Behind the scenes on PANCHO LAND: The Plot Outline

A look at one author's use of a plot outline

Some writers start a novel with a piece of dialog or bit of narrative and see where the story takes them. Others, like me, don't really begin to flesh out scenes until they have a complete plot outline. Pictured above is one of the spreadsheet drafts I used to create PANCHO LAND, the third installment of the AMERICA LIBRE trilogy.

To avoid spoilers, I deliberately reduced the font size, making it impossible to read. But even at this magnification, you can see five columns that trace the developments for each major character during the story. The spreadsheet lets me integrate the varying story lines and keep each moving together toward a coherent conclusion.

Once I know how the story will unfold, I choose which character will serve as point-of-view for each scene. Although the series is written in third person, I try to present each scene from the perspective of a single character. This adds drama and suspense since the reader only knows what that character knows.

Inevitably, as I begin to flesh out the scenes, I find reasons to tweak the plot. This is another place where the plot outline is valuable since it reminds me how that change will affect all the other characters. When I make this kind of change, I keep the original version of the plot outline and create a new version. There are times when I've decided to go back to a previous approach and having the older version saves a lot of work.

The plot outline is the backbone for several other devices many writers use to craft novels. I will be sharing more about these in the coming weeks.

Raul Ramos y Sanchez

The depths of ignorance

How out of touch are some mainstream Americans with what it means to be a Latino? An example of the depths of that ignorance was on display March 15th when the pep band at Southern Mississippi University chanted "Where's you green card?" as Angel Rodriguez of Kansas State stepped up to the free throw line during an NCAA tournament game.

Rodriguez is from Puerto Rico, and like all Puerto Ricans, he is a U.S. citizen. He has as much need for a green card as any of the native-born students deriding him.

But in their minds, the equation was simple: Latino equals immigrant.

That alone would be ignorant enough. But to taunt Rodriguez by questioning his status reveals the deep-seated sense that every Hispanic is suspect. In small minds like these, Latinos cannot be "real Americans" -- even when they clearly are.

Raul Ramos y Sanchez

My publisher's Amazon deal on HOUSE DIVIDED

The price on HOUSE DIVIDED is 60% for a limited time. 

Hey, in case you're interested, my publisher is running a limited time deal on HOUSE DIVIDED paperbacks -- $5.60 (reg. $11.19). That figures to 60% off. If you or someone you know has been wanting to read my second novel, you might want to check this out.

FIND OUT MORE AT THE HOUSE DIVIDED PAGE ON AMAZON.COM

A poll: Is "Pancho Land" offensive?

Pancho Land is the working title for my third novel in the America Libre trilogy. Do you think this title is demeaning or offensive? I hope you'll take a moment and share your opinion. Feel free to leave a comment if you are so inspired. Thank you! ~ Raul

Do you find the novel title "PANCHO LAND" offensive?

Gone writing

With PANCHO LAND, the third installment of the AMERICA LIBRE trilogy due this summer, I will be carving out more time for my fiction work over the next few months. Not to say a breaking story will not prompt an editorial during that time. But I've reached the harvest season for my next novel and will be toiling in that field more intensely.

As the novel progresses, I will be posting elements for your feedback here: some cover designs and perhaps an excerpt or two of the work in progress.

In the meantime, hope you'll check out the blog archive for posts with current relevance.

To the regular readers of this blog I want to say thanks for your interest and support -- and the comments, even when they are dissenting.

So even though I'm not minding the store, leave me a message. I'll reply when I can. As long as we are talking, there is hope.

Raul Ramos y Sanchez

Joe Arpaio enters Sasquatch territory

"This un-retouched photo of us near his woodland lair shows undeniable evidence of the existence of Sasquatch." --Sheriff Joe Apraio (on the right)

Well, now that Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his anonymous "Cold Case Posse" have given us irrefutable proof that President Obama’s birth certificate is fake, it appears he may have stumbled onto a lucrative new sideline in verifying wingnut myths. (Sheriff Arpaio made it clear this investigation was paid for by private donations.) With that in mind, here are some more headlines we may expect from the good sheriff and his posse in the future:

News flash: Sheriff Joe Arpaio confirms the existence of Sasquatch.

News flash: Sheriff Joe Arpaio confirms Apollo Moon missions were fake.

News flash: Sheriff Joe Arpaio uncovers Roswell alien bodies.

News flash: Sheriff Joe Arpaio proves Mr. Rogers was a Navy SEAL.

News flash: Sheriff Joe Arpaio has proof Richard Gere had gerbil in his rectum.

News flash: Sheriff Joe Arpaio proves Lady Gaga is a hermaphrodite.

News flash: Sheriff Joe Arpaio proves blue whale sperm makes oceans salty. 

Back to the Obama investigation... Gasp! Who would have imagined that a sheriff accused by the Justice Department of racial profiling, under investigation for abuses of power, and widely chastised (even by other Republicans) for his neglect of sex crimes involving children would have found evidence President Obama is not a real American? This man is clearly an impartial party.

