Building comunidad

In a clean, once-well-lighted place just off North Carolina State Highway 54, flags hang down from the rafters with faded honor. They are reminders of the old country—Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Argentina, Colombia, some other nook of the Latin American world—and the community, the poverty, the family that once meant home. On the back wall, a glow-in-the-dark cityscape mural casts palmettoed glimmers of Miami onto the dance floor. The rain continues to fall outside, leaving the hall sparse, but not quite empty. Bar hands scuttle about, pouring drinks, setting tables, absorbing the salsa beats flowing from the corner stereo through the place.

Pilar Montás sits in the lobby and chats with a friend in her machine-gun castellano. A short, heavy-set woman who left a comfortable life in a Madrid suburb five years ago, she carries on three conversations at a time while greeting customers for her nightclub, the Montás lounge. “It’s bad weather tonight; usually we have more people,” she explains, a note of apology tingling in her voice. “But people will come—they will come.”

Sure enough, the patrons trickle in—Latinos, whites, blacks, Asians; college kids, lonely old men, nervous couples, after-work drinking buddies. The dance floor is filling up when 11 o’clock rolls around, as sweaty hands raise delicate arms and a sea of bodies sways, dips, turns, strides, stumbles and gets back in tune. There is music and there is dancing tonight—and so there must be dreaming, too. Dreams of better jobs, bigger families, healthier children, happier lives. Everyone here tonight is pursuing, for lack of a better one, the American dream. Some are finding their places in a changing country, others are exploring a culture they never knew. But among the trumpets, congas, bongos and upbeat vocals, one thing seems certain: as long as there are voices to sing and feet to dance, there is reason to hope.

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North Carolina is a state in the midst of a revolution. By nearly every demographic measure, Hispanic immigrants are flowing into the area with an unstoppable force. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1990, 22.4 million people living in the United States identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino. That number jumped to 35.3 million in 2000—representing a 58 percent increase over the decade. But even such a leap hardly compares with the staggering growth in the Tar Heel State. While 76,726 people in North Carolina identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino in the 1990 U.S. Census, 378,963 did so in 2000—representing a 10-year growth of nearly 400 percent. The numbers depend, of course, on who’s counting: El Pueblo, a Hispanic advocacy organization based in Raleigh, cites an estimated 530,328 members of the Latino population in 2000, for instance. But Hispanic residents in the state—the vast majority of whom, according to census data, are migrant workers or undocumented immigrants—have been notoriously difficult to count accurately. In a place as rural as North Carolina, furthermore, it is likely that many Hispanic people have slipped through the cracks.

Durham itself has witnessed a rise even more dramatic. While 2,054 individuals in Durham County identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino in 1990, 17,039 did so in 2000—a growth of more than 700 percent. Hispanics comprised 1 percent of the city of Durham’s population in 1990; they now make up 8 percent. While no official federal data is available on a county level for any year since 2000, El Pueblo estimated a Hispanic population of 23,116 in 2003—which would indicate a 36 percent increase in just three years. The Hispanic populations of nearby Raleigh, Greensboro and Charlotte, meanwhile, are three of the four fastest-growing city populations in the nation, according to El Pueblo. Four other counties—Wake, Mecklenburg, Forsyth and Guilford—are among the top 30 fastest growing Latino populations.

The result in North Carolina is a state booming in opportunities and a burgeoning crop of Hispanic immigrants ready to accept them. They have brought with them their families, their friends and—most of all—their traditions, yielding Spanish-language radio shows like WNCU’s “Cita Dominical;” the popular tortilla machine at the Don José tienda in Carrboro; the annual Raleigh festival “La Fiesta del Pueblo;” and Latin dance nights in clubs throughout the Triangle. Their presence has added a flavor of olive-skinned zest wedging itself between the black-white race dichotomy that has dominated the history of the South. Many of the same problems that drove them from their home countries—poverty, loneliness, unemployment, alcoholism—have caught up with them here, as new ones increase the hardships. But despite all the barriers, North Carolina remains a land of opportunity. And for many poor laborers in search of work, Durham has become—against all odds—a new El Dorado.

