01.31.06
Posted in News at 12:18 am by Paloma Cruz
Fox to roll out Hispanic magazine in Houston, other major markets
– reported by Houston Business Journal
A new Hispanic magazine, “Fox Sports en Español,” will hit the Houston newsstands in March.
New York-based Cuatro Media Inc., principally owned by Houston-based private investment firm Savoy Capital, finalized a licensing agreement with Los Angeles-based Fox Pan American Sports LLC Monday to produce and distribute a monthly magazine titled “Fox Sports en Español” in the United States.
The full-color Spanish-language sports magazine will have East and West versions.
It will debut on March 23 in Houston through the Houston Chronicle’s “La Voz” and “La Vibra” publications.
[snip]
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01.28.06
Posted in News at 7:31 pm by Paloma Cruz
Hispanics earning degrees in record numbers
Texas education officials say the increase is not large enough for fast-growing group
– reported by the Houston Chronicle
More Hispanics earned degrees and certificates at Texas colleges and universities last year than ever before, but they are still less likely to graduate than their white classmates.
The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board reported Thursday that the number of Hispanics completing undergraduate degree and certificate programs has grown 47 percent since 2000.
Yet officials and education experts want to see more Hispanics earn bachelor’s degrees because they represent the state’s fastest-growing ethnic group.
[snip]
In part, officials attributed the growing number of degrees — 31,091 in fall 2005 compared with 21,087 in fall 2000 — to more Hispanics at colleges and universities across the state. The majority of those students start their post-secondary education at a community college.
Over the past five years, the percentage of Hispanics receiving associate degrees and certificates awarded by two-year colleges has grown twice as fast as the percentage of those earning bachelor’s degrees at four-year institutions.
[snip]
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01.27.06
Posted in News at 10:30 pm by Paloma Cruz
BellSouth targets Hispanics with ad campaign in Spanish
– reported by Triangle Business Journal
BellSouth on Thursday announced plans to launch a new Southeast advertising campaign - in Spanish.
The Atlanta-based telecommunications firm, which employs 750 in the Triangle, is using the new campaign to target a rapidly expanding Hispanic population in North Carolina and other Southeastern states, company officials say.
[snip]
North Carolina’s Hispanic population had an estimated economic impact of about $9.2 billion in 2005, according to a recent study conducted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That figure is expected to nearly double by 2009.
At more than 600,913 people, North Carolina’s Hispanic population accounts for about 7 percent of the state’s total.
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01.25.06
Posted in News at 12:14 am by Paloma Cruz
Mexican actress portrays own kidnapping
Laura Zapata says she hopes to educate as well as entertain audience
– reported by the Houston Chronicle
[snip]
In November 2002, she and her sister, Ernestina Sodi, were kidnapped outside a theater in Mexico City. Zapata was released after 18 days to collect the multimillion-dollar ransom, but Sodi was held for another 16 days. The criminals were after the fortune of their victims’ even more famous sister, Mexican pop star Thalia, and her husband, music industry mogul Tommy Mottola.
Three years later, Zapata is struggling to come to terms with her terrifying ordeal through Captives, which opened in this central Mexican city last week. Despite the melodramatic dialogue, the play offers a rare glimpse into the bizarre and terrifying daily life of a kidnap victim, and the unexpected relationships that can develop between captive and captor.
[snip]
Mexico, by one recent estimate, surpassed Colombia last year as the world leader in reported kidnappings for ransom. There were 194 cases reported in Mexico during the first six months of 2005 compared with 172 during the same period in Colombia, according to the Citizens Council for Public Safety, a Mexican anti-crime organization.
Mexican victims are more likely to be killed than their Colombian counterparts, the group says, and the violence is getting worse.
In 1995, three Mexicans died at the hands of their captors. During the first half of 2005, that figure was 42, compared with 17 in Colombia, the group says.
