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  1. #1
    Senior Member Virginiamama's Avatar
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    From the barrio to the courtroom

    http://manassasjm.com/servlet/Satellite ... path=!news

    From the barrio to the courtroom

    By DANIEL GILBERT
    dgilbert@potomacnews.com
    Sunday, June 4, 2006


    If he were ever to write the story of his life, it would begin on an early summer morning in Arizona, waking to the sound of his grandmother's voice.

    "Mi hijito, mi hijito, levántate ... que ya es tiempo para trabajar." (My son, my son, get up, for it's time to go work).

    Then Manuel Velasquez, a sleepy-eyed 8-year-old, would run out to the pick-up truck, grabbing a jar of oatmeal on his way out, to work in the fields with his brothers.

    Technically, Manuel Velasquez is not an immigrant.

    Born in Phoenix, Ariz., he was another Latino kid from the barrio in the 1930s, whose parents and grandparents lived in cultural isolation from the English-speaking world.

    But his citizenship notwithstanding, the life of Manuel Velasquez - or Manny, as he prefers to be called - is the story of a migrant.

    His physical appearance tells part of that story, the skin burnt leathery by the Arizona sun; the hands, cracked and calloused, that picked cotton and cauliflower as a child, cradled footballs as an athlete and bore arms in a foreign war.

    It is a story that begins in Spanish, crackles into English, trips through Korea, and eventually lands in the courtrooms of Manassas.

    The journey began, in a small way, when Velasquez crossed a railroad track on his way to seventh grade.

    Leaving the barrio

    The Velasquez family lived in the barrio south of central Phoenix, an exclusively Hispanic community, where only Spanish was spoken and Mexican food served. No surprise, Velasquez says, for a region that once belonged to Mexico. Following the Mexican-American War, the United States paid Mexico $10 million in 1853 for the region that now makes up southern Arizona and New Mexico. Velasquez' parents and grandparents came from two mining towns in Arizona's southeast corner, Clifton and Metcalf.

    In 1930s Phoenix, a railroad demarcated the northern limit of the barrio, dividing the city's Hispanic and English populations. On the barrio side was Lowell Elementary School, where Latinos went after finishing the sixth grade. On the north side of the tracks lay Adams, an imposing brick structure with white, ionic columns, where Anglo students went to school.

    "Like a temple," it seemed to Velasquez, he said.

    "If I went to Lowell, I knew I'd be fighting with all the guys from the barrio," Velasquez recalls. "Adams was one block closer to my house, that was my argument."

    But when he entered the side doors of Adams, climbed the stairs to the second floor and found his way to the seventh grade classroom, Velasquez innocently set the rest of his life in motion.

    "I can't remember feeling uncomfortable, other than my buddies were not going there," he says. "I knew I was different. The thing that helped me acclimate was that I played football."

    His athletic prowess won the short, powerfully built Velasquez acceptance throughout his education, in high school and later in college.

    As he learned English, became a Boy Scout and attended his first social dance, Velasquez felt both the pull of a new culture and the tug of the one he came from.

    Velasquez's decision to cross the culture barrier was not easy for his family to accept. In one of the most searing images of his childhood, Velasquez recalls when, at his graduation from Adams, he spotted his sister and grandmother in the otherwise Anglo crowd of parents.

    "I could see the shame written on her face," he says of his grandmother. "I felt a guilty feeling - I was ashamed."


    Searching for home

    Velasquez left Arizona definitively in 1948 while a student at Arizona State University on a football scholarship. He joined the Army to fight in the Korean war. Completing a six-year tour and earning the rank of first lieutenant, Velasquez returned to his hometown in 1958, the last time he would do so.

    He had married an Anglo woman he met in the military, and they had a young son. His father had become an alcoholic; his grandparents were struggling financially. Velasquez' longtime mentor, Dr. Trevor Brown, chairman of the Phoenix Union school board, told him to leave. "You don't belong here anymore, go back east," Velasquez recalls.

    That same year, Velasquez moved his family to Falls Church, where he worked for Arizona Sen. Carl Hayden by day and studied law at American University by night.

    In 1965, Velasquez passed the bar becoming, he believes, the only Hispanic attorney in Virginia at the time. "Prejudice could not touch me after I'd passed the bar," he says.

    In 1969, Velasquez and his family moved south to Manassas, an area he recognized at the time as "less socially progressive than Falls Church," to open his law practice on Center Street.

    On the crest of a wave

    Velasquez, now 78, has a unique perspective on the wave of Hispanic immigration that has reached Manassas in recent years.

    "I can relate to these people because I have worked the fields," he said. "When I see day laborers, I visualize the cold mornings that we stood out by the bonfires waiting for the truck to pick us up. I remember the sun burning us, our backs aching."

    Yet as an attorney, Velasquez often defends Hispanics he feels little sympathy for, including gang members and illegal immigrants.

    "You're hurting the reputation of Hispanics," he tells them. And while he shares a cultural bond with many immigrants, their barriers to entering society are essentially different from the ones he himself faced.

    "The biggest challenge for Hispanics to overcome today is being illegal. I never had to face the fear of being arrested because I wasn't here legally. A lot of Hispanics are afraid to go to their kid's PTA meeting."

    And while Velasquez has dedicated himself to helping people in trouble, he is starting to cut back. Now he works just three days out of the week and plans to retire completely within the year.

    The idea of retirement has been difficult for Velasquez to accept. "I've always worked," he says, and thinks back to the summer mornings, the pick-up truck and his grandmother's voice.
    Equal rights for all, special privileges for none. Thomas Jefferson

  2. #2
    Senior Member curiouspat's Avatar
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    Hi V-mama,

    Yet as an attorney, Velasquez often defends Hispanics he feels little sympathy for, including gang members and illegal immigrants.

    "You're hurting the reputation of Hispanics," he tells them. And while he shares a cultural bond with many immigrants, their barriers to entering society are essentially different from the ones he himself faced.
    They sure are hurting the reputation of Hispanics. My Cuban-American and Central and South American Hispanic friends (all here legally) HATE the illegal aliens. This situation makes them afraid for their families.

    "The biggest challenge for Hispanics to overcome today is being illegal. I never had to face the fear of being arrested because I wasn't here legally. A lot of Hispanics are afraid to go to their kid's PTA meeting."
    I have an easy solution: they should go home to wherever they came from, ILLEGALLY!
    TIME'S UP!
    **********
    Why should <u>only</u> AMERICAN CITIZENS and LEGAL immigrants, have to obey the law?!

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