Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Nuevo South

Nuevo South transcript

Host intro [not included in audio file]:

It?s sinking in among Americans that the nation?s largest wave of immigration did not happen a century ago. It?s happening now. About 35-million of us were born in other countries. That?s one in eight residents of the United States. Immigrants come from all over the globe, but Latino immigration is remaking the country. And not just on the coasts and in the Southwest.

Siler City, North Carolina used to be the kind of town where almost everyone, black and white, had roots going back a century or two. Characters on the Andy Griffith Show mentioned Siler City, and the actor who played Aunt Bee retired there because it reminded her of Mayberry. It was just about the last place a Spanish-speaking immigrant was likely to land. That started to change in the 1990?s. Today, thanks to chicken processing jobs that no one else wants, Siler City is about half Latino. It?s not unusual; North Carolina and other southeastern states have some of the fastest-growing Latino populations in the country. Many longtime residents of Siler City say they?re not especially troubled by the fact that many Latino workers are undocumented. What does make some uneasy is the way this new population is transforming the racial and cultural flavor of their town.
John Biewen and Tennessee Watson of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University produced this portrait of a town in transition...in the Nuevo South.

Sfx: driving....

Eddie Greene: This neighborhood?s a lot of old families. People have been here since I guess the town's been here. This is one of the oldest families in town right here. / I used to cut that lady's grass when I was ten yrs old. They?ve been there forever.
My name is Eddie Ambrose Greene, and I was born and raised right here on Airport Road in Siler City, North Carolina.
In Siler City we had two options: you either worked at the plant or you drove truck. / I knew I wasn?t geared to work in a plant, / so I started driving truck and hauling chickens from Siler City all over the country.
Siler City, unfortunately, has always been a racially divided town. Like out there where I live, from where you turn on Airport Road, / that's like a all-black section. So when you go past down in the country, it's like all white. So all through here now, all these houses now, are all Mexicans.
[sfx: car blinker.] This is the beginnings of downtown as you come from west to east. They?re old brick buildings. Look at the work force. This is a good time, they're changing shifts. Friday afternoon, almost the end of the day. You're seeing the Hispanic population getting off work at one of the major poultry processing plants in town.
I don?t mean to say this in a racist kind of way, but if you ever seen a house overrun with roaches? And you can't stop them? And it?s like you look and there's two, and you look again there?s four, and when you look back there?s seven? If you notice, you don?t see a black person or a white person come out of this plant. At all.

Debra: I pretty much like here because it's I don't know, it's a different experience since I used to live in the countryside in Guatemala. I'm Debra, I'm in the twelfth grade and we live here since 2002. It wasn't like this before. I think there were four mobile homes. And then the lady that owns this land, she decided to bring more mobile homes. It's like only Hispanics living here, mostly from Mexico. I live with my parents and I have three sisters and two brothers. My parents are Francisco and Florinda.

[Florinda in Spanish:...]

Voiceover: I'm Debra's mom.

[Florinda in Spanish:...]

Voiceover: I've worked for seven years in the chicken plant. One year with Pilgrim's Pride and six years with Gold Kist. The packing areas where I work, you pack everything; what they call the breast, the tender, the leg. You throw it in the boxes, cover them up, and throw them on the line.

Francisco: Mi nombre es Francisco.

Voiceover: My name is Francisco. Right now, I work for a builder where we make walls for houses. I have to drive 40 minutes from here to where I work. But thanks to God for bringing us here. And we're here working. You come from one country to another not knowing about the culture, what life has been like in a place. We didn't know. I didn't know anything. What we have seen is that there are people, like in all places, who are good and there are people who look at others with disdain as if they're saying, "You aren't from here, get out of here." I don't pay attention to them because I know I came to this country to work and to watch over my family, to see to their future. I have a daughter who is about to graduate from high school. From what I see, she has always worked hard and gotten honors in her studies. And she likes soccer.

