My Taxi Driver Spoke Swahili: American Dreams and Las Vegas Nightmares; One Geographer’s Reflections on Las Vegas and the 2009 Annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers

My taxi driver spoke Swahili. Samuel is a trained electrician who had been working in construction until the economic downturn. He’d struggled to get his Kenyan certificates accepted in the union hall and had been doing all right, even at only sixty-five percent of what his years of experience would net an American worker. His wife works as a nurse in a hospital. Two sons are at University of Las Vegas, and his daughter is in high school. Now he drives a taxi. This is the American dream for Samuel and for other construction workers, despite the economic downturn.