Historias Locales

Sat24Aug2013

Reducing brain waste

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elena Print Email
Foreign-trained professionals often encounter difficulties putting their skills and professional and academic experience to good use in the host-country labor market.
 
Recognition of immigrant professionals an ongoing challenge ---   

In 2007, a young doctor named Paola left her job and life in Chile to move to the U.S. Originally from Colombia, she had a valued job at one of the Chile’s largest public hospitals. It was at that same hospital where she met an American man who eventually became her husband.
Sat24Aug2013

Power shift: The rise of Latinas

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Elena Miramar Print Email
Latinas are becoming more educated, tech savvy and connected, allowing them to write their own destinies and challenge the dynamic of Hispanic households. With 86 percent of Latina women making purchasing decisions in households, the times are changing and economic power is shifting.
 
U.S. Hispanic women, also known as Latinas, have recently and rapidly surfaced as prominent contributors to the educational, economic and cultural well-being of not only their own ethnicity, but of American society and the consumer marketplace. This rise of Latinas is driven both by strong demographics and a healthy inclination toward success in mainstream America.
Sat24Aug2013

Cambio del poder: El ascenso de las latinas

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Elena Miramar Print Email
De acuerdo a un reciente reporte publicado por Nielsen. Datos demográficos de los hispanos muestran que las mujeres están en el asiento del conductor.
 
Las mujeres hispanas en EE.UU., también conocidas como latinas, han surgido reciente y rápidamente como contribuidoras importantes al bienestar educativo, económico, y cultural de no solo su propia etnia, pero de la sociedad estadounidense y en el mercado de consumo. El ascenso de las latinas está motivado tanto por los fuertes demográficos
Fri23Aug2013

Tacos Uruapan: Vision de papa

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Ferron Salniker Print Email
Antonio Solorio poses at the entrance of Tacos Uruapan.
 
Success has been bittersweet for Tacos Uruapan. It’s nearing lunch time and I’m sitting at a table in back of the busy Hayward taqueria with the owners, Bertha Solorio and her son Antonio Solorio. Bertha is a petite woman, she’s wearing a bright magenta shirt, and her salt and pepper hair is pulled back in a loose bun. Before I finish my first question, tears have welled up in her brown eyes. Her story has the American dream written all over it: A husband and wife immigrate from Mexico, make a living selling carnitas out of a pickup truck, and fifteen years later buy an empty parking lot with plans to build a restaurant. But Bertha’s husband was never able to see Tacos Uruapan as it stands today. Before the final blueprints were done, he died of cancer, leaving a parking lot, a carnitas recipe, and a dream in the hands of his wife and three children.

Bertha and Alejandro met in their home state of Michoacan, Mexico. When Alejandro came to the U.S. Bertha said he had $25 to his name. He bought a hamburger, a map, a tank of gas, and had a $1 left. “You know that saying ‘he’ll sell anything under the sun?’ That was my dad,” said Antonio. “He sold tostadas, he had a fruit stand, he sold anything he could.” Back in his hometown, a small town called Tanguancicuaro, Alejandro was a cook, and had a talent for making the region’s specialty, carnitas.

Bertha Solorio and her son Antonio making carnitas.Antonio applied his entrepreneurial drive to making carnitas at home and selling them by the pound in a pickup truck throughout the East Bay. Five years later, Alejandro and Bertha bought their first real taco truck. Antonio, whose smile gets bigger as he tells stories about his dad, joked that the name Tacos Tanguancicuaro was too long and that the sign would have been too costly, so they decided on Tacos Uruapan, a larger city nearby.  

In 1995, Alejandro bought the property on the corner of Huntwood Road and Industrial Parkway where Tacos Uruapan is today. They built a patio and stationed the truck while they planned to build a restaurant. After Alejandro’s death, Bertha, Antonio and the eldest brother, Alejandro Jr. opened the taqueria with an expanded menu and an eager following. “I don’t think any of us sat down that first year,” said Antonio.

A month before the one year anniversary of the opening, tragedy struck the family again: Alejandro Jr. was killed in a motorcycle accident. “We were a really good team, it was like we were a tripod,” said Antonio. “It was overwhelming, but we were able to do everything because we did it together.”

This year was Tacos Uruapan’s best year in business. They employ 18 people. Bertha manages and works the kitchen, and Antonio runs the front of the restaurant. Antonio’s 19-year-old daughter occasionally helps out at the restaurant. Their charitable cause, a homework incentive program that rewards school-age kids with free burritos, is in six different schools. As for their next step, Antonio is thinking about building out a store next to the restaurant. “He has his dad’s vision,” said Bertha with a smile.