Lucia Guzman was returning from Texas when she got an earful. The travelers at the airport snack bar were comparing Mexican immigrants to moles and rabbits, and talking about building a rabbit-proof fence along the border. They were ridiculing people – people like her.
“I don’t think it was deliberate,” said Denver’s director of human rights and community relations. “I got the impression that they either were insensitive or they didn’t understand that I, too, was one of those Hispanics.”
Don Mares, former city auditor and an attorney with Fleishman & Shapiro, hasn’t experienced the insults personally, but he has seen people like him demeaned more and more openly now.
“This debate over illegal immigration – which has valid discussion points,” he said, “has had the effect of bringing out the worst in some people.”
The Pew Hispanic Center last week reported that 54 percent of Latinos have seen an increase in discrimination as the debate over immigration has intensified.
For Guzman and Mares, it’s like a recurring nightmare.
“There was so much discrimination against Hispanics in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s,” Guzman said. “It always pained me to see the way my father was treated.”
Guzman’s father crossed the border with his mother as a young child. He was a migrant farmworker for many years and later worked on the railroad. He became a legal resident of the U.S. but never was a naturalized citizen.
“This man became an elder in the community where we lived in Katy, Texas, and still, when he had a serious bout with diabetes and needed to stop often to go to the bathroom, people wouldn’t allow him in their businesses,” she said.
Mares’ parents came from families with deep roots in New Mexico.
“My mom came to Colorado as a younger person and learned English from the get-go,” he said, but his father, who grew up on a ranch in Wagon Mound, N.M., arrived as a teenager and spoke no English.
Later, when Mares was a child and the family moved from north Denver to the city’s west side, “my Dad was told by one of the parish priests to go back to where he came from.
“That was a very difficult time,” he said, but his mother, “a 5-foot-tall firecracker,” would not be intimidated.
One time, a Mexican-American was denied a job as postmaster in Milliken, even though he was the only applicant. “Mom and company – she was the only woman in the group – went to the Brown Palace Hotel to protest this obviously racist decision when the vice president came to town,” Mares said.
“It was overturned.”
As the debate over illegal immigration gets ugly in Colorado, Guzman and Mares stand as totems in a historic struggle for equality. Many like them who thought this country had grown beyond discrimination based on surnames, skin color or the accented English of their parents find themselves facing the same old bigotry they felt in the 1950s.
“In my 60 years, this is one of the most painful eras,” Guzman said.
Rumors of traffic stops to screen illegal immigrants have raced through the community, she said, and with every proposal to crack down on those here illegally, anxiety grows among people of the same color who speak the same language – and are citizens.
“Fear is huge,” she said. “It’s a very difficult time to be Hispanic.”
While Guzman and Mares criticized those who foster ethnic tension and hostility, both said the immigration issue must not be ignored.
“We need to address this issue on the federal level,” said Mares, who confessed that he didn’t envy legislators trying to craft effective state solutions during the recent special session.
For her part, Guzman said that if she were in the legislature, “I’d try to approach this issue from the point of view of preserving human dignity. Maybe I’d urge our country to work with Mexico to improve conditions there. I’d like to talk about positive solutions.
“But I’m afraid people would just laugh at me. That’s the way it is now.”
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-820-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