[Sounds of soccer game]

Paul Cuadros: Today is February 15th, and today's the first day of the team. We spent the entire week going through tryouts and so this morning we finalized the list. My name is Paul Cuadros and I am the head coach of the Jordan-Matthews High School soccer program in Siler City. And in addition to that, I'm a journalist, an author, and an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Cuadros [to team]: Let's have Maria and Debra...

Debra: I play defense, stopper. You have to not let the forwards go in there and make us a goal. So I try to do my best.

Cuadros: She is a lioness in the defensive line. I mean she is the tiniest person out here, but she brings the biggest game.

Girls: Hey, you guys!

Cuadros: Count it!

Girls [together]: One, two, three, let's go Lady Jets! Whoooo!

Cuadros: One, two, three, four, five. We're about a little over half Latina girls. And the rest are white, and we have one African American. So it's a very diverse team.

Jenny Pleasants: I'm Jenny Pleasants and I'm here at Jordan-Matthews, a little late for the soccer game. We appear to be winning by four goals now. I'm watching my child, Meredith Pleasants. She's number 18 and she's a right wing. But the funny thing is, when you go to the soccer games, none of their parents speak English. So they all sit on one side and we all sit on the other. I don't understand a thing they're saying. How do you say, "Your kid's playing really good," if half the time you can't even pronounce the name, you know, and they don't understand anything you're saying?

[Pleasants: Go, Shannon! Ohhhh.]

Pleasants: But the biggest change, I'd have to say, would be at my pediatrician's. I grew up being able to walk in and they all knew who I was and I saw the same doctor and now when you go in, there's twenty Hispanic families and kids everywhere and they have - the lady up front speaks Spanish. I feel like I'm the minority, and that does bother me in a town that I grew up and raised my children in. It's like, "Do you have Medicaid, do you have your papers?" I'm like, "I've been coming here for eighteen years." That frustrates me to sit in a room with, you know, all these Hispanic families, and I know their children need healthcare too. But the change in the environment in the pediatrician's office is not like it was when you could just walk up to the window and say, "Hey, so and so's sick." It's just not what it was, why we went there to begin with.

Cuadros: Well I've always described what a town like Siler City, or now what the country is going through, as sort of the five stages of dealing with grief, or dealing with immigration or cultural change. And you know, initially there might be denial, people saying, "Well, you know it's not really gonna change, it's not happening to our town." And when I got here, I heard a lot of depression from longtime residents, you know a real sense of loss of the community and the culture and everything that Siler City was.

[Female radio announcer: We do have a thirty percent chance of showers, drizzle. We're 67 now and cloudy here at WNCA.]

[Barry Hayes: Hey, do you drive a cool vehicle with those big after-market rims? Well, Wayne's Alignment Service in Siler city...]

Hayes: I am Barry Hayes. I'm the Bear o' the Air at WNCA Radio AM 1570. I'm also the president, general manager of the company and the janitor, and I mow the yards. I'm from this area. I'm from central North Carolina. You know, I've been in Siler City about 25 years. I came here to manage this radio station and just fell in love with the town. It was a rural town, a blue collar town. Maybe 70 percent white, 30 percent black. Typical makeup of a small North Carolina town.

Ilana Dubester: This is Ilana Dubester and I'm the past Executive Director of a local Latino center called El Vinculo Hispano, or Hispanic Liaison, in English. And we provide all kinds of direct services and advocacy. The agency, I helped start the agency with a group of people in the county back in 1995. But I remember coming here in '91 or early '92 and I came downtown and walked around these streets that we're walking right now, and it was a pretty, uh, how do I say this nicely? A depressing scene. [laughs]. I don't know if there's a nicer way to say that. There were a few businesses downtown, but most of the downtown area, which is these two streets on Chatham Avenue, were boarded up. There was nothing. And certainly you know, as you can see from downtown, although it's still working itself up, you know most shops are now open and you see a lot of Latino businesses as well.

