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keep practicing social distancing. What we do not need, Greg Abbott, is for businesses to reopen too soon. Last week, the governor announced a strategy to open Texas back up incrementally. Despite closing schools for the 2019-20 year, he said that state parks would reopen, hospitals would be able to perform some non-elective surgeries, and that retailers would be allowed to deliver items or offer them for pickup.

If this week goes well, Abbott said, he intends to use Monday, April 27, as the day to announce the reopening of Texas bars, bar/restaurants, and theaters with social distancing in place, which may mean they open at half-capacity and with employees in facemasks.

“If I am honest,” recently wrote Megan Henderson, director of events and communications for the urban development nonprofit Near Southside, Inc., “we are not hearing anything about our businesses being able to change anything by Friday. The governor’s new policy really doesn’t favor small business, as most of our small guys have been already conducting business via online sales (if possible for them, as not everyone can showcase their entire inventory online) and simply delivering orders or sending them via mail. Friday does not really signal a change for our community. That’s what our small businesses are reporting.”

Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price is not bullish on reopening anytime soon either. In a TV interview recently, she did not acknowledge Abbott’s plan, instead deciding to stick to the national guidelines set forth by the current presidential administration. One of them, a big one, includes a downward trajectory of new cases for 14 days before reopening can even be entertained.

“We know that we can meet the hospital responses, but we’re not meeting the 14 days of declining just yet,” Price said.

One way to tell if a local politician has done something right is by listening to the chorus of naysayers on the right. Most Texas conservatives were not pleased with Abbott’s executive orders. One right-winger called them “a plan to reopen an economy that should have never been closed to begin with, politicians coming up with solutions for problems they created.”

We, however, are glad that Abbott understands that COVID-19 is not the flu and that we have no vaccine for it or builtup immunity to it. Like most people who aren’t brainwashed by one certain “news” channel, he understands.

Most Americans don’t want to reopen now anyway. Nearly 60 percent of us are concerned that loosening restrictions too soon will result in a spike in COVID-19 cases and deaths, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Thirty-two percent are worried the restrictions will stay in place for too long while 3 percent are worried about both scenarios. You can count me among this last group, though “too long,” to me, means “a month after the curve has begun to dip down.”

The other day I walked into an essential business, and on the way in to purchase an essential 750-ml. bottle of Kraken and an essential 12-pack of Bud Light, I ran into a good buddy of mine. After bumping elbows, we chatted for a bit. I felt a little ridiculous in my homemade facemask as he stood there talking with a visible, wideopen mouth and nose like normal. I also thought maybe he was judging me a little, like maybe I wasn’t manly enough to go buy essentials without caving into the alleged fear-mongering going on (according to that one certain “news” channel). I’m still glad I wore it.

I don’t know about you, but I caught the flu a couple of years ago. I wouldn’t wish it on the worst Trump family member. (Note: That would be Donald J.) Coughing nonstop, running a high temperature, and not being able to sleep because I was constantly trying to cough up the phlegm stuck in my throat, I was capital-M Miserable. As I waltzed into that essential business the other day, paid for my delicious essentials, and waltzed back out, I kept thinking of those days when I couldn’t clear my throat and couldn’t sleep. I don’t care how dorky I look or may be, I’m not going anywhere anymore without a facemask now. You shouldn’t either.

My social media feed has been full of friends and “friends” claiming they now have no plans on eating at Ruth’s Chris anytime soon, which is kind of like saying you’re giving up launching yourself into the sun every day. I appreciate the sentiment and feel it myself. I only hope the employees are feeling the same way. I only hope that worker bees all over the country are feeling this way, because there needs to be a reckoning for the ineptitude and ignorance that doomed us. What I’m hoping for, basically, is a $100,000 Ruth’s Chris gift card. Solidarity among worker bees is a dream as long as racism not only exists but is fueled by the devils passing themselves off as leaders today. As The Atlantic says, “Poor Americans don’t uniformly support greater government intervention on behalf of workers, and it’s not clear whether the pandemic is going to shift those hardened political fault lines. In the past few decades, many low-income whites have become allied with other whites, not with other poor people.”

The closures are coming. Make no mistake about that. Small operations all over the world are going to shut their doors for good. Maybe even us. I’m as desperate as anyone else to reignite the economy yesterday. I’m still not going to risk my life or the health of my family for it. As a formerly low-income white guy and his hard-rock band once sang, “Need a little patience. Yeeeeeeah, yeah.”

