Story by Chris Graham 

Jorge Matalana set out for the United States from his native Peru in 1989 for the same reason that millions of others who have embarked on a new life in America decided to pack up their lives and put down new roots here.

“My country was in a little bit of trouble with economic depression and terrorism and all of that. So I emigrated to come here to make myself better,” said Matalana, who eventually settled in Staunton in the heart of the Shenandoah Valley.

A college graduate and business professional in his native land, Matalana “started all over again - from zero” upon his arrival in the States.

“I became a truck driver - because I had to survive, I had to eat,” Matalana said.

He later latched on with McKee Foods Corp. - while continuing his education, graduating from Blue Ridge Community College and taking classes toward a bachelor’s degree at James Madison University, where he now works as a staff recruitment and employment advisor.

“This has all happened in 15 years. It is amazing what has happened to me in those 15 years,” Matalana said.

“You have to start from zero, and that’s tough. You are coming to work in something that you have never done in your life - like myself. I was a truck driver, and I was moving furniture, actually, for a living, and I never in my life had done that. In my country, I had an office job. I was in a bank. I was very comfortable, but I wasn’t making any money. But when you come here, you’re ready to say, I don’t care. I’m going to wash dishes for a living. And I’m not going to have to do this the rest of my life,” Matalana said.

“It wasn’t easy - but it takes the opportunity to be in this country,” Matalana said.

The birth of a community

Katy Pitcock was a sight to behold.

A self-described “young hippie,” Pitcock waltzed into the Winchester School Board office in 1975 to announce that she was looking for a job.

“The secretary to the superintendent took one look at me and said, You should go talk to the director of the migrant-education program,” said Pitcock, who has worked with the migrant and immigrant communities in the Valley for the past 30 years.Back in the mid-1970s, the communities that she worked with were almost entirely migrant in nature - and the migrants were for the most part internal.

“In 1975, almost all of the farmworkers were Americans from Florida. But as it was, they were immigrants,” said Pitcock, the founder of the Winchester-based Latino Connection, an advocacy group based in Winchester and Frederick County.

“At that time, the Shenandoah Valley was as much a different country from other places in America as a real, live country was. So indeed, this community was receiving a group of people who were identifiable as a group from outside the normal social networks of how people knew each other. So they were receiving immigrants - they were immigrants from Florida. But they were still very much considered a culturally separate group from the folks who had lived in the Valley all of their lives,” Pitcock said.

A new group of migrants were already beginning to cycle through at that time.

“We’ve had Latino immigrants in the Valley, not as settlers, but as migrant workers, since the early 1970s,” said Laura Zarrugh, a James Madison University professor who has focused her academic research on the migrant and immigrant communities in the Valley.

The migrants became immigrants due to the changing socioeconomic climate of the 1980s and 1990s.

“Slowly over time, there was a movement from migrant-farmworker status - apple picking is what really brought Latinos, specifically, to the Shenandoah Valley, originally. The poultry industry in and around the Harrisonburg and Rockingham County area provided people with more permanent, better-paying jobs with better working conditions - and that was a major factor in people settling more or less permanently in the area,” Zarrugh said.

The 1986 amnesty law passed by Congress that offered legal status to millions of then-undocumented immigrants was a key turning point in Virginia and elsewhere in Middle America.

“No longer is it just the L.A.s and Chicagos and New Yorks of the world that are seen as attractive places for immigrants to settle - more and more come to Winchester and to Harrisonburg in much larger numbers than anywhere before,” said Elzbieta Gozdziak, a Georgetown University professor who has been actively studying the Latino communities in the Shenandoah Valley for the past several years.

“In absolute numbers, there wasn’t very many - in Winchester, there has been a growth in the Latino population between 1990 and today of about 1,500, 1,600 people,” Gozdziak said. “This is low, because the Census tends to underestimate these populations, but even in the estimates of the advocates, the number is somewhere around 2,200, 2,300. So still in absolute numbers, this is a drop in the bucket, when you think from the perspective of Chicago or New York.