Hayes: Siler City was an industrial town, but it was a dying industrial town. We were seeing jobs falling by the waysides and we were seeing the textile industry downsizing. We were seeing our furniture industry downsizing, our cotton mill was downsizing, and they continued to downsize for the next twenty years.

Dubester: So '91, there were already, we already started to see a Latino immigration. And certainly I would notice people in supermarkets and stores and trying to read labels or trying to talk to people. And I remember going home scratching my head saying, "How? Why? What's going on here? Why are people here? How are they getting here?"

Hayes: Well as we were losing some of our mainstream industry, the poultry industry was growing here in Siler City. And so they began attracting the Hispanics into this region.

Dubester: Very active recruitment, in Mexico in particular. And they would give bonuses for people bringing more people because they were really in shortage of workers. They had, you know, chewed through the white population, chewed through the black population. Everybody over the years got their children to be better educated than themselves and, you know, moving on to other work. The best guess now is that Siler City is 50 percent Latino, about 5000 people.

Hayes: I think the broader community here has welcomed our newcomers with open arms. The only rub is we would just like for them to obey our laws and learn some of our cultures here and keep clean yards.

Dubester: Then in '96, the town created a Hispanic task force. Well needless to say, there were no Hispanics on the task force. So they created two brochures. First, the Spanish was really poor. It was hard to understand, some of it didn't make any sense, but it was about junk in your yard, domestic violence, drugs. No. Like in this country it's not OK to beat your wife. It was a very offensive brochure and made a lot of assumptions about us, and who we are, and who we aren't, and what we are about. And it was all about we're a bunch of criminals and we've got to learn how to behave.

Hayes: Housing was a problem, too. We had folks who were moving in to vacant houses and then they would be inviting their relatives to come and pretty soon we would have a house with ten, 15, who knows, maybe 20 people living in one house and they'd be parking their cars all in the front yard and hanging their laundry out in the bushes and so forth. We had to deal with that a little bit and trying to educate them as to our ways here in Siler City.

Cuadros: So you've got the depression and then you've got this sort of sense of fear of they're taking over. And then, you know, you have anger. And that's what we saw in 1999 - 2000 in Siler City, a lot of anger that eventually bubbled forth and culminated in this anti-immigrant rally that I think the town still tries to live down: The David Duke rally.

[Sounds of the crowd cheering David Duke rally]

David Duke: The truth and the reason why we're here today, is because we have a deep and abiding love for our heritage for this town that your fathers and mothers, and grandfathers, and great grandfathers and mothers, they built with their sweat and their sacrifice and their vision.

Dubester: It was on the top of Town Hall. They maybe had fifty or sixty people: a couple hundred people on the outside of the event, a lot of them police officers, some curious people, some Latinos. But not many people.

Duke: Ladies and gentlemen, what are we supposed to do? Just be quiet? Just keep our mouths shut while our country and our community and our town and our schools and our heritage is taken away from us? Is that what we're supposed to do? I say no! I say never!

[Crowd applause and shouting]

Hayes: This was brought in by an extremist group. This was not representative of the mindset here in Siler City at all. And we kind of hung our heads you know when that happened and couldn't wait for it to go away.

Dubester: My sense, my opinion, is if that rally had been organized by some upstanding citizen and not tied to KKK, to the Grand Wizard, there would have been a lot more people. But because they had the KKK in it, with David Duke, I mean, who wants to be seen with the KKK? I mean a few do. And we know who we are, we've got their pictures. But not many people are willing to do that our days.

Cuadros: So there's been some, maybe some good things that have come out of that Duke rally. But mostly it made people kind of think, you know, where they stood on this issue. Were they going to stand down there with David Duke and the Klan against the Latino population or were they going to try and find some other kind of accommodation to be able to live in that town?

[Sound of car doors opening, bells]

Tim Riffe: OK. Somewhere on that pad there's a bunch of stuff in red. Anywhere you want to start.