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I like to see smallville on t.v. I like “Hooters” I like to many things of this contry. I hope improve my English some day maybe soon I will be able to speak English so do like Victor O. or michelle speaking Spanish, they are good,

the only thing I don’t like Are the christmas songs when it is christmas time, they play a lot of chrismas songs all day I think are too many songs.

 

When Alberto Duran was still living in Mexico, he heard the same thing everyone else does about the City of Medicine. “Nobody likes Durham,” his relatives living here—a brother-in-law and a sister-in-law—told him. “But you can find work here.” His brown eyes gleam as he smiles.

Duran is learning English, along with about 10 other Hispanic immigrants and their tutors, Duke students who double as translators. He speaks nervously, equally unsure of his grammar and his interviewer, but the words come out smoothly, almost gracefully. Twice a week he comes to Burton Elementary School for free lessons, where he reads picture books, converses with his tutor—Duke sophomore Michelle Roy—and writes stories. Today, he and Roy are exchanging tongue-twisters. “En un trigal tres tristes tigres tragaban trigo en tres tristes trastos, en tres tristes trastos tragaban trigo tres tristes tigres en un trigal,” Roy has written, upon his instruction. “She sells sea shells by the sea shore,” retorts Duran on the page.

Duran says he likes to write; the written passage above is his own. He has just finished another tale of his adventures at a restaurant with a friend.

“Deef-icult?”

“Difficult.”

“Deef—difficult?”

“Good.”

A few desks over, Umberto Duran is reading through a list of phonetically challenging words with his tutor. His story is eerily similar. A peasant in his hometown of Pahuatlan, Puebla, Mexico, he labored in poverty with little hope of seeing improvement. “It was a way of survival, but they paid very little,” he says in thick Mexican Spanish. Duran came to the United States four years ago speaking not a word of English. He tried desperately to communicate with signs and body language, he says, his long black curls bouncing up and down as if on cue. On his brother’s suggestion, he came to Durham and found a job waterproofing houses. A kind American then befriended him on the job and helped him find his way. Today he shares a Durham apartment with his brother and says life is much better here, despite all its difficulties, than it was in the old country.

Lucenio Lopez, a house painter running his eyes over English sentences in the back of the room, lives in a three-floor, 18-apartment building in Durham. He sends $200 a month, if he can, to his remaining family in San Pablito, Puebla, Mexico, and saves the rest to support his wife and two children—Charlie, 8, and Evelyn, 5. He speaks, too, in nervous Spanish, clad in Nike shoes and a basketball camp T-shirt. Lopez says he used to work for a tobacco farm—where crop-pickers regularly vomited from eight hours a day of intense sun-—and slept with five other people in a two-room company-owned apartment. He would like to return some day to Mexico but knows his children will find a better education and a better future here.

The lives of everyone sitting in the room are distinct—but there are more than a handful of common threads that unite them. Poverty. Fear. Long hours of hard work with low pay. And—in the face of it all—optimism. It is that unbelievable persistence, says Greenville elementary school teacher Luisa Haynes, that has sustained the Latino community through so many trials in this country.

“I think that in the U.S., as in life, somebody has to be at the bottom of the rung,” says Haynes, who was born in Cuba and moved to the United States in 1955—just four years before Fidel Castro’s seizure of power. “For years it was the African-American community. Now it’s the Latino population…. I try to explain to [my Hispanic students], ‘Yes, you can still reach the American dream—but we have to work very, very hard.’”

Haynes, who taught for 13 years in the Durham public school system, says she is part of the “Peter Pan” generation, whisked away from relative prosperity in Cuba to an unknown fate in a new land. She arrived in Miami at 18 months old. Still fluent in Spanish today, Haynes says she can hardly remember a time when she spoke only one language. Life in America was devastatingly hard at first—but it was freedom, she recalls hearing from her uncle, a lawyer for deposed Cuba president Fulgencio Batista who took a job bagging groceries. He never regretted the decision.

