Editor, Daily Nexus,

Last Friday, the comedy troupe Chicano Secret Service performed a new piece, “Preemptive Strike (On the Varrio Streets of your Mind)” to an overflowing audience at the MultiCultural Center Theater. The show was tailored to a UCSB audience, which made it unique and meaningful for the audience, who for the most part were people that were familiar with the issues of Chicanos and Chicanas on the UCSB campus.

The performance highlighted UCSB’s historic role in the Chicano movement and in the struggle to make higher education accessible to all people as well as opening up a dialogue about the wounds caused by the sometimes-petty differences between the members of the Chicano/a activist community. Even the recent controversy surrounding the strong sentiment among many members of the UCSB community that the Nexus does not adequately represent the campus was broached in the piece. The punch line – the performers had referred to the Nexus as “the Nixon” – became all the more funny when, rather than covering this remarkable event of importance to such a large segment of the student body, the Nexus ran a front-page story on Monday morning about stolen puppies.

Just as Nixon dodged a question about the financing of his campaign through a story about his dog Checkers, the Nexus dodged an opportunity to cover an underrepresented segment of UCSB’s population with a fluff piece of little-to-no relevance to our campus.

The only way to end the cycle in which the Nexus and the Mexican-American community antagonize one another is by covering our events and the best way to do so would be by appointing a reporter to write about events and issues important to Mexican-Americans and other minorities. Then, perhaps, we can avoid such travesties as the lack of coverage of momentous performances such as last Friday’s, or the Chicano/a grad student Colectiva’s Activist Scholarship Conference last quarter that drew scholars nationwide to present their research on a variety of topics that affect Chicanos and Latinos.