Marcia Espinola: South town? Anywhere.

Riffe: We can go anywhere you want to go. All right.

Riffe: My name is Tim Riffe and I'm the code enforcement officer for the town of Siler City. There's a set of guidelines in the town code, or laws, they're actually laws that deals somewhat with aesthetics and things like that of the town, and my job is to enforce. And I try to use kid's gloves to do that. I don't try to, you know, scare anybody into anything or anything else. I ask them politely.

Espinola: Tim is doing a good job. The problem is he doesn't speak enough Spanish. My name is Marcia Espinola and I'm the Associate Director for the Hispanic Liaison, El Vinculo Hispano. We were agreed that the community was needing some help.

[Sounds of car doors opening, slamming]

Riffe: What's that house number? Can you see that house number there, Marcia?

[Sounds of knocking on door, door creaks open]

Riffe: Hey, how are you?

Espinola: Hola. Como estas? [Continues in Spanish]

Riffe: Obviously he wasn't English-speaking and she explained to him that he needed to remove the sofa from the porch, interior furniture on the outside, which is not allowed by the town code. And she told him that he could take it inside or he could take it to the curb. The town offers free curb pickup once a week.

[Espinola speaking to home resident in Spanish]

Riffe: He may have not done the graffiti - someone else....

Espinola: I said that. [Laughs]

Riffe: Oh okay. All right. I had no clue what you said. [Laughs]

Espinola: You want to say something else?

Riffe: Just thanks for your cooperation. Thank you. Gracias.

[Espinola and resident in Spanish]

Espinola [to Riffe]: And he's going to remove the carpet, too.

Riffe: OK. Good. Gracias.

[Espinola speaks to resident in Spanish]

[Sounds back in the car]

Riffe: You know that some of these people came from some incredibly wretched living conditions. And you know, you don't know the customs and stuff.

Espinola: Some people say, well the Hispanics don't clean their yards and everything, but maybe it's because they don't understand the language. Because after we went last year, talking to, I don't know, ten places, twenty places?

Riffe: Yeah.

Espinola: Everybody cleaned their houses.

Riffe: I've been here almost eight years. It's not nearly as bad as it was when I first came here.

Espinola: So it's helped everybody. And hopefully he's going to speak Spanish next year. [Laughs]

Riffe: Ha. I know about a hundred Spanish words, something like that, maybe two hundred now. I've been working on it.

Calvin Dark: I just want to get a quesadilla de pollo.

Waiter: Chicken? The regular or the-

Dark: The regular. With arroz?

Dark: My name is Calvin Dark. I'm 29. I was born and raised here in Siler City. I now live in Washington, D.C. So I've lived and studied abroad a lot, but I've always kind of kept the connection; I think because my family is here, all of my family on my mother's side and father's side. We're at probably one of my favorite restaurants in Siler City, San Felipe Mexican restaurant. In 2000, when I studied in Argentina, when I got back here I wanted to practice Spanish and everything, so the first thing I did was to tell my parents I wanted to eat Mexican food. They were not that excited about it at first because they'd never had Mexican food, they didn't know what it was. And my parents loved the food. That was a few years ago. Coming to the Mexican restaurant to get fajitas or quesadillas, it's not something, you know, exotic anymore. That's why I think this restaurant and several others have done a lot to just kind of like just open up the culture, to let people in Siler City know, you know, people eat just like we do here, you know?

Waiter: Rice?

Dark: Yeah.

Waiter: Quesadilla?

Dark: Gracias.

Dark: Black people felt that we had a place here. Some parts of it were good and some parts of it were not good. My mother never went to an integrated high school. But it was a definite place. I've never felt anywhere - anything but at home here. But at the same time, having another group come in, it was very tense - very, very tense.

[First Baptist Church band and congregation singing: God is real. Real in my soul.]

