View Details

Unseasonably warm January weather and tantalizing smells lure downtown workers to this taco truck during lunch hours. DAVID FORD/WFDD

This week, we’ve been hearing personal reflections from all across our community about the new Trump administration for WFDD’s series “The Road Ahead.” Today, in our final installment, we talk to an immigrant business owner in the Triad, whose success is dependent on whether or not he’s welcome here.

On one of those rare, winter days in North Carolina that felt like spring, people were out and about enjoying their lunch breaks. A light breeze carried the tantalizing smells of fresh tacos, luring many of them to an unassuming taco truck.

The owner separates piles of thinly sliced meat and onions to prepare a traditional Mexican meal of carne asada. WFDD is withholding his name because he’s not a legal resident of this country, and he’s concerned about his family and his business’ wellbeing.

The taco truck owner grew up in a medium-sized port city in the eastern coastal state of Veracruz, Mexico. When he thinks back on his childhood there, he recalls the steamy heat, playing soccer in the streets with his four brothers, and the food.

Traditional Mexican tacos al pastor (thinly sliced, marinated pieces of pork) served on small tortillas with sides of cilantro, red and green salsas, and onions. DAVID FORD/WFDD

“When I [was] little, my daddy always carried me to eat tacos, to the place, to the supermarket you know, and go and eat tacos all the time, or ceviche, or shrimp cocktail," he says. “I miss it.”

He came to the U.S. in the late nineties. Initially, he intended to work on a farm for six months and go back home. But he quickly realized he could provide a betterlife for his wife and children here. So, he stayed, winding up in North Carolina, eventually getting a food truck and opening up his own business. His days often begin at 6 a.m. and end well after dark, but he says he made the right choice.

“I think that what you do isn’t work. When you like something, it’s not work. When you don’t like it, it’s work. But if you like it, you can work twenty hours. You wake up and go back to work and there you are. And when you have a dream, you say ‘I came for something better, and that’s what I’m going to do.’”

He realized another dream last year, after putting his eldest daughter through school — the first in his family to receive a college degree.

She’s also a Dreamer – young immigrants who receive a temporary stay from deportation under former President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. But President Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to end the program, and his recent blitz of immigration orders has many in the Latino community worried.“You know it’s something like — you don’t have words [that] can say that, you know?” he says. “When I look in her heart, she got a better life, and she will work, and when she walked and got a diploma and everything I said, ‘Wow,’ you know. I don’t care how much I’ve been working. She’s happy and I’m happy too.”

The taco truck vendor is not among them. He says he’s a man of faith, and he’s hopeful everything will work out for his daughter, and his other two children who are preparing for college. Still, the future is uncertain.

“Well, there will be changes,” he says. “But this is a country of opportunities. And he can say lots of things but will he do them? Who knows? We’ll see and we’ll wait and hope. And it’s a nation like it says on the sign: ‘Under god — one nation under god.'"

But he insists he’s not afraid for himself.

“The only thing that could happen is that he puts fear in the people," he says. "I’m not afraid, you know. It’s okay, you know. If it happens, it happens.”

And he has this message for the new President.

“Let us work!" he says, laughing. "We came to work. The immigrants who come from these countries came to work. And this is a country of immigrants. I believe that all of this is an opportunity. I agree that for those who don’t do things well, they have to go. But for those who come to work, and to make a better life — a better future for the family — we have the right to work."

For this food truck owner, the Triad is home. He says the community has embraced him and his family. Business is doing well. He now owns three trucks with hopes of buying more, and maybe someday even opening up a restaurant of his own.

the road ahead #immigration #donald trump

Economy Human Interest Race Normal Tweet

View Details

6th Sense Health & Wellness Center owner Nike Roach stands in front of his business. He opened the doors there in 1997. DAVID FORD/WFDD

In the latest installment of WFDD's series “The Road Ahead,” we hear froma business owner in Winston-Salem, who doesn’t put a lot of stock in the executive branch, and is watching these next few months closely.

Walk into the 6th Sense Health & Wellness Center in downtown Winston-Salem, and your heart rate slows. The mild, sweet smell of jasmine, soft sounds of wind chimes, and New Age music waft gently through the air.

The owner, Nike Roach, is a first-generation American citizen, the son of African and Caribbean immigrants. He grew up in an area with limited options for young people. He says you either graduated and went to college, joined the military, or wound up in jail. Roach chose the army. He was stationed in Europe, and later saw active duty in the Persian Gulf War.

“Being a combat vet, you kind of get a different perspective about democracy, and the price of having a republic,” he says. “And I think a lot of Americans don’t see that, because they see what’s on television. But they don’t really see how the republic is sustained by what people do overseas.”

