Guatemala Day Laborer’s Dream of Being Announcer Comes True – Latin American Herald Tribune
LOS ANGELES – The voice of Luis Gonzalez is heard Monday through Friday from 8:00 to 4:00 p.m. on Radio Centro Laboral, a Los Angeles-based online station over which this Guatemalan day laborer broadcasts a message of hope. Listening to him speak and hearing his tone of voice, story his cadence and diction, it sounds like his natural destiny in life was to be an announcer – but getting there took him 50 years. “I’m 52 years old and all my life I admired the great radio announcers, I dreamed of being one, but thought it was too hard because I only studied up to the sixth grade and I’ve always had to work hard to earn a living,” Gonzalez told Efe in an interview. He came to the United States in the year 2000 looking for a better life, and eventually came upon one of the day-laborer centers of the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California, or IDEPSCA, where immigrants from different countries gather every day hoping for contractors to show up and give them work.