Hannah Gill - The Latino Migration Experience in North Carolina

2010 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker and set in Quadraat, Press Gothic, and Vitrina by Rebecca Evans. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gill, Hannah E. (Hannah Elizabeth), 1977
The Latino migration experience in North Carolina : new roots in the
Old North State / Hannah Gill.

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN978-0-8078-3428-2 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN978-0-8078-7163-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Hispanic AmericansNorth Carolina. 2. Latin AmericansNorth Carolina.
3. North CarolinaEmigration and immigrationHistory. I. Title.
F265.S75G55 2010
303.48*275608dc22 2010020418

cloth 14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1
paper 14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1

INTRODUCTION
Mapping the Issues at the Heart of Change in North Carolina and the Southeast

1 PRESERVING OUR HERITAGE, PROMOTING OUR FUTURE
Whats at Stake in Alamance County and Beyond

2 IMMIGRATION IN NORTH CAROLINAS PAST
Learning from History

3 BIENVENIDOS A NORTE CAROLINA
The Economic, Work, and Social Realities of Migration from Both Sides of the Border

4 BURYING THE KNIFE, BUILDING COMMUNITIES
How Migrants Make New Lives

5 DEFYING THE ODDS
Latino Youth, the Agents of Change

I first discovered in 2002 that I could get on a bus in my hometown of Burlington in the hilly Piedmont region of North Carolina and travel directly to Mexico by sunset of the following day. For just $185, El Tornado would take me to central Mexico in a comfortable and clean coach with movies, air-conditioning, and regular stops. As a native and resident of North Carolina whose adolescence coincided, during the early 1990s, with the arrival of thousands of Latin American migrants, I should not have been surprised that this bus existed. Yet I was amazed to learn how intimately connected my hometown had become with Latin America, particularly when I discovered that this bus ran every single day. Four years later, after taking that bus to a small town in central Mexico, I was similarly awedthis time, standing at the other end of the lineto read in a bus depot a schedule of daily departures listing the North Carolina cities of Greensboro, Burlington, Carrboro, and Goldsboro as destinations. Even more remarkable was the fact that at least five other bus companies in that town made daily trips to places throughout North Carolina and the Southeast, carrying immigrants to jobs and new homes in the United States.

Despite the recent recession, bus companies in North Carolina still leave daily for Mexico, traveling along now well-established networks connecting the southeastern United States to Latin America. While some immigrants have returned to their countries of origin because of decreasing employment opportunities, school enrollments of U.S.-born children and grandchildren of Latin Americans continue to rise in North Carolina. Latinos are no longer just visitors to the state but part of the inevitably changing makeup of its population. Emerging immigrant communities and the integration of Latino populations remain salient issues in the United States, particularly as the U.S. Congress stands on the verge of passing comprehensive immigration reform for the first time in nearly three decades.

The Latino Migration Experience in North Carolina: New Roots in the Old North State explains the real story of Latino migration to North Carolina. It is intended to give North Carolinians from all walks of life a better understanding of their new Latino neighbors, adding light instead of heat to local and national debates on immigration. This book is written for mainstream audiences that include college students, educators, policy makers, law enforcement officials, members of business and faith communities, and anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of Latino migration experiences. While it is particularly useful to people living in North Carolina, it also has regional and national relevance, as the Southeast is a new frontier for Latin American migration to the United States. The book explores the human stories and larger social processes behind demographic change and how North Carolina communities are facing the challenges and opportunities of these shifts.

The majority of perspectives in the book come from Latinos, under-represented voices in larger immigration debates in the United States. Within the diverse population of people who self-identify as Latino or Hispanic, most of the narratives featured in the book are from people of Mexican descent, a choice I made because they make up the large majority of the Latinos living in the state. Most Latinos in North Carolina are immigrants: foreign-born people who have moved, or migrated, from one country to another. The book also uses the more general term migrant, which can be applied to anyone who has moved from one region to another, within a country or across international borders. It must be noted, however, that a growing percentage of Latinos in the state are neither immigrants arrived directly from Latin America nor migrants relocated from another part of the United States but individuals born in North Carolina. It is the permanence of these second and third generations that makes this book particularly relevant in present and future conversations about identity in the state, region, and nation.

The signs of impending growth that eventually brought Latinos to my home county of Alamance were present throughout my childhood in the early 1980s. The expansion of housing developments, shopping centers, and industry revealed, even then, how Alamance County was changing from a rural patchwork of communities where the same working-class families had lived for generations to a place with larger aspirations for growth. One of my earliest memories of indignation at the world occurred when a developer attempted to clear a dozen acres of forest and a favorite pond in my neighborhood to build new houses. What I did not see or understand at the time were the larger processes behind the scenes making these changes happen.

By the time I went to college, my county had become the new home of the fastest-growing Latino population in the state, and these changes were very visible: churches started advertising services in Spanish, a grocery store turned into a Mexican butcher shop, and a local barbecue joint became a Salvadorian eatery with the best food in town. Merengue and