Susan Alston: My name is Susan Alston and I'm a native of Siler city. I've been here life long and I'm Calvin Dark's aunt.

[Alston singing: His love for me...is like pure gold...]

Alston: Well my family history with First Baptist Church go back for, I guess, 70, 80 years with my grandmother being rooted there. In fact, the first minister there was our great uncle, uncle Doc Siler. And we have all just been there all our lives, just as a hand-me-down family. You're a Baptist, you go to First Baptist.

[Alston and congregation singing: God is real and I can feel Him in my soul. Alston: Amen!]

Dark: I'm Calvin Dark, and we're here on the Dark side because we have my Aunt Susie's house here. And then just over there is my grandmother's house. And then my Aunt Pookie's house is there. And next door to hers is my Aunt Betty's house.

[Screen door creaks open, then slams]

Calvin: This is my aunt Susie. You've probably already met. This is my aunt Pookie.

Zylphia Dark: I'm Zylphia Dark. Zylphia. Z-y-l-p-h-i-a. They call me Pookie. I'm 63, be 64 on June the 4th. I retired from the government as a inspector in the plants last year, so I worked with the Latinos. But they are hardworking people, and I understand the reason why they are coming, because no work - and if they were poor like I was growing up, I can understand. Trying to feed your family, you'll about do anything. The work is really hard work in the poultry plant. And I think they treat them - well, to me, the Latinos are really taking place of the blacks, what we used to go through. But I'm a believer God made us and loves us all. And I try to treat people the way I want to be treated.

Alston: I have a different point of view than my sister, which I love dearly, but we think differently. I mean, we look at the Hispanics as coming in because of their lack of necessities from Mexico. But then I ask myself, could we in turn do the same if we were to want to move to Mexico just by flood? And yes, I believe that all of us are human. But to see the same things, the rights that I never had in high school, to just be able to go into a store without feeling the oppression of I'm taking something or I'm being watched. And that's just the way I feel. I don't hate the Hispanics. I just think they stepped into a place that we still haven't arrived at 2008.

Cuadros: For white folks, you know it's kind of like a no-win situation for them. This is Paul Cuadros again, the soccer coach at Jordan-Matthews High School. If they've learned anything from the civil rights movement, from the history with African Americans, and then applying those things that they've learned to this new group of Latinos, then it feels like to African Americans that they're being stepped over, that you didn't treat us that way and now you're treating them that way. Why? So what are whites and Latinos supposed to do? Recreate this history all over again of oppression and misunderstanding? Or really learn from the history that's happened, of race relations in the U.S. and the South?

[Sound of crowd chanting: Si, se puede! Si, se puede!]

Cuadros: In 2006, we had the marches that happened all across the U.S. where immigrants decided that they needed to express their opposition to what was happening in Congress at the time; that was the same march that happened in Siler City as well.

Dubester [speaking over loudspeaker]: Good afternoon and welcome to Siler City. For years I have been dreaming of this day!

Dubester: This is Ilana Dubester. It wasn't an angry event. It was really about immigration reform and solidarity. And a lot of people spoke, a lot of African American leaders spoke, and a lot of people walked up to the mike and asked to speak. And so we filled up this whole block and the entire church parking lot with people and on top of Town Hall as well.

Hayes: I'm Barry Hayes. This was a much larger turnout. The David Duke march maybe had two hundred people there. This one had over a thousand people, maybe fifteen hundred people.

Dubester: We figured there were probably in total about five, six, seven thousand people.

Hayes: I think the town just felt like that this was the wrong way to go about getting something. If you wanted to ask for something or gain the favor of the community that they were just going about it in totally the wrong way.

Dubester: Tough shit. I mean, that's what it was about. It's OK if we're invisible, it's OK if we're silent, it's OK if we hide in our houses, it's OK if we break our backs and twist our hands cutting your fricking chicken. But for us to stand in front of your Town Hall demanding better services, demanding a better life and a better future, that's too much. You brown people stepped out of your place. Yeah. We want a new place. Look how many of us are here. We have power in this town. We don't actually have power, in terms of representation or anything, we don't have, right? But look at what's happening and look at what we can do.

