History > 2006 > USA > Hispanics

Hispanics flee Pennsylvania town

before crackdown

Updated 10/31/2006
9:29 PM ET
By Michael Rubinkam, Associated Press
USA Today

HAZLETON, Pa. — Elvis Soto's variety store used to make money. But few customers have been walking through his door lately, and his merchandise — calling cards, cellphones, car stereos, clothing — is collecting dust on the shelves.

With bills mounting, Soto might have to take another job to stay afloat financially, and may even close the store.

On Wednesday, a tough, first-of-its-kind law targeting illegal immigrants was to take effect in this small hillside city in northeastern Pennsylvania. A federal judge on Tuesday blocked the measure, but the evidence suggests many Hispanics — illegal or otherwise — have already left.

That, in turn, has hobbled the city's Hispanic business district, where some shops have closed and others are struggling to stay open.

"Before, it was a nice place," said Soto, 27, who came to the United States from the Dominican Republic a decade ago. "Now, we have a war against us. I am legal but I feel the pressure also."

The ordinance, approved by City Council in September, imposes fines on landlords who rent to illegal immigrants and denies business permits to companies that give them jobs. The law empowers the city to investigate written complaints about a person's immigration status, using a federal database.

Mayor Lou Barletta, chief proponent of the new law, contends illegal immigrants have brought drugs, crime and gangs, overwhelming police and municipal budgets. He announced the crackdown in June, a month after two illegal immigrants from the Dominican Republic were charged in a fatal shooting.

At Isabel's Gifts, owner Isabel Rubio said business is so bad that she and her husband have put their house up for sale, moved into an apartment above their store and started dipping into their savings.

"I am in a lot of stress right now," said Rubio, 50, a Colombian who moved to Hazleton 24 years ago. "Every day, we hope to have a good day."

Opponents sued on Monday to block the law and a companion measure, saying they trample on the federal government's exclusive power to regulate immigration.

U.S. District Judge James Munley ruled that landlords, tenants and businesses that cater to Hispanics faced "irreparable harm" from the laws and issued a temporary restraining order. He said it was "in the public interest to protect residents' access to homes, education, jobs and businesses."

The ordinances "are nothing more than an officially sanctioned witch hunt," said Cesar Perales, president of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, a group representing plaintiffs in the case. They include the Hazleton Hispanic Business Association, several illegal immigrants, landlords and a restaurateur.

The mayor said he would fight all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary, saying the ordinance is "as bulletproof as we can get it."

Hispanics began settling in large numbers in Hazleton several years ago, lured from New York, Philadelphia and other cities by cheap housing, low crime and the availability of work in nearby factories and farms. The city, situated 80 miles from Philadelphia, estimates its population has increased from 23,000 to 31,000 over the past six years, with Hispanics now representing 30% of the population.

No one knows how many of the new arrivals came to the United States illegally, but assimilating such a large number of people, many of whom speak little English, in such a short amount of time has been difficult.

Many white residents resent the newcomers, complaining about rising crime and overburdened schools. Tensions have flared over relatively minor annoyances such as loud music and double parking.

"You don't like the big-city stuff coming here," said insurance agent Vincent Santopoli, 49, a lifelong resident. "We're not used to it."

Barletta, who has risen from political obscurity to become a darling of anti-illegal immigration activists nationwide, said he sympathizes with struggling Hispanic business owners. But he said the fact their revenues are down is proof the city had a problem with illegal immigration.

"I've said from the beginning my goal was to make Hazleton one of the toughest cities in America for illegal aliens," he said. "Today, if I was an illegal alien, I certainly wouldn't pick Hazleton as my home."

Police Chief Bob Ferdinand said his officers appear to be responding to fewer calls. But on Oct. 20, a legal immigrant from the Dominican Republic was accused of shooting and killing two Hispanic men, one in the country illegally.

Todd Betterly, 37, who was awakened by the gunshots, said the killings are proof the crackdown is necessary.

"There is absolutely nothing wrong with trying to find out who belongs here and who doesn't," he said. "If we could have stopped one murder by knowing where these people are, isn't it worth it?"

