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Yesterday afternoon I asked myself a tough question as follows:

"Who do I personally know who has raised themselves from one social class to another?"

I decided that I could only consider people who I had known personally and interacted with. No one who had inherited money or married to raise their social class would be considered.

I came up with a short list. I was amazed to see a couple of things as follows:

1) Despite all of the grim talk about upward mobility being dead in the United States, all of the people on the list achieved their success in the USA.

2) The majority of the people on the list are women.

Here is my short list as follows:

1) Elena and I: We both came from lower middle class neighborhoods in Houston and Buenos Aires. Thanks to our hard work and Elena's incredible competence and talent in medicine, we are now in the upper middle class.

2) Jobeth Williams: She was born and raised in the same humble neighborhood where I grew up in the east end of Houston. She graduated from the public Jesse Jones High School. She got a scholarship to the Ivy-League Brown University. She started her career in acting as a soap opera (telenovela) star. She later became a serious movie star and a very wealthy lady. To those of you not familiar with her, here is her IMD Bbiography:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001851/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm

3) Maria Antonieta Fuentes: She was born in the small Guatemala town of Esquipulos. Her family was poor and humble. Almost 30 years ago she took her life savings and came to Los Angeles to start her life again. Antonieta became my domestic partner She is tall for a woman from Guatemala (5'8") and a strikingly-beautiful woman. After two days with Antonieta, I discovered that she was also a genius. She arrived in Los Angeles speaking only Spanish. Eleven weeks later she was speaking perfect American English with an Angelino (Los Angeles) accent. In that same eleven weeks she completed a complex computer training course and graduated number two in the class. She learned to drive a car. A few weeks later she had her full California driver's license. She was doing complex navigation problems on L.A. freeways long before GPS and smart phones. She now lives in an upper-middle class neighborhood in Burbank. She has her own incredible career and is married to a successful engineer.

4) Barbara Assadi: She was born to a very middle class family in Utah. Barbara has had an incredible career in advertising including building her own advertising agency "from the ground up" and selling it for a huge profit. Barbara is a very modest and humble lady. She will blush when I describe her as wealthy.

5) Carlos Mendez: He was born to a very poor and humble family in Mexico. He came to the United States and began to work as a technician in the telecommunications industry. Carlos is a man who is constantly working hard and studying to improve his skills. Today he is an engineering manager as the huge biotechnology firm Genentech. Up to 12 people report to him. He has made it to the upper middle class.

Anna Claudia Chagas you have not officially made the list yet. But I know that you will.