Immigrant: I came looking for a good job

Editor’s note: Today we wrap up a series of stories dealing with Fremont’s illegal immigration ordinance and issues as we near the one-year anniversary of the city council’s vote on a proposed law.

At 31, Armondo Martinez is looking forward to the American dream.

An immigrant from Mexico who became a United States citizen two years ago, Martinez said next year he wants to take the next step.

“I’m planning to buy a house,” he said, adding he currently is renting an apartment.

“I think it’s a good idea,” he said. “It’s money that you’re putting into something. You’re investing money. When you buy a house, you know, you have something there. If you sell it in 15 or 20 years, you know you’ll get something back.”

Martinez has worked at Hormel Foods Corp. in Fremont for

11 years after coming to the United States in 1994.

“Things in Mexico are kind of bad. I came to the U.S. looking for work,” he said. “I thought I would find a good job and better pay.”

It took some time, but said he finally landed a job at Hormel, where he has been working his way up from one job to a better job to his current job as forklift driver. But he said he’s still moving up, taking community college course work so that he can move into a position in the plant’s maintenance department.

But learning is something he’s been doing since he crossed the border.

“When I came here my English was bad, not even a word,” he said. “When I first started working here, I worked with two guys who didn’t speak a word of Spanish. I wanted to learn. I started picking up words. When I came home after work, I was always looking up words in the dictionary. Now, I do a little bit better.”

After living in Fremont for

14 years, Martinez said he’s never seen anything like the group of people trying to get a proposed ordinance that would ban the harboring and hiring of and renting to illegal immigrants to a vote in a special election.

“I think that these people are just being selfish,” he said. “We came here looking for a better life. Now that we are here, this is our country too. There are millions and millions of immigrants here. I don’t understand these people.”

When the group was circulating an initiative petition to get the proposed ordinance on the ballot, Martinez said it made him angry at first.

One day a few months ago when Martinez went to the post office in Fremont, he saw two men manning a table to get signatures for the petition.

“I went to look at the forms,” he said. “I didn’t say nothing. When I was looking at that, there was another guy who asked me what I think. I said I didn’t care. He said I’d better care. He said, ‘They want to get you guys out of here.’ He was a contractor and said all his employees were Hispanic. That made me feel sad. We didn’t come here to do bad stuff.”

Marisol Fernandez said she sees the immigration issue in the United States and in Fremont differently.

The 18-year-old recent Fremont High School graduate said she doesn’t understand why some local residents are prejudiced against immigrants.

“It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Immigration is part of the history of the United States. Our ancestors came from different parts of the world.”

Fernandez was born in California after her parents immigrated from Mexico.

“Maybe you and I don’t consider ourselves immigrants because we were born here, but we all have ancestors who weren’t born here,” she said.

She said it seems to her that the proposed ordinance specifically targets Hispanics for one reason.

“If you look at the population of Fremont, most of the immigrants here are from South America or from Central America or from Mexico,” she said. “I have family in Mexico. I consider myself a Latino. But we’re all part of the Fremont community.”

Enrolled now at the University of Nebraska at Omaha with plans to become an optometrist, Fernandez said she understands that people have different opinions.

“I see things from a different perspective than other people may,” she said. “I think there are many people in Fremont who are really respectful. I’ve been treated equally. Because of where I work, I meet lots of different people of different ages.

“I just listen. In a way though, it does make me angry.”