Talk:Eddie Pérez (politician)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography. For more information, visit the project page.
Biography Portal
Stub This article has been rated as stub-Class on the project's quality scale. [FAQ]
This article is supported by the Politics and government work group.

[edit] Puerto Rican or Puerto Rican-born

_ _ Antonio, while i think your change from

an American Puerto Rican-born politician

to

a Puerto Rican politician

was a pretty bad edit, i'm far more upset by your summary,

If you were born in Puerto Rico there is no such thing a "American Puerto Rican" for you

This is not the "Antonio Committed to NPoV Martin" that i thought i knew!
_ _ I would absolutely respect that statement, made by you and applied to yourself or even to your close friends.
_ _ (As a statement applied to any public figure (except one who is your close friend), it is the height of arrogance. Now, i grant that almost all political statements are necessarily the height of arrogance, and making them is part of any political process where arrogance doesn't get you thrown in jail for more than a week. So i have a certain degree of respect for someone saying it as an expression of a political view. But that's also not what matters here.)
_ _ What matters for WP is that it is not a statement of fact, but of attitude, and even if it is an attitude of 99% of ethnically Puerto Rican people who are born in Puerto Rico, it is still PoV. It cannot be a valid reason for an edit. I'm not going to ask you to say anything by way of disavowing your implication that that statement could offer any justification for an edit, but you've parked an enormous elephant in the living room, and i'm not going to ignore it. You have put an outrageous reason for an edit into the nearly unalterable history. You've convicted yourself of making an edit with clear PoV intent, and put yourself in the position where almost anything you further you say about the subject has to overcome the presumption that you are still pushing the same PoV.
_ _ While the old language happens to be from my edit i'm not trying to suggest it is the only reasonable wording. Rather than restoring it, i'm working on an edit that attempts to respond to some of the acceptable reasons you could have given for the edit. I think it is reasonable for me to insist, under the circumstances, that you work on this talk page toward a consensus wording, and refrain from editing this article as it pertains to ethnic or nationality issues until there is a consensus here on any proposed edits to it by you, that have an ethnic/nat'ty thrust.
--Jerzy•t 15:17, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

_ _ For the interim while we seek consensus (and as my first proposal for a long-term wording), i've made the article open with

Eddie Alberto Perez (born 1956 or '57) is a Puerto Rico-born politician. As of 2006 he is mayor of Hartford, Connecticut.
He was born in Corozal, Puerto Rico (and by that fact, holds American citizenship). In 1969, at the age of 12, he arrived with his family in Hartford.

_ _ There is enuf confusion about Puerto Rico's exact status among even American Anglos that i am convinced Antonio's wording would mislead many non-Puerto Ricans, around the world, and leave them uncomfortable about their grasp of how someone not described as American holds public office in an American state. I would normally say that "Puerto Rico-born" standing alone in the lead sentence of a bio of someone who's making their career in the US but outside Puerto Rico was still too misleading. In this case, the mention of the city and the state in the next sentence eases that problem, and may make it reasonable to leave the word "American" (or "U.S.") for all the way in the third sentence. (But i would welcome a smooth wording that got it into the first two, but didn't seem to be drawing conclusions about how American and/or Puerto Rican he feels.)
_ _ The distinction between "Puerto Rican" and "Puerto Rico-born" IMO makes a big difference:

IMO, "American Puerto Rican" hints strongly at the parallels of "American Navajo" and "German Jewish", which i would use intending a short hand for e.g. "is eligible for only an American passport and is of Navajo ethnicity"; outside of that structure, i find "Puerto Rican" ambiguous among birth-place, residence, ethnicity, and "would want only a Puerto Rican passport, if only such a thing had any use in getting you thru immigration-control anywhere but in Cuba, if there". --Jerzy•t 18:07, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] HOLD UP

Wait a second. His gang activities serve as a foundation for his platform today? Reading the next sentence it becomes clear that this is not what was originally said here; maybe there's a sentence missing. I have no idea what it's SUPPOSED to say, so I won't edit it, but please someone fix this.