Abogados de Inmigracion

Nelson A. Castillo is the President of the National Hispanic Bar Association. I met him for the first time in the Consulate of El Salvador in Brentwood, New York almost four years ago. He was donating much of his time and knowledge to the Salvadoran people because of the love that he has for his people. Born in El Salvador, he immigrated to the United States, and by the age of seventeen, like so many Latino youth, he was out of high school working in a gasoline station.

A woman recognized his intelligence in conversations with him and told him that he could complete his education by passing the GED exam or what is known as the High School Equivalency. On HITN-TV on the television show Coast to Coast in Spanish, he told this story to a national audience of Hispanics. I was sitting alongside him with Malín Falu, the television hostess of the show, as he recounted how he bought a GED book, studied at home, and easily passed the GED test in English and went on to the university and then law school. His story is special but not unique because many people who have dropped out of school and taken the GED have gone on to great success, including the Surgeon General of the United States, Dr. Richard Carmona and Bill Cosby, the actor. Rosa Parks died this week and one of the many outstanding things she did in her life for herself and to be a role model was to finish up her high school education (at the age of 21) after leaving school because of family illness. Taking into account that the GED did not exist in 1934, this was a great personal accomplishment for her, and I am sure this is a little known fact among African Americans.

I did not invite Nelson Castillo on the show. He asked me if he could come on. This is the great difference that divides Hispanic leadership all over the world. He was there to help his people. He could easily have said, if I had asked him to come on, “Martin, I am too busy.” But he did not because among so many Hispanic leaders, he is one of the few who knows just how important the GED is to his community and speaks out about it all the time. Bill Cosby, for example, lost a great chance years ago to promote the GED among African American adults and now he is on tour trying to help raise the academic level of African Americans. It is still not too late for Bill Cosby to promote the GED the way Nelson Castillo does.

Nelson Castillo and I network together. My GED RPM Center is designed to help people who have deserted the classroom to quickly get a GED without going to class, just the way Nelson Castillo did. People who have little or no time cannot go to class to study. When a lawyer from Latin America first arrives in the United States and wants to become a practicing lawyer here, I do tell him to research the information in the library. What I do is tell him to call Nelson Castillo. This accelerates the person’s acquisition of information and promotes the revolution that I want to cause for people.

Photo of Nelson Castillo on the left with friends at the Presidential Forum of President Antonio Saca of El Salvador taken by Profesor Martin in November 2004.

MARTIN N. DANENBERG
7 BLAZER DRIVE
ISLANDIA, NY11749
GEDHOTLINE@AOL.COM
631-348-1341
WWW.GEOCITIES.COM/GEDHOTLINE