Mexican Arrivals Seek New Frontiers

In this rural township, chartered three years before the adoption of the Constitution, a stand along Route 4 stocks live clams and lobsters--but tortillas, chiles and tangy mole sauce are also big sellers.

Schools offer bilingual instruction for Spanish speakers.

And down the Androscoggin River in Lewiston, where hulking facades recall New England’s manufacturing heyday, tenements that once housed mill employees now shelter Mexican poultry hands.

Few places in the U.S. seem as distant from Mexico as rural Maine, a state whose proportion of white residents ranks second only to that of neighboring Vermont. But even here, the Mexican immigration that has so shaped California is sending out demographic shock waves.

Hundreds of Mexican immigrants have settled in and around the town of Turner (population 5,000), drawn by jobs with the world’s largest brown-egg producer. Elsewhere in the state, Mexican immigrants clear brush, rake blueberries and process seafood.

“Here there aren’t many Latinos, and you leave the job smelling like a chicken, but there is always work to be found,” said Francisco Guzman, a 28-year-old Mexican national who came here two years ago from Fresno in search of more steady employment. “It’s a different life than in a place like California, where sometimes it feels like Mexico.”

Although Latinos compose less than 1% of Maine’s population, the growing Mexican presence here points to a national trend: Immigration from Mexico has spread throughout the United States despite the continued enforcement buildup along the U.S.-Mexican border. Mexican settlers are still concentrated in a handful of states, especially California, but they have now arrived in virtually every region of the country, underscoring the prodigious nature of contemporary immigration to the U.S. from its southern neighbor.

The Mexican exodus of the past two decades or so, scholars say, now represents the largest-ever sustained mass migration of one group to the United States, far eclipsing earlier arrivals of Irish, Italian and Jewish settlers.

More than 7 million Mexican-born people now reside in this country, the vast majority having arrived since 1970. Natives of Mexico outnumber the next-largest immigrant group, Filipinos, by almost 6 to 1, and account for more than one-fourth of all foreign-born U.S. residents.

The huge numbers, combined with other singular factors--Mexican immigrants’ proximity to their homeland, the strong presence of Spanish-language publications and television, the ease of cross-border travel and communication--may signal a redefinition of the American immigrant experience.

“We are assimilating differently than other immigrant groups,” said Gregory Rodriguez, a research associate at Pepperdine University. “We are maintaining our ‘Mexican-ness’ even as we become American--in a way that Italians, Irish, Jews and Greeks could not.”

To some, the phenomenon is nothing less than an invasion from the south that threatens to overwhelm U.S. culture. But Rodriguez and others view Mexican immigration as invigorating the nation and keeping the economy globally competitive.

Yet just as earlier migrations from Europe had long-lasting effects, the ongoing Mexican influx--combined with the smaller surges in Latino arrivals from Central and South America and the Caribbean--is altering U.S. society in ways both profound and subtle.

Obvious indications include the growing presence of Spanish-language signs from the Carolinas to Walla Walla, Wash., and the prevalence of Latino music and food--salsa has even replaced ketchup as the nation’s favorite condiment.

According to census projections, Latinos will surpass African Americans as the nation’s largest minority group within a few years and will account for about a fourth of the U.S. population by mid-century. Those trends are already the reality in California.

The Golden State’s rancorous struggles with issues of immigration and race may presage similar battles elsewhere. Today, the kinds of grass-roots citizen groups that spearheaded Proposition 187--the 1994 ballot initiative that sought to make illegal immigrants ineligible for public schooling and other government services--are popping up from Washington state to the deep South.

“We’re being colonized,” complained Dan Morris, founder of a group called Americans for an Immigration Moratorium in Northwest Arkansas, which has seen an influx of Mexican immigrants in recent years. “Our schools are being impacted, our taxes are up, our property values are down and health care is being overburdened.”

New immigrant groups have always faced hurdles being accepted, but the extraordinary reach of today’s Mexican immigration--often into regions that have no recent memory of arrivals from abroad--is sometimes creating ugly cultural collisions.

Two years ago, two white men shouted, “Go back to Mexico!” to a group of Latino poultry workers at a convenience store north of Turner, then took off in high-speed pursuit of the fleeing Latinos, firing shots at their vehicle. One of the workers was hit but recovered. The assailants were caught and convicted in 1995 of federal civil rights violations.

Seeking to overcome that kind of animosity, the Irish, Italians and other earlier groups turned to political participation. Mexican immigrants--long largely absent from U.S. civic life--are now showing signs of a similar political maturation.

In California, more than two-thirds of newly registered Latino voters went to the polls in 1996, a rate that surpassed that of registered voters overall.

Mexican immigrants are becoming citizens in unheard-of numbers, altering the political makeup of voter districts in California and elsewhere. An extraordinary 255,000 people born in Mexico took the citizenship pledge in the most recent fiscal year, shattering the previous single-nation record--the 106,626 Italians who naturalized in 1944, which was during a wartime era of strong anti-Italian sentiment.

Just as it was for the Italians, the chief draw for Mexican immigrants is employment. The heterogeneous ranks of Mexican immigrants include millionaires and professionals, but the great majority lack high-school educations and typically fill low-rung, often unpleasant and sometimes dangerous jobs.

