Our Town -- or Is It Theirs?

There has been discord enough in the shady streets of this rice-growing city north of San Francisco, where the population has shifted from three-quarters white to nearly three-quarters Latino in just two decades.

Anyone wanting some heated conversation need only mention the time six years ago when the board of education extended the Christmas break to three weeks to give Mexican families more time to go home for the holidays.

The realignment of the calendar maximized classroom time, resulting in lower truancy and improved test scores. But it also set off a cultural debate that continues to this day.

“The Caucasian community didn’t want the change,” which meant trimming the treasured summer vacation by a week, said Colusa County Supervisor Mark Marshall. “It was very controversial.”

Now, if this were a story about Hazleton, Pa., or San Bernardino, places where federal immigration battles ring as loudly through City Hall as they have at recent congressional hearings, it might have culminated in angry denunciations, protests and television cameras capturing them-against-us conflict.

But in Williams, a place that demographer Hans Johnson describes as “the most ethnically transformed city in California,” the story is not that simple.

Williams “serves as an almost natural experiment about what these changes mean for all of us,” said Johnson, of the Public Policy Institute of California, who estimates that as much as 20% of the city’s population could be undocumented.

This city of 5,087 (and rising fast) is the closest thing to a “Petri dish” for observing the effects of immigration in their most concentrated form, said Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center.

The experiment has not always had predictable results. Practical people, for the most part, residents of this agricultural outpost are slowly -- sometimes reluctantly -- coming to terms with the dramatic changes wrought by immigration.

“All of the families like mine and my husband’s, who grew up here all their lives, have had problems with the change in culture,” said Kara Alvernaz, who works for the local fire district. But the last thing she’d do is give up on the schools -- calendar change or no. “I chose to keep my kids here. They’ve gotten a good education.”

It was Monica Ordaz, a business owner of Mexican descent, who issued her daughter’s teacher an ultimatum last year, when bilingual Nicole hit kindergarten: “If my daughter was ever used as a translator, taken away from her time to learn to teach someone else, I’d take her out of the school,” she recalled saying.

“I just don’t think it’s fair for the kids,” said Ordaz, who with her husband runs El Campesino, the combination general store, tax service and translation center that largely caters to farmworkers.

As immigration touches nearly every facet of life here, it’s been a slow march of two steps forward and one step back, of honest effort meeting harsh reality.

The police and fire departments now have healthy percentages of bilingual members, but elected boards lag far behind in representing the Latino supermajority. An expensive subdivision largely for commuters has been welcomed; expanded housing for farmworkers has not.

At the Church of the Annunciation, Spanish Masses outnumber English 2 to 1. But when a shortage of priests drove Father Francisco Hernandez Gomez to trim one poorly attended English Mass a month, white parishioners revolted. “They thought I was favoring the Hispanics,” he recounted, “and that I was kicking out the whites from their own church.”

Hernandez Gomez, who has reinstated the English Mass, said the prejudice he sometimes senses in Williams is mostly passive and, perhaps, rooted in feelings of fear and loss.

“Yes, after being the majority just a few years ago, now they are just a few people among a big new community,” he said. “The whites could feel they are losing their town, their church, their school, their stores, their language.”

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Small enough to be featured in a guidebook called “Wide Places in the California Roads,” Williams has been a farm town since its early history. Today, it is part of the No. 1 rice-growing county in California.

But rice’s dominance is slipping in the region -- and therein lies one key to the city’s metamorphosis.

Rice is a relatively low-labor crop, with increasingly slim returns. So farmers have been planting other things. Agriculture Commissioner Harry Krug predicts that, for the first time, almond revenues will surpass rice in Colusa County this year.

“The almond orchards have increased dramatically,” said Krug. “Tomatoes came in. We grow a lot of seed crops ... They needed more labor. That’s where the influx came from.”

Changing immigration law also has boosted Williams’ population. The federal amnesty program in 1986 paved the way for thousands of illegal immigrants to become legal residents. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, those who used to regularly travel back and forth from Mexico have been more likely to stay put, fearful of being caught at the border.

Most of the city’s new small businesses cater to Latinos: Toro Loco Mercado; Pita’s Restaurant; Roberta’s Taqueria, which sells lengua (tongue) and cabeza (head) tacos hard by the Burger King.

Even longtime grocery stores like Shop n’ Save stock pork skins in vinegar, mango lollipops, bottled cactus and cones of dark sugar called piloncillo, along with Campbell’s soups and People magazine.

Members of Alicia Zamudio’s family have trekked to Williams since the 1940s -- three generations of campesinos from the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, all in search of work.

Her parents were the first to come. Zamudio, 49, her husband and children started coming each summer in 1990. Today, two of her children, grown and married, have settled in Williams. She would stay too if housing weren’t so dear.

