting for their order, in walked two men in ICE uniforms (ICE is “Immigration & Customs Enforcement” — the new, official name for what Mexicans call “la migra”).

David and Jose were petrified. They sat stock still at their table, trying to be cool. Waiting, just waiting. Here’s what finally happened.

The ICE agents ordered some food. To go. It came. They went. David and Jose finished their meal.

Back at the Thanksgiving table, we changed the subject to Creedence Clearwater (Jose has been trying to understand the lyrics to “Cotton Fields”).

I later vowed to spend more time on IndyMedia’s “Voices that Must Be Heard” site (click here). “Voices” is a translated, continually updated digest of the best of the ethnic press in New York City. It regularly covers newspapers in dozens of languages. Reading Voices weekly, you get a pretty good idea of what’s going on in our immigrant communities — and sometimes not just in New York.

Take that quick item I wrote a few months ago about male smugglers — coyotes — being nicer to female smugglees than they used to be (click here). Well, according to a recent Voices That Must Be Heard piece, translated from El Diario (click here), it’s not just that guy coyotes are becoming more sensitive. It’s also that the human trafficking profession is shifting gender: these days, lots of smugglers are women.

They talk in the Diario article about how they can take care of migrant moms and children better than male coyotes can, because the women smugglers turn their own abodes into safe houses, providing their customers tasty, home-cooked meals and comfy beds. Female smugglers also try to devise better ways for their clients to travel north than those yucky treks through the deadly but macho desert that no normal girl and her babies wants to bother with. (For a recent, very moving description of what such people leave behind when they make those terrible crossings, click here.)

It won’t be long before big, beefy Vicente Fernandez types will also choose women coyotes over their own sex. Real man may not eat quiche. But they still go for a nice bowl of pozole casero and clean sheets en route to Gringoland.

Writer David France was on (click here) Boston public radio WBUR yesterday, talking about his story, in last month’s New York Magazine, about the fall of former New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald. France’s interview is the first normal radio piece about the subject — “normal” referring to the quaint practice of a host asking critical questions of a critical guest, rather than staging a puff event, as NPR’s “All Things Considered” did with its media reporter David Folkenflik in late October, and WNYC’s Brian Lehrer repeated days later.

(On the Lehrer program, Eichenwald lavished ad hominems on me, as is his wont. The show must have felt embarrassed, because later they invited me to be on — but warned that I was not to talk about Eichenwald … not about the same issues that France would subsequently discuss in Boston. I argued about this restriction with a Lehrer producer, but ended up agreeing to appear (click here to listen) and thought we’d be talking about the problem of how, under the law, the media can’t research child pornography. Indeed, that’s how the show was advertised. But when I got on the air, Lehrer’s questions seemed to be trying to point me toward saying I approve of sex between teens and adults. It seemed weird, strained, and none too friendly. Still, I was happy for the chance to call for reason and intelligence when considering issues regarding children, young adults, and sex. Thanks, Brian!)

Back to the Boston interview. On the radio, France (shown at left) brings up new material that did not appear in New York Magazine. He provides more detail about Eichenwald’s involvement with a web site that turned out to have illegal material on it. He gives critical context to Eichenwald’s claims about epilepsy induced memory loss. He speaks at some length about men who were convicted based on Eichenwald’s misguided reporting — and he expresses sympathy for these men’s legal plight, as well as skepticism about the fairness of the long prison sentence one of them faces. Most of all, France focuses on the various tragedies and outrages that occur when emotion and moralism get in the way of competent reporting.

The interview ends with a suggestion that the story may not be over when it comes to Justin Berry.

This is a sharp, nuanced piece of media that surpasses France’s written work on the subject.

I’m waiting until after Thanksgiving to blog the latest sex-politics news, culled from research and journalism from here and there. More later; meanwhile, enjoy the holiday!

I dropped by the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival, held at NYC’s Museum of Natural History over the weekend. The fest began decades ago, to showcase moving-image offerings by anthropologists — materials that have been coming out since stuff like Man of Aran first appeared in the 1930s. Back then, the medium was 35 or 16mm. Later Super8. Then camcorders. Now there’s cheap, digital equipment — including cell phones. And currently, some of the most interesting “ethnographic” productions aren’t even made by anthropologists.

Instead, they might be by human rights, political and media-democracy activists.

“The Machine is Us/ing Us: Content from YouTube, WITNESS’ The Hub, and Karma Tube” was the title of a presentation I attended.

