Join us at the NO MAS HAMBRE Summit on December 7!

By Alfredo Estrada

"¿Tienes hambre?" For me, those words evoke my grandmother asking if I want  yet another helping of arroz con frijoles.  But for too many of us, they have a darker meaning.

Believe it or not, nearly one third of the Latino community goes hungry. No, that's not a typo. Nearly one in three of us suffers "food insecurity," the clinical name for not having enough to eat from day to day. When I first learned of this grim statistic, my initial reaction was that it had to be a mistake. After all, I went to Harvard and I'm the editor of LATINO Magazine, and it's my job to know these things. Since I didn't know it, how could it be true?

But the figure comes from a demographic study undertaken by the USDA each year.  Over 50 million people in the U.S. face hunger, 14.9% of all households. But  for Latinos  the figure is 26.2%, so we are almost twice as likely to go hungry than other Americans.

Once convinced of my ignorance, I asked some of my peers, some as overeducated as myself. As it turned out, they knew just as little about it. When I told them the facts, their response was just like mine, one of disbelief...until I showed them the numbers. There's no way around it, no way to explain away or argue about this statistic. It is what it is.

"So how could we not have known?" we asked ourselves. By then, my reaction had turned from incredulity to anger. We should have known! We live in the wealthiest country there ever was, and we have the resources to feed everyone. Many Latinos go hungry because they simply don't know where to find emergency food services or apply for government programs such as SNAP, or food stamps. And many of us who have more than enough to eat simply don't know about the specter of hunger haunting our community.

That's why we started NO MAS HAMBRE,  nonprofit initiative to raise awareness of hunger in the Latino community At LATINO Magazine, we felt that if we could inform our readers about this crisis, we could encourage them to get involved and make a difference in their communities.  To learn more, attend our second annual NO MAS HAMBRE Summit taking place on December 7 at the Capital Hilton in Washington, DC.

Please join us! You'll hear invited speakers such as Max Finberg, USDA, and help community leaders, hunger relief advocates, government officials and others to develop a Latino anti-hunger agenda. Attendance is free and you can register online at http://www.latinomagazine.com/registration.htm.
Help us spread the word about the 2012 NO MAS HAMBRE Summit. Because no one should go hungry.

Alfredo Estrada is the editor of LATINO Magazine, which focuses on issues, politics and culture and is available online at Latinomagazine.com. His latest book is Havana: Autobiography of a City (Palgrave, 2009). For more information about NO MAS HAMBRE, please contact him at ajestrada@latinomagazine.com.