“Two thousand people, who cares, right? But in places like Winchester, to have one-tenth of the people who look, talk, behave differently than the general population, the impact was definitely there,” Gozdziak said.

By the early 1990s, the Valley Latino population was booming - spurred by the demand for labor in the equally booming and heated U.S. economy.

“What happened not only in the Shenandoah Valley but across the country was we saw this booming economy where everyone who wanted to get a job basically could get a job,” said Micah Bump, a Georgetown University researcher who has been working with Gozdziak on the school’s studies relative to the Valley Latino community.

“If you look at the unemployment rate in the Valley from the early 1990s up until the present time, you’ll see that in ‘92 and ‘93, there’s a 6 percent unemployment rate, and then it goes under 2 percent by the mid-’90s. And that is steady through today. And that basically means that anybody who wants a job and is employable can get a job. People who analyze labor markets will say that if the unemployment rate is hovering around 2 or 3 percent, this means that everyone who is employable has a job. The 2 to 3 percent are people who are perhaps disabled or are high-school dropouts or are people with addiction problems - are basically just not employable,” Bump said.

“There was a plethora of jobs not only in the poultry industry, but you have a booming housing market and development coming out from metropolitan D.C., which was also booming at the time. And so you have construction, you have the food-processing, and then just on the I-81 corridor there, you have a lot of manufacturing and distribution plants that immigrants were able to move into,” Bump said.

Reaching out

Danitza Porras came to Winchester from her native Costa Rica in 2004.

Porras and her husband, Alvaro, were summoned by The Salvation Army to help the Army’s Winchester unit better reach out to the growing Valley Latino population.

Danitza Porras wasn’t sure what to expect when she got here.

“The idea we had when I was coming was that Americans don’t like Latinos - no matter whether you are legal or documented or undocumented,” Porras said.

“Our transition here was so nice because of the warmth of the people here - Hispanics and Latinos as well. We have a family here,” Porras said.

It’s not the easiest thing to do, of course - to leave your family, to leave your homeland, to strike out in search of something that you perceive will lead to a better life.

“There’s no doubt that the journey from even Mexico, which is of course on our border, to communities in the United States that are not along the border, imposes significant hardships,” said David Shreve, an economist and professor at the University of Virginia.

“It’s not an easy decision, I would imagine, for most of these immigrant workers to make - to leave their families. And a lot of times, they’re doing just that - they’re not bringing entire families, but the individuals from families are coming and sending money back to their families in Mexico or other Latin American countries,” Shreve said.

Because that is often the goal - to be able to make enough money to send dollars to family members back home - and because the kinds of jobs that they find are usually on the lower rungs of the U.S. economic ladder, new immigrants in particular tend to struggle mightily to make ends meet.

The transition experienced by Porras and others is the result of the work of people up and down the Valley who have made it their responsibility to make sure that the assimilation of Latinos into the social fabric is as smooth as is possible.

“What we found was that the history of working with the migrant community benefited the immigrant settlers - because you had this core group of people that worked in the areas of health care, housing, education and social services, and they had worked with this population for 25, 30 years,” Bump said.

“Those people were in the community, and they were familiar with the needs there, and they had the language capacities. And so for those general areas, the transition went smoothly - because these people were able to step in and mediate between the larger community and the new settlers,” Bump said.

The kinks have long since been worked out - to the point where Porras has advanced from newcomer to an important position in the service-delivery network in the Lower Valley in the relatively short span of three years.

“Our first objective was to let the Hispanic community know that it was safe for them to come to The Salvation Army and ask for help - any kind of help. Because as an immigrant, and some of them are undocumented, they were afraid of coming and saying, I am hungry, and I don’t have a Social Security number. So that was one of our first aims - going to the communities and letting the people know what The Salvation Army is, who we are, what we do, what we offer,” Porras said.

