Living la Vida Buena in Georgia

In this corner of Dixie that each day becomes a little more like Mexico, Homero Luna has written his own Horatio Alger story.

His tale begins in 1993, when the bus drops him off in town. He’s just another 20-year-old baby-faced Latino immigrant, high on hopes but low on cash. His first day in Dalton, he lands a job in a poultry plant. They teach him how to gut a chicken in less than 20 seconds. When someone at the plant steals his only pair of shoes, he spends days wearing his rubber work boots.

Skipping ahead six years, we find Homero Luna dressed in an olive-colored sports coat and gleaming leather loafers. Now the publisher of the town’s fastest-growing newspaper, he zips off to a meeting of the local Rotary Club. The business elite of Whitfield County wants to know what he sees in the community’s future.

“We’re being taken seriously,” says Luna, 26, in the offices of his newspaper, El Tiempo. “And we like that, because we’re serious people.”

Luna’s rapid ascent from chicken worker to newspaper publisher is an emblematic tale in northern Georgia towns like Dalton, where Mexican and Central American immigrants, including many transplants from Texas and California, are becoming an increasingly conspicuous social and cultural presence. Although Latinos make up just 3% of Georgia’s population, in a handful of counties in the Deep South Latinos now outnumber blacks as the largest minority group.

El Tiempo is just one of three Spanish-language newspapers in Dalton, a town of about 22,000 people just south of Chattanooga, Tenn. The quaint community, where cupolas rise from some of the 100-year-old brick buildings downtown, also boasts a Spanish-language radio station and dozens of Latino businesses. In September, 2,000 people watched Dalton’s Mexican Independence Day parade.

Many of the immigrants who have settled in this region in the last decade describe their new homes as almost mythical places of abundant opportunity. They like the small-town feel of rural Georgia, where the conservative social mores and measured pace of life are not that much different from the Mexican countryside.

“Sometimes, I’m out here working on the yard and white people, strangers, drive by and wave hello,” says Flocelo Aguirre, a former California resident who founded the 36-team Dalton Soccer League. “In my pueblo they do that. But in Los Angeles, people are more likely to give you the finger.”

The changes are just as dramatic in other Georgia cities, including many suburbs of Atlanta. In central Gainesville, the statue of the Confederate soldier in the town square casts his bronze gaze across a city markedly different from when the Daughters of the Confederacy placed him there in 1906.

If he could turn his head to the left, the rebel soldier would see groups of Mexican men and women emerging from a taqueria called Los Rayos, the lightning bolts. Looking beyond his feet at the traffic circling below, he’d see cabs with names like “Taxi Mexico” shuttling passengers across town. (Gainesville and surrounding Hall County have at least 30 such “Spanish taxi” services.)

What changed Dalton was the need for low-wage labor and the willingness of immigrants to take often nasty work in the roar of a chicken plant or on the night shift at a carpet factory. Similar forces have brought large numbers of Latinos to other towns in Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee and the Carolinas.

Rafael Huerta, 26, arrived in Dalton from Tala, Mexico, after his brother-in-law told him: “If you want to live in a place where it’s peaceful, safe and where the pay is good, come here.” Three years later, Huerta says he hasn’t been disappointed.

In north Georgia, even if you don’t speak a word of English, jobs fall into your hands like overripe fruit from a tree. Turn on Dalton’s Spanish-language radio station, WDAL, and every few minutes you hear a commercial offering a position at a local factory--with plenty of extras like overtime, retirement benefits and dental plans.

If you bring your family, the local schools are, for the most part, eager to teach your children. Every summer, Dalton sends groups of teachers to Mexico to study Spanish and the subtleties of Mexican culture, the better to unleash the potential of all those immigrant boys and girls filling local classrooms.

“We’re trying to build on the strong family values of the Mexican people,” says Dr. Frankie Beard, principal at Roan School, where 80% of the students are Latino. “It’s just phenomenal to us how quickly these children can learn.”

Despite the occasional immigration raid--and a steady stream of anti-immigrant rhetoric on local talk radio and in the region’s English-language newspapers--immigrant life here is marked by an undeniable sense of progress and acceptance.

Alejandrina Duran, a 17-year-old native of Mexico City, came to Gainesville a decade ago. Her parents first worked in the chicken factories but quickly found better jobs. Many relatives followed, establishing roots in the city 50 miles northeast of Atlanta.

