It is a pedestrian school. A polite phrase for poor people who don't own cars .
Plastic shopping bags litter the main street, windblown , trapped against the fences surrounding the school.
The majority of the students are Mexican. Parents speak little or no English. Drawn by the casino resorts, building boom and the ancillary services complimenting these major industries, the American-Mexican dominates the east side of Las Vegas, Nevada.
Most billboards are written in Spanish. Major grocery stores sell products marked with bilingual advertising. Mercado's are interspersed among the franchise grocery stores. It is where I go to buy chili candies -my students favorite.
Mexican-Americans work for the school district. Organized, hard workers, willing to take on the jobs at the bottom rung, many advance to positions of responsibility and respect.
Students are related. Cousins are common. Multiple families living in one dwelling is common as well. Pooling the money earned means a newer car, babysitter overlap, better food and a common sense of security.
Isolation is not a characteristic of the Mexican-American culture.
Then the bottom dropped out. Las Vegas layoffs started with the building industry.
Gardeners, painters, carpet layers-laid off.
Casinos cutting back -housekeeping staff, buffet and dining staff. Cleaning crews.
American families live in isolation. A layoff often has a domino effect. Lose a job, lose the house-the car-downsize, downsize, until what? We don't live with other families unless desperate. We see living together as a sign of failure.
We prefer to fail alone and take our families along.
As the job market tightened my students talked about parents losing work.
They collected cans. They looked for odd jobs. They also worked with their parents.
One parent came around to the schools on certain days and cleaned teachers' cars for 20$.
Another parents sold corn outside the school(corn with mayo and chilies is awesome)
A mother made tamales and sold them, bringing them in heated containers.
The school started a flea market once a month. Parents could bring items and sell them.
One mother sewed princess dresses, very much like the Disney princesses and sold them for the Halloween season.
Valentines Day, Easter, Christmas- any holiday, actually, on the east side of Las Vegas, corner stands pop up with a variety of gifts, fruits are sold on street corners, there is no end to the market on the east side.
Many garages selling used tires, tire repair and service , guaranteed only by the owner's reputation abound.
I admire entrepreneurship.
I believe it is the only way to break the conglomeration of corporate price fixing, pushing each product to the line of sale, lamenting about the price of labor-the continual gouging of the American worker.
I think the east side Mexican-Americans of Las Vegas have the right idea.
Is it fair to our system? Legal? Perhaps-no.
It would be if the same companies asking us to buy American actually supported the United States worker, the US consumer. Is our system fair to the workers? Is buying American to our advantage? How many of you are without jobs right now due to "downsizing?" Is it corporate profits or truly a business in trouble?
How do we know? Wall Street seems to recovering. Why aren't we?