A second ordinance would require tenants to register their name, address and phone number at City Hall and pay $10 for a rental permit. Landlords who fail to make sure their tenants are registered can be fined $1,000, plus a penalty of $250 per tenant per day. The goal is to discourage illegal immigrants from even trying to rent in Hazleton.

A 32-year-old Mexican who slipped into the United States nine years ago to find work said he has no intention of registering.

"What is the mayor gaining by this law? I'm not a drug trafficker, I don't run around in gangs. I do my job and I go home to my family," said the married father of two, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of his immigration status.

Pennsylvania native Kim Lopez and her husband, Rudy, a Mexican immigrant, closed their grocery store Oct. 1 after business tailed off dramatically over the summer. They lost more than $10,000 — their life savings.

"Everyone was running scared and left town," said Lopez, 39. "We had customers who came in who were legal citizens and they didn't want the harassment and hassle and told us they were leaving."

    Hispanics flee Pennsylvania town before crackdown, UT, 31.10.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-31-crackdown-flee_x.htm

Bridging a Racial Rift That Isn’t Black and White

October 3, 2006
The New York Times
By RACHEL L. SWARNS

WILLACOOCHEE, Ga. — The ministers close their eyes and raise their voices to the heavens and, for a moment, they are colorless. Two men who grew up desperately poor, who picked tobacco in the fields and hauled boxes at Wal-Mart and whose life journeys ultimately led them to the Lord and to each other.

“It’s like praying with a brother,” said the Rev. Harvey Williams Jr., 54, who is black.

“He looks out for me and I look out for him,” said the Rev. Atanacio Gaona, 45, who is a Mexican immigrant. “In the eyes of the Lord, there are no colors.”

In this immigrant boomtown in Atkinson County, about 45 miles north of the Florida border, the ministers have forged a rare friendship that transcends the deep divide between blacks and Hispanics here.

For centuries, the South has been defined by the color line and the struggle for accommodation between blacks and whites. But the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Hispanic immigrants over the past decade is quietly changing the dynamics of race relations in many Southern towns.

The two pastors find that the fault lines that separate their communities sometimes test their friendship and challenge their efforts to bring blacks and Hispanics closer together.

Blacks here, who had settled into a familiar, if sometimes uneasy, relationship with whites, are now outnumbered by Hispanics. The two groups, who often live and work side by side, compete fiercely for working-class jobs and government resources. By several measures, blacks are already losing ground.

The jobless rate for black men in Georgia is nearly triple that of Hispanic men, labor statistics show. More blacks than Hispanics fail to meet minimum standards in Atkinson County public schools. And many blacks express anguish at being supplanted by immigrants who know little of their history and sometimes treat them with disdain as they fill factory jobs, buy property, open small businesses and scale the economic ladder.

“If you have 10 factory openings, I would say Hispanics would get the majority of the jobs now,” said Joyce Taylor, the Atkinson County clerk, who is black. “And if you look at the little grocery stores, there are more Hispanic businesses than black businesses.”

“It’s kind of scary,” said Ms. Taylor, 44, whose daughter was laid off from a factory here. “My children, looking forward, it may be harder for them.”

Some Hispanics say African-Americans treat them with hostility and disparage them with slurs, even though blacks know the sting of racism all too well. They say many blacks are jealous of their progress and resent the fact that whites, who dominate the business sector, look increasingly to Hispanics to fill work forces. Blacks say employers favor immigrants because they work for less money.

An Area of Intense Feelings

The killing of six Mexican farm workers in a robbery last year in Tifton, about 30 miles away — and the arrest of four black men in the case — has heightened the friction. Nothing so violent has occurred here, but some Hispanics say black criminals focus on immigrants in this town, too.

Speaking of blacks, Benito González, 51, a Mexican who has worked alongside them at a poultry plant, said: “They don’t like to work, and they’re always in jail. If there’s hard work to be done, the blacks, they leave and they don’t come back. That’s why the bosses prefer Mexicans and why there are so many Mexicans working in the factories here.”

Such images stoke the debate over how to overcome tensions, which flared nationally this year when some African-Americans expressed anger and unease as immigrant groups hailed efforts to legalize illegal immigrants as a new civil rights movement. Although the push in Congress to create a guest-worker program has stalled, concerns about competition between black and immigrant low-wage workers remain.

