Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs

State Speech Tournament at Peoria, IL, is over. Now I am going to pontificate on the hard times these kids will face. Today you can  read in the NYT the article with the tilte I'm using for this note.

I have a little story from my neck of the woods, that everyday looks more and more, like the Illinois suburbs, where my family lives. Here in Chilpancingo, I witnessed a heart wrenching family reunion.

A professor in the Math Department introduced me to his beautiful daughter, just one year older than my son. She is comig from New York, her mother took her there, but she was not able to provide her with a high school education. Since the girl got here a few days late, now she is enrolled in a kind of GED program in Chilpancingo.

Jobs are hard to get in the US. This girl's mother has siblings in New York, so they thought they could take care of the girl. She ended up working instead of going to school. The American Dream Was Not.

I feel that most Americans do not realize how intertwined our two countries are. We are very aware here, of the North Colossus, as we call it sometimes. But for Americans, Mexicans are invisible. I just remembered a line in an Adrien Brody movie, Bread and Roses. One Mexican character says, for Americans we are invisible. Mexican-Americans are so alien for Americans, that I have found this movie in the FOREIGN section of Blockbuster, in Wheaton, IL.

Guatemalans feel the same way about us, but that is another story.

My friend is taking care of his daughter, now that she is here. She will get a high school education as she is supposed to.

Some of my kids at East Aurora High School, find me in social networks online, and they are very happy. They are Mexican children whose parents took them to the US for a better life. Now some of them have told me that they are coming back to Mexico, and seem glad that I got this job at the University of Guerrero.

Millions of Unemployed says the NYT. I have no idea of where we are going, all I can tell you is that it doesn't look easy; fat years are over writes Tom Friedman today. I couldn't agree more.

A final note. It is not true that Americans don't care. Nick Desideri who won first place for Extemporaneous Speaking (ES) in the State Speech Competition, in Peoria, as you can read in the note below; wrote a paper on his recent trip to Mexico, with warmth and sorrow for the lot of Mexican kids, as he saw it. I met him in an ice cream parlor, while he was celebrating with other members of the WWSHS speech team after some activity. His face was so intelligent and good natured, that I couldn't help liking him immediately. I know that for him, Mexicans are not invisible. He cares.