Maintaining a Latino identity in the United States has been a daunting challenge—one Haynes says she has often skirted.

“My children were born here, and my husband wanted me to speak to them in Spanish, but I wouldn’t,” Haynes says. “I wanted them to be normal, and somewhere along the lines, that meant I wanted them to be good ol’ American kids.” Only later did she change her mind.

Arlie Petters moved to Brooklyn from Dangriga, Stann Creek, Belize, at age 10. He echoes Haynes’ perspectives on the difficulties of forging a cross-cultural identity. Now a professor in the math and physics departments at Duke, Petters says had he adopted his father’s last name— “Vasquez”—instead of his step-father’s, he might have developed a wholly different life trajectory. He got plenty of strange looks growing up in New York just the same.

“We were a British colony, so we spoke English,” says Petters, who praises Duke for its efforts to recruit Hispanic faculty and students. “You’re dark-skinned and you’re from Latin America, but people look at you and don’t necessarily associate you with being Latino, right? So that creates very interesting situations for immigrants, where you have that odd fit.”

 

It costs $3,000 for a Mexican immigrant to hire a coyote to guide him across the United States border, says assistant professor of sociology Emilio Parrado. Those who can scrap up the cash after months of saving and borrowing have a gruesome host of options: some try to cross through hundreds of miles of scorching desert; others have tried to make it through suffocating, rat-infested tunnels. Since the United States fortified much of the San Diego border in Operation Gatekeeper in 1994, Mexicans—along with individuals who have trekked there from further south in Latin America—have sawed holes in metal fences. Others try to cross California’s New River—a river so polluted with feces and chemicals they know American immigration officers will not ford to pursue them.

Things scarcely get better once across the border, a journey that Parrado says kills about 400 would-be immigrants a year. Many coyotes refuse to release the immigrants they have taken across until receiving payment from family members. Others rob the immigrants, knowing many have strapped their life savings to their chests. A group of citizens in Arizona—where Parrado says most Latino immigrants to Durham cross— has formed a vigilante group called the Minuteman Project, swearing to hunt down and report illegal aliens.

North Carolina annually offers about 10,000 Latin Americans a better passage—if only slightly so. Every year, the United States Department of Labor extends H-2A temporary visas, permitting foreign workers to help agricultural employers with seasonal harvests. Almost a quarter of the visas the Department of Labor allotted in 2001 went to workers bound for North Carolina, according to Legal Aid of North Carolina, a non-profit advocacy group. The visas offer Latin American immigrants a free ride into the country—but they must leave after a pre-ordained date, and the H-2A status does not aid them in the quest for citizenship.

Tony Macias, assistant director of Student Action with Farmworkers, a Durham-based advocacy group, says conditions have not improved considerably for many Hispanic farm workers. Nationally, less than 75 percent of farm workers earn under $10,000 a year, Macias says—and the percentage of foreign-born farm workers has skyrocketed from 10 percent in 1989 to 81 percent in 1998. In North Carolina, though the September 2004 decision of Mt. Olive Pickle Co. to permit its agricultural workers a contract renegotiation has set a historic precedent, Macias says job conditions have for the most part actually gotten worse.

“The majority of workers in North Carolina are undocumented—they have a hard time exercising rights because they still have a fear of deportation,” Macias said. “They’re still exposed to pesticides, they still work long hours in the hot sun, they’re still paid by the piece and they still live in egregiously substandard housing—most of it worse than what prisoners have.”

Germán Lechuga—going by a pseudonym—knows the tribulations of farm life firsthand. Living now in Oxboro, he says the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994 destroyed his grandfather’s coffee farm in San Pablito by flooding the American market with cheaper imports from elsewhere. Today he works in construction, but he started out on a tobacco farm in Texas. The American patrón—field boss—used to curse at them all, though Lechuga didn’t know enough English at the time to realize it. When the workers asked for lunch breaks longer than 10 minutes, the boss squealed his tires and drove away from the camp in a fury.

