Valery Pozo still gets angry thinking about it. It was about a decade ago, and the immigrant communities in her hometown, Salt Lake City, were on edge because of recent immigration enforcement raids in the area. Pozo’s mother, an immigrant from Peru, was on the sidelines at her son’s soccer game when another parent asked whether she was “illegal.”
“To me, that was clearly a racist question and a racist assumption,” Pozo recalled. But her mother saw it as a harmless comment, despite Pozo’s best efforts to convince her that it was something bigger. …
A survey conducted by NPR, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that Latinos born in the U.S. — those like Pozo — were nearly twice as likely as immigrant Latinos — those like her mother — to say that someone had used a racial slur against them or had made negative assumptions or comments toward them because of their race or ethnicity. CONT.
Adrian Florido, NPR