Lawyer proud to be a Utahn — and to help fight for Hispanics
It could have started about the time Martinez, a 1st Cavalry foot soldier, was sitting on a rock in Cambodia reading a copy of U.S. News and World Report. "There was Nixon saying we weren't in Cambodia," Martinez recalls with a sardonic laugh.
Now a prominent Utah attorney, Martinez has proven to be the proverbial thorn in the side of the white establishment, particularly as it relates to discrimination and injustices toward Hispanic peoples. "For 99 percent of my clientele, Spanish is their first language," he said.
Unlike most Hispanics who now call Utah home, Martinez was born and raised here. His parents had migrated from New Mexico where his family roots stretch back 330 years. Like thousands of other Hispanics, his father came to work the Bingham copper mine in the years following World War II.
His parents settled in southwest Salt Lake County, raised a family and became a respected part of the diverse working-class communities that defined the mining towns of Bingham and Lark.
"I was as much a Utahn as you can get," Martinez said. "I spoke English, I went to school, I went to college. It was my last name that identified me as as a foreign element, that and the fact I worshipped at a different church (than most Utahns growing up in the 1960s)."
A draftee at age 19, Martinez pulled a two-year hitch in Vietnam from 1969 to 1971.
With the help of a grant from the Ford Foundation, Martinez then found himself attending the University of Utah, the first in his family to pursue a college degree. He was also part of cadre of young Hispanics attending the U. who would go on to be the vanguard for Latinos who would follow their footsteps. Leaders like Andy Valdez, Solomon Chaco and Pete Suazo.
"There weren't very many (Hispanics at the U.) but those that went have had a tremendous impact on Utah politics," he said.
When Martinez graduated from the University of Utah Law School in 1976, he became the first practicing Hispanic lawyer in the state. He credits the diligence of a law professor, Lionel Frankel, who took an interest in him and other minority students, helping them navigate the bureaucratic morass.
Six years later, Martinez was named deputy general counsel of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where he supervised all U.S. government attorneys who enforced employment discrimination laws. He returned in 1984 to carry on the fight for Hispanics in his home state.
He is still challenging the establishment's protestations of innocence. When police say there is no racial profiling, he says baloney. When universities say they are doing enough to recruit Spanish-speaking staff and faculty, he snickers. When a Latino businessman is unjustly accused, he files a lawsuit.
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