Town Speaks the Language of Its People

As ceiling fans puffed at the big American flag on the community center wall, the dozen residents at the City Council meeting Thursday poised hands over hearts for the Pledge of Allegiance.

Then they commenced their town’s modestly historic council meeting, possibly the first in the United States to be conducted by city ordinance in Spanish.

Far-flung, sun-battered and mostly poor, this former colonia of trailers and frail bungalows found itself in the middle of a political vortex two weeks after enacting a pair of surprising laws.

Under one ordinance, all city government business must take place in Spanish. And under the second, city employees--all six of them--are forbidden to help the U.S. Border Patrol catch undocumented immigrants, at risk of being fired.

“About 75% of the people at meetings here only speak Spanish,” said Mayor Rafael Rodriguez. “The other 25 always had to translate. . . . If you talk only English and they don’t speak enough English to understand the meetings, people got mad.”

In a town of about 1,700, where virtually every resident is an immigrant, married to an immigrant or the child of immigrants, the laws reflect not so much a rejection of American culture but acknowledgment of a border culture dominated by the Spanish language and haunted by Border Patrol search vehicles.

Incorporated only 10 years ago, El Cenizo, like most such border communities, is unused to outside attention. These sprawling, often substandard settlements have been largely bypassed by the state’s prosperity in the two decades since they began to sprout.

Although the Texas Legislature recently passed a measure to speed up an existing sanitation improvement program for the border counties and allotted $331,000 yearly for a colonia trouble-shooting team, critics say the money is far too little to make much difference.

More like part of a developing country than the United States, critics note, the border counties house most of the state’s poor. In mid-1998, the Texas comptroller reported that more than 25% of the residents had annual per capita incomes of less than $10,840, 38% of the area’s children lived in poverty and about 8% of the region’s adults were unemployed.

The motivation for the two new laws in El Cenizo was utterly local and did not spring from any broad ideology, Rodriguez said. Political rivals of City Council members had accused them of turning in undocumented residents to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the new law will help dispel such accusations, he said.

In addition, residents had complained bitterly of Border Patrol vehicles’ stopping of local buses that carried residents to welfare offices and health facilities to run residency checks on passengers.

The Spanish-language law, Rodriguez added, stemmed from a petition by community members--and from common sense.

So far, residents of this depressed town of laborers and factory workers 10 miles down the Rio Grande from Laredo have praised the two ordinances.

“I’m for it,” said Lupe Rojas, squinting in the sunlight alongside her 10-year-old son. “Because in English, well--no! We don’t understand it.”

But while several Latino advocacy groups praised the language ordinance’s tailoring of city services to constituents, the law drew ire from immigration reform activists.

“This is not a good idea,” said Tim Schultze, spokesman for U.S. English, a Washington-based group devoted to making English the official language of the United States. “We have long predicted that this sort of thing would happen in our country. And our opponents have said, ‘You’re insane. You’re exaggerating. It will never happen.’ ”

But Lydia Camarillo, executive director of the San Antonio-based Southwest Voter Education Registration Project, called the statute sensible. “It appears that these folks clearly understand these communities do not speak English and this is a way of providing a service,” she said.

She knew of no other community that had enacted such an ordinance and added that there is little chance that El Cenizo’s action would be widely imitated or would prevent immigrants from wanting to learn English.

Mayor Rodriguez, a 20-year U.S. resident and naturalized citizen, said the ordinance “could” distract residents from picking up English. On the other hand, it will enable residents to make the first steps toward civic participation, and “whenever you learn something, it makes you want to learn more,” he said.

Under the ordinance, English translations of City Council sessions and other official business conducted in Spanish will be made available upon request within 48 hours.

While the language ordinance provokes strong debate, the city’s so-called safe haven rule apparently violates federal law, according to the INS. Haven ordinances in cities across the country have attempted to keep municipal employees from acting as immigration enforcers, but such measures, unlike the one here, typically include the proviso that they be enforced within the limits of law.

Immigration law forbids any federal, state or local government official from restricting government entities in giving or getting immigration information, said INS spokesman Bill Strassberger in Los Angeles. However, he added, the INS had no plan to challenge the El Cenizo law. “Other types of criminal activity are our priority,” he said.

At the council meeting, residents voiced overwhelming support for the measures but, like the INS, quickly became preoccupied with more pressing issues.

Following the language ordinance’s pledge to create all legal paperwork in English, a city commissioner rapidly rattled off the top item on the agenda. Then, in the universal sing-song of bureaucrats, secretary Elsa Degollado repeated the item in Spanish.

“We’re going to lower the property taxes . . . so everybody can be more comfortable,” she announced. “This year it was 50 cents [per $100 dollars of property value], and we’re lowering it to 40 cents.”

For residents with no fire department, no ambulance service and no garbage collection, she explained later, the tax break, like the language ordinance, was a small but palpable relief.

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Times staff writer Hector Tobar contributed to this story.