Patricia Guadalupe

WASHINGTON — Young immigrants have seen solid wage and job gains under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows them to study and work without fear of deportation. Despite the benefits, a significant number of DACA recipients whose protections expire this year have not reapplied, a study released this week has found.
The Obama-era DACA program has clearly brought tangible benefits to its recipients. About 96 percent are in school or working and 78 percent have seen an ...

WASHINGTON — She has one of the most influential positions in the country, but as a girl who did not grow up privileged, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor credits her incredible journey to one thing.
“The key to success in my life, it’s the secret that I want to share with kids and how I became successful. I’m here as a Supreme Court Justice only because of books," said Sotomayor.
The first Latina Supreme Court Justice spoke to a packed main hall of over 2,000 people at the Walter E. Wash...

WASHINGTON —As students return to high schools and colleges across the country, a number of Latino groups are ramping up efforts to register young voters with midterms less than 80 days away.

“Our goal is once they get their class schedule and get settled where they’re living, we can approach them and they can see what their (voting) options are,” said Jared Nordlund, a Florida-based civic engagement senior strategist with UnidosUS, a national Latino advocacy organization.

Earlier this year,U...

WASHINGTON — Hundreds of marches took place across the United States on Saturday as thousands of people demanded the Trump administration reunite families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The protests, marching under the banner "Families Belong Together," are hoping to push the Trump administration to reunite thousands of immigrant children separated from their families after crossing into the United States.
More than 600 marches occurred throughout the country, from liberal, immigrant-fr...

The UFW had been allies of Kennedy going back several years prior to 1968, when he traveled to the union’s home base of Delano, California to participate in a Senate Labor subcommittee hearing on farm worker issues. He excoriated the county sheriff for arresting picketing workers who the sheriff said were “ready to violate the law.”
Kennedy questioned how people could be arrested without committing a crime, and suggested — to cheers and applause — that the sheriff should “read the Constitutio...

WASHINGTON, DC – When Vicente Fox left the Mexican presidency in 2010, he did not remain quiet or on the sidelines as former leaders have done, opining on a slew of issues ever since. Most famously, he came to prominence in the United States as one of President Trump’s most vocal Twitter critics.
Since then, critics in Mexico have called Vicente Fox out, saying that he’s more popular among the American public than his own. They’ve also noted Fox’s racist and sexist remarks during his own pres...

WASHINGTON — Homeland Security Secretary Kirsten Nielsen was in New Mexico last week looking at border wall construction efforts and meeting with local sheriffs about enforcement. At the same time, the administration has cracked down on immigration enforcement and increased deportations, part of Pres. Donald Trump's pledge during the campaign trail for tougher immigration measures.
As part of his push, Trump announced last year he would end DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), the O...

WASHINGTON — Long before the growing #MeToo and #TimesUp movements of female empowerment, there was what I’d like to call the Puerto Rican Puig "posse," four feisty women who took no prisoners and opined their way into every situation.
They happened to be my mother’s aunts: Ana, Alejandra, María and Luisa Puig. Separately or together, for a young girl like me growing up in Puerto Rico under their imposing shadows, they were the most aggravating and exasperating bunch of people. They were alwa...

WASHINGTON — The legacy of seven-time Grammy Award winner Gloria Estefan was recognized at this year’s Atlantic Council Leadership Awards ceremony, a prestigious event sponsored by one of the country’s leading international think tanks that aims to celebrate the contributions of global leaders. Estefan is the first Latina to receive this recognition.
The Cuban-American singer, songwriter, actress, author and businesswoman received the Distinguished Artistic Leadership Award in honor of her le...

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Under a steady, heavy rain reminiscent of the day exactly six months ago when Hurricane Maria slammed into the island of Puerto Rico, several hundred demonstrators gathered in front of the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) today to express what they called “bitter frustration” with the agency’s response to the storm that devastated the island.
Many of the demonstrators carried blue tarps similar to the ones FEMA distributed to homeowners who suf...

In the über-macho, rough-and-tumble world of race car driving, the top female engineer in NASCAR is blazing quite a path and using it to give back to her native Puerto Rico.
“When I went to the university it was mostly guys, so the fact that I’m in a job where it’s mostly guys seems normal to me,” said Alba Colón, Chevrolet Racing Program Manager for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Program, General Motors’ most visible racing program.
Colón oversees the engineers who test the engines and designs for th...

WASHINGTON — There may be tensions between the United States and Venezuela, but another form of diplomacy involves teens, trips and yes, Dollywood.
Even while the situation between the governments escalates —with the Trump administration banning certain Venezuelan officials from traveling to the U.S., an organization in Washington, D.C. has been quietly conducting its own version of diplomatic détente, bringing Venezuelan youth to the United States to experience life for several weeks.
The gr...

WASHINGTON — Máximo Contín, a retired agronomist, still remembers when he came to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic as a teenage exchange student in the early 1960s.
“I was expecting to find movie stars,” he chuckled, “but instead went to the small town of Visalia, in the Central Valley. Everyone was very friendly and very open. It felt like I was in some small town in the Dominican Republic,” he told NBC News.
When he returned home, the situation was increasingly unstable; A longtime dict...

Kevin Hilton is very passionate about social economic justice. As CEO of the Ironworkers Management Progressive Cooperative Trust (IMPACT), he fights for it every day through the group’s stance that everyone is entitled to a living wage, with benefits, that can support workers and their families.
It is something that is elusive in some industries, but Hilton believes that the more people know about being an ironworker, the more they’d be interested in pursuing it as a career. “Every ironworke...

Throughout corporate America, many companies have recognized the advantages of having a diverse workforce, but one has been particularly committed to making inclusion a key component of its business model. The financial services firm Morgan Stanley has 57,000 employees in 42 countries, and its Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion, Susan Reid, is a native of Jamaica. In 2016, Reid organized a panel discussion at the company that focused on race in the wake of recent tension-filled interactio...