|
||
Mexico in the Heart of Dixie: Impact of an Influx of Immigrants
|
 |
|||||||||
| At dusk on a Friday evening, the row of restaurants and shops is jumping with activity. Customers at a market choose from bins of fresh green tomatillos, plantains, traditional Spanish candies, and a dozen varieties of colorful chile peppers. Next door, flashing strobe lights in red, white, and green, the colors of the Mexican flag, draw passersby to a cafe; its Day-Glo window sign advertises “Margarita Special!” and the music of a live mariachi band drifts from an open doorway. A typical street scene in Mexico City? Far from it. It’s a neighborhood in Birmingham’s Southside.
For years, Alabama residents have known intuitively what the most recent U.S. Census numbers just made official: Hispanic immigrants are by far the fastest growing segment of the population. Nationwide, 95 percent of American counties reported an increase in Hispanic residents over the past decade. Because of Mexico’s proximity, the growth has been especially rapid in Southern states. |
|
 |
|
|
In a recent issue of the Birmingham Post-Herald, a six-inch-high bold headline trumpeted “Habla Español?” And with good reason. The official census count puts Jefferson County’s Hispanic population at 10,284—an astonishing 364 percent increase since 1990. Some area Hispanic groups say that’s only the tip of the iceberg; because of census undercounting and significant illegal immigration, they maintain, the true number may be closer to 50,000. The growing numbers of immigrants have already made their mark on the area’s cultural scene and everyday life. Wide selections of ethnic foods are now available in supermarkets, and increasing numbers of bank ATMs are offering instructions in both English and Spanish. In addition, ads in Spanish are appearing in general publications, and the state is now home to both a Spanish-language radio station and a bilingual Spanish newspaper that has doubled its circulation in the past year and stepped up its publication schedule from monthly to biweekly. But along with the progress have come serious challenges—particularly to overburdened organizations that provide medical care, education, and social services. There’s a shortage of trained interpreters, and teachers of English as a Second Language (ESL) programs are having a hard time keeping up with demand for their classes. And if the experts are right, the immigration trend is just beginning. Census officials predict that in less than 10 years, Hispanic Americans will outnumber African Americans as the country’s largest minority group.
“The real immigration boom in Jefferson County started about seven years ago,” according to Lisa Theus, language services coordinator for the county health department. Theus, who was born in Spain, came to Birmingham in 1986 to pursue a Master of Science in Public Health degree in UAB’s School of Public Health. While she was a student, she worked as an intern in the health department’s administrative offices.
“I was called on more and more frequently to come down to the clinic and interpret,” she says. In 1994, after she received her master’s degree, the health department created her current position. In the beginning, she says, the clinic saw about 40 Spanish-speaking patients in a typical month. Today, the monthly average is more than a thousand.
|
|
 |
|
Another observer who spotted the immigration trend early is UAB’s Raymond Mohl, Ph.D., professor and chair of the history department in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Mohl, whose academic specialty is urban and ethnic history, recalls becoming aware of the trend while driving through parts of rural Alabama after his move to Birmingham from Boca Raton’s Florida Atlantic University in 1996.
“The signs were everywhere in the small towns,” he says. “In a metropolitan area, immigrants tend to sort of blend into the background for a long while. But in small towns, the phenomenon is a lot more obvious. So the people who live in outlying areas saw this trend coming long before others did. In some rural areas, Hispanic immigrants now comprise a third or more of the population.”
|
|
|
Nabbing New Jobs The continuing “Mexicanization” of Alabama has been remarkably peaceful, Mohl observes. When Miami started seeing large numbers of Hispanic immigrants from Cuba in the 1960s, he says there were riots in the black community by those claiming the immigrants were taking away jobs in hotels, restaurants, and other service businesses. But no such controversy has erupted in Alabama. Part of the reason, Mohl believes, is that many immigrants have taken new jobs rather than existing ones: “Most of the poultry processing plants in North Alabama, for instance, just weren’t there before. I think it would take a pretty severe economic downturn, and a far more competitive labor market than we have now, to create any friction over jobs,” he says. |
|
| Except for concern in the Hispanic community about the state attorney general’s attempts to overturn a requirement that Alabama provide driver’s license exams in Spanish if requested, the main controversy created by the immigrant boom seems to be over what its members should be called. “Spanish” technically applies to people from some 20 different countries. “Hispanic” is the federal government’s chosen term for this immigrant population, although the Census Bureau compromised with groups preferring “Latino” by offering “Hispanic/ Spanish/Latino” beside the check-box on the latest census form. Some people from Mexico prefer to be called Mexicans, and some don’t. In California, the term “Chicano” became popular at one time for denoting Mexican Americans. But for now, at least, “Hispanic” seems the most popular general term. Myths about Migration
|
|
 |
|
|
Though the new immigrants have much in common with other new arrivals in the United States over the centuries—the language barrier and the need for social services, for example—they’re also very different in many respects. So says UAB cultural anthropologist Chris Kyle, Ph.D., an assistant professor in UAB’s School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Kyle is studying the way of life of indigenous people and has made many field trips to Mexico to collect data on the culture there. Mexico is a much more complicated society than it’s painted in the American media, Kyle says, and as a result, misconceptions about the country abound here. “Probably the biggest myth is that Mexican immigration is driven largely by poverty,” he says. “As ironic as it may seem, the opposite is actually the case.
