Whenever I see Hispanics working in construction, I imagine my grandfather and his men speaking Italian rather than Spanish, doing almost exactly the same thing.<\/p>\n
When my Italian ancestors first came here, they would rent the attic of someone\u2019s house because they couldn\u2019t afford a house of their own. Slowly, they made money, had families, and helped build the United States that we know today. The Irish did the same, as did the Chinese, Japanese, Germans and Scandinavians.<\/p>\n
Before them were the migrations of English, Dutch and French, as well as the swells of African slaves. Thousands of years before them, Native Americans arrived from Asia.<\/p>\n
Our ancestors were all immigrants, most of whom were leaving an impoverished existence hoping to find a better way of life. Politicians have historically gained power and influence by convincing us that \u201cwe\u201d are different and more worthy than \u201cthose others\u201d of different racial, cultural or religious decent.<\/p>\n
We aren\u2019t. We\u2019re all the descendants of immigrants who helped to make the United States what it is. The latest mass migration is of Hispanics from Central and South America who harvest our crops and, like my grandfather, build our houses.<\/p>\n
We need the energy of these immigrants to enhance and enrich the nation that we will become.<\/p>\n
Chuck Romaniello<\/p>\n
Montrose<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Whenever I see Hispanics working in construction, I imagine my grandfather and his men speaking Italian rather than Spanish, doing almost exactly the same thing. When my Italian ancestors first came here, they would rent the attic of someone\u2019s house because they couldn\u2019t afford a house of their own. Slowly, they made money, had families, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5820,5819],"tags":[125],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-101496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-letters-to-the-editor","category-opinion","tag-newsletter-opinion"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101496\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101496"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=101496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}