Braiding the strands of cultures: The path to assimilation is a difficult one for immigrants

SALT LAKE CITY — Antonio Tinti, an American by choice, not chance, sits behind the desk of the trucker-training school he owns while his son Anthony and brother Henry go in and out with paperwork that needs attention.

He wasn't always able to work so openly. When he came to the United States on a temporary visa with his wife, Elizabeth, in 1984, at age 22, he was a college student running not from poverty, but from repression. Guatemala's communist, military government frowned on personal choice and education. He craved both.

When their visas expired, they stayed anyway.

Tinti's longing for the freedom he saw in America was so strong he was willing to endure menial jobs, bad neighborhoods and the skittishness that is just life when you know you can be deported at any time. His goal, he says, "was to participate and be part of the history of this country."

They decided his wife wouldn't work — one less chance they'd be found out. Over the coming years, he would clean toilets and floors, graduate to manicuring yards, then learn to drive big trucks as he saved enough to move his family from a rough California neighborhood to a series of increasingly better ones.

They kept a low profile until 1986, the year the Tintis took the American government up on its offer of a clean slate, claiming the amnesty offered by Ronald Reagan. Eventually, they became naturalized Americans and brought his mom over. He had converted to the Mormon church back in Guatemala when he was 15. Eventually, that tie would draw him to Utah and the life he now embraces as a business owner, husband, dad and contributing member of his community.

His four children — Stuart, Anthony, Elizabeth and Jessie — were born here, and are all attending college. His siblings and their families live nearby.

What the Tintis didn't expect was how difficult it would be for a very long time as they tried to mesh their native culture with that of their new home. "I thought it was going to be easy. It never was," he says.

Some call it assimilation. Lorena Riffo-Jenson, a naturalized citizen who came to the United States for political asylum from Chile with her parents when she was 14, prefers "acculturation."

"We love this country, and we are proud of it, but we are also proud of our roots," she said.

Adopting a new land, Tinti and Riffo-Jenson agree, is about finding a way to braid the strands of who you were and who you now are to make a strong life.