NEW:
• Gallery 255 enjoys a musical grand opening
• Housing advocate tells about preparing herself for homeownership

Current Updates

Gallery gets new name, image

Gallery 255 owner Sandra McCullough welcomes guests to the gallery's grand opening celebration on Feb. 5, 2010 in Ventura. Performing next to her is artist/musician Xavier Montes. Formerly known as The Seabreeze Gallery, Gallery 255 is open from noon to 5 p.m. Thursday through Saturday at 255 S. Laurel St. For more information, call 805.861.0624 or click here

Photo by Carlos J. Licea/Amigos805

Click on image to see entire set of photos of event
courtesy of Flickr

Elizabeth Alvarez
Area Housing Authority
of the County of Ventura

True tales of an accidental housing advocate

Please click here for the full story — Ventura County Star

— Elizabeth Alvarez created free education classes for the Area Housing Authority of the County of Ventura that are offered throughout Ventura County. She is a writer, educator and a passionate advocate on behalf of the consumer in the mortgage industry. Read more at consumermortgageadvocate.org

Recent Updates

Emergency message from Carmen Ramirez:
Stop Oxnard's 2030 Plan and send it back for very important upgrade

Now is a once in a lifetime chance to save and fully restore, clean and protect the Ormond Beach Wetlands in Oxnard.
We Need Your Help to Rewrite the Map! Let the Oxnard City Council know that you want Ormond Beach protected!

Oxnard City Council Chambers
305 W. Third Street, Oxnard
Tuesday evening, February 9, 2010
7:00 PM Tuesday evening

For too long, the Oxnard Coast has been allowed to be abused and neglected. Especially, the Ormond Beach wetland area, like many coastal wetlands, has been degraded and diminished by urban and industrial development - including the Halaco facility, which is now a Superfund site. Despite these impacts, the area is still considered a treasure by scientists and nature lovers. The California State Coastal Conservancy is also leading efforts to permanently protect and restore the wetlands. If successful, this could be one of the largest coastal wetland areas in Southern California. The Conservancy's plan also envisions interpretive facilities, a trail network, boardwalks and wildlife overlooks, which would make Ormond Beach a amazing destination for residents and out of town visitors - a benefit to our entire community and our local economy.

However, a decision will be made on February 9 by the City of Oxnard about the Oxnard 2030 General Plan, and it could directly impact whether this restoration plan will be achieved. The 2030 General Plan describes Oxnard's vision of what the City will look like through the year 2030. Unfortunately, Oxnard's vision for Ormond Beach still includes significant industrial land use, including authorizing new industrial development on land still free from urban development. Industrial land use is incompatible with wetland protection, and the General Plan places it directly in the Conservancy's wetland restoration planning area.

Your participation at this hearing is critical. If you can join us, please attend and let the City Council know the 2030 General Plan should not be adopted because:

· You support the State Coastal Conservancy's efforts to acquire, permanently protect and restore Ormond Beach. The City should promote the Conservancy's efforts at Ormond Beach and make any changes to the 2030 General Plan that conflict with the Conservancy's preferred restoration plan (most recently identified as Alternative 2U in the Ormond Beach Wetland Restoration Feasibility Study), including changing to "resource protection" the Gateway Park area, the Halaco foundry site, the Reliant power plant, the Agromin site, and the area south of Hueneme Road between Edison and Arnold Roads.

· You support the current designation of the Halaco slag heap property as "resource protection." The Halaco foundry site, which is still designated "industrial," should also be designated "resource protection." U.S. EPA will consider the 2030 General Plan when it makes its cleanup decisions for the Halaco site, and the City should send an clear message to EPA that it intends Ormond Beach to be free of polluting facilities that threaten human health and the environment.

· You support eliminating the residential development land use designations north of Hueneme Road. Residential development presents significant threats to wetland species. The land should remain designated "open space" to continue to buffer the Ormond Beach wetland area from urban impacts.

Bring every one you can.

If you cannot attend the hearing, please email the City Council members:

Mayor Tom Holden: drtomholden@aol.com

Mayor Pro Tem Andres Herrera: andres.herrera@ci.oxnard.ca.us

Council Member Dean Maulhardt: deancity@yahoo.com

Council Member Dr. Irene Pinkard: irene.pinkard@ci.oxnard.ca.us

Council Member Bryan MacDonald: bryan.macdonald@ci.oxnard.ca.us

Let them know that you care about the future of our city!

