Growing up in one of the most politically active communities in Houston, I was taught from an early age that voting was our most important civic duty. My father would always say “If you don’t vote, you don’t count.” In those days, people had a great deal of confidence in one another and our electoral...
Erin Davis Valdez is a policy analyst with Right on Work at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. She conducts research on career and technical education at the secondary and post-secondary levels, civics education, and welfare to work programs in Texas. As the trickle of businesses relocating to Texas becomes a flood, it is vitally important...
As a first-generation American kid, the saying, “you only really appreciate something when it’s gone” was repeated to me ad nauseum and drilled into my brain by my parents, who were forced to flee their homeland of Cuba in 1960. I heard it at family gatherings as well, and when visitors came over. Hearing it...