July 06, 2005 News & Views » Cover

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New Latino South, Old Latino South 

Stop calling Hispanics aliens - recent archaeological evidence shows los Españoles beat the English to North Carolina by at least two decades

By
click to flip through (5) Hermn Marin
  • Hermn Marin
       

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Guatamala has the highest ratio of Protestants of any Latin American country, and most practice a Pentecostal faith born in the United States. Patrons of Palacios' music inventory may speak Capt. Pardo's language, but they can trace their religious roots as much to preachers in Kansas and California as to any priest in Madrid. Alongside the hundreds of Guatamalan Catholic families in Morganton are those like Palacios, who attend charismatic churches with names such as Luz y Verdad ("Light and Truth") and Nueva Vida ("New Life").

The worn brick building that houses Rincon Hispana lies a few blocks north of Morganton's quaint downtown, beyond earshot of the easy-listening 60s pop hits that waft from speakers mounted high on antique-replica light posts in the town's central square. Around the corner from the bookstore, in a neighborhood where many other Latinos live, another Guatamalan, Alberto Vasquez, runs a market of his own, La Esperanza, which means "hope." He is 30 years old and has lived in Morganton for half his life, but only recently has Vasquez enjoyed the freedom of owning his own home, gabbing with friends on his business line, making his own hours and serving people who speak his language.

Since coming to North Carolina at 15, Vasquez has laid bricks, sewn socks, assembled furniture and gutted chickens — the same sorts of jobs that attracted Hispanics by the hundreds of thousands during the 1990s, giving North Carolina the fastest-growing population of Spanish speakers in the United States. NC Latino affairs director Alex Lluch says learning English is a priority for the state's Hispanics, but his predecessor, Nolo Martinez, found that North Carolina has the most monolingual Spanish speakers in the US. This hasn't gone unnoticed by the Anglo population.

In Morganton's nostalgic Courthouse Square, elderly men and teenaged boys gather at Sterling Billiards and Snack Bar to shoot pool each morning and evening. Most hesitate to talk about the Latino newcomers, but David Lane, a Burke County native of 62 years, complains of the burden Spanish speakers place on local schools. "If I went to another country, I know darn well I'd have to either learn their ways and their culture and their language, or I wouldn't get nothing," says Lane, arguing for tuition-funded English-language education outside the public school system. "They're not going to put the red carpet out for me."

Vasquez has heard such complaints.

"Gringos say, 'No, you're no American, you need to speak English or you are no American,'" he says. "I'm American, too; I'm from Central America."

He voices a common theme among Latino immigrants. "America" is a word in both English and Spanish, distinguished only by an accent mark above the "e" in the Spanish version. To Latin Americans, America spans the entire Western Hemisphere, from the Bering Strait to Cape Horn. America's identity is both Anglo and Latin. In short, America belongs to them as much as it does to English speakers.

"I believe that we are God's children, and I'm here because God wants me to be here. ... Everything belongs to God, so wherever I go, it should be mine, too," says Letty Cortes, who left El Salvador for North Carolina 16 years ago and hosted a Spanish-language radio show in Charlotte before moving to Morganton in 2004. "Everybody from North, Central or South America, we are American, with different languages, different cultures, but I think everybody's included."

Maurine Dougher, a college Spanish teacher and Latino advocate, agrees. "When you learn geography in the States, they talk about seven continents," says Dougher, "but in Latin America, they talk about five."

A Simple Twist of Fate
The Spanish and English continued to clash in North Carolina as late as the mid-1700s, but the short life of Fort San Juan in the late 1560s symbolizes the Spanish failure in settling what is now the southeastern United States. Capt. Pardo had built the fort as headquarters for his mission to establish an overland path to Mexico; 18 months later, the Indians of nearby Joara destroyed it. Though the Conquistadors could not conquer North America for Spain, archaeologist Moore believes their European diseases decimated the native population, enabling English settlement during the 17th and 18th centuries.

"It would have been a much more difficult struggle (for the English) against the Native Americans had their populations been higher and had their settlements been denser," says Moore.

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