Duran remembers an uncle who spent a week saying goodbye to everyone in Gainesville, announcing, with great fanfare: “I’m going to Mexico and I’m not coming back.” A year later, he had returned: The jobs and the money in Georgia were just too good to pass up.

“People say Gainesville has a curse,” says Duran, a high school senior. “Once you come here, you can never leave.”

In Dalton, the “Carpet Capital of the World,” Latinos make up a third of the population. The Catholic parish is building a new church to house the overflow crowds. There are more Latinos in the Dalton school district than any other ethnic group (45%). This year, there are 2,041 Latino students in the district; a decade ago, there were only 151.

Longtime residents speak of the changes in startled tones, surprised by how quickly they’ve happened--in half a decade, a mere blink of the eye in a region where many can trace their family histories deep into the 19th century.

Fourth-generation Dalton resident Bitsy McFarland says it seems like only yesterday that Dalton was just another “sleepy little mill town.” These days she doesn’t even have to open her eyes to sense how Latino the community has become: When she steps out of her downtown office she is overwhelmed by the sweet aroma of pan dulce drifting from a nearby bakery.

“It smells so good,” she says, “I can’t resist going in there.”

North Georgia’s small black community has been especially supportive, Latinos here say. But some wonder how long the kind reception will last, especially if the economy turns sour.

“There is no long history of anti-Latino discrimination in the South because, outside of south Florida, there isn’t much of a history of Latinos in the South,” says Ted Hamann, a Brown University researcher who studied the Dalton schools. “In Dalton, there has never been a substantial Latino population during economically difficult times.”

Even now, not everyone welcomes the newcomers so warmly.

The local newspaper, the Daily Citizen-News, has received so many nasty anti-immigrant letters that last year its editor declared he would no longer print the most offensive ones. In October, a clash between Latino and Anglo students at a local high school led to the suspension of four self-described “good old boy” teens who had weapons in a car.

The more insidious threat to immigrant youth here, however, comes from the booming economy itself: Young men are dropping out of high school in large numbers, tempted by factory jobs that pay double the minimum wage.

“We’ll see a student come to school for a while, but when he turns 16, he’s gone,” says Laura Clark, a teacher at Gainesville High. “It’s time for them to start working and earning money.” The problem, she says, is rooted in cultural expectations.

She says she’s just learned the Spanish term that describes the phenomenon. “How do you pronounce it?” she asks. “Machismo?”

Word in Mexico Spreads

In Mexico, news of the good opportunities available in the American South has been spread, mostly, by word of mouth.

Homero Luna first heard about Dalton in his native San Luis Potosi. A long drought was making it hard to keep his fledgling produce business afloat. One day an old elementary school friend called from Georgia. Within a day Luna had sold everything he owned and hopped on the bus for the three-day journey northward.

Within a few hours of his arrival in Dalton, Luna says, he’d been hired to work the night shift at the ConAgra chicken plant. ConAgra employee Lynn Norris remembers Luna as a hard-working young man who, even then, stood out from the crowd. “It was like he stepped out of a fashion magazine,” she says. “He was a very ambitious individual.”

After six months, Luna got a promotion to a quality control position. Then he got a job in the personnel department.

He started saving money and became fluent in English, albeit with the deep, Blue Ridge accent of the locals. He married a Mexican American he had met on the factory line and became a legal U.S. resident.

Soon, the arrival of thousands of his countrymen opened up new, grander possibilities.

Luna, who had edited a high school magazine in Mexico, came up with the idea of publishing something similar in Dalton. By then he was working at another personnel job, at the night shift at a carpet plant. He’d get home after dawn, sleep, then work on El Tiempo, enlisting the help of friends. He’d shuttle around town with a notebook and camera--a reporter, ad salesman and distributor all in one. He made frequent stops at the many Latino businesses in town.

Within a year, he had quit his job at the carpet factory to work full time on El Tiempo. Today the paper is also distributed in Chattanooga and nearby Georgia towns, such as Rome and Calhoun. The force that has driven El Tiempo’s success is neatly captured in the motto that appears every week on its front page: “Creciendo con la comunidad.” (“Growing with the community.”) Its 48 pages brim with ads for local banks and utility companies, for the Piggly Wiggly grocery chain and local ranchera concerts.

