LETTER FROM
THE EDITOR
HUFFINGTON
10.21.12
The People
Still Left
Behind
N THIS WEEK’S Huffington, Tom Zeller
puts the spotlight on
what he rightly calls a
“national disgrace”: the grinding
poverty that plagues rural communities throughout America,
especially among minorities. The
numbers are staggering: 46 million Americans now live below the
poverty line, nearly 60 percent of
them minorities; the poverty rate
among children in rural areas is
about 27 percent (up 6 percent
since 2000)—their struggles and
suffering not touching our country’s moral consciousness.
In a desolate trailer park outside Laredo, Texas, Zeller meets
Elia De La O and her husband,
ART STREIBER
I
Rogelio—legal immigrants who
came from Mexico more than a
dozen years ago. Their trailer has
electricity but lacks running water; for this they must travel miles
to a county-run spigot that dispenses barely-drinkable water,
or else a water vendor in Laredo.
As Elia puts it, the conditions are
far from her vision of the American Dream when she was living in
Mexico: “We didn’t think when
we came here that we would live
like kings, but we didn’t imagine
there would be places like this.”
Join the
conversation
on Twitter
and Facebook