Who gets a warm welcome?

In late 2007, I began a chapter of my life that few of my white countrymen ever experience: I lived as an ethnic minority in a community within the United States.

Nogales, Arizona, is a border town of 20,000 inhabitants and about 95 percent are of Mexican descent. The Nogales International offered me a reporting job and I jumped at the chance to live in the desert Southwest, right next door to Mexico.

Although I was keenly aware of being Anglo and being different, I never once experienced any discrimination during my three years in Nogales. Speaking Spanish helped me bridge the differences. Most people were warm and welcoming, and the only time I felt any hostility had to do with something I wrote for the newspaper, not my race.

Contrast that reception with the cold shoulder that Latinos sometimes feel when they move into an insulated white community, such as Central Oregon. I grew up in such a community, near Tacoma, Washington, in the 1950s. Fortunately, my parents never made rude comments about people of color, and as I grew up, I found friends of many different backgrounds.

I raised my daughter in the Sonoma County, California wine country where Anglos and Latinos get along with each other and kids can learn Spanish in elementary school. In Southern Arizona, with its large Latino and smaller black and Native populations, I found a similar comfort level among people of different groups. How can we get to this level of tolerance in Deschutes County?

White residents who react with fear when immigrants and people of color move into their community mistrust the newcomers only because they have never talked with each other about the things they have in common. Others extend their hand in friendship to their new neighbors.

In September, Central Oregonians who want to bridge this divide are organizing Bend’s third annual Welcoming Week to help bring citizens and immigrants together. Stay tuned for the 2019 events.