http://www.hispaniconline.com/magazine/ ... 10-10.html

Googling around and found this. Follow the link to see which other areas are so highly regarded. I know its almost four years old, but...

10 RALEIGH-DURHAM-CHAPEL HILL

With the Blue Ridge mountains to the west and the beaches of the Outer Banks to the east, North Carolina has suddenly become The Destination for new Latino immigrants. Since the last census, the Triangle (and Raleigh’s Wake County in particular) has experienced a nearly 500 percent increase in its Hispanic population of mostly Mexicans. It started with the economic boom of the ’90s and huge demands for unskilled labor in the construction, poultry and meat-processing, and hospitality industries. That’s transforming what used to be a black-white duopoly into an increasingly diverse area. Of the Triangle’s 1,031,600 residents, about 5 percent are Hispanic. That sounds tiny, but the area’s receiving 10,000 new arrivals annually.

“My prediction is that we will eventually be the Latino capital of the east,” says Puerto Rican Nolo Martínez, director of Gov. Mike Easley’s Office of Hispanic/Latino Affairs in Raleigh. “The future of our growth is going to surpass any other city that has become too busy and too big for other Hispanics. In a town like Raleigh, the Triangle, so far away from the border, the speed and the transformation that we have had is faster and stronger than any other place on your list. I mean, we have the highest number of monolingual speakers in any state in the union.”

James H. Johnson, Jr., director of the Urban Investment Strategies Center at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, explains that employers began heavily recruiting Mexicans to the state through informal networks in traditional gateway border communities like Los Angeles and Texas, traditional Hispanic strongholds like Miami and New York, and also directly from Mexico.

“This process crept up on people in North Carolina,” Johnson says. “It began in the ‘80s and really accelerated in the ‘90s. In 1992, it was clear to me that me that this state was radically different and really changing.”

Unlike earlier Latino waves, who came and went as migrant farm workers, this one’s not ephemeral.

“We have permanent interests in the state,” Martínez says. “Considering people think this is a backward, conservative, hick place full of rednecks, I’d say it’s been welcoming.”
Maybe because part of the affinity between Southerners and Latinos is strong family and religious values. (And socializing. Forbes just cited the Triangle as the fourth best place in America to be single.) With Sunday mass available en español, ESL in public schools, superb colleges (like Chapel Hill and Duke University in Durham), a high-tech boom in Research Triangle Park, low crime, a mild and unpolluted climate, easy commutes, affordable cost of living (houses average $164,600), two Spanish-language newspapers, several Spanish-language radio stations, a Latino credit union, El Centro Hispano (which handles everything from court translation to cultural events), a soccer league, a Mexican consulate, a statewide advocacy group called El Pueblo, a web resource guide called www.ayudate.org, Hispanic bodegas and restaurants—we’d say Dixie’s goin’ Latin.