EthnicMajority

(Contact Music) The On the Floor hitmaker became a minority shareholder in the English-language NuvoTvchannel last year (12), and now she's been promoted to take charge of programming and marketing as the company prepares to be re-launched in July (13).

She tells Billboard.com, "A network that reflects the modern Latino experience, but in English, must have the quality that everybody has."

Lopez will feature on-camera in two upcoming shows for NuvoTv - a special 90-minute Tvbiography and a new behind-the-scenes series, titled Gotta Dance, focusing on the dancers who recently accompanied the superstar on her world tour.

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(Mediaite) When HuffPost Live’s Jacob Soboroff hadGeorge Lopez on his show this week, he asked the comedian to give his reaction to a particularly disturbing recent clip of Rep. Louie Gohmertsuggesting that terrorist are being trained to “act Hispanic” in order to infiltrate the United States. Lopez had one, simple response: “You are fucking crazy, dude.”

Gohmert made his comments last month of C-Span’s Washington Journal. “We know Al Qaeda has camps with the drug cartels on the Mexican border,” the congressman from Texas said, and “we know that people are now being trained to come in and act like Hispanic, when they are radical Islamists.”

A distraught Lopez sighed and said, “Louie Gohmert, you’re fucking crazy, dude. You’re crazy, man.” To explain what Gohmert may have been thinking, Lopez said the idea that “acting Latino” would make it easier for a terrorist to enter the country is “ridiculous.”

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(Huffington Post) Jason Richwine, the co-author of aHeritage Foundation report on immigration who came under fire this week for arguing in his Harvard dissertation that Hispanic immigrants to the U.S. have substantially lower IQs than whites, resigned Friday.

"Jason Richwine let us know he’s decided to resign from his position. He’s no longer employed by Heritage," spokesman Daniel Woltornist said in an email to HuffPost. "It is our long-standing policy not to discuss internal personnel matters."

The news was first reported by Slate's Dave Weigel.

The report put the cost of immigration reform at a whopping $6.3 trillion. Though Heritage's 2007 report was one of the reasons an earlier immigration bill failed, the 2013 report was widely mocked, even by Republicans the foundation hoped would support it.

Harvard accepted Richwine's 2009 dissertation for a doctorate in public policy. In it, he spoke of the "growing Hispanic underclass."

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(McClatchy) Hispanic lawmakers and community leaders warned Republicans on Tuesday about the consequences of blocking President Barack Obama’s nomination of Thomas Perez to be labor secretary.

The show of force at a Capitol Hill news conference came a day before Wednesday’s scheduled confirmation vote on Perez by a Senate committee, following a two-week delay caused by partisan infighting.

“Tom Perez is eminently qualified for this job,” freshman Rep. Joe Garcia, a Florida Democrat, said in an interview. “If Republicans wanted to show an understanding of the Hispanic electorate or sympathy for the Hispanic electorate, they picked the wrong guy to make a scapegoat.”

Some Republican senators have criticized Perez’s performance as the head of the civil rights division in the Justice Department, accusing him of unfairly blocking several states’ voter ID laws and of enforcing anti-discrimination laws too aggressively.

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(Hispanic Business) The unemployment rate for Hispanic men kept pace with the national rate in April, but the rate for the Hispanic workforce overall continues to lag behind U.S. numbers, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. 

The unemployment rate (not seasonally adjusted) for Hispanic men dipped to 7.6 percent in April from 8.2 percent the month before, compared to 7.5 percent for the general population. The seasonally adjusted rate for the general Hispanic workforce stood at 9 percent, however, only slightly improved from last month's 9.2 percent. 

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(Huffington Post) Holy stereotypes, Batman! Have you seen the teaser trailer for Eva Longoria's new Lifetime series,Devious Maids?

The minute-long trailer manages to efficiently portray Latinas as hypersexual, nosy, scheming and, at times, totally invisible domestic servants, one set of pushed-up breasts, devilishly squinted eyes and sassy hair flip at a time. What the trailer doesn't do, however, is allude to the supposed actual premise of the show. According to MyLifetime.com, the show is supposed to center on "a close-knit group of maids who are bonded together by their jobs, life struggles and the melodramatic 'upstairs-downstairs' universe that engulfs their employers." This formula, the network promises, will paint class warfare both fun and dirty! Because, you know, class warfare has always been so very boring. Thanks, Lifetime!

That being said, Devious Maids seems to be a wasted opportunity. The series is the first mainstream, English-language television drama featuring five Latina main characters, which is — for better or for worse — a novel concept even in this day and age. Not novel, however, is the fact that all — count 'em, all! — of the main characters play "devious" maids. It just all seems like a missed opportunity to diversify the roles played by Latinas.

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(Hispanic Business) The U.S. Senate proposal to replace diversity visas with a merit-based program is being met with skepticism by some civil rights groups and black lawmakers. 

The current proposal is to create at least 120,000 merit visas a year by 2015 that would be replace the 55,000 diversity visas that have been doled out annually via lottery. 

Advocates said they haven't seen evidence yet a new merit-based program is an acceptable replacement for the diversity visas. 

Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP's Washington office, is advocating the diversity program be retained, the Washington publication The Hill reported Friday. 

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(Hispanic Business) African-American and Hispanic students are less likely than Whites to work part-time in high school, according to a University of Michigan study. But those who do hold jobs tend to work longer hours, and are less likely to suffer negative consequences. 

Those are among the findings of a new analysis of data on nearly 600,000 10th- and 12th-grade students, collected between 1991 and 2010 as part of the Monitoring the Future Study conducted by the U-M Institute for Social Research. The analysis was published online in Developmental Psychology, a journal of the American Psychological Association. Monitoring the Future is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health. 

"Working more than 15 hours a week is associated with problems for most students," said ISR researcher Jerald Bachman, the study's lead author. "These include lower grades and higher use of cigarettes, alcohol, and illicit drugs. But this pattern does not hold true among some minority students, especially those from less advantaged backgrounds." 

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(CBS News) As the Senate's "gang of eight" announces its proposed immigration bill, the political calculus behind any bipartisan push seems clear. Immigration affects many groups but after winning a whopping seven in 10 Hispanic votes last year, Democrats will particularly want to fulfill a promise to tackle it, while Republicans need to start winning some of those voters back. Many will see this as a chance for the GOP to re-engage after finding themselves on the wrong side of a demographic wave that could hinder them in elections for years.

Last cycle it seemed Republicans couldn't get a hearing from Hispanics after the strident talk of fences and deportation that had surfaced during the primaries. The party's own post-election review lamented that – and Mitt Romney's "self-deportation" comment in particular: "If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States they will not pay attention to our next sentence."

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(NBC News) More Hispanics than ever say that they are in favor of gay marriage, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Telemundo oversample of 300 Latino voters.

By a 49 percent to 43 percent margin, Latinos say they are in favor of allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry. That’s the widest margin for Hispanics in the NBC/WSJ poll’s history, but it lags behind other traditionally Democratic-voting pillars.

Click here to view full poll results

Views on gay marriage have evolved rapidly since 2004, but not among Hispanics. All respondents said they supported same-sex marriage by a 53 percent to 42 percent margin, a 43-point turnabout from 2004 and up 2 points from this past December.

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