Those feelings resonate with particular intensity in the South, home to the nation’s largest share of African-Americans and its fastest-growing population of immigrants, according to an analysis of census data by William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.

The two Pentecostal ministers who pray together are men of faith who say they believe that blacks and Hispanics should be allies in the struggle to overcome discrimination and economic adversity, even though they acknowledge that interethnic unity is often hard to come by.

Mr. Williams, a thoughtful man who studied psychology in community college, ruminates in a weekly newspaper column on topics like spirituality, ethnic relations and his recovery from cocaine addiction 20 years ago.

Mr. Gaona, whose boyish looks belie his intensity, left school after second grade to help his father work the fields in Mexico. He entered the United States illegally and started picking tobacco here when he was 24. Over the past decade, he has received his citizenship and built his church from the ground up.

The two men met working on a Wal-Mart warehouse floor in neighboring Coffee County around 1993 when Mr. Gaona was starting to deepen his faith and Mr. Williams, already a pastor, was looking for a ride to work.

Neither expected much from the acquaintanceship.

Mr. Gaona, who said his perceptions of black Americans were shaped in Mexico by news reports of crime and violence in poor urban areas, recalled, “I was thinking: ‘He’s black. Who knows what he wants from me?’ I was just trying to keep my distance.”

Mr. Williams said he never envisioned a friendship because he had never known blacks and Hispanics to be friends.

“I think I probably saw him as being a Hispanic,’ he said, “and I was only going to get so close.”

Over the next five years, in their hourlong weekday commuting trip in Mr. Gaona’s 1988 Oldsmobile and later in Mr. Williams’s 1982 Ford station wagon, they discovered common ground. Both are divorced fathers. Mr. Williams has two sons and two daughters. Mr. Gaona has five boys.

Both grew up poor, working in the fields. And both were trying to advance at Wal-Mart and searching for pathways to God. It was Mr. Williams who helped persuade Mr. Gaona to quit Wal-Mart to open the first Spanish-language church in this town.

Today, the men are remarried, full-time ministers who chat by telephone and disregard the diners at local restaurants who still gawk at the sight of a black man and a Hispanic man eating together.

But they also remain painfully aware of the fear and prejudice that remain in their communities.

Mr. Williams, who leads a working- and middle-class congregation of teachers, Civil Service workers and factory workers at the Union Holiness House of Deliverance, shakes his head as he describes the jokes about Mexicans with poor hygiene that circulate among some black people he knows.

“It was not so long ago that we were the object of jokes,” Mr. Williams said. “I’m constantly having to remind people.”

Mr. Gaona, whose flock at the Iglesia Alfa y Omega is dominated by factory and farm workers, says his members often describe American blacks as moyos, a derogatory Spanish term that sometimes refers to a black insect. He used the term, too, he admits, before he found God and his friend Mr. Williams.

“Every now and then, I remind them that we need to respect people, no matter how they look or their color,” Mr. Gaona said. "But mostly, we don’t know them, and they don’t know us. There’s no real communication going on.”

Gaps and Similarities

The tension simmers just below the surface in the quiet communities of bungalows and trailers where the two churches are situated. Five years ago, these neighborhoods were overwhelmingly black. Today, Hispanics and blacks account for 21 percent and 19 percent of the county population of about 8,000, respectively.

Lyrical Spanish chatter competes with the sweet Georgia drawl as blacks and Hispanics share streets, assembly lines, classrooms — and hardships — that could prove to be the basis of community and political alliances. The two groups appear more likely to be poor than whites. About 36 percent of Hispanics and 31 percent of blacks live in poverty in Atkinson County, census data shows; 17 percent of whites are poor.

The two ethnic groups report experiencing some discrimination from non-Hispanic whites, who account for 60 percent of the population, and they view the blue-collar jobs in the factories that manufacture industrial fabrics and mobile homes as steppingstones to prosperity.

School administrators and sociologists suggest that the gap between blacks and Hispanics in employment and education may stem in part from immigrant parents who push their children harder to succeed in schools and the immigrant zeal to find work, regardless of how much it pays.

Many black adults, who typically have more formal education than new immigrants, seethe at the disparities. In a town where neighborliness is entrenched, blacks and Hispanics often treat one another warily.

