La vida Utah: Hispanics are a vibrant part of state's culture
But summer heat has fired Salt Lake City streets into a blistering furnace, and spicy Mexican food is not selling well right now. Maybe 30 customers a day — mostly professionals in suits and construction workers in hard hats — stop by Martinez's taco stand at 200 South and State.
"It's not so good here, maybe $200 a day," Martinez shrugs. And that's on a good day.
Still, Martinez is thinking of deploying three more street-corner taco carts in the city, each costing a cool $8,000. You have to spend money to make money, he notes with entrepreneurial fervor.
The former cook and would-be king of Salt Lake taco vendors is, quite simply, a self-employed businessman living the American dream — a dream far, far removed from his Sonora, Mexico, homeland where jobs are few and despair is pervasive.
"No more Mexico for me," said Martinez, who came to Utah four years ago after first migrating to California. "The people here are good, the money is good. I like it here, and I plan to stay."
Martinez is hardly alone. In fact, he is one of tens of thousands of Hispanics from across the Western Hemisphere — from Cuba to Chile, from Baja to San Antonio — who have poured into Utah in recent years. And the number is burgeoning.
Some estimates place the number of Hispanics — legal and illegal immigrants — in Utah at between 200,000 and 250,000, or about 10 percent of the population. Official 1998 estimates by the U.S. Bureau of the Census place the number at 142,479, or 7 percent of the Utah population.
The estimate of the number of immigrants here illegally ranges from 50,000 to 100,000.
The numbers game
No matter how you look at it, the Census estimates, Latino advocates say, are laughably underrepresentative of the actual number of Hispanics living and working in Utah. They point to huge Hispanic neighborhoods all along the Wasatch Front and growing populations in rural areas, too.
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