Roach served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, where he practiced emergency medicine and prevention. He also studied massage therapy, and when he returned to the states, he made it a fulltime career, opening his business in 1997.

Nike Roach is a licensed massage therapist who got his start in emergency and preventative medicine while serving in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. (Credit: David Ford)

He calls himself a “patriot at heart,” but he’s skeptical of government, and its role in people’s lives. He’s a self-described Independent — he didn’t vote for either of the major party candidates — but he says he’s willing to give Donald Trump a chance, and he’s optimistic about the next four years.

“As a business owner, I do believe that we Americans, and we in Winston-Salem, and Forsyth County, can solve a lot of our own problems, our own challenges, be they health care, or criminal justice, or we’re talking about more people coming to town,” says Roach. “I think we can do that ourselves without having a larger and ever-growing government presence.”

Roach says there was much to admire in former president Obama; who he was as a man, and the ideas he brought to the table. But he’s anxious to see how Donald Trump’sbackground plays out as president.

“One of the very first times you actually have a business man in there — a true, live, ‘This is how I made my money was business,'" says Roach. “Not politics. Not the legal profession. [Someone] who had a successful track [record]... So, I’m optimistic from that standpoint.”

Roach says he’s lessoptimistic about some of Trump’s cabinet picks, and what he perceives to be their lack of experience in some cases. Even there, however, he calls the intense fear he perceives to be building among those who oppose the new president overblown. After all, he says, historically there have been plenty of highly qualified cabinet picks who turned out to be terrible in their new roles.

But he adds the president does set the tone for the country, and that’s one aspect of the new administration that Roach will be keeping a very close eye on during its first 100 days.

“I have three boys, and they are in the statistic of who’s going to go to prison,” he says. “That’s what keeps me up at night. [I’m] saying, this is the foundation of this country, that everybody who has a desire and the means to be able to go down the path that they want to go to — not being impeded by some yahoo who believes that they are a second-class citizen because of where their ancestry comes from.”

Through it all, Roach remains hopeful that the tone set by the new administration will lead to more active community engagement on the part of people who live here.

“I’m willing in the first 100 days to give each person an opportunity to make good on what they promised,” he says. “And then, after that, we’ll say ‘Hmm…this may not have been the best choice.’”

Roach says that regardless of Trump’s first term, one good thing is that Americans have choices. He says after four years, depending on the outcome, we can choose to either vote the president back in, or tell him, ‘Thank you very much for your time. Go back into the private sector.'”

the road ahead #donald trump #immigration

Economy Politics & Government Normal Tweet

View Details

Ty and Robin Parker own a coffee shop, tanning salon and movie rental business in King, North Carolina. Ty says he believes Trump will help grow the economy and help small business owners prosper. Keri Brown/WFDD

This week, we’re hearing from people across the Piedmont to find out their feelings about the new president. In our series "The Road Ahead," WFDD’s Keri Brown went to King, North Carolina, a small city in a county that overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump.

On the main drag that runs through the heart of King, a shopping plaza marquee still displays a Donald Trump campaign sign. This is the home of the coffee shop Java Junction. Ty Parker froths a carafe of milk in one hand, and has a gun on his hip.

A Trump sign displayed in King, North Carolina in Stokes County. Keri Brown/WFDD

Parker was born and raised here. His shop serves more than coffee. Move your way down a short hallway, and the air is thick with the smell of suntan lotion.

“We have a unique situation. We have a tanning salon here. We have ten tanning beds,” says Parker. “We do movies. We still do movie rentals just like they did years ago. We're not a Red Box, we're better. You get to come inside and actually touch the movies and read them and stuff.”

Parker is a lifelong Republican, and this last election was no exception. He voted for Donald Trump.

“What drew me to him is that it seemed like he was different. He was beating all of the odds [and] everybody said he couldn’t do it. He’s not the establishment and I felt like he would be someone who could stir up everything and get the economy moving,” says Parker. “Politicians, it’s stagnated, it’s like they’ve lost the real world of what’s really going on with cities and in small towns like right here.”

Parker is a strong supporter of gun rights. But one of the issues he cares about the most is the economy. That was a major stumping point for President Trump on the campaign trail. He promised to bring back jobs in places hit hard by the loss of manufacturing.

Trump’s message of “Make America Great Again” really resonates with Parker. He remembers a time when things were better.

“I remember the '80s. The '80s were unbelievable and the early '90s were really great. I had another business at one time, a dump truck business. I was brokering 38 to 40 trucks a day and I couldn’t find enough trucks. Everybody was begging for trucks. In 2007, it really changed and you couldn’t give a dump truck away."