|
|
 |
|
“When the bottom dropped out of the peso in 1995, President Clinton argued that we needed 40 or 50 billion dollars in loan guarantees, very quickly, to stave off a huge wave of immigration to the U.S. But contrary to predictions, Mexican immigration actually slowed down during the hard economic times.
“The reason is that, for a Mexican household, the decision to field a migrant to America is a relatively risky one, especially if they don’t have other family members already in this country whom the migrant can call on for support. Migration, whether legal or not, is an expensive proposition. So if a Mexican family doesn’t have the resources for that kind of long shot, their immediate response is to stick close to home and make the best of what they’ve got.”
|
|
|
Another popular misconception, Kyle says, is that Mexican immigrants tend to come with unreasonable expectations of the wealth and glory they can achieve in the American economy. “People in Mexico read the papers, they watch the news, and they keep in touch with family and friends who have come here,” he says. “They know people who expected to send a lot of money back home but are instead just barely breaking even at the end of the month—especially in cities such as New York, where the cost of living is high. They hear stories of Mexicans taking jobs as itinerant flower vendors, or of day laborers working in virtual slave-like conditions. So they pretty much know the score before they come.”
The South isn’t exempt from exploitation of immigrant workers, says Edwin L. Brown, an associate professor of business in UAB’s Center for Labor Education and Research (CLEAR). The current influx of Hispanic immigrants is thus a serious concern within the area’s labor movement, he says, especially in such dangerous trades as construction. A worker killed in a Tuscaloosa County construction accident several months ago was found to be not only an illegal immigrant, but also inexperienced for the task he was doing and, at 16 years old, underage as well; a wrongful death lawsuit is pending against the company that employed him.
“The unions really have their work cut out for them in organizing these immigrants,” says Brown. “For one thing, the laborers often don’t work for the company itself, but for subcontractors or temporary agencies. The language barrier is obviously another problem. And if the worker’s just here temporarily, that prevents building a long-term relationship with the union. Then there’s always the threat that if a worker rocks the boat, he or she might be deported.”
|
|
| Right now, according to Brown, the AFL-CIO is concentrating its efforts on workers in the lowest-paying jobs, which are generally at poultry-processing plants across the northern part of the state.
Judith King, an associate professor of business and director of CLEAR, says one obstacle that American unions face in organizing the immigrants is the history of Mexican labor unions: “The labor unions there are different,” she says. “In recent history they’ve sometimes been used as tools of the government. So people from Mexico are rightly suspicious of a union that says it’s going to look out for their best interests.” “Unions here as a whole are weaker than they were a generation or so ago,” Brown adds. “They’re trying very hard to keep immigrants informed of their rights, but it’s an uphill battle.” |
|
 |
|
|
King says the unions are making strides, though: “We’re seeing more bilingual representatives and organizers, as well as union material that’s printed in both languages. The labor movement can look to other parts of the country—California, Florida, New York, and Texas, for example—where Hispanics have become a very important force in the unions. We’re learning, but it’s not going to happen overnight.” In the meantime, stories of exploitation by employers continue to cause concern. One temporary agency, for example, pays its workers by way of what appear to be ATM cards; the catch is that the cards only work in the agency’s ATM machine, which rakes off a much larger than usual chunk of the employee’s paycheck.
