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Letter: As mass deportations loom, check your assumptions about immigrants

Where are you from? Every now and then people ask me this question, and it always makes me wonder why they are asking. Is it because they are just curious about me as a person? Or, is it because of my skin color?

I am a Latino who has lived in Utah since 1950. My family moved here from Taos, New Mexico. At that time the federal government was recruiting workers in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico to come work at the Tooele Ordnance Depot (TOD). They needed veterans like my father and uncles who could handle the equipment and munitions being stored there.

A town named Tod Park was created five miles south of Tooele to accommodate all of us newcomers. When it closed down, some of us moved to Salt Lake City, Tooele, Grantsville, Price, Layton and Clearfield, while others went back to Colorado or New Mexico.

Those of us who stayed in Utah did assimilate. The young men in our families continued to enlist in the Armed Forces. For the most part, we did well in Utah. However, one fact is indisputable, we cannot deny we are Latinos.

As a school administrator in the Granite School District, now and then, I was asked if I was a school janitor even though I was wearing a dress shirt and tie. I would have to patiently explain to the student or parent who asked that I was an assistant principal. I believed they asked this because people do make assumptions based on a person’s skin color.

Hopefully, now that a major deportation movement is about to take place in this country, our citizens will realize that not all Latinos are illegal immigrants.

Luciano S. Martinez, Murray

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