“There are many more Latinos here,” said Zamudio, who works in the fields six days a week tending tomatoes and vine crops grown for seed. “I see a lot less Anglos now. Maybe because the work here in Williams is farm work and not a lot of Anglos want to be in the field hoeing and picking tomatoes.”

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When Linda Granzella describes the Williams High School homecoming game of 1993, her words come out in an emotional rush. She is sitting in the office of her family’s combination restaurant, motel and olive packing company, barely looking up as the tale bursts forth.

Granzella was in the bleachers, waiting for the Yellowjackets to take the field, when the high school band struck up the national anthem. The loudspeaker’s disembodied voice asked everyone to stand.

What happened next “put me over the edge,” she said. “Eighty percent of the stadium wouldn’t stand. They were Hispanic children, and they didn’t stand for the national anthem ... I asked them why. They said, ‘This is not our country.’ ”

The indignant mother’s response was visceral: She took her daughter out of Williams Elementary School and sent her 10 miles east to a public school in the county seat of Colusa.

“I didn’t want her to be in a school where she was a minority in her own country, and they didn’t have respect,” Granzella said.

Families like Granzella’s began transferring their children to nearby districts with fewer Latino students a decade or so before the school board began debating a change in the academic calendar. Tiny Maxwell, 10 miles north on Interstate 5, has been a popular destination, with its plush athletic fields and a high school that’s more than twice as white as school enrollment countywide.

“The calendar was a good excuse,” said Williams Elementary School Principal Cyndee Engrahm, to explain what for years has been “white flight, pure and simple.”

Changing the calendar took a year of acrimonious debate and laid bare the chasm between white and Latino work lives. To some, it also became an argument over whose time was worth more.

“The Anglos wanted more time during the summer. They thought that their time was more important during summer than winter break,” said Carlos Velazquez, a real estate agent and chairman of the Williams planning commission.

Three weeks was actually a hard-won compromise. “We’d like a month,” Velazquez said. “Most of us are off during the winter, at least three months.”

Rice farmer Bob Freed, a school board member at the time, said the final result rankled nearly everyone.

“I had people call me on it: ‘You’re giving in to the Hispanic population,’ ” he recounted. “That’s not true. Basically it was the answer to the problem.”

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The moment was not lost on new Police Chief Jim Saso. As he walked into his department’s small offices one steamy July day, a resident was conducting a bit of routine business. Two police officers, the records clerk and the city’s code enforcement officer were all chiming in -- in Spanish.

“I realized we’ve come a long way,” Saso said.

When Saso joined the Williams Police Department as a sergeant in 2001, there was one bilingual police officer. Today the department is more than 50% bilingual, a change Saso credits to recently retired Chief Dick Waugh, who Saso said recognized “that the demographics are changing.”

Similarly, the volunteer Fire Department, which once was nearly all white and open to candidates by invitation only, just promoted Jaime Davalos to captain. He is the first Latino to hold the post.

Twelve of Williams’ 42 volunteer firefighters are Latino, seven joining up in the last six months alone. Most of the new recruits, drawn by word of mouth, are people who have lived in the agricultural city for many years. To Chief Jeff Gilbert, who has headed the department since 2003, it’s a sign that the Latino community is changing: “We’re getting into a new generation. They care about the community.”

The Latino majority remains largely outside the political arena, however.

Mayor Virginia Frias was appointed in 2004 to fill a vacant seat on the City Council; if she wins this November, she would be the first Latino elected to that body. The school board is entirely white, as is the Colusa County Board of Supervisors.

Some here fault discrimination, “cultural differences” or long hours in the fields for the discrepancy between population and representation. Others cite language ability and citizenship -- or the lack thereof. Almost half of the Latino immigrants in Williams had arrived in the last decade, according to the 2000 census, and only 6% were naturalized.

Velazquez, 38, is someone whose name comes up regularly in conversations about possible Latino candidates. Born near Guadalajara, he is the son of farmworkers and has lived in the area since he was 12.

He wavers on whether he’d ever run, but either way, he believes the city’s politics need someday to mirror its population. Part of the problem for Latinos, he said, is lingering mistrust arising from experiences in their home countries.

“I think a lot of us don’t want to make waves,” Velazquez said. But “we’ve got to be able to represent our population.... We’ve got to get over our fear of government.”

A lot is at stake. Consider housing policies.

The city has embraced an earth-tone development where single-family houses fetch $400,000, while balking at a proposal to build 50 units of what some consider desperately needed dwellings for year-round farmworkers.

Officials say the project’s biggest hurdle is the city’s outdated sewer system. Some project supporters see darker motives.

“The city put every roadblock in our way,” said Agriculture Commissioner Krug, who runs the seasonal housing complex for migrant workers and wants to see it grow.

“The one thing I’ve been telling my manager: Get these people to run for office. Get them on the City Council and the school board. They need some representation.”

maria.laganga@latimes.com