Immigrant Influx Meets Hostility in Rural South

Ernie Pantoja traveled the migrant worker stream from Mexico through Chicago, Florida, Tennessee and other Southern states before arriving here in 1985 and “settling out” of the flow.

Pantoja, 34, now earns a living year round by picking tomatoes and planting pine trees in this quiet farm community about 35 miles northeast of Birmingham. It’s backbreaking work, but he says it’s worth it because he likes small-town Alabama.

“Chicago was kind of dangerous,” said Pantoja, speaking with quiet intensity. “Florida, too. Then I came here. It was kind of quiet.”

For similar reasons, the huge influx of Asian and Latino immigrants that in recent years swept into the big cities of the North and West is increasingly turning to the South. Many succeed in finding jobs, peace and tranquility. But as their numbers increase in rural areas, others are finding something else:

--In Greenville, Miss., Wai Ma, a restaurant owner, carries a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson on his hip because two Chinese grocers have been robbed and shot to death in his town in the last three months.

Born in Hong Kong, he lived in Cleveland before moving to Mississippi seven years ago, attracted by “a small town where things went easy and slow.” But “for the last year or so,” said Ma, “things are tough. People have started killing people.”

--In Raleigh, N.C., Ming Hai Loo was killed in a pool hall in July, hit on the back of the head with a pistol and slammed to the ground, where his face struck a beer bottle.

Witnesses quoted two white brothers as saying before the incident: “Because of you people, our brothers and friends went to Vietnam and never came back. We are going to finish you tonight.” Loo was Chinese. The brothers were charged in the slaying.

--In Gainesville, Ga., about 300 members of the Ku Klux Klan marched on the Saturday before Labor Day “to protest the thousands of filthy, illegal wetbacks that have ruined this fine north Georgia town,” said a klan flyer.

According to the 1980 census, 14,622 Chinese, 12,536 Japanese and 9,273 Vietnamese lived in six Southern states--Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. Those numbers are expected to jump dramatically in the next census. Latinos, who numbered 127,300 in 1980, had grown to 154,900 in those states five years later.

“As the influx increases, the (social) pressures increase,” said Ozell Sutton, southeast regional director of the Community Relations Service, an arm of the Justice Department that works to ease ethnic friction.

Built-In Hostility

The problem is particularly acute in the homogenous rural and small town areas that typify much of the South. Here, unlike the urban North and West, large ethnic communities built by immigrants and children of immigrants are virtually unknown. As immigration to the South has increased, a clear pattern has emerged: The first immigrants to a Southern community find curiosity and hospitality. But as their numbers grow, so does the likelihood of hostility.

Mario Moreno of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund recalled that as a child in a migrant family he lived a while in Mississippi during the late 1950s. There, he said, the family was “considered exotic. Everybody wanted to talk to the family, learn about our ethnic background, eat my mom’s enchiladas and tortillas.”

But when the larger community began to fear they were losing jobs to immigrants, the family became “less exotic and more a threat; the attitude changed,” Moreno said. “I’m afraid as the (Southern immigrant) community grows, there will be some tension.”

Seen as a ‘Novelty’

Po Chan, who was born in China and now lives in Raleigh, said he is perceived as a “novelty” in groups where he is the only Chinese. “When people don’t feel threatened,” they “treat me special.” However, “when you have a group getting larger and larger and competing . . . then they feel threatened.”

Many immigrants complain that they are caught between two prejudices, one black, the other white. Black people accuse them of taking jobs and making money off black neighborhoods without reinvesting. White people accuse them of taking jobs and reject them because of their ethnic heritage.

The klan march was targeted at Gainesville immigrants who often work at low-skill, low-pay jobs in the agriculture and poultry businesses. “It’s as if the klan thinks its constituency has some great desire to go into those chicken coops and pluck chickens,” said Eva Sears of the Center for Democratic Renewal, an organization that monitors hate group activity.

Melinda Yee, executive director of the Organization of Chinese Americans, said: “People tend to get territorial, despite the fact that (the newcomers) are bringing in business and money.”

Dates White Woman

Ma, the pistol-packing restaurant owner, believes black robbers shot the grocers in Greenville. Whites, he said, stare in hostility when he goes out with his white fiancee. “You can see the expression on their faces,” he said. “What’s that white girl doing with that Chinese?”

Paul Igasaki of the Japanese-American Citizens League recalls a friend’s horror when she traveled through a small town in Georgia and heard a television announcer “using the term ‘Jap’ quite comfortably. She called the station and they said they didn’t think it was derogatory.”

Along the Gulf Coast, clashes between Vietnamese and American-born fishermen became commonplace as the newcomers began settling there in the 1970s. Now such friction is played down, but as the population of Southeast Asians rises, other problems emerge.

In Biloxi, Miss., Charlie Pham, a co-owner of an insurance firm, complained that police failed to help him retrieve his stolen typewriter, even when they knew the thief. “I don’t want to say it is discrimination,” he said, “but it is the same thing.”

Pham’s business partner, Thomas Vu, said it is dangerous for Vietnamese to walk the streets. “Whenever black people see Vietnamese people, they stop and rob them,” he said.

‘Model Minority’

Immigrants everywhere share the problem of language barriers, which, according to experts, can make newcomers tentative, unwilling to assert their rights. Asians, in particular, say they suffer from what they call the “model minority” syndrome that keeps some from speaking out about injustice and prevents outsiders from perceiving their problems.

Here in Oneonta, population 5,000, the number of immigrants, mostly Latinos, is still small, and townspeople are trying to ease the transition from all-American town to an international one.

“We don’t have the problems of gangs and different groups,” said Mayor Danny Hicks. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re white, black or Hispanic. People just want to be treated right.”

And many U.S.-born residents say they get along fine with the newcomers.

Judy Dempsey, a white cashier at a gas station out on U.S. 231, said: “I’ve had ‘em move in all around me, and they come in here and never give me no problems.”

Nevertheless, there are signs of the pressures.

Followed Into Store

Matter of factly, Pantoja said he and other Latinos have been followed in a local store because the manager “thought we were going to steal something.” Sometimes when Americans “don’t know your name, they say ‘Hey, Mexican,’ ” he said.

Along the red dirt roads that wind through nearby Straight Mountain and Chandler Mountain, tomato fields and processing plants dot the landscape. Trucks carry loads of Mexican workers to and from the fields, where, according to Pantoja, a worker can earn $250 to $300 “in a good week.”

In the brutally hot climate, some workers hang their sweaty work shoes under porch awnings rather than bring them inside houses where several young men often sleep in one room on beds made up on the floor.

Driving his van through the area, Joe Castillo, who was born in Ohio, grew up in Texas and moved here in 1973, angrily recounted complaints that he hears from many workers. The problem, he said, is not just low pay. “Sometimes it’s no pay. They (farmers) work them for a day or two and then run them off.”

Radio Program Helps

Castillo recently began a radio program in Spanish to inform Latinos of their rights as employees, and to provide information on immigration, English classes, which he teaches, and other concerns.

Sitting around a table at Corpus Christi Church, several officials of the Birmingham Diocese’s Hispanic Ministry--including Irma Nolla, the program director, and Graciela Comontofski, a volunteer coordinator--ticked off problems that grow as the area’s Latino population grows: shortage of affordable housing, poor working conditions, lack of bilingual safety signs on jobs, no bilingual driving tests.

“The immigrants come here and sweat and work to help the economy, but when they want a driver’s license, nobody wants to help them,” Comontofski said.