Sherry Chandler

Why would the town council of a little town like Inez, Kentucky feel compelled to declare English its official language? The answer may be found in “My New Kentucky Home,” an article by Peter Laufer in Washington Monthly. The article has the blurb: The cutting edge of illegal immigration used to be L.A. Now, it’s Owensboro. It starts like this:

Route 77 is a small road, an east Texas highway that runs north from Brownsville to Corpus Christi, past the spring break resorts of the Padre Islands. There it connects to Route 37, which takes you to San Antonio. If you turn on Route 35, you’ll pass Dallas en route to Oklahoma, following a sagebrush express highway built to cut across nearly empty counties and link the far-flung commercial centers of the Southwest and heartland to one another. From Oklahoma City, you get a choice of destinations, each of them places where Middle America dwindles out into the countryside: west to the panhandle, north to Kansas, east to Arkansas or Missouri, and, eventually, Kentucky. Drive long enough on this route, and you begin to remember the value big interstate roads like these had in allowing farmers to bring their products to market more easily. Step off the road now and then, though, and you begin to notice something else: This set of ur-red state roads has become a main artery for immigration.

When they were not following the harvest, immigrants from south of the border once clustered in a few big cities: Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Denver. By the 1990s, that roster had expanded: meat-packing plants in rural parts of the country, unable to seduce native labor, starting hiring workers off the streets of Veracruz and Morelia, and little Mexican communities started popping up in places like Kennett Square, Pa., and Dalton, Ga. But during the last decade, Mexican immigration has gone through a third iteration: Mexicans are now simply everywhere in the United States.

…

Ten years ago, [the cutting edge of immigration] was southern California. Today, it’s Kentucky.

This article goes on to describe a process in Bowling Green, Kentucky that I’ve observed myself in my small town of Paris, Kentucky. Hispanics come into the community and take the low-end jobs. They cut tobacco and work the horse farms. Soon they also begin to revitalize Main Street, which is failing in most small Kentucky towns. In Paris, we now have at least two Mexican restaurants, a Mexican grocery, and attendance at the local Catholic church has imcreased tremendously. The Protestant churches now put Spanish-language slogans on the marquis. The produce sections of the local supermarkets have improved tremendously. Once upon a time, you could get iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, apples and oranges. Now you can get jalepenos, tomatillos, mangos, … And you see life on the streets after 6 p.m. The parking lot at Wal-Mart fills up in the evenings.

Back to the article:

The restaurant manager, who asks me to call him Israel, walked across the border several years earlier. I ask him why he chose to stay in Bowling Green. “Because no problems,” he tells me. “In California and New York hay muchos problemas.”

He’s speaking Spanglish. “Here there are no problems and lots of work. The Americans of Kentucky,” he says, “are muy amables,” kind and friendly. “There are no problems because Mexicans work hard.” He believes … only about 5 percent of the Latinos in Bowling Green are legal. But he points out that all of them carry papers testifying to their legal status. A set of U.S. identification papers, from a driver’s license to a Social Security card, takes about three hours to procure on the Bowling Green black market. The going rate rarely exceeds twenty dollars a card.

It’s a fascinating article, not over long, that raises some intelligent questions about our immigration policies. I recommend reading the whole thing.

A press release from Maryam Hand:

We will hold the last Wild Oats Coffeehouse of the season on Friday night, May 19 from 7:30 to 9 pm.

We would love to have you back!

So far, we have Sherry Chandler, recent winner of the Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize, David Cazden, Ellen Birkett Morris and myself reading.

If you would like to read, or if you know of anyone who would like to read, please forward this message to them and have them email me at embracelife@bellsouth.net

This Wild Oats is at The Mall on Shelbyville Road in Louisville near Borders Books.