Back to his roots West side mayor draws on his Ephrata upbringing

EPHRATA — Jimmy Matta has walked a path well-worn by generations of immigrants to the United States.

The son of migrant farm workers, Matta dropped out of Ephrata High School before he was supposed to graduate in 1994, became a carpenter and union organizer, started his own construction business, and was elected the first Latino mayor of the West Side city of Burien last fall.

It’s a very American story, one shared by waves of Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews and Germans.

“This country is a country of opportunity and dreams,” Matta said as he sat with a group of students in the cafeteria of Ephrata High School. “But opportunity won’t come knocking. You have to go out an get it.”

“You have to learn how to take rejection, and you can’t allow your inner self to tell you that you can’t succeed,” he added.

Matta, who was in Ephrata on Friday to speak at schools across the city, credits growing up in the town helped make him the person he is today.

“I’m very happy to be in Ephrata. I love the kids,” he said.

“It was difficult, I got picked on a lot,” Matta said, noting that he was the only Latino in his third grade class at Columbia Ridge Elementary school. “But I said, you aren’t going to break me.”

Matta read to students at Columbia Ridge and Grant Elementary schools, and spoke to students in the Avid class at EHS, described a rough upbringing. His father died from a drug overdose and school was difficult, and difficulties with school lead to his falling in with a rough crowd.

“I hung out with some bad kids, who accepted me as I was,” he said.

But hard work, persistence and the intervention of a lot of mentors helped him get straight, Matta said.

“This country is built from all different kinds of people, and we built it together,” he said. “No one group of people built or fought for America.”

He decided to run for mayor of Burien — a city of 54,000 people just south of Seattle — after a run-in with a supporter of President Donald J. Trump left him determined not to stay silent.

“He said, ‘your president is gone now, so you need to go back home,’” Matta said. “This is my home. I’m an American, I was born in Preston, Idaho.”

Matta said he never expected to be elected, and he is just beginning to get into the groove of being mayor of a fairly sizable city.

“The people who live in my community are embracing change and learning to understand it,” he said.

Saying it was the kind teaching of others who “taught me how to operate in mainstream America,” Matta told the students of Ephrata High School to take time to teach and help others.

“Mentor one person when you grow up,” he said. “You’ll never know what a difference you’ll make.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com.