Racism and Romeo. Tooele, Utah (Interesting read)

“One man’s history: how race and religion twisted the fates of two 1950s teenage lovebirds

Nearing the autumn of his life, 71-year-old Lee Martinez has been reflecting on his greener years. A story of young love and societal rejection in Tooele in the 1950s continues to gnaw at his soul. Now an aged Catholic Chicano divorcee, Martinez has been thinking about his first love and how, he says, racism played a role in destroying his relationship with a young Mormon girl.

More than just reflecting on the past, Martinez said his story is replaying in the present. He now has three “white” grandsons from his children’s interracial marriages and that phenomena once made him feel as if the world had become more tolerant. Martinez says, though, that the recent public debate and treatment of illegal Latino immigrants in the United States shows that fewer things have changed than he thought.”

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