“We teach computer classes, we teach English as a Second Language classes. Also, we refer people to classes in the community - because our resources are limited. Basically, whenever we know about a person who needs something, and we know about someone else who is providing these services, we can help push people in the right direction,” Porras said.

Resources are limited across the spectrum - which is why the Latino Connection’s Katy Pitcock focuses so much of her time and energy making sure that service providers across the spectrum know each other and know what they are all doing.

“The Latino Connection is basically a networking organization for the mostly bilingual outreach service providers from a variety of organizations and agencies - ranging from the official, like the public schools, to churches to individuals. We meet regularly and look at the issues and what are the kinds of things that we could do, things that would be useful that require a group effort,” Pitcock said.

“We’ve done a variety of things, like a bilingual resource guide - which includes information on how to register your children in school and where to go to get an immigration physical and what places have language access. For example, Frederick County Social Services has a bilingual person there on Thursday afternoons. We look at what are the barriers to services and then kind of educate everyone about what’s available and what’s not available,” Pitcock said.

Pitcock was also instrumental in helping a Harrisonburg-based effort modeled on the Latino Connection get off the ground. It’s called the Harrisonburg Area Hispanic Services Council - and chair Rick Castaneda is the point person for the multiagency effort to devise strategies for delivering services to the Harrisonburg-Rockingham County region’s growing Latino community.

”

For the most part, we network about our services and what we do - and the communication is oriented toward making us more effective in what we do, and understanding that one agency is not a stopgap and cureall for every individual. We are able to communicate across the board to find out what each of us is doing so that we’re not duplicating services and so that we’re offering services in the most effective way that we can,” Castaneda said.

“The Hispanic Services Council is very much a grassroots group. We don’t have a charter, we don’t have bylaws, we don’t have a budget - we don’t have any money, actually. It’s just volunteers getting together talking about what they do in their jobs. And each of us have jobs that require us, that want us, to be networking with other agencies to provide the best services to the people that we work with,” Castaneda said.

“We just want to be there for immigrants for whatever they might need - and help people become acclimated to life in the United States so that they can better participate in the communities that they live in,” said Susannah Lepley, the director of the Harrisonburg-based NewBridges Immigrant Resource Center, which offers assistance to immigrants seeking to apply for citizenship status and in recent years has added a schedule of ESL classes to fill gaps in the availability of those classes in the Harrisonburg-Rockingham area.

“It’s a communitywide effort,” said Peter Loach, the deputy director of operations at the Piedmont Housing Alliance in Charlottesville and the founder and chair of the Charlottesville-based Creciendo Juntos - Growing Together, a network of service organizations in Charlottesville and Albemarle County working to coordinate their efforts to reach out to the Latino communities in the city and county.

Creciendo Juntos grew out of an exercise that Loach began at the Piedmont Housing Alliance to improve the nonprofit’s ability to reach out to the Charlottesville-Albemarle region’s growing Latino community.

“As we started that conversation internally, I started bumping into people in other agencies - because we do a lot of partnering with other agencies. And they’re all going through the exact same thing - whether they’re social-service agencies or health agencies or police departments or emergency services or whatever. So a few of us said, Why don’t we get together and share some ideas about what’s working and what isn’t working?” Loach said.

Creciendo Juntos met for the first time in 2005 - and in two short years, the number of participating service agencies has grown from six to more than 40.

“What we’ve tried to do - and we have no budget - is kind of the sweat equity of people’s time and different agencies saying you can donate some of your staff time to this thing. We have set up a Web site with information to help service providers understand the needs and situations of Spanish speakers. We have a guide in Spanish, a manual, as it were, for Spanish speakers, that describes all the services that are available in the area from over 50 different agencies - from information on whether there’s someone at the office who speaks Spanish to other information of that nature,” Loach said.

Another focal point for Creciendo Juntos has been to reach out to the Valley to try to learn from the experiences of the Harrisonburg Area Hispanic Services Council, in particular.