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Hugo Ceja Connects

Not only is he trying to heal the racial divide, but the Trimble Tech senior wants robots in every house.

BY KEN WHEATCROFTPARDUE

In the corner of Dos Amigos, a six-table taqueria located in the heart of the Polytechnic Heights neighborhood, the TV is blaring Univision, but that sound is mostly drowned out by the clattering of pots, pans, and dishes, plus a steady stream of to-go orders this Saturday night before the coronavirus turned our world upside down. Inside, the walls are burnt orange, but the air is filled with the savory aromas of [frijoles], pollo, carne, arroz rojo, tripas, puerco, and other mouth-watering delights.

I’m at a table in the back, visiting with the owner’s son, Hugo Ceja, a senior at Trimble Tech High School. This March, he was ranked third in a class of more than 400 students. His GPA is 4.45. His teachers, principal, and counselors all sing the praises of this mature, well-spoken young man. He’s been a student leader, founding C.O.N.N.E.C.T., a club dealing with racism, and has been asked to speak at a national LatinX Conference in Houston. He was one of 93,000 who applied

nationally for a Coca-Cola Scholarship, but now he is one of 251 finalists, the only student in the Fort Worth school district to be so named.

But Hugo is no son of affluent parents who could afford to send him to private schools and lavish him with tutors galore. He is a product of Fort Worth ISD. His parents are Mexican immigrants and small business owners. Truly from humble origins, he’s had to work hard to reach his goals. In fact, his life could have turned out very differently. And he can point at the exact moment when that occurred.

In the summer of his freshman year, he enrolled in a program in Carbondale, Colorado, called HS2 (High School Squared), which, as its website explains, is “a rigorous STEM-based summer enrichment program … [for] underserved communities.” At the time, Hugo says, he was displaying “an unhealthy level of selfesteem.”

He was “very cocky,” he admits, shaking his head. “I did not listen.”

He was so overconfident, in fact, he ended up being drummed out of the program for not following instructions, but the very worst part was when he had to explain to his parents how he had failed. The shame of that moment led him to reflect on what he had done and adjust his attitude.

Hugo and his fellow C.O.N.N.E.C.T. Club members recently discussed racial slurs at Daggett Montessori Middle School. Courtesy of Hugo Ceja

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Hugo’s father, Dos Amigos’ owner for the past 20 years, finally gets a chance to come out to greet me. Built like a boxer, he seems a man with boundless energy.

“Is he telling you the truth?” Ceja jokes, pointing at his son, who shares his first name. We laugh.

Ceja wants to know if I want something to eat. Of course, I tell him. I’m at a Fort Worth taqueria. I’ve got to eat something. It’s mandatory.

After his father goes back to the kitchen, Hugo reveals that his change in attitude led him to become more socially conscious. Returning to Trimble Tech his sophomore year, he noticed lots of racial tension. At a campus with students from all over the world, people regularly made fun of others of different ethnic origins, he says, and during lunch, most students self-segregated, only hanging with their own kind. Hugo decided to start the C.O.N.N.E.C.T. Club to tackle racism head-on, to show that all students, regardless of where they came from, had more in common with one another than not.

Another of Hugo’s main motivations for forming C.O.N.N.E.C.T. was his father’s experience when he first came to America. While working as a dishwasher at a restaurant, Ceja shared with the owner his big dream of one day opening his own place. With a few gruff words, his boss totally annihilated him. Forget about it, the man scoffed. You’re “a wetback.”

Words, Hugo says calmly, fighting back emotion, “have meaning.”

Importantly, Hugo wanted to include in his club Trimble Tech students who also participated in Success High School, a program for over-aged and under-credited students to prepare them for graduation and college or the workforce. Many Success students are new immigrants who have had to deal with racism daily, much as Hugo’s father had to when he arrived.

At first, C.O.N.N.E.C.T. worked hard to improve racial tensions at Trimble Tech and Success, but the club also went to elementary and middle schools to discuss the scourge of racism. At the elementary level, they talked about kindness and respect. For middle schoolers, they tackled a more difficult topic: Was it right to use the N-word or other inappropriate racial epithets?

Crystal Mercer, the group’s faculty sponsor, says in an email that Hugo was “able to connect with second-grade students.” In fact, she found it “inspiring to see him connect with people of all ages.”

For Hugo’s part, he was surprised at

Courtesy of Hugo Ceja

Hugo and his cousin worked on their grandmother’s grave site in El Cortijo, Guadalajara, Mexico.

how attentive the middle schoolers were. Later he was told that C.O.N.N.E.C.T.’s presentation had produced a lot of discussions among the students, which made him feel good.

