“They have a saying in Latin America, “It’s better to die standing than to live crawling,”‘ said Sandra Aponte.

Usually the figures on that check–along with the laughable cover story about “pursuing other options” and the shameless letter of recommendation–compel silence. But the figure offered to Sandra Aponte by WGBO, Channel 66, where she’d worked just a few months, was $2,134.80. Instead of signing the “separation and general release agreement” they gave her, she blew off the money.

If she had signed Aponte would have been agreeing never to sue Univision, the Spanish-language network that owns WGBO, for anything whatsoever, dating “from the beginning of the world to the date of this Agreement, including specifically by way of description but not by way of limitation, any and all claims” arising from her job or the loss of her job or “based on local, state or federal sex, race, color, national origin, marital status, religion, physical handicap, mental condition, or mental handicap discrimination laws.”

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Baker also said that Univision uses the separation agreement routinely. Antonio Guernica, the general manager who’d fired Aponte and then told Baker what to offer her, had no comment.

Recalling his regular work for Film Comment in the 70s, he writes that his “personal-confessional” mode of writing led to “a certain intolerance and belligerence that probably reached its shrillest level in my “London and New York Journal.”‘ He confesses that “the philistinism and xenophobia that seemed to me on the rise in New York film criticism often sent me into intemperate rages.”

The good news, he writes, is that his job at the Reader is not only the one he’s held longest but “the most satisfying.” He believes (correctly) that “my knowledge of film actually played some role in my being hired. Strange as it seems, this has rarely functioned as a criterion for the hiring of movie reviewers on American or British papers.” And after describing the “steady feedback” he receives here, he reports, “I feel like a respected member of a community–something I’ve experienced comparably in my career, and to a lesser degree, only when I was in London in the mid-1970s. It’s a very nice feeling.” Yesteryear’s furies have mellowed into a tolerable prickliness when he’s being copyedited.