Parker adds, "There’s no work out there for anyone and so that’s what I want to see is go back to the building industry and let’s manufacture stuff. Quit having other countries manufacture stuff and let’s do it here. I’d rather pay more, a little extra for a product if it was made in the United States.”

Parker says he’s following the news of Trump’s first days in office, but he doesn’t trust the media. He’s not bothered, for example, by several claims that the Trump’s administration made in his first week in office that have been proven false or not supported by factual evidence. But it’s exactly Trump’s style that Parker finds authentic.

The thing is he just says what he thinks and that’s refreshing. He’s not politically correct every time and he does say some things that are controversial. It’s kind of getting old to watch the media nitpick apart every single word that he speaks and analyze every little word that he’s talking. I think the social media is great because once he posts it out there it is there. They can’t twist it or turn it around. It is what it is. And there’s always going to be that little bit of "I’m not going to come out and tell you 100 percent everything you want to hear or the truth." But at least with him just blurting it out like he does, you know it’s off the cuff, you know it’s not rehearsed. He’s just saying what he feels.

As for all of the recent protests over President Trump and his policies, Parker says he’s saddened by what he calls the chaos.

“It’s still early in the game. He’s been in it for days now and you would have thought ... [with] the media and everything, that he’s been president for a year now already, and let’s hang on. What’s the worst that could happen? Four years from now, we could vote somebody else in. It’s not going to be the end of the world, it’s not going to be the end of the United States. Give the man a chance. Let’s see what he can do,” says Parker.

Whatever happens, Parker says he and his wife Robin are focusing on their small business. They have work to do. There are tanning beds to clean, new movie releases to stock on the shelves, and a customer is heading toward the coffee counter.

*Follow WFDD’s Keri Brown on Twitter @kerib_news

the road ahead #donald trump #president #city of king north carolina #trump supporters #republican #gop

Politics & Government Normal Tweet

View Details

Bennett College junior Azuree Bateman says her new favorite saying is "educate, motivate, organize." (Sean Bueter/WFDD)

Today we present the first story in our new series, "The Road Ahead," in which we bring you the voices of real people from across the political spectrum. It's your neighbors, sharing their hopes and fears about the new Trump administration.

A few weeks ago, the Women's March in Greensboro and around the country suggested there's a growing resistance against the policies of President Donald Trump, and Bennett College junior Azuree Bateman is part of that resistance.

Bateman is a hard-working student, a journalist, and an activist. Plus, she loves movies, especially those based on books.

"So like, Their Eyes Were Watching God, To Kill a Mockingbird... But my all time favorite would have to be Back to the Future," she says.

Bateman doesn’t just seek out drama on the big screen. She’s also found it in politics as both a reporter and organizer with a passion for social justice issues. That work has become more urgent for her since Donald Trump won the presidency.

“Election night was just…it was a roller coaster of emotions," she says.

2016 was the first time Bateman had a chance to vote in a presidential election. She had admired Barack Obama, and she especially did not like Donald Trump. As it became clear that Trump would win the Electoral College, she was overcome for a moment.

"I really just sat there and was crying. [I] shed a few tears, looked at everybody around me and was like, 'all right, is everybody ready for tomorrow?'”

Since then, Bateman says she’s been preparing herself and her friends for what she believes will be a difficult time for America, and particularly people who are already marginalized. So far, she says, the constant drumbeat of big news out of Washington has been concerning.

"The political climate is a scary one," she says. "You could wake up one morning and everything that you kind of know can be totally different than what you were expecting."

She says it’s not just the issues themselves, but the speed at which the administration is moving with some of its most controversial campaign promises, including the president’s recent immigration ban.

"I have family members and close friends that are Muslim, so for me that kind of hit close to home, and I'm like, 'no that's not OK,'" she says.

Bateman is worried about where the United States might be headed as a country, but at every turn, she also speaks with determination.

"A year from now, I think things might be worse. It seems like [Trump] has a very, very straight path that he's sticking to," she says. "And so the more and more he's putting out these executive orders, the people are going to resist."

Despite all of her concerns about what's to come, that theme of resistance and community involvement are the core of where Azuree Bateman finds hope. And though she seems certain that life under the Trump administration will be more difficult, she also points out that difficult times create the conditions for change.

"This could also be a great time for people to come and really see what's happening and giving people the opportunity to find new skills and capabilities that they have to help people," she says.

In fact, she says she’s already seeing friends becoming more involved and more interested in political causes, even people who never showed interest in government before.

For Bateman, that’s heartening. It's the first step in what she says is her new favorite slogan: “educate, motivate, organize.”

Story does not include AP content

the road ahead #bennett college #greensboro #politics #donald trump

Politics & Government Normal Tweet