Margaret Mead in Samoa as a young woman

There, YouTube’s film manager, Sara Pollack, said YouTube is fueling political activism by posting practically any video that’s submitted, including those promoting all sorts of justice and social change projects. She clicked on an example (see it here): about Eric Volz, a young US guy running an environmental magazine in Nicaragua who says he was falsely charged and convicted of murdering an ex-girlfriend in that country. According to Pollack, the video made by Volz’s supporters, then posted on YouTube, has garnered attention for the case from the mass media.

Also up was Sameer Padania, of the brand new site The Hub. It’s part of Witness, a group that trains people worldwide how to use technology so they can go on the streets and videotape human rights abuses. Anyone who creates such a product, even if it’s just with a cellphone, can submit it to The Hub. The person who filmed Seinfeld comedian Mike Richards making racist comments at his show would not send that video to The Hub. The one who recorded Egyptian police torturing suspects in the jailhouse would. Great site!

Another speaker was Michael Smolens, founder and CEO of dotSUB — which allows polyglot volunteers to translate YouTube-style videos into a second language. And a third, fourth, etc. It’s a Wiki-esque version of the Tower of Babel razed.

Very strange Mead images found on the web

Here’s how it works: Say someone translated one of those tortured Egyptians’ words from Arabic to English for the Hub video. Using dotSUB, someone can then translate the English to Swahili, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish or any other tongue. One person can translate a fragment of the video, then fall asleep or have to go to his or her day job. A second volunteer can pick up where the first left off. Maybe V2 doesn’t finish, either, but V3 takes over. And so on till the whole thing is done. Very cool.

I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I still don’t know how to embed YouTube items into my blog. So you’ll have to follow the links yourself, but I hope you go to this one. It was recommended to me by Naomi Dagen Bloom, whom I met because she was sitting behind me at the Mead festival. She’s has been using her blog to spread the word about a bill that just passed through the House of Representatives and is headed now for the Senate.

It’s HR 1955, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism and Prevention Act of 2007. It’s an amendment to the 2002 Homeland Security Act. From a First Amendment point of view it’s very scary, particularly because it’s aimed not at foreigners, but at US “natives.” True to name, it would establish a commission to study and come up with ways to prevent “violent radicalization” and “homegrown terrorism.”

“Violent radicalization” in the bill is defined as the “process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change.”

“Homegrown terrorism” is “the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence…to intimidate or coerce” — among other entities — “the United States government….in furtherance of political or social objectives.”

Hmm. If you replaced “United States government” with “British government,” wouldn’t the American revolution and its activists have fit HR1955’s definitions of extremists and homegrown violent radicals? The mainstream media has published almost nothing about HR1955 but the web is roiling with protest denouncing it as the “Thought Crime Bill” — including on YouTube (click here for examples).

To learn more and take action, see various entries this month on the excellent blog, “As Time Goes By.”

Margaret Mead would be proud of how her festival is promoting all this online ferment. Granted, she knew nothing about the internet, and most pictures of her make her look very unhip and old. (Though I think the one I mounted at the top of this post is exceptional.) I look pretty old, too, and so does Naomi. OK, well, let’s just say old enough that we know how to spell.

Which is why, when I went on YouTube to view all those anti-HR 1955 videos, I felt like a weirdo invading MySpace. I mean, I’ve never seen so many apparently smart, educated people dubbing their videos with “accept” when they meant “except”, “intimadate” for “intimidate,” and so on like sounds of chalk on the retina blackboard. All the lefty and righty civil libertarians seem to be about 20 years old: that’s the only way to explain their semi-literacy. No doubt they’re intelligent, but they’ve done 2 much TV watching & txt mssging, and damn, I wish they’d get edited so people like me won’t feel ancient and like we’re not members of their new “The Machine is Us” club.

But hey, kids. Now that you’ve made it to this site, the crone is going to give you a lesson about sex politics, which is what I blog a lot about. So — like, did you ever hear of Margaret Mead? She wrote a book back in the 1920s, Coming of Age in Samoa. It was a real breakthrough in modern anthropology and in the US as a whole, because it said certain things about Samoan adolescents. To wit, that they and their parents were open and relaxed about sex, which allowed them to engage in much sexual exploration. This led Mead to propose that attitudes about sex are formed culturally rather than naturally, and if it weren’t for cultural repression, people would masturbate, have homosexual relations, and engage in unwed sex and other erotic acts without feeling anxious and guilty. The book caused quite a stir when it first appeared. It was as innovative then as the net is now.

