I recently received an email from Vicky, an NCLR supporter, who thanked me for reporting each month on how Latinos are doing in today’s economy. She also shared that she is unemployed and has come to realize that being bilingual is not enough to help her land a job. Vicky does not have postsecondary education has found that employers want the whole package in a worker: adequate training, in-demand skills, and education beyond high school.
Many jobseekers like Vicky are keenly aware of what it t
Having command of Spanish and English means, for Latino women, a competitive advantage, several outstanding Hispanic figures from the political, activism and business spheres said Monday.
"Being bilingual is an incredible opportunity. I have two children and I'm concerned for both to speak Spanish as well as English, because that's going to help them in their professional careers just like it helped me," Lidia Soto-Harmon, CEO of the Girl Scout Council of the Nation's Capital, told Efe.
The maj
John Villegas recently opened a State Farm Agency in Palatine, and a ribbon cutting ceremony was held by the Palatine Chamber of Commerce.
John Villegas is a bilingual, first generation immigrant who graduated from Maine West High School in Des Plaines, and earned a BS in Finance from DePaul University. He has more than 15 years of experience in the financial services industry and is passionate about financial literacy and giving back to the community.
Also active as a planning committee volunt
Telemundo has long been like a remote Caribbean island, cut off from its sprawling media homeland.
NBCUniversal acquired the Spanish-language television network a decade ago for $2 billion but became discouraged by its seemingly limited prospects. But Comcast Corp.'s takeover of NBCUniversal last year may be building Telemundo a bridge to the mainland.
"Telemundo now has the full support of Comcast and NBCUniversal," said Emilio Romano, a former Mexican airline chief executive who was hired a y
The future of the American labor movement may lie just off the Las Vegas Strip, inside a squat building huddled in the shadow of the Stratosphere casino.
That's the home of the Culinary Workers Local 226, a fast-growing union of hotel and casino employees that has thrived despite being in a right-to-work state and a region devastated by the real estate crash.
More than 90 percent of Culinary's 60,000 predominantly immigrant workers opt to be dues-paying members, even though Nevada law says they
Latinos are the fastest-growing demographic in the nation, yet few companies are reaching out to this group in their sustainability initiatives, according to research by advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi.
According to The Myth of the Sleeping Giant: Why Latinos are the Fastest Growing Segment the Sustainability Industry has (N)ever Seen, “the vast majority” of US companies – even those who are spending serious dollars to connect with Latinos – are not messaging to this audience about environm
The future success of California and the nation lies in successfully educating Latinos so they can bolster an increasingly skilled workforce, according to speakers at a forum put on by California Assemblyman Das Williams Tuesday at Ventura College.
"While Latino college completion rates are important in the United States, they are even more so in California with the highest population of Latinos in the United States," Williams said. "Only 16 percent of Latinos have college degrees. If this conti
Talks of the fiscal cliff continue to escalate, and the Obama administration is leading a strong PR campaign telling the American public to call, write, or even Tweet members of Congress. The White House wants citizens to pressure Republican representatives to pass a tax increase on the wealthy and avoid cuts on federal programs.
All Americans will be affected if an agreement isn’t reached by January 1, but one group who may face the toughest hardships are the families largely responsible for pu
A second generation of Hispanic TV channels has arrived in the US, with a new take on language and its staple series, the telenovela. Sean Davidson reports.
The recent Democratic National Convention in the US included among its many speakers Julian Castro, mayor of San Antonio and a rising political star. Together with his brother and fellow politician Joaquin, he is expected to be a key player as the party looks to attract more Hispanic voters in campaigns to come.
Castro gave a rousing speech
For Latino and foreign businessmen, working towards the American Dream may get a little easier, thanks to a new tool found in cyberspace.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services this week launched a website at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship in Cambridge, Massachusetts that aims to ease the immigration process for entrepreneurs.
The website was part of an initiative announced by federal immigration services in October designated to provide tools for employment-based and high-s
A new study is sounding the alarm about the number of dropouts from the Chicago public high schools.