“It took a little while for us to get to a point to look over there - we had enough to keep us busy here,” Loach said. “One of the things that we did was a few months ago we invited Laura Zarrugh from JMU to a meeting to give a presentation based on her research on immigrants and their transition to the U.S. and their impact on businesses and the community. She gave a great talk, and then she put me in touch with a network over in Harrisonburg that works in this field over there.

“I want to try to get over there and learn from them - because certainly the population over there has gone through this initial burst of growth dating back 15 or 20 years,” Loach said.

The Three R’s - Readin’, ‘Ritin’ and Reinventin’ the Future

Rosy Perreault knows all about the difficulties that Latinos face when they arrive in America with little or no English-language proficiency.

Perreault is a native of Brazil who came to the U.S. in 1999 - and even with her work in the Programa Alas afterschool program for Latino students in Winchester, she confesses to having problems sometimes getting her thoughts across in her second language.

“I came here to improve my English skills - and I am still working to improve these many years later,” Perreault said.

Perreault, then, is more than just the site director of an ESL afterschool program. She is also somebody who can relate to parents who themselves need to work on their English - both for themselves and for the betterment of their children and their education.

“I help parents to fill out the forms - and we teach them how to help their children in school,” Perreault said. “We have some courses that help them there. We help them with other things that can come up - like taxes and doctors. I work as well at night in the adult ESL program as a volunteer. So I have contact with the families from the kids coming here in the day to the parents who go to school at night to learn English as a second language.”

Vernon Laney, who oversees the Winchester school system’s ESL program, has seen the demands on the program grow almost exponentially in the past decade. In 1996, the public-school system had a total of 57 ESL students spread out among grades K-12. As of Sept. 30, 2006, that number had grown to 582 - a 921 percent increase in 10 years.

What that has meant to the school system is evident in this other bit of data - in 1996, Winchester got by with a two-person ESL staff; the staff for the ongoing 2006-2007 school year stands at 30.

“When we started out, we had all our students in elementary school in one of our four elementary schools. Then five years ago, we had so many that we had to switch and go to two elementary schools. So we sort of split the city in half,” said Laney, who reversed the split four years ago with a return to the home-school philosophy wherein ESL students once again attend schools in their home district as normal.

“We really had no choice but to return to that model - because in elementary school, our percentages have us with about 20 percent of our student body in elementary school as English as a second language students. And our preschool is 50 percent English as a second language,” Laney said.

The focus of Programa Alas is the same afterschool as it is during the regular school day - on language skills.

“We have language for learning - a direct method of teaching English that focuses more on communication skills. And then when they finish the four books in that series, they go to language for thinking, that works more on their listening skills. The focus is more toward the communication end of things,” Perreault said.

The Harrisonburg public-school system also has a sizable number of ESL students - in the current 2006-2007 school year, 39 percent of all students in the school system are enrolled in the ESL program, said Rick Castaneda, who in addition to serving as the chair of the Harrisonburg Area Hispanic Services Council works as a parent liaison in the Harrisonburg school system.

Castaneda, a graduate of Eastern Mennonite University, knows that the demands associated with ESL programs are not a one-way street.

“The Latino population’s desires and demands and expectations are almost identical to those of the nonimmigrant population. In a sense, it’s the basic struggle of human beings to provide for their families and provide opportunities for themselves and their children for the future. And so what they’re hoping for is for a good education for their children so that they can have even more than they have. And the issues and struggles that we face are the same issues and struggles that we face with any population,” Castaneda said.

“The challenges of working with the Latino population are not any less or any greater than the challenges of working with any subgroup within our school system. Every young person comes to us with their base of information, and we go from there to give them what they need to pass the state achievement tests and to give them the skills that they need to pursue whatever it is that they want to in the future - be it higher education, be it other post-secondary education, be it a job in a technical career field, be it to raise a family, whatever it may be. We want to give all of our students here the skills that they need to achieve the dreams that they have for themselves in the future,” Castaneda said.

