Category Archives: News

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Hispanic-owned businesses are finding a home in Indianapolis

Manuel Morales first came to the state as a migrant worker, traveling 1,300 miles from his hometown on the southern Texas border to pick summer crops for the season. After six years of making the hard journey, Manuel decided to stop migrating and plant some roots of his own in 1955 Indianapolis.

At the time, Indiana’s Hispanic population was somewhere between 0 and 1 percent. When Manuel lay dying of cancer several years later, he asked his son, Tomás, to give back to the city’s small Hispanic community. Tomás took his father’s words to heart and formed Morales Group in 2003, now one of the largest Hispanic-owned staffing agencies in the city.

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Indiana Ranks 29th in Nation for Child Well-Being

The percentage of Indiana children living in poverty has decreased to 18 percent from 22 percent in 2010.

Of Indiana’s neighboring states, only Illinois has a lower percentage. However, a third of African-American children and a third of American Indian children lived in poverty — and they’re three times as likely as white kids to live in poverty.

In school, more Hoosier students are facing challenges graduating on time, according to the National Data Book. Sixteen percent of Hoosier high school students did not graduate on time in 2016-17, two percent higher than in 2010-11.

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Is Indiana A Racist State?

The KKK held a rally in Madison, Ind. in 2018. But most of the people who showed up were protestors. (WFIU/WTIU News)

Madison says it’s up to Hoosiers to take a stand and make a change.

“Individual Hoosiers in communities in Indiana have done just enough dumb, stupid, hateful things to spark the question again and again ‘Well is Indiana klan state?’ My answer to that is no, it’s not. But Indiana has flirted down to the 21st century with some of the culture, some of the ideas, some of the beliefs and values that so informed the Klan in the 1920s.”

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Bloomington clinic provides care to immigrant community

Volunteers in Medicine of Monroe County

From the beginning of President Trump’s campaign, he has called for increased restrictions on immigration and blamed immigrants for crime and unemployment. As he has moved through his first two years of presidency, rhetoric and national policy continue to be pitted against immigrants — and the clinic is feeling the repercussions.

Shelley Sallee, Volunteers in Medicine assistant director, who began working at the clinic in 2008, said she wasn’t expecting it to be like this.

“I’ve never worked in a place that relied so heavily on the political environment,” she said. “You know, we don’t want to be political, we just want to take care of people.”

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IU-Bloomington School of Nursing to graduate first Latino

IU senior Mark Casanova said he would never forget when he realized the meaning of being a nurse.

He was in nursing school, observing a cesarean section during his junior year.

He saw the doctor remove not one, but two babies from the mother that day, and it opened his eyes to the effect he could have on patients and the world. Casanova said he remembered the mother’s ecstatic face while holding her twin girls.

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Man was killed at Olive Garden because he was Mexican, family says

Jose Munoz, who died in last weekend’s Louisville Olive Garden shooting, was killed because he was from Mexico, family members said Wednesday.

Munoz, 25, had been living with family in Sellersburg, Indiana, for over six years. The native of Guadalajara, Mexico, worked for a concrete company and was supporting a 7-year-old son who lives in Mexico.

“He wasn’t famous. He wasn’t an artist. He wasn’t a singer,” Munoz’s older brother, Efrain, said through a translator. “But he was a very loved person.”

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Growing Marijuana Industry Struggles To Attract Employees Of Color

As marijuana becomes legal around the country, blacks and Latinos are often left out of new business opportunities. Advocates say people of color are often reluctant to join the growing legal marijuana economy because they were targeted far more often than whites during the war on drugs. Studies show members of such communities were arrested and jailed for illegal marijuana use far more often than whites.

As Massachusetts developed laws for legal marijuana, officials wrote what they claimed was a first-in-the-nation Social Equity Program explicitly to give members of those communities a leg up.

But this part of the state law isn’t working — next to no black or Latino candidates have applied for licenses in Massachusetts.

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IU Libraries celebrates Mexican

Students explored displays of Mexican art, history and immigration Thursday in Herman B Wells Library during the library’s Exploremos open house.

Exploremos was just one event put on as part of IU Arts and Humanities Council’s Mexico Remixed programming. The third annual remixed festival aims to celebrate the culture and history of a certain country each year through a series of events, activities and speakers, said Ed Comentale, director of the Arts and Humanities Council.

“It celebrates our international students, showcases our resources and knowledge in that area and explores current art and culture from that country,” Comentale said. “When we say remixed, we are referring to people who are actively remaking and rethinking the traditions of their country.”

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Undocumented immigrants pay billions of dollars in federal taxes each year

One of the biggest misconceptions about undocumented immigrants is that they don’t pay any taxes. In his first address to Congress, President Trump set the tone for his coming immigration agenda when he said immigration costs US taxpayers “billions of dollars a year.”

A 2017 Gallup poll that asked survey respondents “whether immigrants to the United States are making the [tax] situation in the country better or worse” found that 41 percent said “worse,” while only 23 percent said “better” (33 percent said they had “no effect”).

The reality is far different. Immigrants who are authorized to work in the United States pay the same taxes as US citizens. And, contrary to the persistent myth, undocumented immigrants do in fact pay taxes too. Millions of undocumented immigrants file tax returns each year, and they are paying taxes for benefits they can’t even use.

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Standing up to fear

“I learned my lesson not to give up because I could have easily given up,” Naciye said as she recalled recovering from an assault by a former IU student in 2015. “I was almost losing my business.”

Naciye faced numerous hurdles in her recovery, including issues with her back and posture and the recent closing of the business, Sofra Café, due to unpaid taxes. Naciye said her physical therapist taught her to hold her spine straight again after the assault.

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