Others have sought to tap into this growing market. The English-language Daily Citizen-News prints a Spanish-language weekly, El Informador. On Thursdays the Citizen-News runs a feature called “Como se dice?” (“How do you say?”) teaching the locals a few phrases of what has become Dalton’s second language.

Always attuned to new opportunities, the exuberant Luna--whose crescent-shaped sideburns make him look younger than his 26 years--rattles off a series of grand schemes to make his paper the biggest weekly in Georgia.

His next goal is to distribute El Tiempo in Atlanta--the Census Bureau estimates the Latino population in the metropolitan area has surpassed 100,000--and eventually to distribute the paper across the state.

“We consider Georgia our home,” Luna says. “I think that it scared 1/8the Anglos 3/8 at first that we wouldn’t leave,” he says. “They would say, ‘Oh, the Mexicans will leave for Christmas.’ But then we would come back with 20 friends and relatives.”

Occasional Anger in Georgia

In California, a similar influx of immigrants gave birth to a movement whose climax was the passage of Proposition 187 in 1994, which sought to bar government services to illegal immigrants. Those angry voices can occasionally be heard in north Georgia too, as the region feels the strain caused by the most dramatic social transformation here since the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

A small group of protesters picketed downtown three years ago when local business leaders pushed the school board to fund The Georgia Project, the program that sends about 20 Dalton educators to Mexico every summer.

For Erwin Mitchell, an attorney, World War II veteran and former congressman who founded The Georgia Project, the protest was an echo of the battles he fought three decades ago in the state Legislature to end segregation in Georgia’s public schools.

“This is America and those things happen,” he says. “I’m sure there are droves of people here who oppose it. But it’s absolutely a desperate need, not a luxury.”

Mitchell, like others here, describes The Georgia Project as “pure self-interest.” Dalton’s carpet and poultry factories simply couldn’t operate without Latino immigrants, he says. And bringing thousands of immigrants to the region without educating their children would be a recipe for social disaster.

A few years ago, the Dalton schools were, in fact, a picture of chaos, unable to cope with the sudden appearance of so many Spanish-speaking students. Teachers couldn’t communicate with their new charges, and school officials found it nearly impossible to recruit bilingual staff.

These days, thanks in part to efforts like The Georgia Project, Roan elementary has turned the corner.

Special language teachers float from classroom to classroom. A dozen members of the school’s veteran faculty--they average 13 years of teaching experience--have been to Mexico and speak some Spanish. The school has the spit and polish of an affluent suburban district.

Like all Dalton schools, Roan spends more than $7,400 per student per year, among the highest in Georgia and significantly higher than the state average in California: $5,414. (This largess is made possible by the property taxes paid by more than 100 local factories).

Rafael Huerta says he was amazed at how quickly his daughter learned when the family moved to Dalton. After just six months in kindergarten, she was fluent in English.

“When I started working in the 1/8carpet 3/8 factory, my co-workers all told me how good the schools were here,” he says. “They were right.”

Less than three years after his arrival in Dalton, he’s moved from his factory job into a new position as a paraprofessional at a local school.

Roan Principal Beard has undertaken the same cross-cultural journey--in reverse. Recently, she traveled to Zacatecas, Mexico, to see some of the towns her students used to call home. Beard was dismayed by the rural poverty and by the schools, where even pencils and chalk were hard to come by.

“If I were living in those conditions and I were pregnant, I’d crawl across the border to come here,” she says.

Young people who have grown up on both sides of the border agree that life is easier in Dalton, Gainesville and other north Georgia towns. That is not to say, however, that they find everything about their new homes appealing.

Erika Venegas remembers the days after she first arrived in Gainesville at the age of 14. Afraid of the exotic Southern city outside her door, she kept herself locked in. “All my parents did was eat and sleep and go to work” at a chicken factory, she says. “I hated it here. I cried for days and days.”

Still, being young people, they’ve adjusted quickly to the new surroundings. At Gainesville High School, Latino students have created their own publication, a newsletter called Onda Latina.

It is a measure of their assimilation into Georgia life that the cover story of a recent issue wasn’t about immigration or the soccer team but rather about the travails of Gainesville High’s football team.

When the team lost, 40-3, to a Franklin County rival, the headline read: “No comieron frijoles!” They didn’t eat their beans!