La Plaza Central

A wise man once said, “lo que pasó pasó, entre tú y yo…“, and I know that the gift wrapping was a month ago, but I wanted to let people know that we added another 20 photos to the album.

There are also new photos from Amy’s despedida (goodbye) party today.

Thanks to Marissa for the photos.

Sunset in Costa Rica

Immersed in winter as we are, with snow and temperatures consistently below freezing, I just wanted to show our readers the future home of our Executive Director, Amy Boren.  Today is Amy’s last day at El Centro, and while she will no longer pass through our doors, her influence on our organization will be hard to miss.  She is almost single-handedly responsable for our increased staff, budget, notoriety, and the general improvement of our reputation as an organization.  The staff here at El Centro will be forever grateful to Amy for her assistance, patience and hard work, and antes de todo, for making us better people than we were before.  We wish her all the best as she moves on to new horizons and new challenges in her professional career.  And as she settles into her new home in Costa Rica, I would just like to personally remind her that whenever the waves look particularly good I have a surfboard stored in southern Nicaragua, and I’m only two flights away.

First, the link from the Omaha World-Herald.  The article is about the large percentage of immigrant farm workers from indigenous communities in Latin America.  Oftentimes, they don’t self-identify as indigenous because of the prejudice they face in their home countries, and so they are underestimated in surveys of farm workers here in the U.S.  They arrived here for many of the same reasons as their more “Hispanicized” or ladino countrymen, primarily war and poverty.  In many cases, they suffered the most when it came to civil wars and oppression of the people.

I think that it might be hard for some of us to conceptualize, for example, a person from Mexico who is not “Mexican” in the sense that we think of as being Mexican.  Guatemala is geographically about half the size of Nebraska.  There are 21 official languages spoken in Guatemala.  My job took me to many small towns where the only ones in the auditorium who could speak Spanish were me and the community representative.  There are many other areas of Latin American that are the same way: southern Mexico, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru, to name a few.

I sometimes wonder to what extent and how quickly all of these differences will dissipate and eventually disappear as our world becomes more interconnected.   But that’s for another day.

There was a beautiful article in yesterday’s Journal Star about the new mentoring partnership at LPS made possible by Amy’s grant.  The program will combine three sources of mentors (Big Brothers/Big Sisters, TeamMates of Lincoln, and the Latino Achievement Mentoring Program) and one huge source of mentees (LPS).  The idea on the surface looks beautiful, and the goal to increase the relatively low graduation rates for minorities, particularly African American and Latino (61% and 56%, respectively), is a laudable one that has been mentioned several times on this  blog.  The impetus is there, the will is there, the funds are there, and now all that’s missing are a few volunteers.

Heartland Big Brothers Big Sisters

TeamMates of Lincoln

LAMP

Cindy Gonzalez of the Omaha World-Herald recently profiled a community leader in Omaha who has done a lot of work with Spanish-speaking immigrants in Nebraska.  In addition to his international work in Guatemala, he helped establish a Latino center and pantry in south Omaha.  The one line that stood out to me was, “Resolutions to many problems came after simple phone calls and persistent follow-up.”  I would guess 90% of my work is following up and contacting people and contacting people and then contacting them again.  Sometimes it just takes a deluge of phone calls, emails and personal visits to get things done.  It is a whole different ballgame than the private sector’s profit motive.

Article today in the Journal Star about El Centro staff watching the Obama’s inauguration with the Malone Center, complete with interviews from Olga and Maria.

I’m not praying in the photo.  I’m just looking down sadly at my coffee because it was empty.

Great story in the Journal Star today about a lady who teaches her neighbors English.  She noticed something amiss and took action.  It sounds like her methods are pretty similar to those of volunteers from Lincoln Literacy Council, except she is able to use Rosetta Stone.   People think it takes a lot of time and effort, but really you can start making a difference with one hour a week.

The World-Herald has an interesting article about something we don’t hear about very often; Latinos returning to their home countries to run for office.  One story involves a man who came to the U.S. illegally in the trunk of a car, became a millionaire by inventing a tomato planting machine, and returned to Mexico a few years ago when he was elected into their Congress.  I was in Guatemala in 2007 when Rafael Espada ran successfully for vice president alongside Alvaro Colom, and his work in the States was widely acknowledged as a great asset.  The article doesn’t speak to it, but I wonder to what extent these candidates face jingoistic arguments from their opponents.

