A man and his wife sit on either side of a woman in a wheelchair at University Hospital in Salt Lake City. It is late in the evening and the three speak quietly in Spanish. All of them appear to be tired.

The woman in the wheelchair is five months pregnant, and cannot return home to her family in Mexico because she is having early contractions. Instead, she is alone in Utah, but she seems to find reassurance in the soft words of encouragement Tony Yapias and his wife offer her.

Just days earlier Yapias, an activist and political leader in Utah's Hispanic community, received a phone call about this young woman, 27-year-old Lilia Reyes. A hospital worker who was trying to help Reyes had run out of ideas, and referred her to Yapias.

Yapias is a man of action. His methods have been criticized and his solutions have been praised, but Yapias says he wants to help Hispanics meet their needs.

"Everyone has certain skills, certain abilities to help people," he said.

Yapias began his journey to making a difference for Hispanics in Utah as the student body president in the small town of Evanston, Wyo., at Evanston High School.

When Yapias was 14, he and his family left Peru to join their father in Wyoming. He and his sister spent five to eight hours studying English their first spring in Wyoming. From the beginning Yapias said he never saw any discrimination and some of his best friends were Caucasian.

Four years after his arrival, Yapias was elected the first foreign-born student body president at his high school. That year he traveled to Washington with 300 youths from other Wyoming schools to meet with Dick Cheney and Alan Simpson, Republicans who at the time represented Wyoming in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, respectively. Yapias said the experience changed his life.

He said both men told him his community would need leaders like him.

"It was an awakening," he said, to a life of service and leadership.

Yapias later returned to Washington to intern with Simpson, where he said he "really learned about immigration," an issue he said is at the foundation of everything affecting Hispanics.

In the years following his graduation from BYU in 1993, Yapias helped organize the Utah Latino Council, worked as the Head of the Office of Hispanic Affairs, and organized an activist group called Proyecto Latino de Utah.

After 15 years working in the Hispanic community of Utah, Tony Yapias saw thousands of Hispanics rally to the streets of Salt Lake City last April to make their voices heard on the immigration issue. The next day they marched to the capital. Yapias helped organize the march.

"Everybody has his own perspective of that march, but everyone gained a perspective because of that march," said Michael Martinez, a lawyer who met Yapias 10 years ago. "The issues he [Yapias] has raised on behalf of immigrants and the community are issues that needed to be raised. They are issues that needed a champion."

Although Hispanic leaders across Utah supported and planned the march, some feel Yapias is taking too much credit and isolating himself by criticizing others, said Michael Clara, who has known Yapias for five years and worked with him on the Utah Latino/Hispanic Legislative Task Force.

"He doesn't seem to want to work within a coalition or groups of people," Clara said. "One person is not going to be able to make social changes without working together in a coalition of people of like mind, which is one thing he seems to be resistant to. We may have the same objective, but his methods are suspect."

Other leaders in the community say Yapias has not been here as long as others and although he is doing good things, he "has not yet earned his stripes," said Frank Cordova, who heads the Utah Coalition of La Raza.

Yapias is aware of the criticism, but said he will do all he can to help people find solutions to the issues they face. He said some of those who disagree are his good friends.

"I am very impatient. I am impatient because of the ... people I deal with on a daily basis," Yapias said, explaining that the people he helps are in dire need and can't afford to wait.

"I've always said I wanted to help people. I think where I am most comfortable is when I am with the people."

Copyright Brigham Young University 27 Nov 2006