[snip]
I remember when this happened. I admit that, until this made the news, I hadn’t paid attention to what was going on in Mexico City. It’s dangerous. It’s very dangerous. And it’s just getting worse.
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Posted in News at 12:10 am by Paloma Cruz
For Hispanics, farming is a growth industry
– reported by the Houston Chronicle
[snip]
Moctezuma is one of a growing number of Hispanic farmers in the nation. Between 1997 and 2002, the number of Hispanic-run farms grew 51 percent. At the same time, the number of farms run by African-Americans and Anglos declined, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service.
Like Moctezuma, many Hispanic farmers are immigrants who picked up the skill in their home countries. Moctezuma’s father and brother work a 130-acre cactus farm called Rancho El Periocolo in the Mexican state of Hidalgo, where Moctezuma was raised.
[snip]
And for many Hispanic immigrants, owning land is a symbol of prestige, said Mario Delgado, a U.S. Department of Agriculture rural development specialist in Georgia, where he is helping to organize a March conference on Hispanic farm operators.
[snip]
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Posted in News at 12:07 am by Paloma Cruz
It finally happened, Mexicans invaded the US… or not. Anyway, depending on which news you read or watched, something happened on the US side of the Mexico/US border involving people with guns and people doing something illegal.
Texas troopers involved in standoff with Mexican Army soldiers
– reported by KHOU CBS Channel 11
Men dressed as Mexican Army soldiers, apparent drug suspects and Texas law enforcement officers faced off near the U.S.-Mexican border after three suspicious SUVs attempted to flee state authorities, officials said Tuesday.
Andrea Simmons, an agency spokeswoman in El Paso, told The Associated Press that Texas Department of Public Safety troopers chased three SUVs, believing they were carrying drugs, to the banks of the Rio Grande during Monday’s incident.
Men dressed in Mexican military uniforms or camouflage were on the U.S. side of the border in Texas, she said.
Simmons said the FBI was not involved and referred requests for further details to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
[snip]
U.S. officials who pursued three fleeing SUVs to the Mexican border saw what appeared to be a Mexican military Humvee help one of the SUVs when it got stuck in the river, he said.
When that didn’t work, a group of men dressed in civilian clothes started unloading what appeared to be bundles of marijuana from the SUV, and the stuck vehicle was then torched, he said. A second SUV had a flat tire and was left behind in the United States and its occupant ran across the border, he said.
Glancey said he could not confirm whether the armed men seen at the site were Mexican Army, police officers, or drug dealers, and would not detail what markings deputies may have seen on the men’s uniforms or the Humvee.
[snip]
Standoff raises questions on both sides of border
– reported by the Houston Chronicle
Men in Mexican military-style uniforms crossed the Rio Grande into the United States on a marijuana-smuggling foray, leading to an armed confrontation with Texas law officers, authorities said today. No shots were fired.
The men retreated and escaped back across the border with much of the pot, though they abandoned more than a half-ton of marijuana as they fled and set fire to one of their vehicles, authorities said.
The Mexican government denied its military was involved.
The confrontation took place Monday and involved three Texas sheriff’s deputies, at least two Texas state troopers and at least 10 heavily armed men from the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, said Rick Glancey of the Texas Border Sheriffs’ Coalition.
Gov. Rick Perry ordered an investigation.
[snip]
Monday’s incident follows a story in the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin in Ontario, Calif., on Jan. 15 that said the Mexican military had crossed into the United States more than 200 times since 1996. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has said reports of Mexican incursions into the United States were overblown and most were just mistakes.
[snip]
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Posted in News at 12:03 am by Paloma Cruz
Deportation concerns as visas set to expire
– reported by KHOU CBS Channel 11
[snip]
Arqueta is one of 40,000 Central Americans working in Houston thanks to Temporary Protected Status, a special visa program for victims of natural disasters such as Hurricane Mitch in 1998.
The visas will begin expiring in the next few months and the fear is they will be canceled and immigrants like Arqueta will be deported.
