Hispanics

JHANE Myers certainly wasn't expecting a personal phone call from Mel Gibson. "He said, 'Hello, Jhane, I know you don't know me. This is Mel Gibson, and I really would like to have you call me back,' " Myers recalled. When she did, the Oklahoma City public relations executive found herself enlisted in Gibson's grass-roots marketing campaign for his new film, "Mel Gibson's Apocalypto," due in theaters Dec. 8.

FedEx Corp. is being investigated for an alleged pattern of discrimination against blacks and Latinos, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said Monday. The company requires that employees pass a cognitive abilities test for promotion from entry-level jobs, according to an employee complaint the EEOC said it was investigating. The test has an adverse effect on black and Latino workers and is therefore discriminatory, the complaint claimed.

If you're among the 28 million Latinos in the U.S. and an aficionado of cyberculture, you might be tempted to clickear el mouse and surfear the Net or e-mailear a document to an amigo. Speak cyber-Spanglish? The advent of techno-language has resulted in the creation of a host of new words in the English-Spanish hybrid language called Spanglish, spoken by tens of thousands of Americans and immigrants among the growing Latino population, linguistic experts say.

California Latinos have been nearly twice as likely as whites to die of H1N1 flu since the pandemic began last spring, according to statewide figures released Thursday by the California Department of Public Health. Over the same months, blacks in the state have been 50% more likely to die of H1N1 flu than whites, the report said. "Not everybody has been impacted equally" by H1N1, said state epidemiologist Dr. Gilberto Chavez, who added that statistics have shown "very important racial disparities" in H1N1 mortality and hospitalization rates.

Nearly half of the Latino and African American students who should have graduated from California high schools in 2002 failed to complete their education, according to a Harvard University report released Wednesday. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the situation was even worse, with just 39% of Latinos and 47% of African Americans graduating, compared with 67% of whites and 77% of Asians.

A brick wall separated Julio Perez's childhood home from Disneyland, where his father worked in the laundry room. On that side was the Anaheim that America knew, the quintessential Orange County suburb where expanses of orange groves gave way to rows of 1950s tract homes and a signature theme park. On his side was the neighborhood where Perez, 30, spent his 1980s childhood: a dense, vibrant, heavily Latino island where parks filled with soccer players and families grilled carne asada.

The prayer in Spanish sounded like one from an ordinary Catholic Mass. But the man who led it wore a coyote-skin headdress and called himself the last of 13 generations of brujos -- witch doctors -- in his family. FOR THE RECORD: Santa Muerte: An article in Monday's Section A about followers of the sect of Santa Muerte misspelled the last name of Rick Nahmias, a photographer who has documented the movement, as Nahmais. — The name the worshipers invoked was not that of the Virgin Mary but of Santa Muerte, or "Holy Death," a Mexican folk saint linked to narcotics trafficking, a kind of female grim reaper with a skull for a face.

An immigration scam exploiting the use of the Spanish word notario has bilked thousands of Latino immigrants seeking to legalize their United States residency status and prompted Los Angeles officials to launch a crackdown. In some Latin American countries, a notario is a lawyer. In others, the title denotes someone who holds public office. In the United States, however, a notary is simply someone legally empowered to witness and certify documents and take affidavits and depositions.

The number of storefront medical offices catering to a Latino clientele is surging throughout California as immigrants look for accessible and affordable health care -- with a flavor of home. More of these clinics -- common south of the border -- are opening as doctors and other businesspeople meet the growing demand in Latino neighborhoods.

When the National Hispanic Media Coalition filed a petition to deny the license renewal request of Spanish-language radio station KKHJ-AM (930) 16 months ago, some of the loudest huzzahs came from the offices of Heftel Broadcasting, programmer for three of KKHJ's chief rivals. At issue was Alfredo Najera's adult-relationship show, "Alfredo Contigo," which, the petition claimed, was "crude, vulgar and graphic."