A new accent on diversity
If Oregonians know anything at all about the town of Woodburn, they're probably familiar with its giant outlet mall. Most of the town's visitors never make it past the mall's shops. They buy Gap shirts, Eddie Bauer pants, London Fog coats, and then drive 20 miles north back to Portland.
But a few blocks away from the outlet mall is a town center that may seem surprising this far from the Mexican border: Rumbling lowrider motorcycles cruise the streets, and it's not at all unusual to see men wearing sombreros and strumming guitars. Everywhere there's the lyrical sound of Spanish being spoken.
This wasn't always the case. For the first time, according to the 2000 census, more Hispanics than whites were counted in Woodburn. This gives the formerly sleepy farming community the "brown" face of the future in the United States, as envisioned by Richard Rodriguez in his latest book, "Brown: The Last Discovery of America" (Viking, $24.95).
When you mix many cultures and colors together, brown is what you get, he explains. He speaks not just of skin color, but of foods and cultures, arts and literature, and ways of life, with something completely new resulting from a mixture of many backgrounds.
Mr. Rodriguez believes this "browning" is the beginning of a new era, a realignment of the American sense of identity.
In more than just numbers, Woodburn population 20,100 has become what many towns across America already look like and many more will become in the future. With three main ethnic groups, it is a sometimes-awkward patchwork of cultures and languages, accompanied by occasional social tension and anxiety.
But what may set this town in transition apart from the communities that have already wrestled with diversity issues is its awareness of the need to work out the problems for the benefit of all residents.
According to the US Census Bureau, the nation's Hispanic population will likely grow from 11.8 percent in 2000 to 18.2 percent in 2025. By 2100, it estimates, more than one-third of America's projected 570 million people will be of Hispanic origin.
Already, the US has the fourth largest Hispanic population in the world.
California, Texas, and the Southwest were among the first areas to experience increasingly large Mexican-American populations. The Midwest has had a large influx of immigrants over the past decade. But other regions still have not dealt with this issue, and haven't grasped the lessons that other areas learned decades ago.
"It's a national phenomenon," says Arturo Madrid, humanities professor at Trinity University in San Antonio. "The next wave will be the South."
America has always attracted immigrants, of course. In earlier times, the "huddled masses" came mainly from Europe, so although they experienced a backlash from the mainstream population, they were still white, and their similarities of culture and skin color allowed them to blend more seamlessly into the communities in which they settled.
This new wave of immigration, however, is more diverse, whether it be Somalis in Georgia, Hmongs in Wisconsin, Indians in California, or Latinos anywhere.
With 51 percent of the country's foreign-born population now coming from Latin America and 26 percent from Asia, the current cultural transformation isn't just of a slightly different hue. It means that communities that may have been homogenous for years will have to adapt in large and small ways.
Woodburn's cultural diversity goes beyond Latino and Anglo. Seven percent of the population is Russian, and a retirement community has brought more senior citizens to town.