When asked why a local law enforcement official under fire for racial prejudice, abuse of power and negligence was conducting a federal level investigation, Sheriff Arpaio replied, “I’m just doing my job.”

Some things you just can’t make up. 


Raul Ramos y Sanchez

Santorum promises religious favoritism as president

“I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.”

--Rick Santorum

Rick Santorum is taking a huge gamble in an effort to maintain his precarious lead for the GOP presidential nomination over Mitt Romney. He has doubled down on his support from the religious right. “I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” Santorum told ABC News. Santorum went on to criticize an icon among many U.S. Catholics, John F. Kennedy. According to the New York Times, Santorum claimed “he had become sickened after reading John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech calling for the rigid separation of religion and politics.”

How far we’ve come.

In his 1960 campaign, JFK had to convince a predominantly Protestant U.S. electorate that the nation’s first Catholic president would not put his religion ahead of the nation. At the time, many voters were worried Kennedy might show favoritism to Catholics or let Papal edicts sway his decisions. Fellow Catholic Rick Santorum has turned Kennedy’s position on its head, promising that as president he will most certainly show favoritism to his faith. The video that "sickened" Mr. Santorum is included below. 

Of course, today’s voters need not really worry that Santorum will be a handmaiden of the Catholic clergy. Although Santorum’s stand on contraception and a woman’s right to choose mirror the official views of the Catholic Church, Santorum strongly opposes immigration reform which American Catholic bishops have openly supported.

To my knowledge, no one in the media has asked Mr. Santorum to explain this break with his widely self-proclaimed faith. I hope someone with access to Santorum will do this soon.

Interestingly, the most common nativist response to the Catholic Church’s support for the undocumented is that a religious organization should stay out of government policy. You see, in this case, many of Santorum's supporters believe there should be a strong separation between church and state.

Raul Ramos y Sanchez

Operation Wetback: The Romney blueprint for "self-deportation"

When Mitt Romney’s immigration advisor Kris Kobach boasts that 5.5 million “illegals” could be forced out of the U.S. during the first term of a Romney presidency, it is no idle claim. There is a model for “self-deportation” that led to the expulsion of up to 700,000 Mexicans during the mid 1950s: Operation Wetback. This quasi-military nationwide effort launched by the Eisenhower administration in 1954 is a clear example of how the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens can be trampled when hysteria and prejudice reach a fever pitch. The offensive name was only the beginning of its xenophobic nature. 

Operation Wetback

In less than a year Operation Wetback led to the arrest of over 80,000 people of Mexican origin in the U.S. and is credited with forcing the voluntary expulsion of up to 700,000 others. The operation targeted Mexican-American communities in California and Arizona and employed roadblocks along with the cordoning off of entire neighborhoods to indentify “illegal aliens.” Random stops of persons who appeared to be "Mexican" were also employed. These indiscriminate interrogations of people based purely on their ethnicity were organized and fully sanctioned by the federal government. Allegations of widespread harassment and beatings were later supported by lawsuits settled in favor of U.S. citizens victimized during the operation. Many of those detained were released hundreds of miles inside the Mexican border to discourage their return.

The motivation behind the draconian Operation Wetback reflects the bipolar nature of U.S./Mexico labor relations.

After the massive “Mexican Repatriation” during the Great Depression, the entry of the U.S. into WWII brought a new round of labor shortages. Again in need of cheap labor, the U.S. and Mexico entered into the Bracero Program which brought a new wave of Mexican workers to American farms and factories. Although the demand for cheap labor continued after GIs returned from the war, tensions mounted. After complaints of labor law violations by some Bracero workers, a backlash arose claiming that "uncontrolled immigration" by undocumented workers were depressing wages and creating unwarranted employment competition. Thus, Operation Wetback was born.

Will the Romney/Kobach “self-deportation” work today? Not likely, according to a recent study by the Center for American Progress. The study indicates that many of the undocumented today have been in the U.S. for decades and will not easily abandon their strong family ties forged here. The study also cites a lack of opportunities in the migrants’ native countries and the high cost of returning as additional factors against self-deportation. However, this will not likely deter nativists from attempting a repeat of Operation Wetback, making the human costs of such a scheme all the more tragic.

“If America could deport the illegal invaders back then, they can sure do it today!” boasts a nativist website in reference to Operation Wetback and the Repatriation of the Great Depression. These incidents and others like the unlawful Japanese interment during WWII, prove that fear and prejudice have often trumped the guaranteed constitutional rights of U.S. minority citizens in the past.

Ironically, nativists are especially fond of invoking  the “rule of law” to justify punitive legislation like Arizona’s SB-1070. Yet the concept of a “rule of law” in the U.S. was created to prevent mob rule from violating the rights of individual citizens. This is exactly the opposite of what occurred with Operation Wetback when U.S. citizens were harassed and arrested purely on the basis of their ethnicity.

