Talk Bronx New York

Lance Cpl. Edwin Marrero, U.S.M.C., your past beckons.

Courtesy of Olga Torres Edwin Marrero

Two battered photo albums testify to the South Bronx life you put on hold when you shipped off to Vietnam as a teenage jarhead in 1969. Carmen vows, on the back of the prints, that she misses and needs you. Martha, primly friendly, sends her love. You look downright suave at a club with another girl, drinks on the table and cigarette in hand. And there are your relatives, getting goofy at home while you were slogging through rice paddies.

Forty years ago, in Vietnam, you gave these albums to Mike Torres, a fellow Marine from Jersey City, when your own duffel bag was too full to make the trip back to the Bronx. Mike came home a few weeks later. But for reasons he never fully explained to his wife, Olga, he was never able to locate you to give them back. Mike died last June.

Courtesy of Olga Torres Mike Torres

Now, Olga wants you to have them.

Read more..

(No Ratings Yet)
 Loading ...
 Email This Post

The Fordham Road Business Improvement District announced that 76 BID businesses are participating in a special Holiday Shopping Promotion in which they will offer 10% public discounts (consumers must display one of the many BID sponsored newspaper/magazine advertisements, downloadable online coupons or a MetroCard at the time of purchases, some restrictions may apply) from Friday, December 4 through Sunday, December 20. A portion of these businesses will also have extended shopping hours on each Friday until 9 p.m. during the promotion dates.

BID-sponsored print advertisements are running in the Bronx Times Reporter, the Daily News, the Mount Hope Monitor, the Norwood News and Time Out New York Magazine. There will also be web and on-air radio promotions and television commercials. Read more..

(No Ratings Yet)
 Loading ...
 Email This Post

Rubén Díaz Sr., a New York state senator, has argued that a bill legalizing gay marriage should not be allowed to come to the floor

 Every Sunday morning, the deep, melodious voice of State Senator Rubén Díaz Sr. rumbles across the congregation at his Bronx church. On weekdays, it echoes across the Senate chamber as he rails against Medicaid cuts or abortion. Earlier this year, it enthralled thousands at a boisterous rally against same-sex marriage.

Rubén Díaz Sr., a state senator and Pentecostal minister.

But ask him about the gay people in his own life, and Mr. Díaz’s voice grows quiet. His smile vanishes.

Two of his brothers are gay, he murmurs, one of them recently deceased. So is a granddaughter. There is an old friend who works for him in the Senate. And a former campaign aide.

“I love them. I love them,” says Mr. Díaz, who grew up one of 17 children in Puerto Rico. “But I don’t believe in what they are doing. They are my brothers. They are my family.”

His voice rises again. “So how could I be a homophobe?”

For those fighting to expand gay rights, Mr. Díaz, a Pentecostal minister, represents the most outspoken and unpredictable of foes. He was forced to resign from the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board years ago for suggesting that the Gay Games would encourage homosexuality and spread H.I.V. In 2003, he sued the city to shut down a high school for gay and transgender students.

As advocates push for a vote on same-sex marriage in the State Senate on Tuesday, Mr. Díaz is again speaking out, arguing that last week’s election results show that the tide has turned against allowing gay people to wed.

Read more..

(No Ratings Yet)
 Loading ...
 Email This Post

“It is beyond anybody’s imagination when I started that a Puerto Rican could ascend to that position, to the Supreme Court,” said Edwin Torres, who in 1959 was hired as the first Puerto Rican assistant district attorney in New York

In the summer of 1959, Edwin Torres landed a $60-a-week job and wound up on the front page of El Diario. He had just been hired as the first Puerto Rican assistant district attorney in New York — and probably, he thinks, the entire United States.

He still recalls the headline: “Exemplary Son of El Barrio Becomes Prosecutor.”

“You would’ve thought I had been named attorney general,” he said. “That’s how big it was.” Read more..

(1 votes, average: 3 out of 5)
 Loading ...
 Email This Post

New York judge Sonia Sotomayor is president Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court. She’s 54 years old and, if confirmed, she would be the third woman ever to serve and the first ever Hispanic. Sotomayor is a self-described “Newyorkrican” and grew up in a Bronx housing project after her parents moved to New York from Puerto Rico.

CUNY Law School professor Jenny Rivera worked with Sotomayor in the Manhattan federal prosecutor’s office and joins us now. Read more..

(No Ratings Yet)
 Loading ...
 Email This Post