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Mexican-American man named to new position to assist Mexicans living in United States
By DEBORAH KONG
The Associated Press
9/19/02 5:47 PM
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Mexican President Vicente Fox has appointed a man with dual U.S.-Mexican citizenship to a new post aimed at helping generations of people who have emigrated north to this country.
Candido Morales' designation as director of the newly created Institute for Mexicans Abroad underscores the economic boost Mexicans living in the United States give to their home nation.
Morales will be introduced Friday at a news conference at the Mexican Consulate in San Francisco.
In an interview Thursday, Morales said Mexicans in the United States send about $11 billion each year to relatives back home. His office, he said, will send the message to those immigrants that "it's a family. It's saying, 'We are behind you, we can give you support and when there's problems, we want to help solve those problems."'
Morales, who was born in Mexico, came to the United States at age 13. His family settled in mostly rural Sonoma County, Calif., and Morales helped his parents by picking prunes, apples and grapes after school and during summers.
For the past 30 years, the 57-year-old Morales has worked at the California Human Development Corporation, but he'll take a leave of absence as vice president of the nonprofit to serve in his new role.
Morales will try to assist the more than 20 million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans living in the United States. He'll be based in Mexico City, but will travel frequently, splitting his time between the United States and Mexico.
An advisory committee set to meet in November will help him identify priorities. One will almost certainly be immigration reform. "People who are undocumented, they want laws that would allow them to become legal residents" of the United States, he said.
Morales also hopes to work with wire-transfer companies to reduce service fees levied on the money immigrants send home. He also wants to assist Mexican-Americans who may be interested in business opportunities in Mexico.
Guadalupe Gomez, president of the Council of Presidents of Mexican Federations of Los Angeles, said Morales has a big job ahead.
"What I'd like to see from this guy is that he stays here in the United States, that he helps organize Mexicans here, and that he serves as a liaison to not only the Mexican government, but to the American government," Gomez said.
Morales was chosen for the job partly because Fox wanted someone who had lived in the United States for many years, "not a Mexican bureaucrat from Mexico," said Bernardo Mendez, spokesman for the Mexican Consulate in San Francisco.
Born in Oaxaca, Mexico, Morales is of Mixtec Indian descent. His father crossed the border illegally in the 1950s "for the same reason that most people come to the United States," Morales said. "He needed to find employment."
An employer helped his father obtain legal residence, and in 1958, Morales, his mother, brother and sister joined him in Sonoma County.
After graduating from Sonoma State University, he started working at the California Human Development Corporation, which provides job training, immigration and citizenship assistance, housing and other services to low-income people.
Morales still maintains strong ties in both countries. His father retired after 47 years as a farmworker and lives with his mother in Windsor, Calif. Other relatives live in Oaxaca.
"The United States is the land of opportunity," Morales said. But "I always had an appreciation for the rich Mixteca culture and made trips to my village, which I love dearly because part of my family is still there."
Copyright 2002 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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