As a lifelong American, why would I hate my own country? I do not. I am a veteran who left my wife, then three months pregnant and in tears, to serve overseas. We were separated for more than a year. I volunteered partly to avoid the draft, but also because I wanted to serve my country. Even without the threat of being drafted, I would make the same choice again. Military service was one of the best decisions I made, and many young people who take that path become responsible citizens and devoted Americans. So why do some people believe that native-born Americans hate their country? I do not believe they do. I have visited many admirable countries, and I judge a nation in part by how well it cares for its people. By that standard, the shine of American patriotism begins to fade. It deeply saddens me to see Americans resent other countries—and, worse, one another. “Divide and conquer” remains effective for those who benefit from division. Most Americans are watching their freedoms shrink and their opportunities disappear because of poor leadership and, more importantly, indifference to the lives of vulnerable people. The weak, the uneducated, people with disabilities, and the poor are treated as expendable. Giving simply to help others is disappearing. If there is no personal benefit—no answer to “What’s in it for me?”—too many people, make no effort to help their neighbors.

This website was created to educate our audience on the struggles US citizens face when they fall into hardship “through no fault of their own.” We lean our focus toward the Latino communities and that culture mainly because of the roots of its founder. Habitaciones Para Latinos or (Homes, living quarters, for Latinos) HPLA Charites was founded after seeing the horrible living conditions so many people were content or forced to live in. If you have lived in a one room house with dirt floors than a two-room house with flush toilets is a mansion. A wheelchair bound individual that has groceries delivered and a health care representative coming by one a week for baths and med check is heaven because there is no money to help make things better. The hope dilutes and the structure of the house just goes downhill. Leaky faucets, clog drains, broken toilets, drafty windows etc. lead to a very unhealthy environment and so welfare homes become the result and as a ward of the state it’s not long before even friends stop showing up. Whether drugs or lack of exercise intime not eating or drinking leads to more time asleep than awake. No food or water is required and soon a ward of the state becomes expendable and dies. I was heartbroken when a veteran of the local fire department started going downhill. I was visiting family and coming from out of state, so I witnessed the slow decline of this hero from listening to war stories to him not knowing his own name.

There is so much pain in watching folks passing way before the life expectancy date of a US citizen. Males are at 76.5 years while females are at 81.4 on average. HPLA Charities helped Ms. Clarke make it to 90 years of age and only spent a few weeks in a facility. Death with dignitary for our clients, which is a goal but living in dignity is a higher priority for us. In our mission statement we state that we provide minor home repair for low-income homeowners. Lately that mission has required more help with food and utilities rather than leaky faucets. We have had to put those projects in second place due to lack of funding.

Every politician running for election or reelection has reached out to me for a donation but while they are asking for help to become millionaires or multi-millionaires HPLA Charites can do wonders with your donations of five or ten dollars to help people stay in their homes without becoming deathly sick. Would you send the same amount that you sent to your political party to HPLACHARITES.ORG/DONATE

There is such division in our country today and yes probably by design, but I am going to ask respectfully to help support our mission. We are helping those that love their country. We prefer to help build a good country that is concerned about the care for its people than one that only cares about helping people get rich at the expense of the poor. Charity has stayed in the perpetuation of America. As important it is to keep our furry friends and environment healthy it is more important to keep Americans healthy especially those that are hurting through no fault of their own. rflores

By: Roberto Franco Vazquez – Labor Day Belongs to the Workers Who Built America – America depends on Latino workers. It is time our politics caught up with our economy.

 September 3, 2026 –Every September, Americans pause to celebrate the worker.

Then, almost immediately, we return to work.

Labor Day has become synonymous with backyard barbecues, retail sales and the unofficial end of summer. But the holiday began as something more consequential. On Sept. 5, 1882, thousands of workers marched through New York City in the first Labor Day celebration, demanding recognition of the dignity and value of their work. Twelve years later, Labor Day became a federal holiday.

The holiday’s origins should prompt a question that is particularly important in 2026:

When we celebrate the American worker, do we fully recognize the Latino workers who have become indispensable to the American economy?

We should.

More than 35 million Hispanics and Latinos are in the nation’s civilian labor force, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In July, about 33.5 million were employed and the Hispanic unemployment rate was 4.6%.

