ABSTRACT
Background and Context In their 2002 Brookings Institute Report examining nationwide Latino urbanization, Suro and Singer (2002) identified 18 ‘Hispanic Hypergrowth’ metro regions. Ten were situated in the Southeast, and three of the top four were centered in North Carolina’s largest urban areas (Raleigh, Greensboro, and Charlotte). The speed and scale of new migrant streams into southern cities, formerly by-passed by earlier inter and intranational migration, has created unprecedented challenges for these communities, not least of which is the incorporation of rapidly growing Latino populations into a reconceptualized ‘Nuevo New South’ (Mohl, 2005). While the South has a long history of identity transformation flowing from political and economic shifts and strategies, rarely has demographic transition and its associated cultural shifts so fundamentally challenged what it means to be southern. As Sociologist Carl Bankston suggests, ‘Latinos are arriving in the … southern United States at a time of declining regional identity. Much of the southern regional identity is an identification with the past that Latinos simply don’t have’ (as quoted in Whitmore, 2005, p. 5A) or, as Cobb (1999) might argue, never really existed. Indeed, the Nuevo New South is the latest version of the ever changing New South mythic that seeks to paint the region in progressive, modern, and internationalizing terms while at the same time holding tight to a romanticized version of a polemic and isolationist history (Tindall, 1999). In his work describing the impetus and implication of multiple New Souths across history, Cobb (1999) makes the point that each rests on a mythical and distorted view of the past. He warns that ‘at the end of the twentieth century, the bitter fruits of this distortion … remain a formidable obstacle to the creation of yet another regional identity to which all southerners … may legitimately subscribe (186). Into this context of an eroding and fabricated regional identity, thousands of Latinos have arrived and begun to make their own lasting mark on the region’s
character and identity. But they are doing so within a Nuevo New South that is celebratory of the region’s growing diversity yet obscures the harsh reality that very real southern traditions of race-based discrimination and exclusion are being extended to the incoming Latinos. As Alderman et al. (2003) emphasize, regional identities, particularly the southern one, are hybrid not only of fact and fiction but also of ‘changes and continuities (that) exist alongside each other’ (p. 247).The Nuevo New South then must be viewed as a hybrid of myth and reality, of multiculturalism and of past and present, all of which embrace the region’s growing global connectedness but fail to highlight the continued presence of exploitation, and exclusion that is increasingly characteristic of the Latino experience here. Charlotte, the focus of this chapter, may well be prototypic of other regional urban centers as it strives to meld its globalizing character with its historic past. Over the past 25 years, the city has endeavored to transform itself from a mid-sized regional center to one of America’s leading financial axes (Smith and Graves, 2003). However, Charlotte remains in many ways a traditional southern place, with deep roots in a culture where the interweaving of place and identity have always been powerful forces. Indeed, where one lives in the city, where one went to school or attends church, continue to intersect with what ‘race’ you are and where your family comes from. Although race and place shape one’s position and opportunity in communities across the nation, in the urban and rural places of the South, these forces remain particularly palpable. In this context, the influx of Latinos coming from other countries as well as other national regions has meant that the conventional markers framing placeidentity in Charlotte are increasingly dislodged. Traditional bi-racial constructs that have long shaped human relations in the South are ceding to reconstructed, and not always comfortable, notions of a tri-racial structure - Black, White, and Brown. In this new structure, Latinos, along with Asians and all others not clearly Black or White are grouped together indiscriminately. In turn, contentious issues surrounding privilege, access and belonging frame the arrival of racially ambiguous (and non English-speaking) Hispanic migrants, whether they have moved from Florida or Mexico, or are citizen or immigrant. For many Charlotteans, the status and presence of Latinos as a permanent part of the urban fabric is a recent discovery. Prior to the release of the 2000 Census data, and the follow-on media attention that flagged Charlotte as an emerging destination for inter-state and international Hispanic migrants, Latinos were largely viewed (if recognized at all) as an invisible cadre of working class laborers, filling the growing demand for poverty wage jobs that accompanied Charlotte’s urban and economic transformations. Settling in non-descript middle ring suburban apartment districts, this predominantly male population was ephemeral and purposefully insular. Cravey’s (2003) analyses of transnationalism and Latino migrants living in Raleigh-Durham and Chapel Hill offers keen insight into an adapted masculine lifestyle and set of coping strategies that extend to the Charlotte experience as well. Over the course of the late 1990s, Charlotte’s Latinos transitioned from a small stream of trailblazers drawn to the city by the boom in construction and low-skill
