For Hispanics in U.S., a Dream is Going Sour

In his first years in the United States, Carlos Jacinto endured the itinerant life of a Guatemalan migrant worker, from picking fruit in Florida to moving logs at a sawmill in Washington. Eventually, he settled here in northern Georgia and erected a middle-class American life.

The carpet factories that sustained this town were desperate for workers to supply a nationwide boom in home construction. The wages that Jacinto earned over the last decade were enough to buy a minivan and a brick house with a yard and a swing set for his four young girls. It was a long way from his childhood home in Guatemala: a wooden shack without electricity or plumbing.

But last month, amid the shrinking fortunes of the American economy, Jacinto, 37, was laid off. Everything he has achieved is suddenly at risk.

"Am I going to be able to keep up the payments on my house?" he asked. "I never believed this could happen. Now, we don't know the future."

The economic downturn unfolding across the United States is imposing a particularly punishing toll on Hispanics, a group that was among the primary beneficiaries of the expansion in recent years. What had been a story of broad and steady advances has given way to growing joblessness, diminishing paychecks and lost homes.

The boom in American housing generated millions of new jobs for those willing to engage in physically demanding tasks, from factory work churning out floorboards, carpeting and upholstery, to landscaping, roofing and janitorial services. Latinos occupied widening swaths of these trades and filled large numbers of relatively high-paying construction jobs.

As a great influx of Latino immigrants spread beyond the initial entryways of the Southwest into smaller cities and towns across the South and the Midwest, many found employment doing much of the unpleasant work shunned by those with better prospects.

But now significant portions of this work are disappearing and what were once the fastest-growing areas of the United States, including states with expanding Hispanic populations like Florida, California, Georgia and Nevada, are often bearing the brunt of the pain. READ MORE

By Peter S. Goodman - International Herald Tribune