Before we hand out these statues tonight, we want to stop and say a few word about where these shining Oscars come from – Chicago.
That’s right, the statues that millions of people around the world are ogling were born at the R.S. Owens & Co. factory on Chicago’s Northside. They have been made there for the last 27 years.
And this year’s statues, going to the world’s most talented artists of the movie screen, come from the talented hands of workers like Jorge Marroquin, who is orginally from Quatemala and who is the production boss at this highly talented factory.
These statues were pressed and shined and polished to a wonderful gleam, passing through the hands of many, many of whom came to the U.S. from Mexico, among them Martin Vega, originally of Michoacan and Alvaro Lando, who comes from Guerrero and Josefina Godea whose roots go back to San Luis Potosi.
Sounds heart-warming enough for an award winning documentary, doesn’t it?
Well, the facts are right. They were spelled out last week in a wonderful two page spread with photos in Hoy. If only somebody in Hollywood would say a few such words for the folks who bring Oscar to life.
But it not too late to give an update to a story that will provide a very humane grounding for an event that has its eyes stuck on the heavens.
Oscar Avila had another compelling first page piece last week on the front page of the Trib about the separate worlds of Chicago’s restaurants: white up front and black or Latino outback. But his story followed an equally powerful and personal piece written by Fabiola Pomareda in La Raza about the abuses Latinos suffer in our restaurants.
Antonio Olivo also did a wonderfully humane piece in the Trib about how Iraqi refugees and others, among them Bosnians who remember their days in such terrible plight, who have come to help the latest refugees. It is a story that needs to be told again and again in Chicago’s Arab news media, where it will most certainly have the greatest resonance.
But this is a story about refugees in a strange land and at a tough time and it’s a story almost any immigrant community will want to embrace.
The tragedy of the hollowing out of Chicago’s newspapers is the lack of reporters from Chicago’s mainstream papers on the ground in Haiti. They relied on others words. But Richard Muhammad, editor of the Final Call was there, and wrote both articles and an editor’s note about what he found.
He wrote: “The reality is simply incredible as is the resilience of the Haitian people.”
saludos, Stephen
