“It’s just balls-out fun,” Steve Spoonamore, serial entrepreneur, says about the essence of it all, as practiced here in the U.S.

“There are people who love to sail the ocean or climb mountains...More power to them—but it’s nowhere near as interesting as taking a technology nobody has heard of, finding a market for it and launching it to your customers. That’s satisfying,” he adds.

Latino style, American style? Isn’t it one and the same, people?

Why keep brushing them aside, pushing them to the edges, as if they were newcomers, those Latino brothers and sisters, that has been busy building and rebuilding America, not only now in the 21st Century, but before, in the 20th, 19th, and 18th centuries, ever since the beginning of our Republic here in Philadelphia.

Be aware: They are already in the center of the mainstream in this 21st Century "problemático y febril" , and it is for you to find out how they already managed to squeeze in, Tango style.

There are well over 7,000 Latino-owned and operated business in Philadelphia, according to the local Business Journal, and 4.3millions more all over the country, according to the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

All generating thousands of job, billions in sales and millions in profits, and taxes paid to the government, with a total economic output that competes with our great neighbors to the North, Canada, not to speak of our great neighbors to the South, the thriving country of Mexico.

If U.S. Latinos —which has been called “a nation within a nation”— were an independent country, they not only would be more populous than Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Argentina, but, thanks to to the free enterprise we are allowed to practice here in the U.S., we would rank at the very top in economic productivity, competing with the top players south of the border, all the way down to Brazil.

However the so-called legacy media in Philadelphia, as well as across the country —some of it, to be brutally honest, very outdated and blindsided media, — only counts and repeats to exhaustion only one statistic:

The number of “undocumented Latinos," echoing a monothematic President.

“Ilegals,” as the very accurate and "objective" AP used to brand them until not long ago.

Here at AL DÍA we will focus on the overlooked statistic:

How many Latinos, and other Multicultural residents of our city, our State and our great Nation, are breaking their back this morning to meet a payroll, pay taxes to the government, close a new contract, keep a business afloat and thriving?

How many of them are making sure our food is served fresh as we deserve, our clothes are ironed out and clean to wear, our computers function well at the Dell factories because the micro-processors correctly built by Latino Engineers, or brain surgeries were performed successfully again yesterday because a Latino surgeon (former 'Ilegal') did his job well at the prestigious John Hopkins University Hospital down in Baltimore, Maryland.

Or our news, like delicious Tacos, are delivered on time by U.S. Latino Journalists, with some degree of needed cultural sensitivity and factual accuracy, with some secret semantic sauce administered with professionalism (yes, our primary duty here at AL DIA is— pardon the plug:).

This nation, and this great city that led to its foundation 242 years ago, has open the doors to many of us— when they remain shut hard on our faces, in other places of this great American continent.

For that reason we are nothing but sincerely, extremely grateful.

To Philadelphia, to our neighbors and to our friends, here and across the country.

Here we have been given the right to free enterprise, to build a home, to be left alone, and, more importantly, to raise on your own your family. A good American Family, now part of the larger American Family.

As proud American Citizens, we also pay the tributes to the IRS, and have also learned how contribute and give back at the end —all of it back— knowing full well nothing we will take with us when our time is finally up.

Mother America, stern as it may have been, has also been, in the end, very kind and generous to us.

The slapping we went through was just ‘tough love,’ I guess.

Meet in this edition Adriana Alejandre, just a sample of many more to come in these pages, within our new editorial series ALDÍAEntrepreneurs— in the making as we speak, back in our own bakery of new ideas, so to speak. ;)