aibanter.com/2008/11/07/why-did-brian-bennett-get-snubbed/ http://thejoeperezabaiangibber.com/2008/11/07/why-did-brian-bennett-get-snubbed/#commentsWed, 07 Nov 2012 23:17:42 +0000http://thejoeperezabaiangibber.com/2008/11/07/why-did-brian-bennett-get-snubbed/]]>Why, after being involved in the community for several years and even being inducted into the National Hispanic Who’s Who organization (not exactly the Chamber of Commerce Hall of Fame, but it’s something), did Brian Bennett have to write a public letter asking for his name to be added to the Chamber of Commerce wall of fame. Is it because he didn’t “know” all those individuals personally or because he didn’t have “contacts” or because he didn’t have “experience”? Bennett: I was a little surprised. For those that know me, it’s not that surprising. The other thing is people are probably more impressed when someone comes in who has more of an experience. They’re like “We want someone who can influence more of the community.” It didn’t take me long to come up with people, and I didn’t know anybody, but, when I talked to people in the community, I was thinking “You’re kidding, right? That wouldn’t happen to me. This isn’t who I am.” I’m an average guy and this is really not how the city used to be. I can tell you that, just because somebody has money doesn’t make you their friend. Why? Well, because not everybody that wears nice clothes and drives a nice car is a good person, is it? ]]>http://thejoeperezabaiangibber.com/2008/11/07/why-did-brian-bennett-get-snubbed/feed/1http://thejoeperezabaiangibber.com/2008/11/07/why-did-brian-bennett-get-snubbed/Why the U.S. is Not Getting the Most Out of its Latino Immigrantshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheJoaPeezabaiAnGibber/~3/0rXU0qGwOjM/ http://thejoeperezabaiangibber.com/2008/06/14/why-the-u-s-is-not-getting-the-most-out-of-its-latino-immigrants/#commentsFri, 14 Jun 2008 02:57:21 +0000http://thejoeperezabaiangibber.com/2008/06/14/why-the-u-s-is-not-getting-the-most-out-of-its-latino-immigrants/]]>I was not an English teacher in high school and college. Neither was my wife. However, I did enjoy the experience of teaching Spanish in high school. Teaching Spanish gives me a unique insight into the life experiences of the students and the students’ families that are not often brought to the fore in schools. From my observations, the Latino American population in the U.S. tends to have several characteristics. They seem to me to be at a higher risk of becoming disconnected from the life opportunities that I have tried to share in this piece. It’s a truism that you need to have a job before you can save money for a house, and so it is for all of us: my son, my niece, my brother, the young man that cleans my house, and even the young businessmen who stand on street corners and sell cell phones to people who are already deep in debt. The young people with jobs today are no different from the generations that preceded them. They come into this world with only themselves to rely on. Their mothers, fathers, and older siblings worked hard, but not even the American Dream promised them anything more than these young folks have. Some of the things that young folks today have is not a function of good fortune, but of a system that is far more sophisticated than the one their grandparents enjoyed. These young men and women can go online, see advertisements for products that they would never buy, but which show their friends, and friends of their friends, using those products and having a good time. These ads come to their friends’ homes, too, from televisions they’ve never even turned on. That isn’t luck. That’s an electronic mass media environment that is now used to advertise products that young people may never have seen before in a store window. Many Latinos enjoy a higher standard of living than is available to Americans in general. While many of the nation’s poor are white, more of the world’s poor are black and Latino. Most of the country’s Latino residents earn incomes that are at or near the U.S. median, and the median Latino household income is substantially higher than the median income for other families. But they also have incomes that exceed 80 percent of U.S. median household income only by a small margin. And many of those low- and middle-class Latino households tend to have incomes that are significantly below the poverty line, particularly if compared to other Latinos and the broader white American population. The United States does not offer poor Latino immigrant families any guarantee of a good job or good health insurance. They often live in areas that are already heavily populated with poor persons of all ages. For many Latinos, the reality is that what little they have will have to be distributed among relatives or dependents. That is only a fraction of what an American might have if he happened to get a good job. But you have to have a good job to afford a house, doesn’t it? My family didn’t have a house and my wife’s family had nothing at all, and the immigrants that immigrated to this country didn’t have anything, either, so how come we have homes? There is more than a grain of truth in what we’re told. We have homes because our parents worked hard to get them. It may not be much, but it is a lot more than many other families can brag about. They also worked hard to give our children what we didn’t get. They sacrificed their evenings, their health and safety for us. They left what they had worked for in some parts of the world to come here and try to make a new life in this one. This was their chance to send us to college and not work themselves. They wanted us to move ahead and become somebody. They never wanted to give us the opportunity to look at the world and question whether there are things they did that could have been done better. The result is that this generation has a difficult time seeing how they might be able to do better for themselves than the generation before. What does that mean? That means that I need to get more than a basic education in order to improve myself in order to try to better my life. And, by improving myself, I am supposed to be able to provide opportunities for my family members. All of this because there is something called a “classroom.” People have always sacrificed their time, their money, and their health in order to try to improve their families. The fact is that for most of them, that is what it takes. Maybe it’s because they have never had a fair shot at living a better life. Maybe it’s because they didn’t come from the right country or because they don’t know how to dance or how to speak English or because they’re too tired at the end of the day. Maybe they think that the way you improve yourself is when you get to come to America and enjoy the American Dream. And if you don’t think that, if you think you have to work your way to the top, then maybe you’ll give this country a chance. ]]>http://thejoeperezabaiangibber.com/2008/06/14/why-the-u-s-is-not-getting-the-most-out-of-its-latino-immigrants/feed/2http://thejoeperezabaiangibber.com/2008/06/14/why-the-u-s-is-not-getting-the-most-out-of-its-latino-immigrants/I’m Not a Millionairehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheJoaPeezabaiAnGibber/~3/e9yN-D_rJUw/ http://thejoeperezabaiangibber.com/2008/02/13/im-not-a-millionaire/#commentsSun, 13 Feb 2011 04:23:45 +0000http://thejoeperezabaiangibber.com/2008/02/13/im-not-a-millionaire/ When this first came out I didn’t even know whether he really said it or not. Apparently he did. (Or, was it just a parody of Barack Obama, as some of my conservative friends have suggested?) The point that