The controversy over the exclusion of the Latino experience from Ken Burns’s recent documentary The War raised important questions not only about how he and PBS view Latinos, but more generally about Latino and Latin American images in the media. At first PBS and Burns maintained that it was too late to make any changes in the film, but after the Latino community mobilized on this issue, they changed their position, agreeing to make last-minute marginal changes.

George W. Bush inadvertently created a public maelstrom in January 2004, when he proposed a new temporary worker program and a road to citizenship for millions of unauthorized immigrants.
By 2006, immigration had become the major issue on the nation’s political agenda. The last time this happened was in 1994, when California voters passed Proposition 187, which would have denied unauthorized immigrants many public benefits and required state employees (including health care workers and school teachers) to point authorities to “apparently illegal aliens.”

