With Immigrant Boom, South Makes Translation

Around a horseshoe-shaped table, two dozen Tennessee cops follow their instructor’s lead, trying to turn their twangs into trills.

“Manos arriba!” the teacher prompts. “Manos arriba!” the officers answer, one at a time. “Manos arriba!”

Their accents are clunky and rolled Rs come out sounding more like growls. But the officers gathered in this classroom in Tennessee farm country can hardly be blamed for less-than-nimble tongues. For most, it is only their second day of speaking Spanish.

Over three days, the officers, representing 10 departments from around the state, will learn a holster full of helpful phrases in Spanish, from the mundane, like papeles del carro, or auto registration, to the more adrenaline-charged manos arriba (hands up) and acuestese boca abajo (lie facedown). They also are introduced to aspects of different Latin American cultures and to simple but important niceties, such as whether to address a woman as senora or senorita.

Similar scenes are now playing out around the South, as police officers, firefighters, social workers and other government officials scramble to cope with a population of immigrants from Mexico and Central America that has grown faster in spots around this region than anywhere else in the United States.

But unlike places such as California, with generations of Latino residents and a deep reservoir of Spanish speakers, most of the South is essentially starting from scratch when it comes to the language.

Besides crash courses for police and municipal employees, some agencies are making use of a translator hotline, while others are hiring interpreters and translating documents into Spanish for walk-in clients. Police in Lexington, Ky., finish their language classes with five weeks of Spanish immersion in the Mexican state of Michoacan. Four officers head for Mexico on Thursday.

The language training is the latest sign of how immigration is altering the face -- and voice -- of the modern South, a part of the country with few home-grown Spanish speakers but plenty of work in crop fields, construction sites and poultry plants during the last 15 years. The presence of immigrant workers here, a novelty not long ago, has fairly quickly been accepted as a fact of life.

While cities such as Charlotte, N.C., and Atlanta have seen fast jumps in the number of Latino residents since 1990, the immigrant wave has shown up too in rural areas -- from Athens, Ala., to Shelbyville, Tenn. -- where it once would have been unusual to hear anything but English.

“Nontraditional states like Georgia for receiving immigrants are really faced with the challenge of language,” said Jorge H. Atiles, an assistant professor at the University of Georgia who co-wrote a report last year on the needs of Latinos in Georgia.

Officials acknowledge that many agencies have been slow to respond. Often, Spanish speakers have shown up at government offices seeking help, only to be met with uncomprehending shrugs or instructions to come back with their own translators. Many don’t bother to return.

The language barrier is viewed as especially critical among public safety agencies. Police and sheriff commanders are arranging Spanish classes so that officers can deal with immigrants as they would native-born residents -- not just as criminal suspects but as victims, witnesses or motorists running a red light.

Police also see the language training as a safety measure for themselves; the Tennessee class includes a rundown of Spanish phrases that might be used to deter a violent attack on an officer.

Critics say the language programs might be done with good intentions, but that they are a poor use of public money.

“We think that instead of English-speaking employees going to learn some phrases in Spanish ... the immigrants themselves should be learning English,” said Jim Lubinskas, spokesman for U.S. English Inc., a Washington-based group. He said crash courses probably don’t provide enough proficiency.

Art Heun, chief of police in Pulaski, Tenn., about 80 miles south of Nashville, said it would be ideal if immigrants mastered English. But, he said, “the fact of it is, that’s not happening, and we have to communicate with them. Why make it difficult on both sides?”

Four of Heun’s officers attended the class here under a new program called the Tennessee Criminal Justice Language Academy, which plans at least eight rounds of classes by year’s end.

Sgt. Randy Keene recalled his first encounter with Spanish speakers a decade ago when he stopped a car that had been reported stolen. The English-speaking driver and several Latino passengers were ordered out of the vehicle. But the Latinos didn’t seem to understand. In the end, Keene said, “they understood a 12-gauge shotgun, and they came out.”

In recent years, the Pulaski department has armed its officers with cards bearing phrases in Spanish and summoned Spanish-speaking residents, including the owners of a Mexican restaurant and a Guatemalan-born veterinarian, when it has needed translators. Two years ago, the veterinarian translated for police gathering information from a man who was suspected in a rape but indicated he did not speak English.

The idea for the new Tennessee academy, funded this year by a $180,000 grant, came after police met growing numbers of immigrants with whom they could not communicate. At safety checkpoints, officers got blank looks in response to their questions. Often, the flummoxed officers simply waved the drivers on.

“No one could communicate with them,” said Paul Rosson, who directs the language academy. “One thing happened: ‘Hasta la vista.’ ”

Cheryl Holloway, a sheriff’s deputy in Bradley County, east of Chattanooga, said she has resorted to gestures and pantomime to convey directions to immigrants, who have moved into her area in striking numbers during the last two years. Holloway would press her palms downward to say slow down, for example.

“If I couldn’t get enough out of them, I would let them go,” she said. “If you don’t know what they’re saying, you don’t know what they’re saying.”

On this day, Holloway was wrestling with a different problem -- coaxing her mouth to produce words like afuera, which means outside. She kicked herself for not retaining more Spanish from high school and from three years spent living in the Panama Canal Zone as a youth.

“I don’t remember any of it,” she said sheepishly.

The idea of these officers mastering Spanish phrases might have drawn puzzlement a decade ago. Not now. A report issued last fall by the Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy and the Pew Hispanic Center showed that of the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas, those with the fastest-growing numbers of Latinos were in the South. Tops was Greensboro and Winston-Salem, N.C., where the Latino population jumped nearly tenfold, to 62,210, from 1990 to 2000. Next were Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham, N.C., Nashville and Atlanta.

The response by officials to the new linguistic demands has been uneven, leading to findings that some agencies have failed to meet civil-rights laws barring discrimination on the basis of poor English proficiency.

Providing language services represents an added burden on state and local governments already wobbly kneed with budget troubles. In Lexington, police have paid for language training -- about $5,000 per officer -- with proceeds seized during drug arrests. The Tennessee program expects to have enough grant money to cover three years.

“It’s a lot easier for us to teach officers a few words of Spanish,” said Rosson, the academy director, “than it is to have an immersion program for the hundreds of thousands of people who are here.”