Latinos, hit hard by job losses, are making strong comeback

After scraping by on handyman jobs for a year, Bert Qintana figured he'd have to leave his wife and teenage son at their home near Taos, N.M., and find work elsewhere.

Then Qintana got a call last month from Chevron Mining, which runs a mine 20 miles away. Would he be interested in hauling muck from the molybdenum mine for $17.05 an hour? He leaped at the offer.

"Thank God," said Qintana, 45, a Latino who had worked as a general contractor. "I was able to hang in there and not have to move." About a dozen other workers, most of them Latino, also were hired.

Like Qintana, many Latinos with ties to the home building industry got slammed by the recession, which wiped out about 2 million construction jobs.

But now, as the economic rebound picks up a bit of steam, Latinos are scoring bigger job gains than most other demographic groups and proving to be a bright spot in the fledgling recovery.

While they make up only 15% of the country's workforce, Latinos have racked up half the employment gains posted since the economy began adding jobs in early 2010, Labor Department data showed. READ MORE