The overwhelming majority of the nation’s nearly 50 million Latinos are here legally. Simplistic solutions like Romney/Kobach self-deportation scheme will not just fail, they will very likely antagonize a large portion of the Latino community. That is not a good recipe for domestic tranquility. For proof, one need only look at the ugly side of similar scenarios such as the Chechens in Russia, the Basques in Spain, the Tamils in Sri Lanka and the mother of all ethnic conflict, the Balkans.  

The solution to the presence of some 11 million undocumented people in the U.S. will likely be messy and involve compromise. But the alternative could be something no one except the right militias want.

Raul Ramos y Sanchez

Sources:

Encyclopedia of Latino popular culture - Cordelia Candelaria, Peter J. García, Arturo J. Aldama

Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954 - Juan Ramon Garcia 

Race, gender, and punishment: from colonialism to the war on terror -  Mary Bosworth, Jeanne Flavin

Wikipedia – Operation Wetback

Over one million Mexicans forcibly relocated under "rule of law"

More than one million people of Mexican origin were unlawfully removed to Mexico during the 1930s across the United States. Approximately 60% were U.S. citizens.

Many of those who demonize the undocumented and support harsh nativist legislation instead of immigration reform cloak their arguments under the guise of maintaining "the rule of law." They make this point despite law enforcement statistics that show crime has dropped significantly across the nation since the early 1990s, the period when the present flood of undocumented immigrants began. (In Los Angeles, a city with probably the highest concentration of undocumented immigrants, overall crime has dropped 64% during this same period.)

This weekend, a plaque will be unveiled in the City of Los Angeles acknowledging one of the most flagrant civil rights violations in U.S. history. This seldom-mentioned event was perpetrated across the nation by elected officials and law enforcement agencies at every level under a federal campaign led by President Herbert Hoover.

According to scholar Kevin R. Johnson:

Many Americans have not heard of the forced removal of approximately one million persons—U.S. citizens as well as noncitizens—of Mexican ancestry from the United States during the Great Depression. This is true despite the fact that the number of repatriates dwarfed by about tenfold the number of persons of Japanese ancestry who were interned by the United States government during World War II. Unfortunately, the lack of awareness of the repatriation is consistent with the general invisibility of Latina/o civil rights deprivations throughout much of U.S. history. 

Although “repatriation” is the term often used to refer to the campaign to remove hundreds of thousands of persons of Mexican ancestry from the United States in the 1930s, it is not entirely accurate.  Federal, state, and local governments worked together to involuntarily remove many U.S. citizens of Mexican ancestry, many of whom were born in the United States.  These citizens cannot be said to have been “repatriated” to their native land. Approximately 60 percent of the persons of Mexican ancestry removed to Mexico in the 1930s were U.S. citizens, many of them children who were effectively deported to Mexico when their immigrant parents were sent there.

The forced “repatriation” of an estimated one million persons of Mexican ancestry from the United States included the removal of hundreds of thousands of people from California, Michigan, Colorado, Texas, Illinois, Ohio, and New York during the Great Depression.  It is clear today that the conduct of federal, state, and local officials in the campaign violated the legal rights of the persons repatriated, as well as persons of Mexican ancestry stopped, interrogated, and detained but not removed from the country. The repatriation campaign also terrorized and traumatized the greater Mexican-American community.

To justify the "Repatriation," Los Angeles county officials claimed that returning Mexicans would save the city money by reducing the number of needy families using up federal welfare funds and free up jobs for “real” Americans. However, sources at the time documented that less than 10 percent of people on welfare across the country were Mexican or of Mexican descent.

The “Repatriation” included sweeps through barrios with indiscriminate mass arrests. Most people were unconstitutionally denied their legal rights of Due Process and Equal Protection under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment. (The U.S. Department of Justice recently stripped Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio's office of its immigration enforcement powers for conducting similar "sweeps".)

Is this what nativists mean by the "rule of law" in the United States?

Raul Ramos y Sanchez

Romney bashes Santorum for his support of Sotomayor

From a video just released by the Romney campaign

Mitt Romney is pulling no punches in trying to beat back a challenge from Rick Santorum for the GOP presidential nomination. This recent attack ad is one of several the Romney campaign is using to blanket Michigan airwaves. The ad features Santorum's connection with Arlen Specter, Republican turned Democrat.  In passing, the ad takes a swipe at Santorum's vote for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

With Judge Sotomayor's widespread popularity among Latino communities across the nation, this move reveals one of several things about the Romney campaign: 1) They feel Romney can win in November without much Hispanic support. 2) They think Latinos will forget being used as a political piñata in pandering to xenophobes and racists during the GOP primaries. 3) They are completely clueless.

The complete video is included below.

Raul Ramos y Sanchez