These are not marginal workers in marginal industries. They are construction workers building homes and infrastructure. Farmworkers harvesting food. Nurses and home health aides caring for the sick and elderly. Restaurant workers preparing meals. Drivers moving goods. Employees staffing factories, warehouses, hotels, offices and small businesses. They are entrepreneurs, engineers, teachers and union members.

In other words, they are the American workforce.

Yet the national conversation about Latino workers too often takes place somewhere else — in the language of immigration rather than labor.

That disconnect matters.

America has spent decades debating whether immigrants belong here while depending on their labor. We ask who has the right to cross the border, but too rarely ask what rights should belong to the person already standing on the other side of the workplace door.

We depend on farmworkers to put food on our tables while remaining largely removed from the conditions under which that food is harvested. We rely on construction workers to build homes and commercial projects while rarely asking whether the people doing that work can afford the homes they help create. We celebrate economic growth without always considering whether the workers producing it can share in that prosperity.

This is not simply a Latino issue.

It is a test of what we mean when we say that work has dignity.

The American labor movement was built around a simple proposition: economic power should not be so unequal that workers have no meaningful voice over their wages, hours or working conditions. Labor Day is a reminder of that history.

Latino workers have helped carry that tradition forward.

Few figures symbolize that history more clearly than César Chávez and the farmworkers who organized through the United Farm Workers. Their movement forced Americans to see people who had long been treated as invisible labor and to confront the conditions under which some of the nation’s most basic necessities were produced.

That struggle is not confined to history books.

This week, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to revisit changes to the H-2A agricultural guest-worker program after ruling that the Labor Department had acted unlawfully in changing the way wages for foreign farmworkers were calculated. The court found that the new methodology could depress wages for both H-2A workers and U.S. farmworkers and also rejected a provision allowing employers to deduct certain housing costs from workers’ wages.

The case is complicated. The principle is not.

What is a worker’s labor worth?

And an even more basic question follows:

What does a worker deserve?

A fair wage.

A safe workplace.

Protection against retaliation.

The ability to organize.

The ability to report violations without fearing that doing so will destroy a family’s livelihood.

And a reasonable chance that full-time work can lead to a more secure life.

None of that requires romanticizing labor. Hard work is valuable, but hard work alone has never guaranteed economic mobility.

For generations of Latino families, the phrase “work hard and you will succeed” has been both a source of hope and a difficult test of faith. Parents have worked multiple jobs, endured long commutes and spent decades in physically demanding occupations so their children could have opportunities they never had.

Many succeeded.

But individual success should not obscure structural problems.

If a family works full time and still cannot afford housing, healthcare and childcare, telling its members to work harder is not an economic strategy. It is an evasion.

That is why Labor Day should be more than an annual expression of gratitude.

It should be a measure of national priorities.

If work has dignity, that dignity must extend beyond the workplace. It means wages that allow families to live with some security. It means safe working conditions and meaningful enforcement of labor laws. It means affordable education and a housing market in which working people have some prospect of becoming homeowners. It means giving the next generation a genuine chance to do better than the one before it.

And it means recognizing an uncomfortable fact about the American story:

The history of American labor is inseparable from the history of immigration.

The immigrant worker is not an outsider to that history. The immigrant worker is part of it.

That reality is especially visible in Latino communities, where Labor Day can evoke a family history that will never appear in a textbook: the father leaving before sunrise for a construction job; the mother cleaning houses while raising children; grandparents harvesting crops; relatives working nights, weekends and holidays to build a small business.

Their names may never appear on a monument.

Their labor is everywhere.

It is in the houses we live in, the food we eat, the roads we drive, the hotels we visit and the businesses we depend on.

That is why the phrase “those people” should have no place in the vocabulary of American labor.

There are no “those people” when it comes to the workforce.

There are workers.

There are families.

There are citizens and immigrants, people born here and people who came here, all contributing to the same economy and sharing many of the same anxieties about wages, housing, healthcare and the future.

America’s politics often divides them more easily than America’s economy does.

The economy knows what it needs.

It needs people willing to work.

The question is whether our politics is prepared to recognize what those workers deserve.

Labor Day was never simply a celebration of work. It was a statement about the value of the people who perform it.

That principle remains as relevant now as it was in 1882.

So this Labor Day, Latino workers should not merely be invited to the celebration.

They should be recognized for what they are:

not guests at the American table, but among the people who built it — and who continue to build the country every day.

When low-income families cannot afford to pay for skilled labor to meet their basic needs HPLA Charities helps them get a leg up until they can. Help us help them http://www.hplacharities.org/donate