Thread: Hispanics mostly see South as a place to get jobs

http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/n ... 260584.htm

Posted on Sat, Nov. 26, 2005

Hispanics mostly see South as a place to get jobs
They don't feel ties to region yet, but scholars say it's bound to happen
TIM WHITMIRE
Associated Press

MONROE - When Flora Lopez moved to North Carolina in the mid-1990s, the grocery stores didn't sell the kind of cornmeal used to make tortillas. Now, a little more than a decade later, tiendas are sprinkled throughout the town of 28,000 -- and not only in Hispanic neighborhoods.

At Wal-Mart, pallets are stacked high with Maseca cornmeal, Mexican candies and other imports. Across the highway, a car dealership advertises "Credito Facil" -- easy credit. A furniture store's sign reads: "Se Habla Espanol."

But ask Lopez and her husband, Claudio, if they feel a tie to the region, if they feel like "Southerners," and they respond with blank looks and expressions of confusion. They're here because this is where the work is, offering a chance at a better life.

"What you want is a job," said Flora Lopez, whose ability to speak English and Spanish makes her a valuable employee at a CVS pharmacy. "You want to work and get better money than in Mexico."

In towns such as Monroe across the region, the South's long economic boom has attracted tens of thousands of new neighbors like the Lopezes over the past 15 years: Spanish-speaking immigrants, primarily Mexican, many here illegally.

Interviews and studies suggest most of them don't yet feel a cultural tie to the region. But some scholars say it's only a matter of time before Hispanics stop seeing themselves as outsiders and start making an indelible mark.

"Increasingly, Moon Pies will be replaced as a cultural icon by fajitas," predicted Bill Ferris, director of the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC Chapel Hill.

A recent Associated Press/Ipsos poll was consistent with an analysis of 10 years worth of surveys by UNC Chapel Hill, both finding that barely half of Hispanics living in the region identified culturally with it. In fact, in the UNC studies there was a 20-point drop in the percentage of Hispanics who identified themselves as "Southern" from 1991 to 2001 -- the largest of any ethnic group in the region.

"They're arriving in the United States and in the Southern United States at a time of declining regional identity," said Tulane University professor Carl Bankston, who has studied migration patterns in the South. "Much of Southern regional identity is an identification with the past that Latinos simply don't have. They're much more likely to develop an American identity than a Southern identity."

Six Southern states -- North Carolina, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina and Alabama -- saw their Hispanic populations increase by more than 200 percent in the 1990s; since 2000, the Hispanic population in all Southern states outside of Florida and Texas has grown by an estimated 680,000 people.

The Washington-based Pew Hispanic Center recently named Monroe's Union County as one of 36 "new settlement counties" for Hispanics in the region, a list that covers such urban centers as Charlotte, Atlanta, Nashville, Tenn., and Benton County, Ark., home to the headquarters of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Tyson Foods Inc.

"North, South, East, West ... a lot of people just come for the jobs," said Armando Oseguera, co-owner of Los Tres Amigos, a Mexican restaurant in Gulfport, Miss.

That said, Oseguera counts himself a Southerner. He arrived in Montgomery, Ala., from the Mexican state of Chihuahua in 1986 at 16, when there were "maybe 20" Hispanics in the city, he said.

Nearly two decades later, he is a citizen, married to an Alabama native, Leann, with whom he has a 9-year-old son and an 8-year-old daughter. And he has long had a passion for his mother-in-law's cooking. "The okra, the green beans, the mashed potatoes," Oseguera gushed.

But Oseguera's feelings about the South are far from universal among Hispanic immigrants.

Aside from language and folkways, another factor working against Hispanics embracing a Southern regional identity is that the vast majority are Roman Catholics. Only about half of the region's Catholics (Hispanic or otherwise) consider themselves Southern, UNC sociologist Larry Griffin said in a recently published study.

Griffin found that both ethnicity and religion "independently dampen" identity rates. And he suggests that racial and religious minorities, in general, may feel unwelcome by whites and Protestants, the so-called "authentic Southerners."

"Hispanics are going to change the very meaning of being a Southerner," he said. "And the only way that wouldn't happen, I think ... is if those of us in the South and those of us who embrace its identity now, if we do not permit these folks to be Southerners."

Angeles Ortega, a leading advocate for the Hispanic community in Charlotte, said a political atmosphere that's often hostile to immigrants makes questions of Southern identity relatively unimportant to most newcomers.

In the Latino community, the complaints from natives about illegal immigration are viewed as hypocritical because so many in the South benefit from cheap Hispanic labor.

"It's sort of like extending a double message to the Latino community: `Come here, but don't come,' " Ortega said.

For the time being, Bankston expects the South's Hispanic population to remain mostly on society's margins.

"When people become politically active, it's usually the second and third generation," Bankston said. "It's going to take a while."

Last in a Series

A new Associated Press-Ipsos poll finds the percentage of people in the region identifying themselves as "Southerners" is slowly shrinking. This three-part series explores the question of what it means to be Southern today, and whether the qualities that have long been ascribed to the region are really true anymore.

Thursday: The South, the most maligned and mused-upon of American regions, has been labeled as everything from the Solid South to the Old South to the New South. But are we heading toward a "No South"?

Friday: How blacks can identify so strongly with a region that oppressed them for so long.

Today: How the South's Hispanic immigrants identify with their adopted home.

A bunch of Anti-America, Anti-United States professors happy about illegal immigration.