[snip]
Critics argue it would be unfair to keep renewing these special visas only for Central Americans. They said residents of other countries such as Pakistan clearly need it as well.
A congressional campaign to prevent immigrants from being deported is under way.
[snip]
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01.24.06
Posted in News at 12:01 am by Paloma Cruz
Experiment opens college to everyone in Mexico City
Presidential hopeful hails it as the future; critics call it populism running amok
– reported by the Houston Chronicle
There are no entrance exams. In fact, there are no exams at all, nor grades. Classroom attendance is optional, and tuition is free.
Welcome to the Autonomous University of Mexico City, or UACM. This radical experiment in higher education is how Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the presidential front-runner, sees the future of public universities in Mexico: accessible to all, regardless of age, income or academic achievement.
The former Mexico City mayor created the UACM by decree in April 2001, fulfilling a pledge to give disadvantaged residents the chance to attend college. If elected president in July for the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, he has vowed to re-create the experimental model in 30 new public universities across Mexico.
[snip]
It is a radical response to a well-known problem: the failure of public universities to meet growing demand for college education in Mexico. While record numbers of Mexican students are graduating from high school, only 20 percent attend college — a figure that is low even by Latin American standards. Meanwhile, enrollments in private universities have more than doubled from 15 percent in 1985 to the current 33 percent, according to Mexico’s Public Education Secretariat.
The result is a growing divide between those who can afford to pay for higher education and those who cannot.
[snip]
The UACM is the first public university created in the capital in three decades, and one of a tiny handful opened nationwide. It is also the first to cater to underprivileged residents. The vast majority of its 6,200 students come from poor, working-class families, according to administrators.
The university’s four campuses are in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, including one built inside a former women’s prison, in the working-class slums of Iztapalapa. And there are plans for a fifth campus; the goal is to bring enrollment up to 15,000 within the next four years.
[snip]
Students say they are too busy studying and holding down full-time jobs to worry about politics. The university offers morning and evening shifts to accommodate the majority of students who work.
Many are middle-aged women who were forced to drop out of school after they had children. Others, such as Leticia Arroyo, 31, attended public high schools that failed to prepare them for the competitive college admissions’ process.
[snip]
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01.22.06
Posted in News at 10:45 pm by Paloma Cruz
Houston has most undocumented college students
– reported by KHOU CBS Channel 11
[snip]
Since 2001, Texas became the first state by law to allow undocumented students into public colleges at the subsidized in-state tuition rate and make them eligible for financial aid, as long as they have lived in the state for three years and graduated from high school.
Houston now leads the state with upwards of 600 such undocumented students going to public colleges.
Not surprisingly, it wasn’t hard to find critics of the law. They say it does nothing more than encourage illegal immigration and that it gives unfair advantage to immigrant students over those who are here legally.
[snip]
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01.16.06
Posted in General at 10:03 pm by Paloma Cruz
The Houston Chapter of the National Society of Hispanic MBAs is holding “How Business People are Making a Difference in K-12 Public Education.”
The Broad Residency in Urban Education and Net Impact, Houston Chapter invite you to join us for a discussion on “How Business People are Making a Difference in K-12 Public Education.”
Net Impact is collaborating with the Broad Center for the Management of School Systems to improve student achievement by recruiting executive leadership talent to become the next generation of urban school district leaders. The impact of business on our world is unequaled by that of any other institution, and business leaders are in a unique position to influence what happens in society for years to come. With this power comes monumental responsibility. We can choose to ignore this responsibility or, as business leaders, we can realize our potential to create lasting social change.
This is the context in which we have organized our 31 January event and in this spirit, we look forward to a positive reply to our invitation to participate.
Time and place is Tuesday, January 31, 2006 at 7:00 PM at the Hotel InterContinental Houston (2222 West Loop South).
The event is free, but space is limited. RSVP is required by Friday, January 27, 2006.
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