not just black and white
by Cate House

When it came time to choose a topic for her senior honors thesis in Latin American studies, Karla Rosenberg was ahead of the game —  she'd had her topic in mind since high school.

arla Rosenberg believed the world was black and white. As a white girl who lived in Central Durham and attended predominately black public schools, she also thought she was a minority.

Riding the bus home in middle school, Rosenberg always recognized the Macon Street stop, not far from her own house, because more students got off there than at any other stop. "I watched every day as my black classmates poured off the bus and onto their lawns after school," she says.

Five years later, Rosenberg was surprised when she drove down the same street — almost all of the black households had been replaced by Latino households. "It seemed a huge change had occurred right under my nose," she says.

Mexican tiendas started popping up. Ranchero music played on the street. And in the restaurant where she had worked part time in high school, a lot of the people working in the kitchen were Latino.

"All of these things sparked my curiosity enough that when my mother invited me to begin teaching English classes with her at a local Hispanic community center, I eagerly accepted," Rosenberg says.

And the Latinos were just as eager to learn English. "All of the classes were packed," she says. Each class focused on a different issue such as health care or worker's compensation. For one class, a policeman came and talked about crime in the area. "This is when I realized that crime in the poorer areas was mostly black and Latino. Latinos carried all of their money around with them because they didn't trust the banks, and this made them easy targets for violence," Rosenberg says. "It really hit home when a Latino dishwasher I worked with in the restaurant got shot walking home one night."

.: Karla Rosenberg. Photo by Jason Smith; click to enlarge. :.

Rosenberg began to wonder if there might be some connection between black-Latino hostility and blacks' perception that Latinos were taking over their jobs and housing. She kept this thought in the back of her mind as she finished high school and started college. When her senior year rolled around, though, she knew her honors thesis was the perfect opportunity to explore the impact of Latino immigration on the native black community.

"Latino immigration in this area is a recent phenomenon, so there's not a lot of research data out there," Rosenberg says. Census figures show that between 1990 and 2000, the Latino population in North Carolina quadrupled from fewer than 100,000 to around 400,000.

osenberg went door to door for her information. She interviewed about 15 employers, workers, residents, and landlords — both blacks and Latinos. She asked questions about their community and about work — what it was like, whether they enjoyed it, if they thought the wages were fair, how they interacted with people on the job.

"Everyone was very open," Rosenberg says. "It wasn't so scary. I guess I'm pretty nonthreatening." Petite, with long reddish hair and freckles, Rosenberg says she got more jokes aimed at her than hostility. It helped, too, that she speaks fluent Spanish, something she picked up volunteering at the Hispanic community center and gets to practice regularly with her boyfriend, who is from Mexico.