This isn’t very new, as it came out in October of last year, but the Pew Hispanic Center released a report on Latino population growth in the U.S. since 2000.  Not surprising is they accounted for a full half of the U.S. population growth over the same period and the dispersion patterns indicate large concentrations in southern California, Texas and Florida.  But check out the maps of population growth, and you’ll notice eastern Nebraska grow steadily darker.  In the growth map, I’m pretty sure that is Lancaster County, along with Saline County (Crete), in dark red, indicating fast growth of 41% or more.

Thank you, Amy, for that enlightening piece yesterday.  There is an article in today’s Journal Star about the Kids Count 2008 Report on Nebraska that came out this morning.  The report’s findings indicate that while overall Nebraska ranks pretty well nationally in categories like graduation rates, poverty and crime, minorities still lag far behind their Caucasian counterparts.  You can read the full report for yourself here.  Some of the pertinent points include the following:

• The wealthiest 10% of U.S. school districts spend nearly 10
  times more than the poorest 10%.
• While 61% of qualified White high school graduates enter college,
  only 44% of similarly qualified Hispanic graduates and 28% of
  similarly qualified Black high school graduates enter college.
• African American home buyers encountered discrimination in
  17% of their efforts to purchase homes and Hispanic home
  buyers experienced discrimination at a rate of 20%.

Where is Ward Connerly to correct that last one?  I’ll admit that most of my knowledge on this subject comes from several Jonathan Kozol books (personal favorites are The Shame of the Nation and Savage Inequalities) and the research I did for my high school We The People team on funding inequalities in education that arose in the Supreme Court case, San Antonio Independent School District vs. Rodriguez, in 1978, where the Burger court ruled that education was not a fundamental right.

Whatever your opinion on the subject, this talk is good, but like Amy said, action is better.  Once we’re educated on the subject it’s time to do something about it.  Mentoring and volunteering are the best options, but at a minimum we can all write.  The beginning of the Kids Count report lists all the contact information you need.

Update: The report was also covered in the World-Herald here.

According to high-school drop out rates for the last three years, educational outreach efforts to Latino youth appear to be failing miserably.  In 2006, 24.1% of Latino students  in Lincoln Public Schools dropped out of high-school.  That number increased to 27.3% in 2007, and again increased to 28.7% in 2008.  We could try to console ourselves by assuming the remaining 71.3% of Latino students must be graduating, but we would be wrong.  In 2006 the graduation rate for Latino students was only 56.6%.  That dismal number plummeted even further in 2007 to 53.2%.  Fortunately we saw a small increase in the graduation rate for 2008 – it’s all the way up to 55.7%!  (I suppose we should be grateful for the small things.)  Sadly, hidden in all of these numbers, is the fact that 15.6% of Latino students did not earn enough credits to graduate with their class in 2008.  In 2007, 19.5% were held back and in 2006 it was 19.3%.  As much as we would like to blame the schools, the parents, the community, the government, SOMEBODY for these discouraging numbers, I believe a courageous first step might be to look in the mirror and ask ourselves some tough questions – what are WE doing to stem the tide of students dropping out of schools?  Are we volunteering for mentoring or tutoring programs that target underserved youth?  Are we giving our time and resources to reading programs at elementary schools to encourage literacy development (research indicates a strong correlation between early literacy experiences and dropout rates)?  If each of us were to invest a small percentage of our time and energy into waging war against the dropout rates of Latino – and other minority – youth, I believe we could begin to make sustainable progress in eradicating the scourge of illiteracy and undereducation in our community.

Marissa Torio recently completed our statistics for the year, and El Centro served 5,288 clients in the last 12 months.  That comes out to about 440 clients per month or 14.4 clients per day.  The stats include everything from people who requested translation services to women’s support groups to classes on computers, English, anger management, health and others.  All done with a revolving staff  with usually three or four staff members here at a time.  Thanks to some changes implemented by Amy and Marien, with the help of Marissa, we have done a better job than ever of keeping track of our clients with quantitative measurements.

On similar note, El Centro’s website had more visitors than ever in December with 509 unique visitors and 984 total visits.  I don’t know how that compares to other community organizations in Lincoln, but it represents steady growth for us since we started the website in earnest in June of last year with 149 unique visitors.  I would like to do a redesign of the site sometime in the next year to make it more search engine friendly, but it will have to wait until a few projects get done first.  We have also talked about a Spanish-language blog, but judging from the analysis of the website statistics not very many of our visitors are Spanish speakers.  We’re always looking for ways to bump up the numbers, so suggestions are welcome…