Immigrant workers

This picture is a man named Ernesto Mendez of Mexico City, who works as a male prostitute in New York's Times Square in order to send home $200 a week. The photo is from an exhibit by artist Dulce Pinzon on New York's real "heroes" (I read about Pinzon first on the great Daniel Hernandez's blog). "The Mexican immigrant worker in New York is a perfect example of the hero who has gone unnoticed," Pinzon says.

In SA, immigrants work to build our houses, build our streets, clean our lawns, bus tables and work as janitors. They do the jobs many don't want to do. Immigrants — legal and illegal — now make up 13 percent of the nation's workers. While immigrants make up more than 60 percent of the adult Latino population in cities like Los Angeles, only about 20 percent of the Latino population are immigrants in San Antonio. Still, there are many immigrant stories in SA that are unbelievable (they don't all involve Latinos either).