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The Dream of Education
But a need even more pressing than health care, Ayala feels, is the Latino community's access to education. Perreira agrees. "I believe that we must help our youth graduate from high school and attend college," she says. "For Latino youth from low-income families, the high cost of college and limited availability of financial aid are significant barriers." Perriera is a member of the North Carolina Society of Hispanic Professionals, whose main charge is to help educate youth. Within that organization, she has been working to found a scholarship fund for Latino youth who graduate from high school and are admitted to college.
But many Latino youth may be ineligible to attend college. Foreign-born children of immigrants — whether they're permanent residents, other lawfully present non-citizens, or undocumented — can attend elementary and secondary school in the United States. But once they graduate from high school, their formal education may end. If they are not U.S. citizens, they cannot apply to U.S. colleges without returning to their home country, getting a student visa, and paying out-of-state tuition — even if they've lived here most of their lives and their families plan to stay in the United States.
Often students drop out of school and start working, Ayala says, or go back to their country of origin while their parents stay in the United States. Matt Griffin, a graduate student in health behavior and health education, works with a Latino youth organization in Durham. One of their projects raises awareness about the DREAM Act, a bill that's been introduced into Congress that would allow students a six-year window of temporary residency in order to attend college.
Of course, pre-college education has its challenges, too. James Johnson gives talks on recent demographic change to employers, school districts, and educational associations across the state.
"They are interested in what schools are going to look like in the years ahead," Johnson says. "But I take it beyond that and talk about the implications of the impending demographic change, from the achievement gap to the new imperative to globalize the public-school curriculum, internationalize the faculty and staff, and incorporate diversity-sensitivity training for all staff and administrators because of cultural differences." And Maria Teresa Palmer, a Rockefeller fellow at Carolina's University Center for International Studies, uses research she did with Latina immigrant high school students to present workshops to area teachers on the needs of immigrant students. She also serves on the N.C. State Board of Education.
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Father John Gonzalez hands scrolls to children and adults to prepare for their communion and confirmation. Photo
by Gabrielle
Trapenberg. Click
to enlarge.
Communities of Faith
Often bridges to diversity can be found in churches. North Carolina, traditionally a state with an overwhelmingly Protestant population, has been dramatically transformed in the last decade or so, says Thomas Tweed, professor of religious studies and adjunct professor of American studies. In an essay published in the Summer 2002 issue of the journal Southern Cultures, Tweed writes that North Carolina contains two of the four U.S. dioceses with the largest percentage of growth among Hispanic Catholics — Charlotte and Raleigh. "At first well-intentioned Catholic leaders were surprised, maybe even caught off guard, by Latino migration into the state," Tweed says. But now Spanish-language Catholic masses and Spanish-speaking priests have begun stepping in to meet the need.
Tweed says Latinos in the state are also affecting other denominations, including Protestant and Pentecostal churches, some of which have begun offering Spanish-language services. One, the United Church of Chapel Hill (Iglesia Unida de Cristo), holds a service for Spanish speakers led by Pastora Maria Teresa Palmer. "As pastor of an immigrant church, I strive to create a faith community where nobody feels 'foreign,'" Palmer says. "It is a privilege to help folks become part of our community."
New immigrants' spiritual and social needs are often met by church communities, Tweed says. "In churches, immigrants can make sense of themselves as individuals in a community," Tweed says.
The Civil Rights of Immigrants
Hiroshi Motomura, professor of law, says he came to Carolina from the University of Colorado last year to be in the middle of "the crucible" for determining the relationship between immigrant rights and civil rights. "North Carolina comes from a long tradition in the last couple generations of struggles over civil rights," Motomura says. "You have new populations trying to find their place in a framework of civil rights that has been established in a black-white context. Will Latino groups and traditional African-American groups align and find common cause as people of color, or will there be tension or even a divide based on citizenship status or language?"
Are immigrant rights civil rights, or are they different? "That to me is the challenge for North Carolina," Motomura says. "Clearly there are differences on the surface, because you are often talking about people who aren't citizens of this country. And yet to the extent that the civil rights movement embodies broader values about human rights, dignity, and integration into society, then it's the same thing — especially when you consider that the U.S.-born children of all these immigrants will grow up here as U.S. citizens themselves, whether their parents are here legally or not."
Motomura has served as co-counsel or volunteer consultant on federal immigration cases. He is writing an interpretive history of the last 200 years of U.S. immigration and citizenship law. His book is entitled Americans-in-Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship, because, he says, "We used to treat immigrants much more as if they intended to become citizens. It used to be that if you filed a declaration of intent to become a citizen you could vote, for example. And my argument is that we can and should revive the notion that immigrants are Americans-in-waiting."
North Carolina's Future
James Johnson, who came from Los Angeles, says that North Carolina is facing many of the same race- and immigration-related issues that city faced fifteen years ago. "But I think this state has made a concerted effort to manage it better," Johnson says.
One example is North Carolina's Durham-based Latino Community Credit Union, which operates five branches statewide. Keeping a bank account is the first step toward building credit. But national statistics show that, as of 1998, 25 percent of Hispanic families had no bank account, compared to just 5 percent of white households. Michael Stegman, chair of public policy and director of the Kenan Institute's Center for Community Capitalism, cites Federal Reserve data showing that 18 percent of people without bank accounts say that they just don't like dealing with banks.
Some Hispanic people, for instance, may be wary because in many Latin American countries the banking system is unstable. And Hispanics also deal with language barriers at many banks. But without bank accounts, families can be forced to pay high fees to check-cashing outlets and other fringe banking services. And, as Stegman told Congress in 2000 while testifying about legislation that would help bring more people into the banking system, people who have bank accounts are more than twice as likely to have money saved than those who don't have accounts. The Latino Community Credit Union, established in 2000 and only the second credit union in the Southeast geared toward Latinos, helps address some of these problems.
In addition to many active Latino-community-based organizations, Johnson points to the state's Office of Hispanic/Latino affairs within the Office of the Governor and the UNC-system affiliated North Carolina Center for International Understanding, which operates a program that takes philanthropic, business, governmental, and school leaders to Mexico for cultural immersion programs. He also sees a quiet development in voter mobilization, the proliferation of English as a Second Language classes in schools and workplaces, and the formation of political coalitions between African Americans and Latinos around common issues such as quality of education, housing, and jobs.
"I think in some communities where there used to be tensions over the influx of Hispanic newcomers, now you're seeing efforts to build a bridge," Johnson says.
He describes strong family ties among Latinos, high business-formation rates, and home-ownership rates higher than those of natives. "I don't think we've had a full cost-accounting of the contributions that Hispanic immigrants make to our society and our economy." Johnson says. And the American native population is "graying," he adds, so immigrant worker-power will be essential to the country's future competitiveness. Recent Census Bureau projections predict that the U.S. Hispanic population will rise from 12.6 percent of the country's population in 2000 to 24.4 percent by the year 2050.
"The question becomes, how do we replace the aging baby-boom generation?" Johnson
asks. "The population is going to be exiting the labor market since
we have a baby bust behind it. The only way you can do it is through
immigration."
Ayala's work is funded by the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education and UNC-Chapel Hill's Program on Ethnicity, Culture, and Health Outcomes.
Starting in fall 2004, Carolina will offer a transdisciplinary undergraduate minor in Latina/o studies — the first such minor in the Southeast — which is directed by María DeGuzmán, assistant professor in the Department of English.
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