From the moment we realize that life goes hand-in-hand with a lifestyle, vague notions of the American Dream hover in the background. Embraced or rejected, they are almost impossible to escape. Yet the definition of that dream varies. Newspaper columnists opine about the holy grail of middle-class values. Pop [...]
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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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In America, where we celebrate success above all, the worst thing a person can be is poor. For much of her adult life, Tinsa Hall felt like she had it made, at least relative to where she’d been. She lived in a six-bedroom home on a wide, tree-lined street [...]
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By now, the drumbeat is impossible to ignore: Job, jobs, jobs. With one in 10 adults unemployed, President Obama had little choice but to highlight jobs during his Jan. 27 State of the Union address. He mentioned the term nearly 30 times during the hour-long speech. But among people [...]
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Of all the job-creation efforts cropping up under the heading “green,” few have the breadth and ambition of a Los Angeles plan to employ dozens of marginalized workers by transforming outdated city buildings into models of energy efficiency. On its face, the Los Angeles Green Retrofit program looks straightforward: [...]
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Letters from elected officials arrived by the handful, a pile of promises from Illinois’s governor, state representatives and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, assuring youth organizers that they would attend a weekend meeting at Dyett High School, on the city’s South Side, to discuss the city’s mounting student death rate. [...]
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On a crisp morning in October, 300 low-income families and their allies – all members of a movement known as the Equal Voice Coalition – gathered at a hotel in San Francisco with an ambitious goal: Together, they would spend the next nine hours devising strategies to push the [...]
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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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