“We’re just a little older than them,” Hugo says. “They could relate [to us] in a way.”

When I ask if his group had made a difference at Trimble Tech, Hugo at first says it’s hard to know, but he adds that he thinks there’s been an improvement at lunch. It’s not quite as self-segregated as it had been his sophomore year. But that’s not the only club Hugo is involved in. As a self-described avid reader, Hugo began devouring what he could about climate change, including predictions of its severity by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Because of that wake-up call, Hugo reinvigorated Trimble Tech’s Green Earth Club. As described by Cynthia Jankowski, the club’s sponsor, “Hugo comes along and reforms the club and

Courtesy of Hugo Ceja

builds the highest membership we have had through his passion and enthusiasm for the environment.”

The club meets every Monday, discussing such topics as food waste, greenhouse gas emissions, and the climate crisis, but the organization is not just a place for soapbox discussions of these terribly important issues. The students have also acted. The club has reintroduced recycling at Trimble Tech, picking up recycling bins every Tuesday. The club has also participated in several trash cleanups in the community and raised money for Australia after its devastating wildfires.

While Hugo has led clubs featuring two of the weightiest issues of the day, being a social justice warrior is not all there is to him by a longshot. He describes himself as a budding entrepreneur, identifying Tesla founder Elon Musk and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban as his personal heroes.

Taking no backseat to them, a list of Hugo’s entrepreneurial endeavors is enough to make your head spin. Some years back, he came up with the idea of making and selling arroz con leche (rice pudding). Every night, he would whip up a batch and put it in cups. The next day, he’d schlep them to school in a cooler and sell them, but that’s not all. When he came home, he hawked them door-to-door throughout his neighborhood, facing the problem since time immemorial of doors being slammed in his face. But with his neighborhood being mostly Hispanic, his perseverance paid off, and many neighbors began to look forward to buying their desserts from Hugo.

During his junior year, he was also part of a team selling fuzzy socks, a project for his entrepreneurial class. One person in his group quit, Hugo says, because she thought their goal of selling 500 fuzzy socks was totally unrealistic, but with a lot of hustle, Hugo and his friend proved her wrong.

Currently, he has a startup cellphone repair business, replacing screens and doing other minor repairs. Over the past two and a half years, his work has grown by word of mouth, passing out business cards, and with the help of Snapchat. Normally, he fixes two to three phones a week, he says. Understand that he does that at the same time he is burdened with tons of homework, participates in two clubs, and works regularly at his dad’s taqueria.

But Hugo’s get-up-and-go is nothing new. It’s been part of his makeup for years. Since he was 8 years old, he has worked at his dad’s restaurant. At first, his father didn’t make him do the most “gruesome” work, as Hugo describes it, but over the years, he’s done a little bit of everything: bused tables, performed minor maintenance, worked the register, cooked, washed dishes.

After sending his parents on a dream vacation with money he earned, Hugo ran his dad’s taqueria, Dos Amigos.

Courtesy of Hugo Ceja

From his father, Hugo has learned more than how to run a restaurant. He’s learned lessons in life. One of his dad’s most important lessons was to never put down manual labor, like sweeping floors. Besides that dose of humility, Hugo has learned the hard way to get the orders right. When he got them wrong, his dad punished him by making him do his least favorite job: washing dishes.

Hugo’s work ethic was also honed by summers in El Cortijo, Guadalajara, a small village that is his family’s ancestral home. There he didn’t spend long, lazy summers working on his tan at some all-inclusive resort. He spent one summer working on a raised-cement masonry burial plot for his grandmother. In Mexico, he explains, burials are different from here. You have to buy the plot, but the families are responsible for constructing the grave site. It was hard work under the unrelenting Mexican sol with many hours of mixing cement and digging holes. Undaunted, the next summer he again worked with cement, this time making an irrigation canal. But Hugo being Hugo, long days digging in the heat wasn’t enough. He also had a side-business, going door-to-door installing older video games on televisions. He counts himself lucky to have had those formative experiences.

Like many of his generation, he lights up when talking about programming, robotics, and AI. Last year, he designed a gripper for his robotics team by downloading free software for designing robotic parts. In the end, the team didn’t use that particular part, but the process taught him a lot, he says.

“I grew fascinated by the various ways I could assemble and disassemble parts,” he says. “Through trial and error … I

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