UNIT:
Grades 3-5

Text 1: The text is a biographical summary of Guadalupe “Lupe” Figueroa’s contributions to the East Chicago area of Indiana, which accompanies a picture of her in a Ballet Folklorico costume. The biography shares the immigration story of her parents, Consuelo and Francisco, who left Mexico in the 1920s and settled in Indiana Harbor (East Chicago) where Francisco worked in the steel mills. Francisco and his brothers began a printing press and circulated a newspaper called El Amigo del Hogar (A Friend in the Home) for five years after arriving in the United States. In the 1950s, three Figueroa sons revived the printing press to circulate The Latin Times, which was published until the early 1980s to serve as a voice of the Latino community of East Chicago.

Text 2: As retold by Lupe T. Figueroa to a reporter, the Figueroa family owned a print shop in East Chicago, Indiana in the 1920s. Until the Great Depression, the parents of the family wrote and printed bi-weekly newsletters in Spanish to keep Spanish-speaking community members informed. Feeling like the Latino community was not being treated fairly, in the 1950s the children of the Figueroa family resurrected the publication as a new weekly, bilingual newspaper called The Latin Times. For almost 30 years, they printed and sold 2,000 copies each week to build awareness within the Latino community and to ensure the local government heard the voices of the community.