To live and love across these boundaries is an immutable fact of life for recent Latino immigrants, and Marin's Charlotte-based rock band La Rúa has captured that reality in its popular song "El Chanchito," which translates into English as "The Piggybank." A hit on local Spanish-language radio stations, the song tells the story of a young immigrant, Samuel, who works and saves his money to help his girlfriend Marta come to the United States.
"'El Chanchito' hits home to many immigrants and we are excited that through our music — our passion — we can tell this universal story right here in Charlotte," says Marin's band mate in La Rúa, guitarist Tony Arreaza, a native of Venezuela.
More than a half-million Hispanics have immigrated to North Carolina since 1990. They fill vital roles in our economy, from working farms and construction jobs to sitting on the boards of corporations and serving as elected officials, and they've found neighborhoods to call home. Yet many Latinos continue to visit their countries of origin every year, or send cash and goods back to support their families or help them immigrate to the United States. Hispanic grocers thrive on wire transfers and international calling cards, not to mention the corn tortillas and banana leaves that provide a taste of childhood homes. By cultural training and circumstances of life, Latino immigrants come to see themselves as citizens of the Western Hemisphere — Americans not by immigration status or national identity, but by birth and a heritage both European and indigenous.
"America, it's a continent. It's a continent divided in three different regions, North America, Central America and South America," says Marin, who remembers pining for the day he could finish his studies in Ecuador and join his immediate family in Charlotte. "I'm an American, also. It's a word (that) describes all the people who live in America."Here in the United States, we are used to thinking of ourselves as American and everyone else as something other. We expect those who call themselves Americans to speak English and share our customs. The Latino immigrants in our midst seem like outsiders, yet their Spanish language has a centuries-long history beneath this country's Anglo surface. As archaeologists uncover North America's forgotten Latin identity, immigrants like Marin embrace Cuban poet Jose Marti's vision of nuestra América, "our America."
San Juan, North CarolinaAmerica's new Spanish rhythm isn't really as new as it may seem. As the borders dividing Latin and Anglo America collapse, much to the dismay of some on the northern side, archaeologists are digging up evidence that Spanish-speaking explorers catalyzed this country's origins. Not just in places of clay-capped Catholic missions and Spanish-sounding names like La Florida, or in the former Mexican lands that stretched northward through Nevada ("snow-capped," en espaol), but in such anglophonic, historically Protestant places as Morganton, in Burke County, just 75 miles northwest of Charlotte.
In the spring of 1567 — two decades before England settled its "Lost Colony" on Roanoke Island and more than two centuries before Scots-Irish immigrants founded the city of Morganton — the Spanish explorer Capt. Juan Pardo left 30 soldiers to occupy a fort they had built in the Appalachian foothills. Archaeologists think they've found shards of Spanish pottery and leftovers from meals the soldiers ate that year. The same records that led archaeologists to the Morganton area also suggest that the Iberians built another fort as far inland as Dandridge, TN. And before Pardo led two expeditions through the Carolinas and Tennessee in the late 1560s, Hernando de Soto explored the same region in 1539 and 1540.
"You can't understand the 18th-century Anglo-American history if you don't understand the 16th-century Spanish exploration," says Fort San Juan's lead digger David Moore, an archaeologist at Warren Wilson College in Asheville.
Today, in Morganton, just 12 miles from Fort San Juan's ruins, you'll find Rinçon Hispana, or "Spanish Corner," a tiny store stocked with banana leaves, baby coconuts and tamales. Inside, you may hear the music of Annette Moreno y Jard'n, a Christian rock band whose albums are shelved among hundreds of religious CDs, DVDs and videos. The group sounds much like Nashville's contemporary Christian music but for the Spanish lyrics. Proprietor Juan Palacios advertises Rinçon as a Christian bookshop, and like many of the Guatamalan households that have popped up in Morganton over the past 15 years, the store is both Latino and distinctly American.
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.
England won the race to settle the South some 300 years ago, and the rest is history, not historia; San Juan is a city in Puerto Rico, not in Carolina del Norte. Yet as heirs of the South and Central American Spanish conquest migrate north by the millions, America continues to grapple with what Morganton's Frank Hise, who led an anti-immigration protest there in 1999, called a "culture war." For some Latinos, the discovery of Fort San Juan demonstrates that Hispanics are not the modern-day "invaders" some people label them as, but that they are partners in founding contemporary America, and have been from the beginning.
"None of us are the original ones here," says Bill Beardall-Herrera, a native Panamanian and active leader among North Carolina's Latinos. "The original ones here are the Native Americans, and who knows if they were the original ones here. Who truly were the first ones here? Who knows who the first person was?"
Lingering at a lunch table inside Morganton's Supermercado El Salvador, Costa Rican Rebeca Vasquez agrees. "The limits that the people put around the world, I don't believe in that, maybe because I'm here." That's not to say Vasquez is enamored with her Spanish ancestors and their brutal conquest of Latin America. Though she speaks Spanish and English, the languages of the European colonists, Vasquez identifies more fiercely with her Native American ancestors. Like many Latinos, she can claim not only linguistic ties to the Conquistadors but also genetic ties to Native Americans.
"We are from this continent," she says. "I feel more like American than Spanish."
University of the West Indies professor Gregory Stephens, who studied Latino immigrants as a research fellow at the University of North Carolina, said the recent surge in immigration to Southern states should open eyes to the South's Latin heritage that was buried with Fort San Juan.
"Part of the problem is just myopia," he says of resistance among Southerners to the cultural changes going on. "We have not been trained to think about (the South) as part of the Latin American world. (But) South Florida is really Latin America; it's the capital of the new Latin America."