For more information contact:

Jim Hensley LULAC Deputy District Director: hensleyjim@roadrunner.com or 805.382.7659

Spanish Language contact Jorge Nopoles: Jnapoles@clunet.edu or 805.754.5968

'Mixteco-Speakers in California' subject of panel presentation Feb. 8 in Ventura

Click here for a full-size video
of Zumbathon held at Hueneme High School

A party with a purpose: Coverage of Susan Jordan campaign gathering

Wells Fargo donates $50,000
to FOOD Share

Click here for full-size
Spanish-language video
of "Ventanilla de Salud" meeting

Los Empresarios announce
new meeting location

Santa Barbara community gathers for immigration
reform rally

Galeria de Placencia
celebrates art with auction

Click here for full-size video
of Enedina Castañeda
poetry reading

Supervisor Zaragaza gets media profile

Supervisor Zaragoz steps out
of Flynn's shadow
— Ventura County Star
Click here

Community comes together
to help those in need

Photos from reception for
2010 (R)EVOLUTION calendar

Sal's Mexican Inn
officially closes on Dec. 23

Family seeking public's help
for injured daughter

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A video slideshow from the Oxnard Student Digital Film Festival and Student Film Workshop presented Oct. 16, 17 in downtown Oxnard and Oxnard College

Group photo of Film Festival
organizers courtesy of
Carlos J. Licea/Amigos805

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Three for one — Art invasion at the beach

By Mariana Llamas-Cendon

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Frank X. Moraga:

El Concilio to honor community leaders
at Latino Leadership Awards

Feb. 4, 2010

Educators, law enforcement personnel and groups that assist women farm workers and Mixteco immigrants are among the individuals and organizations selected to receive a Latino Leadership Award from El Concilio del Condado de Ventura this year.

The awards will be presented at El Concilio’s 21st annual awards ceremony on Saturday, March 20 in Oxnard. Sponsorships are still being accepted for the event.

“Service Above All” is the theme for this year’s dinner.

Honorees include Barbara Marquez-O’Neill, Steven M. Ramirez II, Damien A. Peña, Veronica Valadez, Organización en California de Lideres Campesinas, Inc., the Mixteco/Indigena Community Organizing Project (MICOP) and the Financial Empowerment Partnership of Ventura County.

The Building Bridges Award will be presented to the Leaders in Education Awareness Program (LEAP) from California State University, Channel Islands.  Oxnard Assistant Police Chief Scott Whitney will receive the President’s Award.

Barbara Marquez-O’Neill has been a human rights advocate and community organizer for more than 40 years. She authored an issue paper for the Ventura County Human Services Agency, “Moving from ‘No Se Puede’ to ‘Sí Se Puede’: A Message of Hope for Violence Prevention in the Oxnard Area,” which contributed to the development of the Oxnard Safety Blue Print Plan. Marquez-O’Neill is a consultant on youth development and violence prevention for the City of Oxnard and the County of Ventura Probation and Human Services agencies. She is a member of the Ventura County Perinatal Substance Abuse Task Force, FIRST 5 of Ventura County and the Ventura County Child Death and Domestic Violence Death Review Team. She also is a commissioner for the Community Commission of Ventura County.

Steven M Ramirez II, a senior police officer for the City of Oxnard, has a long history of community service. As a member of the Commission on Community Relations, he has volunteered more than 20 hours per month during the past two years to community-based activities and projects. For the past three years, he has volunteered as a community representative for the City of Oxnard Multi-Cultural Festival and has served as a facilitator for the Oxnard College Youth Leadership Conference. He has been a youth mentor for the Oxnard PRYDE Program, which works in collaboration with City Impact, the Oxnard Elementary School District and the Oxnard Police Department to mentor at-risk youth. He has also granted a “Ramirez Family Memorial Scholarship” to graduating high school seniors and deserving adults who are continuing their education.

Damien A. Peña, a native of Oxnard, has made it his mission to affect Latinos in Ventura County by empowering underrepresented students to pursue higher education. He served for nine years as the senior director of academic programs at California Lutheran University. In October 2007, he became the director of Access, Orientation and Transition Programs at California State University, Channel Islands. He was promoted to serve as interim Dean of Students, becoming the first Latino to serve in that role at the university. In June 2009, he was awarded the Division of Student Affairs’ Pillar of Excellence Award. Most recently, he served as a key initiator for the university’s application to become a Hispanic-serving institution. He is currently pursuing a doctorate in higher education leadership at CLU.

Organizacion en California de Lideres Campesinas Inc.

Mixteco/Indigena Community Organizing Project

Financial Empowerment Partnership of Ventura County

CSUCI's Leaders in Education Awareness Program (LEAP)

Photos courtesy of
El Concilio del Condado de Ventura

Veronica Valadez, an educator and community advocate, was raised in Santa Maria, California, by Mexican immigrant farm-worker parents. Influenced by her mother to achieve her dreams, Valadez graduated from UCSB with academic honors. The mother of two is currently working on her master’s degree in Chicano studies at California State University, Northridge. She is the founder and owner of Under the Sun Gallery at the Bell Arts Factory and also teaches and performs traditional Mexica/Azteca dance.