Today, Mexican workers toil at construction sites in Atlanta, on crab boats in Alaska and Maryland, at slaughterhouses in the Midwest, in hotels and restaurants from Washington to Little Rock to Seattle and at casinos from Atlantic City to Las Vegas. And they form the backbone of the agricultural industry from the Carolinas to Hawaii. They constitute a kind of ever-renewable national low-wage work force.

Ironically, a major attraction of locales far from traditional enclaves in the Southwest and on the West Coast is the relative absence of low-wage competition from other Mexican immigrants.

“In California the bosses know they can pay you less, because there are 20 people from Mexico looking for the same job,” said Ramiro Lamas, who settled in Alaska in 1988 after spending almost a year in Northern California earning below minimum wage at a mushroom nursery.

He now makes $18 an hour as a school custodian, with health benefits and paid vacation. “Here,” he added, “if you’re willing to work, people treat you fairly.”

Lamas left California even before the 1990s recession rocked the state’s image as a perpetual-boom promised land. That downturn, experts say, prompted many more immigrants to seek fortunes elsewhere and caused others to bypass California altogether.

Meanwhile, the expanding Mexican presence in the United States is reverberating in Mexico, where more than $4 billion in annual remittances from expatriates is the second-largest source of foreign capital, after oil industry revenues.

At the same time, evidence suggests that more and more Mexican arrivals are settling in the U.S. permanently, eschewing the back-and-forth migration patterns of previous generations. Contrary to popular perception, most Mexican immigrants today do not work in seasonal field jobs, but in year-round industries, from hotels and restaurants to poultry and meat processing.

“I’m happy here now. I’ve had opportunities I would never have had in mi pueblo,” Lamas said. “I sometimes get these allergies from the weather, but life here is tranquil.”

In a so-called “chain migration” pattern repeated throughout the United States, Lamas and five of his siblings are among 100 or so settlers from the village of El Salvador, in the state of Jalisco, who have relocated to Juneau. He followed a trailblazing older brother, underscoring how word of U.S. jobs is dispatched through efficient family and community networks that reach deep into Mexico.

Like more than 2 million other Mexican immigrants, Lamas attained legal status via the government’s amnesty initiative of 1987-88. That program was an important catalyst in hastening the spread of Mexican immigrants: Legal status allayed fears of arrest and deportation, easing the way for travel to other potential employment sites. Amnesty also prompted many to bring loved ones to this country, cementing family ties here. Lamas resides in Juneau with his Mexican-born wife and four children; the eldest, 12, was born in Mexico and the others in the U.S.

The task of educating the children of immigrants such as Lamas typically falls to public schools. Experts agree that this is the largest public cost associated with Mexican immigration, often confronting districts with rapid enrollment increases and a surge of non-English-speaking children.

A group of Spanish-speaking students--children of poultry workers--first showed up unannounced at the Turner schoolhouse in 1986, unable to communicate in English.

“I got a panicky call from the principal of the elementary school asking, ‘What do we do?’ ” recalled Stan Sawyer, Turner’s superintendent of schools. “It was certainly something we hadn’t prepared for.”

Educators quickly patched together a limited bilingual effort, which was soon improved and integrated into the curriculum. The program, funded by both local and federal money, now includes a director, two full-time teachers and four aides--one of whom is herself the daughter of Mexican poultry workers.

Virtually all 60 or so pupils are the children of laborers at the concern known until recently as the DeCoster Egg Farm, spread over 1,300 acres and home to 4.5 million laying hens, stacked in cages three-deep inside the company’s cavernous green and white barns. (The firm made national headlines last year when former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich labeled it “as dangerous and oppressive as any sweatshop we have seen.” The company eventually agreed to pay about $2 million in federal penalties for numerous health and safety violations.)

About half of the 500-person work force is Latino, mostly from Mexico.

Though wages are low--typically just exceeding the federal minimum of $5.15 an hour--laborers can rack up huge numbers of hours, sometimes 100 or more a week on double shifts, six days a week. Egg farm managers rave about the immigrants’ work ethic, arguing that few U.S.-born people would do the job for the current pay.

“The great advantage is that you can work and work and work,” said Felipe Garcia, 28. “Once you get used to it, it’s not so bad.”

The Mexican immigrants also buoy new businesses.

“This is a win-win situation for me--and for them,” said Chris Hathaway, who makes special trips to Boston to keep his roadside stand stocked with an assortment of chiles, made-in-Mexico Coca-Cola--enthusiasts say it has more punch than the U.S. version, although the company says the formula is the same--and other ethnic items. “I get the business and they get the products they need.”

Among his clients is Gloria Gonzalez, who arrived here five years ago with her husband and four children. Her family is among two dozen or so that reside in a company-owned trailer park outside Turner. While her husband knocks off 15-hour shifts, Gonzalez herself puts in 10-hour days.

“It’s not an agreeable kind of work, but it allows us to save,” Gonzalez said at her trailer as she prepared lunch--scrambled eggs--for her family during a rushed break. “One always misses home--the language, the culture, the food. . . . But we’ve come to Maine for something else: to make a better future for our children.”