Latino community

Thirty-year-old José Arturo González Mendoza of Guanajuato, Mexico was in North Carolina under an H-2A visa for temporary agricultural workers. He began working at Barnes Farming in Spring Hope, about 40 miles east of Raleigh, less than two weeks before he died.

Latino workers earned 78 cents on the dollar compared to the national average over the past year. But they’re also making economic gains. That’s according to an analysis by Well Fargo Economics, unveiled last week by the Latin American Chamber of Commerce Charlotte.

Abel Cruz is part of the H-2A program, through which the government issues temporary visas to 370,000 people, mostly from Mexico, to work in the U.S. in agriculture. North Carolina ranks fifth nationally for the number of workers on seasonal H-2A work visas, with about 15,000 laboring under the sun in fields of ripening tobacco, cotton, soybeans and more. Thousands more workers are undocumented.

Charlotte’s Independent Picture House will screen a series of award-winning and hard-to-find Latin American films starting later this month.

Police are investigating after six seasonal farmworkers were struck by an SUV in Lincoln County on Sunday in what authorities are calling an intentional attack. Lincolnton police released footage of the SUV that they say hit the workers. It happened in a Walmart parking lot.

Two companies, Old North State Masonry and Friends Masonry Construction, were fined more than $130,000 over nine allegations of serious labor violations.

Interns from Into the Fields appealed to state senators to oppose HB10, a bill that would obligate sheriffs to collaborate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Taken as a whole, Latinos in the United States represented the world’s fifth-largest GDP in 2020, according to researchers. Part of U.S. Latinos' economic standing comes from a high labor participation rate that persisted throughout the pandemic.

A new Spanish-language student news site, Somos South Meck, highlights a growing dimension of diversity in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools: the large Latino population.

As Charlotte grows and the city mulls revitalization plans, the Central Avenue corridor could change in unexpected ways — and it has before.