As I look back on 2011, I’d say the most memorable headlines concerning Latinos fell under the “made us look bad” category. As in I saw a negative news story attached to someone with a Latino surname and thought “Why, oh why, did the perpetrator have to be ‘one of us’?” After five years of increasingly coarse anti-Latino and anti-illegal immigrant rhetoric, there is a special kind of disappointment and dread of hostile reaction when bad news is associated with Latinos.

For instance, there was that awful moment when the identity of the competitive shopper who pepper-sprayed fellow Black Friday customers at a Wal-Mart was described by Los Angeles police as a “Hispanic woman.” Ugh.

And what Latino didn’t grimace when it came out that the guy charged with firing an assault rifle at the White House in November, and is believed to have wanted to assassinate the president, was U.S.- born Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez of Idaho Falls, Idaho? Double grimace a few days later when Jose Pimentel, an American citizen of Dominican heritage who had converted to Islam and got mixed up with al-Qaida, was arrested under the suspicion of plotting to commit a terrorist attack in New York.

Former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, known to some as the first serious Latino presidential candidate after his relatively short campaign ended in early 2008, is said to be under federal investigation for two separate incidents — one in which $250,000 from campaign funds was allegedly used to pay off a woman who had threatened to file a sexual-harassment complaint and another involving corrupt state investments.

And these are just the most recent examples of Latinos who deserve to have rotten tomatoes flung at them for shaming the rest of us.

Read the full story at The Sacramento Bee