service sector work into a much larger, and increasingly complex, migration flow. Women and children began to reunite or arrive with male partners, families grew, and permanent communities began to take root and become more visible. But even this narrative, while accurate about the general trends defining the 1990s, doesn’t capture the complex and transitioning reality of the city’s newest, or its more established, Latinos. Nor does it recognize that Latinos have been present, and influential, in the city well before the 1990s. During the post-2000 census period, awareness of Latino migration and settlement in Charlotte has become widespread. But an understanding of who this group is, and what their history and role within the city’s transformation from southern backwater to globally ascendant city might be, remains limited. Through stories in the local media and the discourse in the political arena, a mythical image has evolved around Charlotte’s Latinos that is framed largely by the pioneering narrative outlined above. Therefore, for many Charlotteans, even among some ‘informed’ observers, the city’s Latino community remains transnational, Mexican, young, male, of limited means and resident in low rent apartment buildings in the city’s Eastside suburban ring. Indeed, the Central Avenue corridor, lined with strip shop centers filled with Spanish language signage, Latino tailored retailing and services and interspersed with aging 1970s vintage apartments sprouting waves of satellite T.V. receivers has come to represent Charlotte’s immigrant barrio with all the stereotypical connotations that implies. While the Latino community does indeed partially match these demographic and geographical descriptions, it is a far more complex diaspora. Indeed, a central argument of this chapter is that it is erroneous to speak of a singular Latino community. Resident in Charlotte today are a broad and very diverse range of Latino communities fractured along lines of nationality, time of arrival, ‘race,’ ethnicity, gender, occupational and educational attainment, citizenship and immigrant status. A second contention is that an unproductive tension exists between the mythical Latino community, with its quasi-factual bases, and the real multi-dimensional Latino communities. This tension shapes the local attitudes and policies that Latino newcomers encounter and complicates settlement and adjustment processes that might otherwise occur with more ease. Ultimately, the more complicated reality cedes to the simplistic and stereotypical image. The result of this skewed notion lays a foundation for continued failure to better utilize the human assets offered by new migrants, as well as an inability to meet the multiple community needs of the city’s Latinos in an effective and proactive fashion. The research presented in this chapter seeks to bring a balance to this tension by using statistical, interview-based and media content analyses to illuminate a more comprehensive and accurate portrait of Charlotte’s ‘real’ Latino communities. The statistical data used are derived from the 2000 Census of Population, locally derived data and from population estimates drawn in part from Claritas sources.1 These numbers are augmented by more than 20 key informant interviews with various Latino/a community leaders, Anglo and African-American service providers, media writers, and community activists conducted between Summer 2004 and Fall 2005. Interviewing began with a small set of key
informants well known within the city as Latino advocates. Secondary respondents were then selected using a snowball sampling strategy. All were asked general questions about the history, trajectory, and implications of Hispanic settlement in the city and more specific questions about service provision, community building and integration. In referencing the interview-based data, we have chosen to follow a confidentiality structured approach. In the interest of respecting anonymity and encouraging an open dialogue around sensitive issues, our respondents were assured confidentiality and are not identified by name, service, or professional affiliation in this chapter. Both the statistical and interview data are intersected with a content analysis of print news media (The Charlotte Observer) and local television news and public affairs programming (WBTV, WSOC, WCCB, and WCNC). While the pairing of quantitative and qualitative data allows for a finer grained perspective into the actual migration processes and the settlers who have shaped Charlotte’s long term and more recent Latino growth, media content analysis provides insight into the construction of the themes and images that have come to represent the mythical Latino community in Charlotte. Mythical Images of Charlotte’s Latinos
Hispanics are going to change the very meaning of being a southerner … and the only way that wouldn’t happen … is if those of us in the South and those of us who embrace its identity now, if we do not permit these folks to be southerners (Larry Griffin as quoted in Whitmore, 2005).