It is hard to envision such tension in the ministers’ friendship, particularly as they laugh amid the wooden pews in Mr. Williams’s church. But in many ways, they, too, keep their distance.

Despite more than 10 years’ friendship, the two have never dined in each other’s home. Their wives and children have never met, nor have their congregations.

Mr. Gaona does not know the black families who live near him. And he has never addressed Mr. Williams’s congregation, even though his friend has invited him several times. The minister says he feels uncomfortable preaching in English.

Mr. Williams, who has spoken at his friend’s church twice, says there is more to it. (Mr. Gaona’s English, after all, is quite good.)

“There’s still a barrier there,” Mr. Williams said.

He said the worshippers in Mr. Gaona’s church seemed reluctant to mingle with him after his guest sermons there several years ago.

“They are like standing on the side, you know, with their heads down as if waiting for me to leave,” he recounted. “They’re uncomfortable. And that’s one reason for not visiting him any more than I do.

“It’s one of my goals in life, to break down these nationality walls. But people are pretty divided. I just don’t know if that’s going to change.”

Mr. Williams concedes that he, too, strives to do better. He does not know the name of the Hispanic family that lives near him. For a time, he refused to wave to Hispanic drivers on the road because they often hurt his feelings by ignoring him and the Southern tradition of greeting strangers. He has since decided to wave — no matter what.

His wife, who did not grow up around immigrants, still feels a bit uncomfortable socializing with Hispanics, despite his long friendship with the Hispanic pastor.

A Shoulder to Lean On

Mr. Gaona said he was recently taken aback when his 5-year-old came home from school and described his black classmates as moyos, the aspersion.

“ ‘Why you need to call them like that?’ ” Mr. Gaona said he asked his son. “I’m trying to share with him that’s not right. But that’s what he hears.”

Still, on most days the two men put aside such awkwardness and focus on supporting each other.

When Mr. Gaona’s computer became infected with a virus, he called Mr. Williams, who stopped by to help repair it. When state officials refused to renew his brother’s driving license because his immigration papers were not in order, Mr. Gaona called Mr. Williams in frustration.

Mr. Williams relies on Mr. Gaona to interview Hispanic immigrants who ask to rent his church’s social hall for parties. And it was his respect for the Hispanic pastor that helped persuade him to use his newspaper column to chastise Americans who disparaged the newcomers.

“I believe that rather than be angry or envy those who have came to America and found success, we ought to be learning from them,” Mr. Williams wrote.

As the ministers meandered through their changing neighborhoods one afternoon, they considered taking their friendship to another level by preaching a joint service for their congregations. Though they knew it might never happen, they envisioned Spanish speakers and English speakers, newcomers and long timers’ holding hands and praying beneath the oak trees.

On that sultry summer afternoon, it felt good to dream about the possibility. Somehow, it felt like it just might be the start of something.

“We’ll get together one day soon and do one out in the open,” Mr. Gaona said.

Mr. Williams replied: “That sounds good. That sounds good. We’ll do that.”

    Bridging a Racial Rift That Isn’t Black and White, NYT, 3.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/03/us/03georgia.html?hp&ex=1159934400&en=e05d7c173b4a9eff&ei=5094&partner=homepage

The Latino South

In Georgia, Immigrants Unsettle Old Sense of Place

August 4, 2006
The New York Times
By RACHEL L. SWARNS

PEARSON, Ga. — For generations, people here have savored the predictable cadences of small-town living. They knew their neighbors and their neighbors’ neighbors, the sweet sound of Sunday church mornings and the rumble of tractors tilling the rich soil.

And they knew that most outsiders would drive right through this blue-collar community of tidy bungalows and mobile homes, without stopping or settling, on their way to bigger, busier places.

Then Mexican immigrants started streaming in. Lured in the 1990’s by abundant agricultural work and new manufacturing jobs, the newcomers landed in a town with one traffic light, no tortillas in the supermarket and residents who stared openly at foreigners in a county that saw its last wave of immigrants in the 1850’s.

Today, hundreds of Mexican immigrants, both illegal and legal, work in factories, fields and stores; study in public schools; and live in neighborhoods that were once mostly white or black. This year, as many longtime residents anguished over the metamorphosis of their town, Serafico Jaimes opened a Spanish-language video store right off Main Street and proudly hung a Mexican flag alongside his American flag in the storefront window.

