FORKS — On the day Victor Velazquez was to take the U.S. citizenship oath, Seattle police in riot gear stood between him and the federal immigration office.
He’d ridden the Greyhound bus west from Ellensburg, where he was attending Central Washington University.
As it happened, Velazquez arrived in the Emerald City during the “battle of Seattle” — the large-scale protests of the World Trade Organization meetings of November 1999.
“I was all dressed up in a suit, walking into a maximum security zone,” he recalled.
Velazquez, a native of the Mexican state of Chihuahua, did become a U.S. citizen on that day nearly nine years ago.
He has since graduated with a bachelor’s degree in theater arts from CWU, and moved to New York City to manage a theater.
