Maine Voices: Lewiston mayor says Carmona is highly qualified for Portland mayor
Filed under: Articles about Ralph Carmona
Laurent Gilbert believes the community activist would be a game-changer for the state’s largest city.
By LAURENT F. GILBERT SR.
Published June 22, 2011, in the Portland Press Herald
LEWISTON — Portland voters will have the first opportunity, since 1923, to elect a citywide mayor.
As the elected mayor of Maine’s second-largest city, and for the sake of Maine, I believe Ralph Carmona would be an outstanding candidate and I have urged him to consider entering the race.
Carmona would be a game-changer in a crowd of conventional candidates because of his sense of the nation and diverse years of experience. He would have no higher ambition than to serve Portland as a full-time mayor.
Be it the voter on the street, the grass-roots activist or a business leader, Carmona’s prudence and temperament, will resonate with the sense and sensibility of those frustrated with politics as usual.
Like many practical and progressive Democrats, I hunger for someone not tied to the unaccountable, pandering “insider” politics that has resulted in a diminishing number of Democrats supporting their own for local and state office because of a “failed state” sense of our political future.
Why else did the leading Democratic gubernatorial candidate get 18 percent of support from Portland voters?
How else could the Democratic Party lose the state Legislature to the other side? Much of it has to do with national trends; but much is also the disagreeable political mindset of Democrats not always inclusive of those interested in the public good.
Any keen political observer does not have to live in Portland to opine that the Democratic Party leadership has created a void for discontented Democrats to elect three Green Party members to its nine-member Portland City Council.
Carmona’s background and his natural political gifts would distinguish him from those who run, and he would energize the Democratic Party.
One need only look at this month’s successful Portland Democratic City Committee Truman Dinner.
His high-profile critique of Gov. LePage’s NAACP comments and mural removal actions aside, Carmona would be the only candidate to have organized a private meeting with the governor in defense of Portland and Lewiston.
From that meeting, he received LePage’s commitment to meet further on issues affecting these cities.
Carmona is also the only one who has reached out to all three leading losing gubernatorial candidates – Eliot Cutler, Libby Mitchell and Shawn Moody – on the prospects of his candidacy.
Portland’s future greatness depends on someone who can tap the entrepreneurial business vision of the city.
Carmona is what Andy Graham, CEO of Portland Color, calls one of those 10,000 critical and creative thinkers needed to work with thoughtful leaders – business and civic, conservative and progressive – who see an urban region like Portland as the creative economic engine for Maine’s future.
If the 60-year-old Carmona runs, I firmly believe he would have a singular purpose: to elevate Portland’s profile in the national conversation about America’s urban future.
He is a non-establishment Green Business Democrat with a sense of how to blend the city’s retail politics with a wholesale vision for its future.
Carmona’s most recent focus has been on civil rights and immigration.
But make no mistake; this is a leader with close to 40 years of public policy involvement with higher education, financial services and energy at the local, state and federal levels of government.
As one who has experienced life in and out of Maine, I am respectful of Carmona’s potential leadership.
I have worked with elected mayors of the biggest and smallest cities, from coast to coast. We were raised within a few miles of each other in Southern California.
I know Carmona to be honest and dedicated to providing leadership to move Portland in a positive direction to a successful future.
In a national and state political climate of economic uncertainty that is hostile toward immigration, the Portland election of a mayor from a racially segregated and immigrant East Los Angeles, with the highest degree of academic distinction, would profoundly alter the political dynamics of Maine, considered the whitest and oldest state in the union.
A Mayor Carmona would fundamentally change the nation’s impression of our Pine Tree State.
His election would instantly put Portland on the national map. His Mainer wife, Vana, proudly claims that he is “my gift to Portland.”
Carmona as mayor would be a gift about a Portland political leadership needed for an urban jewel we hope to see in the future.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laurent F. Gilbert Sr. is mayor of Lewiston, former chief of the Lewiston Police Department and was the U.S. marshal for the District of Maine in the Clinton administration.
Thanks, Larry!
Filed under: Articles about Ralph Carmona
I’m humbled and honored by the public endorsement of Lewiston Mayor Laurent Gilbert in today’s Press Herald (“Maine Voices: Lewiston mayor says Carmona is highly qualified for Portland mayor“). Larry is one of the people who have been encouraging me to make this run. Thanks, Larry!
Mayor’s Corner: “The Humanity of Cesar Chavez is a Guide for Maine’s Future”
Filed under: Articles about Ralph Carmona
Twin-City Times, April 7, 2011
By Laurent F. Gilbert Sr., Mayor of Lewiston
Several months ago Joey Lopez, originally from Texas and now director of the Maine Chapter League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and his friend Albeni Dasilva, formerly of Brazil, came to see me in support of Latin American issues.
Lopez and Dasilva invited elected officials and police officers for a Latin American meal at LULAC State Directors location at 40 Strawberry Ave. in Lewiston. It was a wonderful celebration, and it provided an opportunity for L-A officials to get to know L-A LULAC members. Joey Lopez and I became good friends. I introduced him to hockey, and now he is as staunch a MAINEiacs fan, as I am. I recently became a member of LULAC. Together we worked on the DREAM Act, a subject I addressed in an earlier column.
Dr. Ralph Carmona, president of the Portland LULAC, moved to Portland this past year with his wife Vana, who is originally from Maine, and we have become good friends since working on a number of human rights issues. Lopez and Carmona were the principals in the development of the Cesar Chavez celebration on March 31 at the historic First Parish Church of Portland.
With Carmona’s permission, I share with you below what he wrote in the program at Cesar Chavez Celebration:
“At 9 a.m. at First Parish of Portland, March 31, people will gather to celebrate the birthday of Cesar Estrada Chavez. Bobby Kennedy characterized him as “one of the heroic figures of our time.”