Cuadros: When I talk about those five stages, you know, this is really dealing with the loss of the culture. The culture's changing. And that's what makes this issue so volatile. The last stage of course, is acceptance. And I don't necessarily think that Siler City is totally there, but it's certainly not as angry as it used to be.

[Sounds of soccer game. Virginia Tobar yells: Good job, Debra!]

Virginia Tobar: Well my name is Virginia Tobar. I'm the interpreter here at the high school. And I do a little bit of everything, not just interpreting but slash secretary, slash nurse, slash counselor, slash - [Laughs].

[Sound of stadium announcer introducing players: "Meredith Pleasants."]

Tobar: All right, Meredith!

Pleasants: OK, I'm Jenny Pleasants, and I have a daughter that's a senior. And Miss Tobar has been at Jordan-Matthews for the last four years. And she's just one that kind of knows everybody.

Tobar: Everybody.

Pleasants: Everybody, no matter who they are, what grade they're in, where they go to church, whatever. And she can speak Spanish one second and then turn around and speak English to me when I walk in the door. I don't know a thing she said five minutes before, but it's like, whatever. It works! [Tobar laughing] She really is a gem to Jordan-Matthews.

Tobar: Aw, well thank you.

Pleasants: She is a gem. We're very lucky.

Tobar: Well thanks.

Tobar: As far as a coach, I mean awesome coach, too, Coach Cuadros. I think he's been just a positive impact on this school, too, 'cause I mean we just started our soccer team. It's been just a few years, which we didn't have a soccer team as far as the boys and the girls.

Cuadros: A small town's identity is usually wrapped up with its high school, its schools. The most visible part of that school is on its athletic fields.

[Sound of drums, band, and crowd at Jordan-Matthews football game]

Cuadros: Now Siler City's a real football town, a very traditional sports town. There was a lot of resistance to the soccer program at the high school, initially - late nineties, early turn of the century. I had never really brought it up as being an outlet for Hispanic students. It was always to be a program open to anyone who could play. But it was quickly seen as something for the Latino students at the school.

John Pleasants: Paul had a hard time getting, really, the access to the fields. And he came to our Rotary and some more people got involved and they decided to go ahead and start a soccer team and let the field be used. John Pleasants from Siler City, I grew up here and I've traveled around and I'm back here raising my kids. I love this town and I love the area. 'Course now you've got a great involvement. They won the state championships with the boys and the girls team, as you can see, it's got great camaraderie out there. They don't really care where their background is. They're all great kids that enjoy each other.

Cuadros: What the Jets did, it was real big. It got the long-term residents to look at these kids as one of their own. These kids were not just Latino kids; they were Jets.

[Francisco in Spanish: Soy Francisco....]

Voiceover: I am Francisco. I'm here watching the game with my two daughters, Helen and Madeline, and all the other fans that are here watching. It's beautiful. We're here supporting our girls.

[Sound of fan: Debra!]

Debra: I think it's good to have different people in the team, especially white girls, 'cause you get to know them better and you realize that it's not how others say that sometimes they are being racist. But like, the girls on my soccer team they like invite us to their house and have like food and play out there. And that's cool. I think it's great to have friends that they're from different countries because you learn from them and they learn from you.

Cuadros: When people talk about this immigration question, it's not about immigration. It's about demographic change. You can deport all 12 million undocumented immigrants - I don't know how many of them are Hispanic, the majority might be - but the demographic change is still going to happen. And that loss of power, numbers, whatever, that frightens a lot of people. But change is inevitable. It's one of the physical laws of the universe. Nothing stays the same, everything changes. And that's a good thing.

Jenny Pleasants: Go, Yadira! Good job! Way to hustle!

[Sound fades to black]

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