“This is our town now, too,” Mr. Jaimes said.

His town sits in Atkinson County, Ga., population 8,030 and a cauldron of demographic change. Over the past decade, hundreds of thousands of immigrants, mostly from Mexico, have poured into the South, bypassing traditional settlement states like New York, California and Florida in favor of far-flung towns with thriving industries.

The surge of newcomers has helped drive the fierce debate in Congress over immigration as well as the budding activism that burst into view this spring when millions of people took to the streets to demand rights for immigrants.

The simmering tensions between Americans and new arrivals have played out here, too, far from the national spotlight. A visit to Atkinson County offers an intimate glimpse at how immigration is rapidly transforming day-to-day life in some small Southern towns.

In 1990, Hispanics accounted for 3 percent of the residents in Atkinson County, census data show. By 2004, Hispanics had eclipsed blacks and become the largest minority, with 21 percent of the population. County officials, who say illegal immigrants have been undercounted, believe Mexican immigrants and their children may actually make up a third of residents. (Whites and blacks now account for about 60 percent and 19 percent of the population.)

The sudden shift is upending traditional Southern notions of race and class, leaving many whites and blacks grappling with unexpected feelings of dislocation, loss and anger as they adjust to their community’s evolving ethnic identity.

Elton Corbitt, a white businessman whose family has lived here since the 1800’s, said immigration threatened everything that matters — the quality of schools, health facilities, neighborhoods, even the serene rhythms of small-town life. And he fears that white Southerners here may ultimately become outnumbered or irrelevant.

“The way the Mexicans have children, they’re going to have a majority here soon,” Mr. Corbitt, 76, said.

“I have children and grandchildren,” he said. “They’re going to become second-class citizens. And we’re going to be a third world country here if we don’t do something about it.”

Many immigrants, meanwhile, wrestle with feelings of both pride and alienation as they deepen their roots in a town that remains ambivalent about their presence.

Olga Contreras-Martinez was 12 when she entered the United States illegally with her family and picked fruits and vegetables in Florida and Georgia until settling here in 1993. Now a college graduate and an American citizen, Ms. Contreras-Martinez feels deeply rooted here.

Yet she says she has never quite fit in, even as she slides seamlessly between English and Spanish, relishes both cheese grits and frijoles and proudly votes in local elections.

She still bursts into tears when she remembers how three white men challenged the citizenship of the county’s Hispanic voters during a race for county commission in 2004, accusing one candidate of registering Mexicans who were ineligible to vote. Mexican-Americans were ultimately allowed to go to the polls, but the humiliation lingers.

“Because of my color, my last name, people always question me,” said Ms. Contreras-Martinez, 31, whose parents, uncles and grandfather all moved to Atkinson County from Mexico.

“I call it home, but I know I’m not welcome in my own home,” she said. “Maybe that feeling of home will be something that will always be missing for me.”

From 1990 to 2005, the number of Hispanics living legally or illegally in Southern states quadrupled, jumping to 2.4 million from 562,663, according to an analysis of census data conducted by the sociology department of Queens College of the City University of New York. More immigrants are arriving in the United States now than when crowded ships carried millions of Europeans into New York in the early 1900’s.

“We really haven’t had this sort of rapid demographic change in 100 years,” said Jeffrey S. Passel, a demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group based in Washington.

No one knows how many illegal immigrants are living in Georgia. But Mr. Passel estimates there are 350,000 to 450,000, up from about 35,000 in 1990.

Creating New Lines

It is a profound change for this insular community in southern Georgia, just northeast of Valdosta, where strangers have traditionally come from neighboring counties, not foreign countries, and where memories of the last flood of immigrants have long since faded.

In the late 1850’s, hundreds of Irish immigrants moved to this area, drawn by the promise of work on a railroad project that ultimately failed. Penniless and stranded, many workers settled here and became farmers, according to archival records from the Roman Catholic Church, which ministered to the laborers.

The Mexicans who arrived more than a century later found a small, sleepy place where rocking chairs sit on front porches and roses bloom alongside rundown trailers. Many families struggle to make ends meet. In 2000, 23 percent of residents lived below the poverty line — compared with 13 percent nationally that year — and mobile homes made up 44 percent of the housing stock, census data show.