Organizacion en California de Lideres Campesinas Inc. is based in Oxnard, but has chapters throughout California. The group was founded in 1992 to promote the development of women leaders in the farm-worker community so they can become agents of social, economic and political change and promote human rights of farm-worker women. The group seeks to raise awareness on a variety of issues facing women, from violence in the home to bad working conditions, reproductive justice and other social issues including sexual harassment and assaults in the workplace.

Mixteco/Indigena Community Organizing Project (MICOP) was founded in 2001 to address the concerns of indigenous farm workers from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. More than 20,000 Mixtecs live and work in Ventura County, and many speak primarily Mixteco and Zapoteco. MICOP holds monthly meetings at Las Islas Medical Group, serves hot meals and hosts educational presentations in Spanish and Mixteco on prenatal care, pesticide exposure, nutrition and domestic violence. MICOP also maintains a “Necessities of Life” program which helps distribute clothing, diapers, blankets and others items to families in need.

The Financial Empowerment Partnership of Ventura County consists of the Business and Employment Services Department of the Ventura County Human Services Agency, the Cabrillo Economic Development Corp. and the Internal Revenue Service. Formed in 2005, the partnership increases awareness of and access to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) program. The group supports multiple "Earn It! Keep It! Save It!" Volunteer Income Tax Assistance Program (VITA) sites in Ventura County, which offers free tax filing assistance to low-income tax filers. From January through April 2009, 21 volunteer tax preparers filed 523 returns at VITA sites, generating $732,163 in total refunds, including $357,839 in EITC.

Assistant Police Chief Scott Whitney was raised in Oxnard and earned his bachelor’s degree in business administration/finance from the University of Oregon. He also received a master’s degree in public administration from California State University, Northridge. He has been with the Oxnard Police Department for 19 years, and has served as director of the Oxnard PRYDE Project for at-risk youth. He is a board member of the Oxnard chapter of Parents of Murdered Children, assisting parents in coping with the loss of a loved one due to acts of violence. He is also chair of the department’s Cultural Proficiency training program.

The CSU Channel Islands Leaders in Education Awareness Program (LEAP) consists of student volunteers who host a campus visit program called “Pathways to College” for kindergarten to 8th-grade students every Friday during the academic year. The four-hour program includes a “How to get to college” presentation. During a three-month period, LEAP students provided presentations to more than 760 students in 13 schools in Ventura County. Many of the LEAP student volunteers are first-generation college-bound, low-income and underrepresented students.

The awards dinner will be held at the Oxnard Performing Arts Center, 800 Hobson Way. Seat reservations are still being accepted. Individual tickets are $125.

Sponsorships — $2,000 for corporate, $1,500 for a table of eight — are also still being accepted.

For more information, contact Tania I. Corona, director of operations at 805.486.9777 ext 273 or via email at ticorona@elconcilioventura.org

Mariana Llamas-Cendon:

The worlds of Omar D'Leon

Omar D'Leon is a Nicaraguan-born artist who fled from his country during the Sandinista era to settle down in Ventura County, where he is exhibiting some of his most recent and some never-before-seen artworks. 

Jan. 28, 2010

Reality and magic aren’t necessarily staunch enemies. Both, as Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher have proven several times, can share a single space and time in which they not only blend to perfection but also don’t disturb their own realms.

This artistic concurrence, better known as “Magic Realism” — a term coined by German art critic Franz Roh during the 1920s — is defined in Wikipedia.com as the introduction of fantastic or illogical objects or scenarios in a very real or common setting that makes them look ordinary, and can be found in almost every artistic expression from literature to film.

Painting couldn’t escape from the “Magic Realism” spell as Nicaraguan-born artist and 27-year Ventura County resident Omar D’Leon exhibits “The Magical Realism of the Americas: The Art of Master Painter Omar D’Leon,” which is showing until Feb. 28 at the Museum of Ventura County.

D’Leon is a well-known Latin American artist who “In 1970 founded Museo-Galeria 904 in Managua, but Nicaragua’s massive earthquake of 1972 destroyed much of the museum, and many of D’Leon’s paintings were lost or looted,” a museum’s press release points out.

“Today his pieces are in the collections of the Museum of Latin American Contemporary Art in Washington, D.C., the Ponce Museum of Art in Puerto Rico, the Chicago Art Institute, the Cuevas Museum in Mexico City, and the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California, among other collections. In 1982 one of his paintings was reproduced in the form of a stamp for UNICEF.”

