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.
