By Becky Kramer, Washington State Magazine
Ruben Lemos and his wife knocked on the door of an apartment building with a “for rent” sign when they were looking for a place in Pasco. The landlady turned the young couple away.
“She said, ‘I don’t rent to Hispanics. They are all drunks and drug dealers,’” said Lemos, recalling the incident from the late 1960s.
Her response didn’t sit well with Lemos, a Vietnam veteran, educator, and community volunteer who grew up in a migrant farmworker family from Texas. He filed a complaint with the city of Pasco, but says it was never resolved.
Lemos’s story is part of a collection of Latino oral histories gathered by Washington State University Tri-Cities history faculty Robert Bauman and Robert Franklin. Latino settlement in the Tri-Cities is a part of Northwest history that hasn’t been well recorded, Bauman says. The stories…