Although bright and numerous colors are predominant in D’Leon’s work, fruits, women and tropical elements also can be found as a remembrance of his motherland, according to a story published by the Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa.

“He is known for his light-reflecting colors and surface textures, created by crosshatch scoring through oil and wax sometimes more then 20 layers deep,” the museum’s press release states.

Anna Bermudez, curator of the Museum of Ventura County, said she is found of the color usage and the themes displayed in D’Leon’s paintings, in particular a piece named “Puberty.”

She added that one thing she really enjoys about looking at D’Leon’s paintings is finding unusual elements in a quick glance since they are masterly fused with other very ordinary objects.

For more information about the exhibit, visit www.venturamuseum.org

Carlos J. Licea:

Commentary: How do you spell ripoff?

Jan. 22, 2010

Coming up on my periodic visit to my doctor, I realized that I had missed my previous appointment and that my prescriptions for my life-saving meds had run out. I save some of my hard-earned cash by buying supposedly cheaper meds from my insurance company’s pharmacy and get my medication delivered every 90 days from its central location in Winter Park, Fla.

Buying this way I get a “discount” in a buy-three, get-one-free prescription order as long as my meds are generics. I have no problem with generics. Brand names have no allure for me. I am a diabetic and I need the pills.

I asked the doctor for a stop-gap refill to hold me until he examined me and gave me a proper prescription to send away to my insurance provider’s pharmacy. He asked me where I wanted the prescription filled and I mentioned a certain chain drugstore in Port Hueneme that had advertised they were fighting high prices by selling generic prescriptions at $10 or less for a 60-day supply as long as I registered properly with the chain and I was issued a “discount” card. I did.

These discounts were offered with great fanfare at the start of the healthcare debate when most feared that there would be stringent controls on the price of pharmaceuticals.

Previous to my change in insurance companies due to a change in my employment situation (I was “downsized” from a previous job and had to find another one that paid less and had a less “generous” insurance deal). Before I paid a $10 copay and now my copay has doubled to $20.

So even at the new price, the offer from this drugstore chain seemed reasonable for a stop-gap and I went there to pick up my prescription. First there was a delay because my prescription was not found and had to be filled again. I had to go to an interview and said I would come back later. I thought nothing unusual since I had done the same thing during a previous occasion when the doctor upped my blood pressure medicine.

Upon returning the employee tried to charge me $20. When I protested, the employee went back and talked to the pharmacist and I said that unless the program had changed that I expected to pay only $10 or less.

The pharmacist gave me a withering look. 

“But you are going to be charged $20 because you have insurance,” she said accusatorily.

I raised my eyebrows. “But I never mentioned my insurance company to you.  I said I had a discount card from your company and I expect to pay accordingly,” I answered, flustered. “I said that very specifically and you did not mention anything about any other insurance.”

With an impatient sigh she looked straight into my eyes. “But you do have insurance and you are expected to pay the insurance rate even if you want to use our program. This program is only for people without insurance.”

 “You mean I can be penalized for having insurance?”

There was no answer. Only the same impatient sigh. I sat down to wait until the prescription was filled. At the end she came to the register. “OK, I will give it to you at the discount rate, but this is the last time,” she said as if it was a big favor made to a petulant child.
It was the kind of explanation tea baggers and fiscal conservatives would have thrown in my face if this had been a government program and I was a wronged customer buying at a socialized medicine shop.  But no, this is a modern, recently renovated store of a large national chain. 

As she said, even though I had never used my insurance company card with that particular chain, there was my name in a computer database. It was not collected by gray bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., but by business-suited individuals (bureaucrats) working for Orwellian private enterprise. 

Surprise. Big Brother is not at the FDA, the AMA or even the DOJ.  It was data shared by private insurance companies and distributed to private chains so they could collect their cut of the pie no matter what. Big Brother sits in a boardroom and collects a big salary to screw me, a 60+ working stiff who barely makes a subsistence wage while underemployed at a non-profit private corporation.

This Big Brother drives a nice car, gets jetted around in a company Gulfstream Jet, receives a salary that I cannot even dream about and gets a golden parachute to land with a nice fanny cushion in case he or she screws up. I cannot elect this bureaucrat at the end of a political term and I do not even know this person’s name.

This is Big Brother (or maybe Sister) of 2010.  And Big Brother holds my life —literally — in his hands.  No wonder they hate national health plans. I guess that is why I have a more expensive copay when I carry a private health insurance provider card in my wallet. Someone has to pay for Big Brother when the private death panel meets. 

And pay twice as much at the counter.

Remember, then, how to spell ripoff: I-N-S-U-R-A-N-C-E-C-O-M-P-A-N-Y.

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