Before significant numbers of immigrants arrived, neighborhoods were largely divided along racial lines. And with population growth largely stagnant, commercial farmers who raised squash, cucumbers and tobacco, and new businesses manufacturing industrial fabrics, mobile homes and fiberboard, were eager for new labor.

Migrant farm workers, who trickled in in the late 1980’s, spread the word, telling relatives that Atkinson County had good jobs, good schools, open space and a better quality of life than many crowded, crime-ridden communities in border states.

Mr. Jaimes, the video store owner, who is 43, arrived in 1991 to pick peppers and cut tobacco. Jose Ponce came with his family in 1995, even as he worried about how Mexicans would fare in the American South.

“I had told myself, ‘Never will I live in that state,’ ” recalled Mr. Ponce, who saw a documentary about Georgia’s segregation era while he was still in Mexico.

“But the schools were good,” said Mr. Ponce, 54, who promotes homeopathic medicines for a Mexican company and is raising three children here. “There was work wherever you looked. In terms of security for the family, it was beautiful.”

Today, Harvey’s, Pearson’s lone supermarket, dedicates three aisles to mole, tortillas, cilantro and other items directed at Hispanics, who now make up 40 percent to 50 percent of the store’s customers, said Rick Merritt, the manager.

Down the road at Guthrie Motors, a used-car dealership, 60 percent of the customers are Hispanic. At the local barbershop, where Arthur Aubrey Morgan has clipped hair since 1945, a third of the patrons hail from Mexico.

A karate school caters to the children of Mexican workers who have prospered enough to pay for classes. This spring, a Catholic church in a neighboring county opened a new building to accommodate worshipers at its Spanish-language Mass, which draws parishioners from Atkinson County.

And a half-dozen Hispanic-owned businesses have opened, including a bakery and several small grocery stores.

Pearson, which now has about 1,900 residents, was losing population before the Mexicans arrived. Tommy Guthrie, co-owner of Guthrie Motors, said the new arrivals had helped his business and others to thrive. Several of his Mexican-born customers, Mr. Guthrie added, have moved beyond his dealership because they can now buy new cars.

Immigrants have yet to play a significant role in politics — there are no Hispanic elected officials and only about 100 Hispanic registered voters — but many believe that will change as the American-born children of new arrivals come of age.

“I tell you something — they’re not staying down,” said Mr. Guthrie, who is white. “They’re moving up.”

But around the corner, at the county commission office, officials are counting the costs, not the benefits, of immigration to Atkinson County.

County Commissioner Edwin Davis Sr. serves as the informal leader of county efforts to stem the tide of illegal immigration. He sees the negative consequences everywhere — in the shabby mobile homes in some Hispanic enclaves, the Spanish-language graffiti splashed on the shopping plaza and the Hispanic mothers and toddlers crowding into the county’s health clinic.

“They’re coming here to have babies as quick as they can,” said Mr. Davis, who emphasized that he opposed illegal arrivals, not legal immigration. “And we’re paying for all of those babies.”

Rising Expenses

Mr. Davis acknowledged that homeowners had not yet felt the impact of illegal immigration in the form of higher property taxes, though he said that might be coming.

And police officials here disagree about whether crime has increased as immigration has surged. Pearson’s police chief says that it has not, the county sheriff says it has, though both say that illegal immigrants driving without licenses have become a growing problem and worry that gangs may infiltrate Hispanic neighborhoods.

But there is no doubt that the local clinic and schools have been hit with rising costs as immigrants and their children have turned to the county for services.

The public school population, which was 7 percent Hispanic in 1995, was nearly 30 percent Hispanic this year. State spending for teaching English to speakers of other languages here soared to $102,002 from $18,296 during that time. And the clinic has hired two Spanish-speaking interpreters since 1991.

Poor patients, including illegal immigrants, receive care subsidized by the state. And many residents complain about having to wait for flu shots behind Spanish-speaking immigrants.

“They done took over the population,” said Jimmy Roberts Jr., a black county commissioner, who said his constituents complained about immigrants receiving subsidized services. “I don’t think it’s right.”