More-fortunate Hispanics find their way into entrepreneurial situations. Mexican groceries, restaurants, and dance clubs, with names such as “Los Amigos,” “El Sol,” and “Sabor Tropical” are sprouting throughout the state, creating jobs for Spanish-speaking clerks, cooks, and servers. Other entrepreneurs take lower-overhead routes. One Shelby County man, who preferred not to give his name, spends his weekdays looking for bargain prices on used cars, then repairing them and cleaning them up. He’s arranged with a local convenience store to display the cars in the store’s parking lot on weekends; word of the venture has spread, and now he often sells out his whole stock, using the proceeds to bankroll another week of searching and fixing.
|
|
| Gricel Ocasio, a native of Puerto Rico, had a journalism degree and a newspaper background but was working for the Huntsville Chamber of Commerce when she made her own entrepreneurial leap last year. Noticing the “amazing number” of Mexican shops and restaurants springing up in surrounding Madison County, Ocasio did some research and decided to start El Reportero, a bilingual newspaper for the Hispanic community. The paper is now distributed in 14 north Alabama counties, as well as on the Internet [www.elreportero-online.com].
By printing English translations of many of El Reportero’s articles, Ocasio hopes not only to make the paper accessible to non-Hispanics, but also to help Hispanics polish their English skills. “Ideally, kids will learn English at school and teach it to their parents and grandparents at home,” the publisher says. “Not knowing English hurts Hispanics’ job and education opportunities.”
|
|
 |
|
|
Learning the Language Because many of the immigrants don’t consider the United States their permanent home but rather travel back and forth to Mexico, they have less incentive to learn English than did the tremendous wave of European immigrants who came to America in the early part of the last century. Boosting English language skills is a major focus of Julia Austin, Ph.D., director of educational services for UAB’s Graduate School. In 1989, she began helping provide training and coaching in English for foreign-born graduate and postdoctoral students working on research and professional presentations. But since 1996, the rapidly growing demand for English as a Second Language (ESL) programs in Spanish for K-12 schools has turned her specialty into “more of a passion than a job,” Austin says. “It’s all happened so quickly that it’s really hard to rank the needs in any kind of order, so we’re just trying our best to meet them all at once. At one school in Collinsville, for instance, the kindergarten now has more non-native students than natives. To a small system like that, it’s a shock they never expected.
“In earlier grades, we sometimes see kids who need ESL training but end up, inappropriately, in special-education classes. The fact that they don’t know the language is sometimes mistaken for disability in functioning.”
Because Alabama’s school systems are strapped for money, churches and other community groups in areas with large Hispanic populations are working to fill the language gap with classes in conversational English. Still, many K-12 students are receiving little or no language training, Austin says. UAB’s School of Education has launched several additional initiatives to help meet the demand, including a master’s-level program leading to ESL certification for teachers. School officials also plan to submit a proposal next summer for a fifth-year ESL program. In addition, they have applied for a U.S. Department of Education grant that would provide professional development workshops not only for K-12 teachers, but also for principals, administrators, cafeteria workers, bus drivers, and other support personnel in schools with significant ESL populations. In addition, the Birmingham Area Consortium for Higher Education (BACHE)—composed of UAB, Samford University, and Birmingham-Southern College—is working to create an institute that would provide ESL services to businesses, university students, and community members. Under the plan, employers could contract with the institute to provide specialized language classes for their workers—or create an entire cross-cultural training program for facilities such as the new Honda plant, where good communication between American and Japanese employees is essential. Another item on the group’s wish list is evening language classes for the general community. In the meantime, Austin says, some creative teachers are using non-traditional ways of enhancing language skills in lieu of a budget. A teacher in Bessemer, who has one Chinese student in a mainly African-American classroom, encourages him to teach the class a Chinese word or phrase each week. “It’s great to see teachers tap into whatever resources they have when it comes to language skills,” says Austin. “A number of studies show that bilingual students are more efficient at problem-solving and score higher on certain types of tests than other students. “The federal government realizes Ala- bama’s great need for language training right now. We have high hopes that some of these grant initiatives will come through soon.”
|
|
| Another area that’s coping with the pressure of increased demand from the immigrant boom is emergency medical services. “New immigrant populations are typically low-income,” according to Thomas E. Terndrup, M.D., professor and chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at UAB. “Many of them have either very limited insurance or none at all. Frequently they don’t have established relationships with physicians, so they tend to wait until they’re very sick to seek care—which means that their care is often coordinated through the emergency department.”
