Main Street Taking On a Latin Flavor

At the Wal-Mart on Walnut Street, shelves brim with 20 varieties of hot peppers and hundreds of pounds of cornmeal for tortillas. Soccer fields bustle with 22 adult Latino teams--up from none five years ago. Four new public schools have sprung up in three years, 20 language teachers have been added to the payroll, and a new high school is planned.

And in the windows of shops all over this small northwest Arkansas city, large signs announce: Se Habla Espanol.

Thousands of Latinos, largely Mexicans, have moved into this predominantly white community over the last five years, drawn by jobs in poultry plants and the hope of stability for their families. It is an extraordinarily rapid demographic change. The Spanish-speaking population has jumped from 1% in 1990 to 12% today, an influx that more and more American towns have been forced to deal with in recent years as immigrants move from border towns and large cities where they first took up residence.

Rogers officials say the Spanish-speaking population is contributing to the community--buying homes, paying taxes, shopping, and donating to charities. The newcomers are for the most part legal workers in search of work, they add, many of whom were already living elsewhere in the United States. People like Mora Vidal, for instance, a factory worker and a homeowner who recently upgraded an $87,000, three-bedroom bungalow here.

“I liked California, but the job market was not stable,” said Vidal, 49, as he watched the 48-inch television dominating his small living room. “I have a stable life here.”

But as it has elsewhere, this influx also has brought the stress of fast growth into a small town--crowding, traffic, crime, racial tensions, illegal immigrants and cultural habits that sometimes don’t sit well with the neighbors. For a brief time, for instance, a few Mexican families were slaughtering goats on their front lawns, an activity nearby residents did not deem beneficial to property values.

Rogers, which has boomed in recent years, saw the immigration trend coming in the early 1990s as upward of 20,000 Latinos moved into northwest Arkansas for unskilled poultry jobs. State and corporate leaders got out ahead of the curve, helping put into place educational, business and city services to smooth the newcomers’ arrival.

In Rogers, Mayor John Sampier and the school district jointly hired a Latino aide--Al Lopez--who mediates racial and cultural tensions at the high school and in the community. Tyson Foods Inc., headquartered in nearby Springdale, offers its executives bonuses if they learn Spanish. Spanish-speaking bankers visit the poultry plants to advise Latinos on how to open accounts and purchase homes. And community leaders gained passage of a penny sales tax to raise $38 million for street improvements, a fire station and other city needs.

But these efforts--intended to make life easier for everyone--have also evoked the ire of a vocal group of immigration opponents who believe that the city has bent over backward to accommodate Latinos at the expense of longtime residents. Even as the Latino influx seems to be leveling off, the rhetoric is escalating.

The opposition leader is Dan Morris, a personnel consultant, who last year started Americans for an Immigration Moratorium (AIM). City officials say they did not know Morris until Morris’ wife, Ann, faxed the mayor a letter suggesting that people might flee the city if immigrants kept coming.

Sampier’s response was blunt: “If ‘unhappy longtime residents’ or any others are discontented for un-Christian, racist attitudes and choose to leave for such reasons, then I believe my city will be better off for their departure.”

A few days later, Morris showed up at an open City Council meeting, challenging Sampier about whether he had colluded with the poultry industry to bring in cheap labor. Morris has since started holding regular open AIM meetings that, to the dismay of city officials, have attracted about 150 people and the local media. Now some Rogers residents believe Morris is considering a run for City Council, and Sampier has raised the specter of racism.

“I don’t care what they call me,” Morris says. “I respond by calling them traitors. After all, for whom does America exist? For the benefit of Americans who support it. . . . Our craven mayor opened the floodgates.”

During a session at the local library that Morris arranged, five of Sampier’s critics blamed Spanish-speaking immigrants for thefts, graffiti, traffic, litter, student discord and last summer’s contamination of a popular tourist lake. One referred to Latinos as “parasitic.”

“All of a sudden I looked around and everything had changed overnight,” said Joy Johns, who owns a lawn and garden shop. “I go out to the Wal-Mart and there were pinatas on the shelves and the babbling of Spanish everywhere. I felt like I was in Mexico.”

It is difficult to assess whether Morris’ views represent the community. One recent rainy afternoon at the mammoth Wal-Mart here, none of more than 15 customers interviewed felt as strongly, and most found the newcomers pleasant, family-oriented and hard-working. A repeated complaint, however, was that Latinos are not making a strong effort to learn English.

The Latinos are drawn to northwest Arkansas and other rural communities by word of mouth, experts say, as they try to escape bad neighborhoods in Los Angeles and overcrowding in Texas.

Eliseo Santillan, 50, was working sporadically in California and heard about Rogers from a friend. He relocated, got a job at Tyson as a chicken scraper and moved his wife and four children here. Today, the Santillans together earn $31,000 annually, enough to enable them to buy their own home--which they did last year.

“Our life is much better now,” Santillan said through an interpreter at his modest one-story house. “We are fulfilling our American dream. We want our children to grow up here, to have a nice place to study, to learn English and to become independent. Here, I have a life.”