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Hispanics leaving rural areas

Web Posted: 08/26/2006 10:14 PM CDT

Mark Babineck
Houston Chronicle

The population growth of Hispanics across Texas' cities and suburbs and roughly the entire eastern half of the state has been the dominant demographic story of the past few decades.
But it's another story in 40 rural counties mostly near the Mexican border and in West Texas. They're the ones that, according to the Census Bureau, have managed to lose Hispanics since 2000.

Illegal immigration isn't really a concern if undocumented workers have no reason to target your community. And that, in itself, is the problem.

"The illegal aliens only pass through Hebbronville because of the railroad between Laredo and Corpus Christi," said Jim Hogg County Judge Agapito Molina from his office in Hebbronville, a dot on the vast untamed plains of far South Texas. "They don't stay around here, they just keep on going."

Advocates of stanching illegal immigration cite the host of problems it brings, such as increased public health expenses, language challenges for school districts and the potential for terrorists to slip across the border alongside job seekers and families.

For many rural Texas counties, the very lack of interest shown by immigrants — or anyone else — is a sure sign of decline for former railroad, petroleum or agricultural outposts that the world doesn't seem to need anymore.

Of Texas' 254 counties, 105 have lost population since 2000, according to the Census Bureau, and almost all of them are entirely rural. Yet even in most of those, the Hispanic population is either flat or rising slightly.

Not so in Jim Hogg County and the other 39.

Towns in decline


In one breath, Molina politely disputes data showing the population shrinking within his jurisdiction's jagged confines. In another, he acknowledges the frustration of watching young residents move away for work or school and never return.
"What can I do?" Molina asked, then answered, "I can't do anything."

Jim Hogg is 90 percent Hispanic, according to government figures, so it could be argued that the Latino share of the population has nowhere to go but down. Still, all the county's population decline from 2000 to 2005 came from the Hispanic community, which shrank by 6 percent to about 4,500 residents. Anglos stayed about steady at a little over 500.

Nearly everyone in the county lives in the extreme northern side at Hebbronville, which like many remote communities was established by the railroads.

It later grew into a minor ranching and petroleum center, but those industries have declined and require far fewer workers nowadays. Ample deer and quail hunting is a growing draw, but it doesn't pay the bills like oil and cattle once did.

"It only goes from October to February, then (hunters) go back home and just come in once in awhile," Molina said. "It really helps the economy a lot because they do hire people to do their housework, their cooking and their cleaning."

Such stories are repeated wherever Hispanics are leaving.

Up the Rio Grande at the town of Sanderson, the loss of railroad jobs and the decline of the wool and mohair industry in the 1990s formed a double-whammy.

Pecos, which sat along an early cattle drive trail and then a railroad, similarly has ebbed along with oil and agricultural activity. It has shed one-third of its population since 1990.

"Pecos looks like a neutron bomb has hit it," said Paul Wright, a rural demographer at Sul Ross State University in Alpine. "It wipes out the population, but the buildings are still standing."

New migration


Wright said the first migration of Hispanics away from the region happened in the early 20th century, when bigotry and joblessness pushed them west to the "promised land" of California.
But California's cities grew into a mix of unattainably priced homes and desperate slums, and migration patterns changed.

"The flow is now going more toward other cities in Texas or New Mexico and not out to California," Wright said. "I would say in the 1980s, the bloom just went off the rose in California."

Opportunities remain limited in the Trans-Pecos region, and even the area's growing reputation as a hipster getaway isn't creating good-paying jobs.

Wright said Sul Ross State tends to graduate women into schoolteachers and men into one of the few major employers in the area actively seeking workers: the Border Patrol.

"For the average Hispanic male (from rural West Texas), that's probably the most desired job to get if you're not going off to graduate school," he said.

Several long-established Hispanic communities on the High Plains are shrinking, too. The only reason the numbers of their Anglo neighbors are falling faster is that Latinos have higher birth rates, demographers said.

The lack of opportunity is forcing the offspring of old Hispanic communities in the same direction as Anglos, toward the major metropolitan areas such as San Antonio-Austin, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth and smaller hubs like Lubbock, Amarillo and El Paso.

One difference Wright sees is that young Anglos from the area seem to have no trouble going far away and possibly staying away for good. Hispanic youths are more likely to try staying near their families.

It's easier said than done, though.

"For the most part, they really love it out here," Wright said. "They would stick around if they thought they could make a good living."


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mark.babineck@chron.com