|
|
 |
|
|
In addition to the language barrier, Terndrup says, emergency physicians are challenged by the fact that medical practices and medications differ greatly from country to country. “Even if a person with chronic medical problems has a ‘paper trail’ documenting the type of care he or she has received, the person’s medications may have different names in the U.S. or may not be available at all. So providing care to immigrants often means starting from scratch.” Different social and cultural expectations and patients’ distrust of bureaucratic systems can also be roadblocks to effective treatment, he says. The good news, according to Terndrup, is that UAB, as an internationally diversified campus, is “in many ways far better prepared for this kind of transition than the average medical center, because we’ve been facing these types of problems for years on a routine basis. For instance, we have a list of local interpreters for various languages, and we call on them frequently. We also have access to highly specialized interpreter services through an arrangement with AT&T. “The people who are looking at the Hispanic immigration boom’s financial impact on health care are obviously concerned, and there are challenges that have to be faced. But from a policy point of view, as physicians, our responsibilities are crystal clear—and that’s to provide care for everybody, period. The details will just have to work themselves out.”
One strategy to keep illnesses from becoming emergencies is the preventive care approach, which is a major focus of a family practice clinic in Huntsville, directed by Michael O’Dell, M.D., associate professor of family practice for UAB’s family medicine program. On a weekday morning, the clinic’s waiting room bustles with dark-eyed mothers and young children, some babes-in-arms. A young Hispanic man in his 20s, dressed in a work uniform, cushions a bandaged hand in his lap, as bilingual nurses with clipboards pass among the chairs saying “¡Hola!” and then asking questions and taking notes. “Most of the Hispanic patients we see are either single adults or young families,” O’Dell says. “A typical situation is that at least one member of the family is working and sending money back home to Mexico, or Costa Rica, as a nest egg to buy a shop or start a business there. A lot of our Hispanic patients don’t view Alabama as their permanent home.” Such rootlessness creates major barriers to consistent and effective health care, O’Dell says. One of his clinic’s functions is to help patients navigate the services available to them in an unfamiliar environment. Doctors, nurses, and support personnel who work in the clinic’s family practice setting are encouraged to have some degree of proficiency in Spanish and are expected to have an understanding of the ethnic and cultural diversity within the clinic’s Hispanic patients, who come from different countries with their own individual cultures and attitudes.
“We see a lot of expectant mothers,” says O’Dell, “and it’s obviously a difficult and frightening time for them to be so far away from their mothers and their aunts. Sometimes we have to play the parent role for them, in addition to giving them the medical care they need. “Too, a lot of the patients tell us about bad experiences they’ve had with American physicians who are condescending to them because they don’t have much money and don’t speak the language well. That’s something we try to teach our staff—to be sensitive to patients’ needs and to look at the larger picture of their overall health and wellness. “One thing we’ve found is that in Mexico and Central America, there’s almost no emphasis on preventive care. The medical system is illness-based rather than wellness-based, to a pretty extreme degree. Part of the reason is the lack of financial resources, of course, but it’s also just a different cultural approach to practicing medicine. We spend a lot of time talking to our patients about things they can do to stay well. We also have outreach efforts through churches and other organizations.
“Because our immigrant patients are in a new place and haven’t developed intrinsic immunities, if an outbreak of infectious disease gets started, it can go through an area like wildfire.”
Despite the growing pains of the state’s major population shift, most professionals who work directly with the new immigrants predict a bright future for the new cultural mix. “Hispanic people have already had a huge impact on the Birmingham community,” says Judith King of CLEAR. “They’ve gained a reputation for working hard and being good citizens, and retailers and other providers of services are responding by trying to meet their needs. “Grocery stores are just one example. You go in and see this incredible variety of foods that weren’t there just a few years ago. These people bring their unique culture with them, and it can’t help but enrich all of our lives.” Raymond Mohl agrees: “I’ve talked to many employers, and all who’ve hired Hispanics say that they’re the hardest workers they’ve ever had—that they do a good job and do it with integrity and a very strong work ethic. I hear employers in different trades say, ‘I wish I had more workers just like them.’”
“The golf courses were empty, the swimming pools were almost deserted, and I realized that, this being Alabama, most people were at home watching football,” he says. “But just then, I passed by this huge, beautiful athletic field. The parking lot was packed with cars, and the bleachers were full. The spectators were Hispanic families, and there were two soccer games going on at one time. The young men all had snappy new uniforms. “And there was a big banner, back up in the stands, apparently from a local festival a few days earlier, and it read ‘SPIRIT OF AMERICA!’ I looked at all of those people, old and young, in the sunshine, and I thought how appropriate it was—their making a new life here. That is the spirit of America.”
|
|
|