Marlene Alvarado

My name is Marlene Alvarado. I am an ESL teacher. I live in Long Beach California, and I work in Huntington Park, California. Long Beach is a beach city next to Los Angeles. It's a great place to live in. The weather is mild so that the winters aren't cold and the summers aren't hot. The Pacific Ocean breezes keep it mild. Huntington Park, where I teach is about 7 miles in land, in what is considered Southeast Los Angeles. It is a separate city from LA, but part of LA County. It is a Latin American immigrant neighborhood. I love my students. They and all the working class of this country are the backbone of this society. Like all immigrants before them, they create the wealth for this country in disproportion to what they get.

I come from an immigrant family. My family came to the US at the turn of the 20th century from Mexico. My maternal grandfather was a scout for General Pershing during the Mexican Revolution which began in 1910. My father came here about 1920 as a 2 year old child. His family entered the US illegally, and he became a US citizen when he fought in WWII. My mother was born in Omaha Nebraska. My sisters and I were born in Chicago, Illinois.

I have done many things in my life, coming from a working class family. I have been a long distance operator when I was in high school, back in 1958 to a TV commercial producer. I produced Spanish language commercials for a small TV station in Sacramento California, which no longer exists after I graduated from Sacramento State College. I love what I am doing now, and I wish I had been doing this earlier in my life.

I am an amateur photographer, altogether I did publish some when I was a freelance writer and photographer. So I think I will prefer my blog to feature my photographs.