Mexican immigrants like Lechuga who left Texas for the southeast may have been drawn to the Olympic torch in Georgia—the spark for the southeast’s Hispanic population explosion, says Melissa Gill, an international studies postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. When the Games came to Atlanta in the summer of 1996, Olympic officials needed rapid completion of massive construction projects—stadiums, roads and the like. Mexican immigrant labor provided an affordable option. After the games, many migrated northward to Charlotte, where more construction projects promised sure employment.

A social network in North Carolina—and especially the Research Triangle Park, one of the fastest developing areas in the nation—soon emerged among Hispanic immigrants. Pressures in Latin America, meanwhile, continued to push more and more Latinos out. NAFTA continued to drive wages and working conditions down in Mexico, Gill says, while a saturated low-skill labor market in Texas and California made those states less appealing.

Still, in Durham proper, Hispanic immigrants face yet more challenges. Heightened security measures since 2001 have made it almost impossible for undocumented immigrants in many states to receive a driver’s license—meaning while many cannot drive to work, others do so illegally and without instruction. Loan sharks then prey on Latino immigrants desperate to buy cars on the sly. A bill currently stands in the North Carolina Congress to bring similar legislation here. Indeed, documentation as a whole poses the direst threat to Hispanic immigrants throughout the area, says Parrado.

“We cannot even estimate how big of a problem it is,” he says. “It affects all areas of their lives, their work opportunities… This is counterproductive because, if it’s a security threat, they are a threat because we don’t know who’s here—so we really need to know who’s here.”

Durham’s Latino community, meanwhile, has the most unbalanced sex ratio of any metropolitan area in the nation, Parrado says—about 2.3 Hispanic men aged 20-29 for every like-aged Hispanic woman. With the ability to date non-Latina women severely hampered by most immigrants’ weak grasp of English and precarious legal situations, Parrado says, many male Latino immigrants have resorted to sex worker use, which in turn has led to a dangerous proliferation of HIV. In a 2004 study Parrado conducted with Chenoa Flippen, a senior research scientist at the Center for Demographic Studies at Duke, and Chris McQuiston, associate professor at the UNC School of Nursing, 28 percent of 442 randomly selected male Hispanic migrant workers said they had used the services of a commercial sex worker in Durham. Only 64.2 percent of those who had visited commercial sex workers said they would always use a condom if the sex worker was “well known.” In 1990, according to Parrado, one in a hundred HIV cases in Durham involved a Hispanic individual; by 2001, that rate had quadrupled.

Self-segregation—both by choice and by necessity—along with tensions with the African-American community have further strained relations for Durham Latinos. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, almost 75 percent of Hispanics live in apartment blocks that are 25 to 60 percent Hispanic. Rumors of blacks who seek to rob Latinos haunt the minds, rightly or wrongly so, of many immigrants. Lechuga tells, for instance, of a black man who entered his car and then refused to leave; he also says his cousin was robbed by a black man in downtown Durham.

“It’s a combination of things,” Parrado explains. “They feel they’re targets of crime and in many cases a crime is committed by an African-American person, so they associate crime with African-Americans. There’s a basic language barrier that separates the two groups. There’s work-related tensions—now, Latinos are at the bottom at many of these positions. African-Americans speak English, so they’re the bosses.”

The Latino population at Duke itself can hardly escape notice. As of Fall 2003, 6.8 percent of the undergraduate student body identified itself as Hispanic. A number of prominent Latino academics have joined Duke’s faculty in recent years—along with Petters, the University boasts nationally renowned Michael Valdez Moses in the English department and Ariel Dorfman, born in Argentina and a Chilean citizen, in the literature department. An October 2003 three-day Divinity School summit brought Hispanic church leaders from across the nation to campus. In the administration, meanwhile, Venezuela-born Gilbert Merkx—whose father captained a tanker for Royal Dutch Shell—serves as vice provost for international affairs. The majority of the workers at the laundry plant Duke sold to Angelica Corp. amidst allegations of labor law violations are Hispanic. And one only needs to walk down the main quad to hear rapid-fire Spanish coming from Duke-contracted workers—laboring on Alumni Week tents, tending lawns, delivering food.

