MIAMI (AP) — Taking the microphone at a church in a predominantly black neighborhood of Miami, the Rev. Jesse Jackson asked how many in the crowd knew someone looking for a job. Most of the several hundred people in the televised town hall gathering stood up. How many knew [...]
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CAPE CORAL, Fla. – After the Second World War, returning veterans were welcomed home to two of the most successful government initiatives ever ” the FHA and VA housing programs ” which put millions of them into their own homes for the first time. Today, later [...]
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ALABAMA – Despite soaring deficits, cuts in social services, worker layoffs and tornado-devastated communities, Alabama’s first Republican-controlled government in 136 years has turned its focus on undocumented immigrants, raising questions about policymakers’ priorities. Governor Robert Bentley recently signed a tough anti-immigration law, the latest in a patchwork of similar [...]
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Idell McShan sits outside her broken trailer home, her 3-year-old great-granddaughter playing at her feet. A slight breeze kicks up, rustling leaves and sending a scrap of paper scuttling across the ground. McShan glances toward the treetops – a hint of worry crosses her face, her body tenses. Her [...]
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Keith and Elaine Davis lived simply and quietly for years in the modest house Keith’s father built in the 1950s in a low-income neighborhood of Tuscaloosa that some just call “behind the water tower.” Their home, furniture, car and pickup were destroyed by the tornado that plowed through Alabama [...]
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Lack of communication technology and infrastructure slowed recovery assistance to Alabama’s most rural communities the first week after the April tornadoes. Many people didn’t hear that shelters were open, or about the need to register quickly for federal emergency aid. Few families have cellphones in the rural corners of [...]
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The tornado damage in Alabama is far more devastating than can be imagined by just seeing the images on TV and YouTube. In Tuscaloosa, full neighborhoods and communities have been obliterated as if a bomb was dropped. Two weeks after the tornado roared through the town of 90,000, bulldozers, [...]
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Low-income families along the Texas border could lose millions of dollars over the next decade and see their voice in government even further diminished because, from the statistical reality of the federal government’s 2010 census, they don’t exist. The 10-year population count may have missed as many as 300,000 [...]
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On a recent Saturday morning in tiny Hidalgo County, Tex., hundreds of men and women wearing bright gold t-shirts with Equal Voice emblazoned across the front marched to polling centers in eight voter precincts. They had already spent weeks peppering candidates with questions on everything from national immigration reform [...]
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HOLLANDALE, Miss. – For a few nights earlier this year, 24-year-old Quincy Mackin slept with his high school diploma hugged up under his chin. No surprise, perhaps, when you learn that Mackin didn’t receive the document until last December or that he’d struggled for years to earn it. Or [...]
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Apr 17 2012
Michael Seifert | Rio Grande Valley Equal Voice Network Compañero. The word means “companion,” and is from the Latin, meaning “the one I share bread with.” A compañero, then, is someone with whom you share the bread of life—be it the bread of the day’s hopes and dreams, struggles and disappointments, or blessings and bounding happiness, which, experienced alone, remain Read more →
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