A study prepared for a conference on re-enrolling dropouts, not surprisingly, found the problem is acute among minority students.
Jack Wuest, director of the Alternative Schools Network, said there’s more.
He said foreign-born Latinos appear to have the highest school dropout rates.
The study, written by Andrew Sun of Boston’s Northeastern University, found Latino school dropouts have seen their
A national group of Hispanic Republicans is demanding that columnist Ann Coulter apologize for a recent column they say is anti-Latino and anti-immigrant.
In an open letter posted to their website over the weekend, the Cafe Con Leche Republicans criticized Coulter for her column "America Nears El Tipping Pointo," which she published on Wednesday. In the column, Coulter mocks the current move by the GOP to appeal to Latinos, saying that Hispanic immigrants are not conservative. She claims that H
BERWYN, Ill. – Diego Marquez, a first-grader at Pershing Elementary School, is the winner of the Verizon Wireless Show-N-Tell contest who received a special visit from Chicago Bears center Roberto Garza this past Monday, Dec. 3rd. Additionally, Garza spoke with the entire student body at a school assembly.
Marquez won the visit by participating in the Verizon Wireless Show-N-Tell contest. From Oct. 5 through Oct. 28, parents in the Chicago area were encouraged to visit one of four ne
As financial institutions urge their customers to bank anywhere anytime by using their phones and tablets, a new survey finds that Latinos don’t trust a mobile device to keep their funds and personal information secure.
Some 44 percent of Latinos said they don’t turn to mobile banking because they are worried about information security, data released on Tuesday by Zpryme and ThinkNow Research shows.
The online survey, which included 500 adult Latinos between the ages of 18 and 70, was conducted
This year, one-in-four public elementary school students is Latino, an indication that the young Latino population is growing quickly. But, Latino students still lag behind their white peers in high school graduation rates across the country, according to preliminary data released last week by U.S. Department of Education.
The report shows that in a state-by-state breakdown of high school graduation rates, Hispanic students were less likely to graduate from high school than whites and Asians in
Like many of his third-grade classmates, Mario Cortez-Pacheco likes reading the “Magic Tree House” series, about a brother and a sister who take adventurous trips back in time. He also loves the popular “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” graphic novels.
But Mario, 8, has noticed something about these and many of the other books he encounters in his classroom at Bayard Taylor Elementary here: most of the main characters are white. “I see a lot of people that don’t have a lot of color,” he said.
Hispanic stud
CNN en Español will launch CNN Latino, a new Spanish language syndicated programming block custom made for the U.S. Hispanic market, in late January 2013.
CNN Latino targets the growing and diverse U.S. Hispanic market, delivering a broad spectrum of programming that will include news, lifestyle, documentary, talk and debate as an alternative to traditional Hispanic networks.
Cynthia Hudson-Fernandez, senior vice president and general manager of CNN en Español and Hispanic strategy for CNN/U.S.,
Lack of educational attainment among Hispanics is one of the biggest crises facing the American labor force, according to a report by Excelencia in Education, a Washington research organization that focuses on education of Hispanics.
“You can’t meet our national goals and our workforce needs without having a tactical plan for Latinos,” says Deborah Santiago, vice president of policy and research for the organization. “This is just a factual statement given what the current population numbers ar
Illinois State University is being recognized among the top 25 public institutions in the country by The Education Trust for improvements in the graduation rates of Hispanic students.
ISU was ranked 19th in two categories: improving Hispanic student graduation rates and narrowing the gap between the graduation rates of Hispanic students and white students in the education advocacy group’s recent report, “Advancing to Completion.”
ISU Provost Sheri Everts attributed the accomplishment to “our ta
If how you do lascosas is not working out, would a new angle be better? Sí, according to successful Latina professionals, who urge us to challenge our perception of la vida we can really attain, by shutting off our automatic pilot.
Recently, asa pasajeroon a road I drive daily, I noticed a beautiful mural, “Is this new?” I naively asked. “It’s been there for years,” was the reply. Just one example, I thought, of how our lives, and careers, go on automatic. My next thought was very scary, Is goin
