| Many Hispanics Are Hit Hard by Economic Slump |
|
|
|
| Tuesday, 13 May 2008 | |
|
By PETER S. GOODMAN DALTON, Ga. — In his first years in the United States, Carlos B. 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 Mr. 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, Mr. 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. READ MORE: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/business/13hispanics.html?ref=us               |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|