And oh yeah, Mead was a lesbian. Plus, a feminist.

The “Machine” owes her a big thanks. That’s why I’m featuring her today, as a tribal rite on my little cyber cog.

To get to Carrollton, the suburb just north of Dallas where my sister lives, you have to drive through mean little Farmers Branch. Which is yet another burb, lately in the news because the town has been trying to keep landlords from renting apartments to “illegal aliens.” I passed through Irving, Texas too – where police are stopping people for the tiniest infractions, demanding papers, and turning those without immigration documents over to federal authorities so they will be deported.

Metro Dallas is small compared to Houston. It takes extra shlep time, but if you’re phobic about 65 MPH, as I am, you can drive from one end to the other without ever getting on a freeway. You see a lot that way – big, bleached, plainsified sky, noble old prairie architecture, and the city’s core, which still has lots of WASPs and WASP churches and white-people emporia.

Out on the perimeter, though, mostly what you see is Mexicans. Christmas-painted restaurants with words like Zacatecas and Tenampa. Endless little night clubs and bakeries and furniture stores with neon-winking Spanish. And people everywhere, going about their business, eating, driving, shopping with wife and kids and grandma.

Harry Hines Boulevard is Mexican. Irving, Mesquite, Market Center. A half million people converged on the May 2006 immigrant civil rights march in Dallas. Mostly Mexicans.

I picked up the local version of Mike Lacey’s New Times (The Dallas Observer) and went by the Mexican consulate to snap a picture of someone reading Gustavo Arrellano’s “Ask a Mexican” column so I could send it to Arrellano and get a free copy of his book (alas, I have since learned he already has a picture of the Dallas consulate). If you dial the phone number of that overworked agency, you often get a message, in Spanish, that you should leave your name and number if you’ve been a victim of the dragnets, and someone will get back to you.

On Sunday morning I went botanica hopping in Oak Cliff, a section of Dallas that appears to date from the 1920s to 1940s. Botanicas sell candles, herbs and powders, as well as statuettes and prayer cards depicting the saints. Botanica magic is based on European folk practice, syncretized with African and indigenous healing and spell casting in pre-Columbian and slaveholding Latin America. According to my mom, my grandmother was into the Old World version — as well as Old-to-New-World immigration. She bribed and sneaked her way out of one of the early-20th-century progroms in Kishinev, where dozens of Jews were murdered. She escaped by masquerading as a peasant (complete with over-the-top crucifix jewelry) and hiding, for a price, under hay in the wagon of a farmer (Bessarabia’s version of today’s coyote). Her own mother gave birth to 20 children and lost 11. To save the other nine from sickness, she wore a garlic chain around her neck. I am here because of such ignorance and hope. Botanicas, even in Dallas. They’re a national treasure.

I asked a few store managers which saint a customer should pray to, to ward off an immigration dragnet.

“All of them!” advised one woman.

“Saint Jude. For impossible causes,” said another.

Being Jewish and not personally worried about deportation this time around, I skipped the frankly Catholic items and chose others.

One, a packet of “Pancho Villa powder,” responds to undocumented immigrants’ lack of access to decent health care here in the U.S. Back in Mexico, there’s a Pancho Villa miracle sect, in which ailing people gather to worship the fabled revolutionary, hoping they will get well. I went to a prayer and healing ceremony once in Cd. Juarez. The main event was the playing, on a thrift-store machine, of an old 33 rpm record of “steed music” — songs dedicated to Villa’s favorite horses.

There are still middle-class white people in Oak Cliff, but – as in the rest of Dallas — most send their children to private schools. Over and over I’ve been told the public system is terrible. But it’s all the immigrants have. That and “No Child Left Behind.”

If “No Child” doesn’t work, there’s always this blessed botanica item you can wash your kids with. Jabon del Estudiante, Soap of the Student. It promises “marvelous changes,” presumably in academic achievement.

Great! But will the changes make a difference in the long run? For years now, immigrant groups have been trying to get the national “Dream Act” passed in Congress. It would allow undocumented young people to gain citizenship by enlisting in the military. Or they could use their marvelous academic skills to attend college. Even though the bargain offers up human life (and even better, brain power) for our homeland, Congress keeps nixing the bill.

I forgot to query the botanica owners about which product we should use to get the Dream Act passed.

So here’s the contest:

Ask the above question at a botanica in Dallas or anywhere else. First person with an answer and a mailing address gets my Pancho Villa powder or jabon del estudiante.

Get to your nearest Latino neighborhood and enter now!