By Maria Leon

TUCSON, Arizona – A group of Latino hotel workers in New Mexico who were fired for refusing to change their names to “more American” ones are studying the possibility of filing a lawsuit.

“The Equal Employment Opportunities Commission has great interest in studying the details of this case. It’s an administrative step that’s important because the law requires it before we can initiate a case in court,” Dennis M. Montoya, the lawyer for the eight Hispanic workers fired by the Whitten Inn in Taos, New Mexico, told Efe.

The hotel was purchased in July by Larry Whitten, who established strict rules for his employees, among them adopting Anglo-Saxon names and prohibiting them from speaking Spanish in his presence.

“There’s a chance that the government could back (the lawsuit) to help the plaintiffs, a discrimination lawsuit could be filed on the basis of ethnic group and national origin,” Montoya said in a telephone interview.

He said that the constitution of the state of New Mexico establishes Spanish as an official language.

The attorney said that cases like this are “very rare” in the state because of the very diverse community that exists in New Mexico and its strong Hispanics roots.

“Usually, discrimination is more veiled, more hidden. In this case, this gentleman was completely open (and) discriminatory with an attitude that ‘I’m the boss and I’m going to do what I want,’” Montoya added.

Whitten, a 63-year-old Texan, asked one of his Hispanic employees named Martin (which is accented on the second syllable in Spanish) to call himself by the English pronunciation of the name, with the accent on the first syllable, while another employee named Marcos was asked to go by the name of “Mark.”

“My son called me to tell me that the new owner of the hotel where he worked had prohibited them from speaking in Spanish and had asked him to change his name,” Shirley Reyes, the vice president of a New Mexico chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens, told Efe.

“When my son Martin was born, I had problems and – being Catholic – I promised St. Martin de Porres that if he helped me I would give his name to my son,” she said.

Reyes said that when the employees refused to accept the changes, they were fired.

“These workers have been called ‘wetbacks’ or ‘illegals,’ but they are all U.S. citizens, many of them the sons of families who have lived in New Mexico all their lives,” Reyes said.

“We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us,” she emphasized.

The fired workers, their relatives, members of the Taos community and LULAC are currently boycotting the hotel.

“The boycott has been extremely successful. The hotel currently is empty. We’re not in any way preventing people from going in, we’re just informing them about what is happening,” Reyes said.

Several immigrants rights groups will hold a march on Nov. 14 to protest the hotel owner’s actions.

“Taos is a multicultural community where native Americans, Afro-Americans, Anglos, Latinos, Asians ... all live without any problem,” Reyes said.

Meanwhile, Whitten told the media that he had been misunderstood and that he only prohibited the workers from speaking Spanish in his presence, since he does not understand the language, but that he has no problem with their speaking Spanish to attend to hotel guests.