Welcome

by Neil Caudle

Two decades ago, if you drove to work early in the morning, you'd often see a crew of Mexican laborers bouncing along in the bed of a pickup truck, with a white guy in the driver's seat. A few years later, Latinos were driving the trucks. Today, they very likely own the trucks, and the names stenciled on the doors could be Lopez or Rodriguez instead of Smith or Jones.

Is this a good thing? I would say yes. We are a nation that renews itself by immigration, and I doubt that my own immigrant ancestors worked any harder or sacrificed more to gain the promise of this land than the immigrants of today. But it's easy to forget how we got here. And it's easy to think, when we see Latino men and women, that they are only here to work. To build our house or mow our grass or prime our tobacco or grow our Christmas trees. The work's getting done, but we're missing something.

So I envy my son, who is not missing it. Who has been semi-adopted by a Latino family and their bright, charming daughter and is thereby free to come and go in a house where dozens of people laugh and eat and celebrate as one unbounded family, every day of the week. Who can work a summer job for her father, laying brick, driving nails, and digging holes. Who can spend his lunch break with them, the only gringo on the crew, perched on an unfinished wall, debating the merits of Ford F-150 versus Chevy Silverado. Who can absorb the fine points of Spanish he won't learn in school.

Here at Endeavors, some stories come to us, and others we ferret out because the time seems right. With guidance from Ken Bollen, director of the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science, we sampled the Latino issues our faculty members are studying. We can only mention a few in these pages. But even if we could write about them all, you'd find many more questions than answers. Immigration is weaving its patterns into the fabric of North Carolina faster than anyone can keep track.

In the end, we can't understand these changes with facts and statistics alone. That's why we were fortunate to learn about Gabi Trapenberg, the undergraduate who took the photographs in this issue's cover story. Gabi has been spending time in Latino households and businesses, listening and making friends, capturing the images that will help us understand the people behind the work. Yes, we are missing something. And Gabi is working to show us how much.