Stephens repeats a familiar refrain among Latinos — that it wasn't too long ago that the entire US West belonged to Mexico, and that the very names of many US states, such as Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas, bear the indelible mark of their Hispanic heritage. At the end of the Mexican-American War fought over dueling claims to Texas in the 1840s, the US took 40 percent of Mexico's total land area in exchange for $15 million.
It's a point Jorge Hernandez, front man of the California-based ranchero band Los Tigres del Norte, makes in song. "I didn't cross the border, the border crossed me," Hernandez sings in the group's hit "Somos Mas Americanos" (We are more American).
"I tease a lot of my American friends and say, you know, we were here first, so we're going to take over," says Beardall-Herrera. "When the people say, you know, 'Go back home,' I say, well, we are. We were here in the early 1500s, and we built a fort up here in Morganton, and if you start looking around there, there's probably a few Hispanic fellows and ladies wandering around here who may be called Smith or whatever else.
"I don't think people have really let that sink into their heads," he adds. "And now people are finding out we are now the largest minority in this country."
Nuestra América
Hispanics comprise about 13 percent of the United States population and recently overtook African Americans as the largest ethnic minority. The US West is nearly 25 percent Hispanic, while the South, anchored by Florida and Texas, is almost 12 percent Spanish-speaking, according to a 2002 Census Bureau update.
North Carolina's proportion of Latinos is about half the national average, but the state's Spanish-speaking population grew by approximately 500 percent between 1990 and 2003. Other southeastern states, such as Georgia and Arkansas, showed similar gains, leading a southern population surge the US Census Bureau predicts will help make the nation nearly 25 percent Hispanic by 2050.
No group of immigrants has arrived on US soil in such vast numbers that they could survive without learning English — without becoming "American," in the narrow sense. Recent Latino immigrants, however, are filling such vital roles in the labor force — many businesspeople say they couldn't operate without them — and arriving in such numbers as to make it prudent for employers to learn Spanish. Frequently working in all-Hispanic crews and aided by bilingual supervisors, first-generation immigrants are surviving for years, sometimes decades, without speaking a word of English, even in North Carolina, where Latinos make up less than a tenth of the population.
Ethnic isolation in newly christened barrios and sandlot soccer fields exacerbates the challenge of learning English.
"If I want, I don't need to speak in English here," says Marin, the Charlotte musician who learned English as a youngster in Ecuador. "My mother, she doesn't speak English, and she can do her life exactly the same as in Ecuador. At this point, you don't need it."
Across the "Nuevo South," public spaces like banks, hospitals, libraries and parking garages all accommodate Spanish-speakers. The Spanish language is doing what the Spanish themselves tried but failed to do. It is penetrating and settling in the South, 450 years removed from Fort San Juan. Spanish La Florida has renewed its drive up into the heart of Dixie. As Spanish and English collide once again in this region, there's little doubt the language of Shakespeare will continue to dominate, but Cervantes' tongue shows no signs of disappearing.
"I would say that it's very important to speak English, not in order to be an American, but I would encourage everyone in America to speak English and Spanish both," says Rev. Alex Gonzalez, a Colombian priest who arrived in coastal New Bern in 1997 without knowing a word of English. "I would say you have to speak Spanish, too, because most of the population in America speaks Spanish."
English may be the dominant language for nearly 400 million people who inhabit the US and Canada, but close to 700 million people live in Latin America, where Spanish and Portuguese rule. So the broader "America" is overwhelmingly Spanish speaking.
Still, social walls remain, even as geographic borders blur. In the past few years, Morganton has witnessed Ku Klux Klansmen march against immigrants, and the local newspaper reported on a cross-burning after which the perpetrator told police he was angry over plans to develop a trailer park where blacks and Hispanics might live. Other citizens are concerned with lost manufacturing jobs and the perception that Latinos are taking them. And they seem frightened by the language barrier.
Letty Cortes says both sides would gain from getting to know each others' languages better. "If we're in this country, then we should speak English, too, or try to learn it," she says. But she suggests US-born citizens should try to learn Spanish, too. "I really admire people who try to speak Spanish and try to understand my people coming to this country. It's so hard for us coming to this country where everything is new, language, people, culture. Sometimes we really feel very frustrated, too, because we want to communicate sometimes and we just can't. We don't find many people who are trying to understand us."
That seems to be changing, though slowly, as the image of Latinos as "outsiders" fades. Most immigrants say they feel more welcome today, even if they still reserve the term "American" for white or black natives of the United States. Rebeca Vasquez laughs at her elusive identity, coining the term "USA guys" to describer her English-speaking friends. As for musician Hermán Marin, his band La Rúa has found a warm welcome in Charlotte, where predominantly Anglo clubs like the Visulite Theatre, the Evening Muse and the Room have booked the group, and Anglo music lovers have begun to come and listen.
In restaurants from Morganton to Charlotte, the smell of hot corn tortillas mingles with the rhythms of traditional Latin American music styles such as cumbia, salsa, son and ranchera, as well as the chatter of waiters and waitresses speaking Spanish to their Hispanic customers and English to those USA guys. It's a huge change from the days when Latino and Anglo cultures in North Carolina looked at each other as if they lived in parallel worlds with glass walls — and from the days when the Spanish and English battled to determine America's cultural identity.
"We started to mix with each other since that time," says Marin, who cites English-language bands such as U2 and the Beatles as influences equally as important as Latin rock legends like Charly Garcia. "It's just a frontier that divides our world from yours, an imaginary frontier."
Jesse James DeConto is not a Spaghetti Western movie star. He is a free-lance writer and the great-grandson of Italian, Irish and German immigrants. You may contact him at jdeconto@thephillipsfoundation.org.