Few immigrant stories in the Gothic Wonderland, however, can compare with that of Rafael Perez, general manager of the McDonald’s in the Bryan Center. Born in Colombia, Perez came to the United States in 1977, studying food science at North Carolina State University. He endured five to six hours’ worth of English language classes a day at UNC. Perez earned his degree in 1983 and returned to Colombia the following year, where he started a frozen vegetable company—Rápido Practico. But his troubles began a few years later, when government corruption led to the theft of money allocated to electrical plants. As brownouts and blackouts plagued the country, Perez chose to cut his losses by selling his business and machinery. He then decided to start a new career raising cattle.

Working in his pastures one day in 1993, Perez says he was approached by about 25 armed members of FARC—the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a leftist guerrilla group classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. Department of State.

“They said, ‘Let’s go for a walk,’” Perez recalls. “They asked me for some money, and I told them I didn’t have that money. Then they kidnapped me.”

The rebels seized his 200-odd cows instead and let him go free. It was about then that he decided it might be time to leave for good.

Today Perez works long hours at McDonald’s, where he oversees 23 employees, 19 of them Hispanic. Often present until closing time at 1 a.m., Perez never fails to greet with his trademark, “Hi, can I help you, sir?” He runs a tight-ship operation, earning the eatery near-perfect sanitation scores and helping his staff improve their English by telling them to learn at least five new words a day. Perez lives in Apex now with his wife, Claudia, and their children—Miguel, 5, and Gabriel, 3.

If the Latino community is to make it in North Carolina, he says, it needs to focus less on racism and recognize the importance of integration.

“If you are in this country, well, you better learn the customs of this country,” Perez says, adding that he cherishes his family’s adoption of Easter egg painting and Thanksgiving turkey dinners. “Don’t separate yourselves… It’s the stupid little things you do that make everyday life better. It’s quite personal, how you want to be—if you don’t get involved, you’re going to feel like you’re behind all the time.”

 

It is difficult for anyone to say where the Latino community in Durham and in North Carolina will go from here. Some things are almost certain—that the Hispanic population will continue to boom; that the burgeoning Research Triangle Park will offer enough jobs to accommodate them; that the nation as a whole has long since realized that the Hispanic role in America can no longer be reduced to tacos and West Side Story. What is unclear now is whether Latinos will find themselves pushed away by protectionists, xenophobes and nationalists; embraced by free marketeers. corporations and global activists; or somewhere in the middle. Latino immigrants, too, must decide whether they wish to assimilate at the risk of losing their past or isolate at the expense of their future.

But perhaps, say some, the choice is not so stark.

“The way I look at it, you have two sources of cultural experience,” says Raúl Montoy, a dance instructor at Montás. Dressed in all black, he sits in the corner as the music reverberates through the hall. “Being macho—I can lose that part of being Hispanic. But there’s no reason for me to lose anything I care about.”

Montoy smiles as he tells his own story—he arrived not long ago from Cedral, San Luis Potosí, Mexico, working construction jobs to pay his own way through the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, which he graduated from in 2000. Most of his family now lives in Texas. He says he has seen plenty of changes already in his short time in North Carolina; most importantly, he can attend a beautiful Spanish language mass at Our Lady of Grace in Greensboro rather than the one haphazardly tacked onto an English language service in Kernsville he used to frequent. He hasn’t let a few incidents of racism get him down and remains youthfully optimistic. “Most Americans are really good people,” he says. “Only a few of them aren’t, and it’s usually just ignorance.”

It’s difficult not to feel that vibe of hope as the night wears on. The rain may keep falling outside the dance hall—but people will drift in from all corners of the Triangle to join in a song, a dance, a drink and a shared moment in time.

“Latin people dance at the same time they learn how to walk,” says Montás, beaming as she watches the crowd grow. “When you’re scraping by every day just to eat, just to acquire money, to have stuff, I think music is something that lifts you up spiritually and personally. And they’re very happy people—they may not have a red cent in their pocket but they are gonna have a good time.”