“It will be an observance beyond Cesar’s organization of this nation’s poorest rural workers into the United Farm Workers of America. It will be Cesar in his complexity and universality: Cesar the educated man, voices of his prayer, faith, music, environmental sensitivity and human rights, a Cesar who goes to the moral core of collective organizing as a civil right for working people.
“My voice will be of Cesar the All-American.
“The Maine League of United Latin American Citizens comes with a political climate symbolized by February testimony we gave against a “birther” bill before a state legislative committee. The legislation required candidates for elective office to prove citizenship. We opined that the proposal deserved no legislative hearing because it is rooted in an extremist belief that our President is a non-citizen and energizes a racist past. The mere introduction of such xenophobic legislation betrays Maine’s demographic reality.
“For the whitest and oldest state in the union, in contrast to states like Arizona, immigration is a non-issue. But understanding Cesar’s humanity is critical for Maine’s future. Like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, his inner faith energized national sentiment. Through thought and deed, Cesar organized against deplorable conditions affecting poor rural workers.
“A child of racial segregation in a Los Angeles that was almost 90 percent white Protestant during the 1950s, my sense of segregation’s injustice came from Robert Conot’s “Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness.” The book is about the city’s 1965 Watts Riots and prophesized a coming Chicano Movement revolt in Los Angeles.
“Cesar’s farm worker movement first came to mind in 1968, when Bobby Kennedy embraced him as a presidential candidate. Along with King, Kennedy was assassinated in that tumultuous year of countercultural and civil rights turmoil.
“Student protests got me into college, after graduation in 1969 from a ‘Mexican’ high school engulfed by citywide Chicano student walkouts. It made me a desegregation college activist and campaigner for George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign. I was moved by Cesar’s endorsement of McGovern and joined co-founder, Dolores Huerta, at a UFW rally for him. I was a guest during the 1970s at Cesar’s headquarters in La Paz, California.
“It was a time, Marc Grossman, Cesar’s spokesman reminds me, when Chavez was told to ‘go back to Mexico.’ Last year, his granddaughter, was asked about her immigrant status and a commentator suggested Cesar’s body be shipped back to Mexico. ‘What is astounding,’ Grossman told me, ‘is that the Chavez family has been in this country longer than many Americans.’
“Fleeing from servitude in Mexico, Cesar’s grandfather, Cesario, settled in Arizona and received property through the 1862 Homestead Act. One of Cesar’s uncles witnessed the legendary 1881 gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. In the late 1800s, he ran a business cutting wood, hauling it in wagons pulled by mule teams that built mines. And, of course, his business contributed to the Internet of a pre-state Arizona economy: The building of its railroads. At the turn of the Century, Cesar’s dad, Librado, drove a Wells Fargo stagecoach, was a farmer, local postmaster and ran a country store that was a community center for Anglos and Latinos. The Chavez family helped build the Old West.
“Born on March 31, 1931, in Arizona, Cesar served in the military. Like the Depression-era Okies in John Steinbeck’s ‘Grapes of Wrath,’ his family lost their property to the banks and migrated to California. From family tragedy came Cesar’s movement for social justice.
“There will be other diverse Chavez voices mindful of a forgotten past when ‘progressive’ leaders equated immigrants with apes and denied women voting rights because they would grow male body hair. Today is a time when ‘others’ of differing gender orientation or immigrant status still feel compelled to hide in life’s public closets and shadows.
“Hopefully, Cesar’s birthday celebration will mark the beginning of a diverse Maine future with opportunity and growth through acts of common humanity.”
I thank Dr. Carmona for allowing me to share his words with you!
I am extremely disappointed with my fellow French-Canadian descendent, Governor Paul LePage, a former fellow mayor of Waterville, for removing the historical mural of the history of the labor strife of immigrants to America.
“They can take a painting down, they can take the names of history down from the conference rooms, but they cannot take our voices and that’s why we’re here today,” said Joey Lopez. He is correct: history is what it is; you cannot hide it in a closet or paint over it because those who lived it will always remember and pass it on, as the Cesar Chavez remembrance has done.
In actuality, Governor LePage brought attention to the mural panels most of us Mainers never knew existed. The murals depicted the labor struggles here in Maine such at the infamous 1937 shoe strike right here in L-A, the paper mill strikes, Frances Perkins, the first woman Labor Secretary under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt who was instrumental in bringing about Social Security and other worker benefits, as she had Maine ties and has the Department of Labor’s building in Washington, D.C. named in her honor.
Thankfully, Governor LePage brought attention to the mural panels, albeit in a very negative sense. The result is that he has made himself as the governor of our great state the laughing stock of our country with the national attention he has brought by his negativism and sarcasm. Strangely enough, his motto is “People before Politics.”
In my opinion, he has yet to live by his words. The words “Business Politics before People” might be more appropriate. Business and workers need to work together, not one with advantage over the other, in a spirit of fundamental fairness. When Governor LePage says: “We are open for business,” his disrespectful and insulting comments become counter-productive to luring any business to establish itself here in such a negative climate.
If Governor LePage wanted to bring attention to business and economic development, perhaps he should commission a mural to be painted at the offices of the Maine Department of Economic and Community Development. Then he could strike the balance between business and labor that he claims to seek.
As a Franco-American and as a mayor, quite frankly, I am truly embarrassed. I wonder if Governor LePage has forgotten his roots. I hope that he will heed the advice of his Republican Senators and Representatives and cool his rhetoric for the sake of our great state and make us proud again with our state motto: “Dirigo.”
He should either lead or get out of the way. He has a duty and responsibility to do so!
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Carmona for Mayor
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