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A new accent on diversity
By Frank Bures
| Special to The Christian Science Monitor
Back to part 1.
When the balance of power shifts
Now that Hispanics are a majority of the population, a few Anglo residents are concerned that Mexican-Americans will "take over" the town and initiate projects that benefit themselves and not others.
Typically, in towns that have several ethnic groups, tall sides jockey for control, says Madrid. A community may find itself divided between "people who want to maintain control and people who want a voice in what happens. The new group wants to have its voice heard."
Retiree Donna Gramse moved to the city four years ago with her husband. As a member of Woodburn's new minority, she is concerned about possible changes to the political power structure.
"It's a worry," she says, "because what they vote in, we've got to pay for with taxes on our homes.... The rest of the city wants and wants and wants, and now they have the ability to vote it in."
But the fact is that despite their numbers, Woodburn's Latinos haven't voted in anything yet. To date, Sifuentez is the only Mexican-American council member.
Veliz learned about Latino political apathy the hard way when he ran for state representative in the primary this year and lost by a large margin. Of the roughly 50,000 Latinos in the district, he estimates – on the basis of examining surnames – that only about 800 voted in the primary.
Veliz is a third-generation Oregonian who lives in the Woodburn home his grandparents bought when they came to the city in the 1950s. Now he gets to watch the current generation growing up in Woodburn.
Young people lead the way
In many ways, say observers on the scene, the city's future will be determined in the schools and among young people. Every day, those in Woodburn's schools face the reality of their town's changing population.
"You don't walk into our cafeteria and see all the Hispanic kids on one side and all the Anglo kids on the other," says Jody Fischer, director of personnel and community relations for the school district. "It's not to say there aren't cliques, but they don't break down by race. They break down more by economics, by who are the new immigrants."
"The kids get along great," confirms Veliz. "It's the adults that have the issues, when you get down to it. With the kids, everybody's mixing and dating. Where you can find a difference is that language can divide a group."
Seventeen-year-old Isaiah Constante was born in Woodburn, although his family originally came from Mexico. He sometimes gets harassed by recent immigrants because he knows no Spanish. But he says most people get along.
"I remember when I was in middle school there used to be a lot of gang problems here at the high school," he says. "But over the years it just kind of cleared up."
"The preppies have taken over now," says Jessica Leon, who came to the US from Guanajuato, Mexico, when she was 1 year old and is now a senior at Woodburn High School. "Everybody wants to be a preppy – Russians, Mexicans, and whites."
In common with teenagers everywhere, Woodburn's students have been united by fashion.
"It's no longer the thing to be in a gang," says Isaiah, who adds that most kids listen to the same radio station, which plays hip-hop. "Everybody pretty much knows the situation," he says. "There's no hating."
Dan Dozier recently moved to Woodburn from Portland because he wanted his daughter to live in a diverse community. He sees barriers of ethnicity breaking down at her school.
"Times are changing," he says. "With the kids playing together and going to school together, that's going to force a change. When I pick [my daughter] up from school, they're all hanging [out]. They're just friends. It's no big deal."
Writer Rodriguez is enthusiastic about young people as the crucible of a new culture. "These kids who are going to be trilingual in this little city are growing up with a global sense of themselves," he says. "I did not have a global sense of myself. I thought I had to choose, as an American, between that place south of the border and this place. Now I'm beginning to see that there's a kind of accommodation in America to a larger sense of its connection to the world."
If we can make it work here ...
For students in Woodburn's schools, this means that it has become normal to see their handouts, newsletters, and signs throughout the school in Russian, Spanish, and English. They routinely sign up for classes such as classic Hispanic literature and Russian composition. They attend a
quinceanera, the 15th birthday party of a friend. They have a sense of connection to the outside world.
"The thing that keeps us optimistic and committed," says the school district's Ms. Fischer, "is the sense that this is a model for the whole world. Seeing how it works, and making it work in Woodburn, means that it will work elsewhere. We are where ... probably the entire country is going."
Still, making it work isn't always easy, as communities that have already traveled this path know. Fusion of cultures can be difficult and tumultuous.
Adults know that and may tread warily, but Woodburn's younger population lives, talks, interacts, and plays on teams together. As they grow up together, they get to know one another as individuals first and as members of another group second.
This model holds hope for cross-cultural understanding among the community's adults. Sifuentez likens the process to a marriage, one that individuals need to nurture every day.
"We need to really get to know each other, neighbor to neighbor," she says.
When her family first moved to Woodburn and lived in a camp for migrant workers, it was easy for her to imagine that all Anglos were rich and had an easy life. But once she got to know them as individuals, she began to understand "they're not any different than we are. A lot have the same obstacles [Latinos] do."
As a town like Woodburn works to assimilate different races and cultures, tension in the social area is natural, because "we're used to seeing, and dealing with, people like ourselves," Professor Madrid says.
"It may cause people consternation to see different-looking people on street corners or in parks," he adds. But this is part of Latino culture. "Hispanics are more public-space people [than Anglos are]."
Getting to know you
Understanding these cultural differences starts where the various groups meet each other, Madrid says: churches, stores, the workplace, and among families of children attending the same school or on the same soccer team.
It's not realistic to think that people will just start inviting one another to their homes. But similar results can be achieved by mixing and mingling at Rotary or Lion's Club meetings. "People need to invite each other to public functions," Madrid says.
More than 20 years ago, a friend of his was one of the first Mexican-American players for the Los Angeles Rams football team. Hoping to foster better understanding between the Anglo and Latino communities, the athlete started a program called Take a Gringo to Lunch, because, he had learned, Anglos and Latinos didn't really know one another.
"If you know people, it's going to be easier to understand them," Madrid explains.
But understanding someone doesn't mean that all differences or tensions have been erased.
"I have a dilemma right now," Sifuentez says. "One of my daughters is involved with a Russian. Well, my Anglo friends and my Russian friends keep telling me to separate them because there's no future [in it]. She'll never be accepted in the Russian [Orthodox]culture. She would have to completely give up her culture and go into the Russian culture. And I think my daughter is too strong, and she would never do that. But there is that problem."
As Richard Rodriguez sees it, this is a natural, painful, and inevitable part of this process.
Blending together
"We are at one of the great moments of civilization," he says. "Nothing as audacious as what we are trying to achieve has been attempted in human history, where you have the Iranian living next door to the Pakistani, living next door to the Cambodian, living next door to the Irishman, living next door to the Mexican. There is just no country that has ever tried this at the level at which we're trying it."
The danger is fragmentation instead of amalgamation.
"Iowa has just declared itself an English-speaking state," Rodriguez says. "That's happening because of this migration. So the migration is happening at the same time there's a withdrawal from it. These two impulses are happening simultaneously. The country is getting browner – that is, more mixed racially – at the same time that people are trying to reestablish boundaries in the culture.
"Only further confusion can save us," Rodriguez writes in "Brown," because from that confusion can some new kind of America emerge.
"What I want," he says, "is something melted. I want something mixed. I want us to realize that we create each other." That is, assimilation is a reciprocal process.
By that measurement, Woodburn is on the right track. "Whenever there are families in need," Sifuentez says, "the people of the town [Anglo and Latino] always come forward."
According to projections, the percentage of Hispanics in the United States will grow from 11.8% in 2000 to 18.2% in 2025.
By 2100, the Census Bureau estimates, more than one third of America's projected 570 million people will be of Hispanic origin.
Currently, the US has the fourth largest Hispanic population in the world.
Of the country's foreign-born population, 51 percent now come from Latin America and 26 percent from Asia.
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