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 the heels of its Fighting Hunger Together campaign, Walmart has teamed up with the nation’s number two tax preparer, Jackson Hewitt, one of the few remaining companies to offer refund anticipation loans (known as RALs). RALs are marketed as a customer convenience, but their excessive fees and high [...]
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e: Reporting for this story began in March, shortly before Arizona’s immigration bill, SB 1070, was signed into law. In the four months since, a national debate has raged over immigration reform, spreading from Arizona to states across the country, and coloring the political landscape. As November’s mid-term [...]
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In the dusty Arizona desert, a young man wearing only one shoe limps toward a group of college students. Thirsty and bleeding, he begs for help. He has trudged for 12 miles, all the way from the Mexican border, and says he has never made this trip before, doesn’t [...]
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Each year, America spends about $68 billion to incarcerate and supervise more than 7 million people. Yet criminologists say our burgeoning penal system – which has tripled in size over the past 25 years – does little to improve public safety. What it has been most successful at is [...]
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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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