This spring, the county approved a zoning regulation prohibiting anyone from bringing in trailers older than 20 years, a measure that some believe will raise rents and make it harder for poor Hispanics to live here. Mr. Davis and Mr. Roberts say the measure will protect immigrants from being forced into substandard housing.

Mr. Davis also supported the citizens who challenged Hispanic voters in the contested county commission race in 2004. The state attorney general is expected to hold a hearing soon to evaluate whether immigrants were improperly registered as voters in that race.

Meanwhile, Mr. Corbitt, the white businessman and property owner whose family has lived here since the 1800’s, proudly declares that he refuses to rent any of his buildings to Hispanic businessmen.

And when his church, First Baptist, considered allowing a Hispanic congregation to hold prayer meetings there, Mr. Corbitt led the opposition. “They’re bleeding hearts,” he said of the church members who voted him down.

Even whites who interact more frequently with the newcomers say they sometimes feel uneasy. Tasha Davis helps run the 4H Club and adores the Hispanic students who giggle and chatter at her desk.

But Mrs. Davis, who is not related to Edwin Davis, said the immigrants had begun to erode the cohesiveness of the community. “Before they come, everybody knew everybody,” she said. “Now you don’t know who is living in the trailer next to you or the second trailer from you.”

Reaching Across the Divide

Fernando Amador Trejo, 37, fumes at such talk. Mr. Amador came here as a migrant worker 12 years ago and now owns two grocery stores, one in Pearson and the other in a neighboring county.

Yet, he says, he has been stopped by the police without good reason and treated with indifference or hostility by whites here. Mr. Amador has never been invited to join the county’s Chamber of Commerce, he said. And the white businessmen and workers who work near him in the town’s only shopping plaza have never formally introduced themselves.

“They call me, ‘the Mexican,’ ” Mr. Amador said bitterly. “I am Mexican. But I have a name, too.”

But as they mingle in stores, neighborhoods and on factory floors, some Southerners and immigrants are trying to reach across the divide.

The Chamber of Commerce, for instance, is now considering recruiting immigrant business owners. On one recent afternoon, Mark von Waldner, the chamber chairman, came into Mr. Jaimes’ new video store for the first time and shook his hand.

“Patrón!” he called out, trying his fledgling Spanish.

On a local Spanish-language radio program, Mr. Ponce recently challenged his fellow immigrants to do more to connect to native-born whites and blacks. “How many of us have been here for 10 years and still don’t speak English?” asked Mr. Ponce, who makes a point of greeting everyone he meets. “That has got to change.”

And late last year at Atkinson County High School, where students say whites, blacks and Hispanics still socialize in largely separate worlds, Sara Silva, 16, and Kinnon Holt, 17, decided to go on a date.

Kinnon, who is white, and Sara, the American-born daughter of Mexican immigrants, have been together for eight months now. He has sampled his first empanada and she has tasted her first Hot Pocket, which she gleefully dubbed “an American burrito.”

“That’s my dream, getting married, having kids, having my own little shop here, having a farm,” said Sara, who hopes to open a beauty salon. “This town is pretty much my life.”

Atkinson County is Ms. Contreras-Martinez’s life, too. She lives comfortably among white and Hispanic neighbors and has worked in so many county jobs — once teaching Spanish to county workers — that many white government employees greet her by name.

But the memory of the 2004 election still burns, as do the slights from whites who speak disparagingly of Hispanics in her presence, assuming she cannot speak English.

Sometimes, she says she feels as if she does not belong anywhere at all, not in Georgia and not in Mexico.

“You’re not from here; you’re not from there,” said Ms. Contreras-Martinez, who coordinates a high school program for migrant workers. Yet when her husband gently suggests that they move to Edcouch, Tex., the mostly Hispanic city where he grew up, she always resists.

She has a baby boy now, the first generation of her family to be born in the county. She dreams of watching him run in the wide open spaces of this little town that she has grown to love, despite everything.

“I’m a Latina Grits — a Latina girl raised in the South,” Ms. Contreras-Martinez said. “So I’m still here.”

    In Georgia, Immigrants Unsettle Old Sense of Place, NYT, 4.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/04/us/04georgia.html?hp&ex=1154750400&en=f41ddc8bc4745d95&ei=5094&partner=homepage