The challenge for educators is to try to mesh the demands of parents and students and the demands that are placed on tight budgets by ESL.

“For us, being large geographically, and having 21 schools and so forth, the problem that we have is having four kids at one school, two at another, 10 in another, 30-some in another - which means in terms of developing the program that you want to, it just becomes very difficult, just because you don’t have the numbers that you’d like to have for the personnel or to pull the kids together to teach them,” said Brian Shirley, who heads up the ESL program in the Augusta County school system.

“When I first started as the curriculum supervisor back in the last century, we had no program,” Shirley said. “There were a few books around about second-language Vietnamese, which goes back to the early ’70s, you know. But it was nothing. We had a couple of Russian kids in the northwestern part of the county. We hired a part-time instructor - and it started growing like that, a half-position a year.

“I now have seven full-time ESL teachers, and I just recently hired a part-time parent coordinator,” Shirley said.

Funding realities have forced Shirley to adopt a method of instruction that he would prefer not to employ in a best-case scenario.

“We still do a good bit of pull-out - and pull-out, probably of the different approaches, probably is the least effective. But because of numbers, you’re forced to do some of that,” Shirley said. “Probably the best approach would be to have a bilingual program - where both English-speaking students and your second-language students are working together, and there are places with large numbers where the English-speaking students are actually taking their biology in Spanish, because they’re becoming bilingual, too.

“The best thing is trying to pull kids together, maybe putting them in a single class, until they attain a level of proficiency, doing as much in-class if they have the personnel. Doing sheltered instruction - which is providing a biology class especially for second-language students, where the language is modified, and you do a lot of specialized things that you can’t do typically in an English-speaking classroom,” Shirley said.

Laney favors a similar way of going about doing things.

“If I had more staff, I would love to go into the classroom for everything,” Laney said. “But at this point, what we do is we have a specialized program called Avenues - a language-arts program and English-language development program. We serve every Level I and II student at least 90 minutes per day for their language-arts program. And the rest of their day - math, social studies, science, it’s in the classroom, the mainstream classroom, and we consult with their regular teachers as much as possible.

“In middle and high school, we do a good bit of sheltered instruction for Level I and II students in all their subject areas. Our main intent there is to provide literacy first and then the content. We try to provide by teaching English to filter in the content into the teaching of English. We’ve been pretty successful - we’ve been able to meet the state benchmarks as far as language proficiency for all our students,” Laney said.

“The trickiest part is high school - because of the Standards of Learning, of course. It’s very difficult with newcomers, especially at that age, to get them into credit courses as soon as possible where they take SOL tests. Sheltered instruction is great for those kids - but that doesn’t meet the SOL requirements that the state has for graduation. Moving those kids far enough along quickly enough to get them in the graduate pool is a big challenge,” Laney said.

The big challenge for Beverly Catlin, the coordinator of the ESL program in the Charlottesville public-school system, is dealing with the city’s large number of international students who are refugees.

“A large percentage of our ESL students are refugees - and with our refugees, many of them come in with very limited prior knowledge in their native language,” Catlin said. “They may not know how to read and write in their native language. They may never have been to school - or had very limited schooling, or very interrupted schooling. And so when we are talking about older kids, it’s not just that they can fall back on some of the skills that they had learned to read in another language, like Spanish. They may not have those skills to fall back on at all.”

The key to working with these students is by focusing efforts on working with their parents

“We try to do that as much as possible,” Catlin said. “We work very closely with the instructors at the Adult Learning Center - because they offer ESL classes for the adults. Part of it is acclimating these parents to America and American schools - and how they work. And so we try to work with the parents when they register their children - because we’ll have interpreters there at that time. We also try to do it as they’re taking their ESL classes - so they can better understand the American system and how it works.

“It’s a costly undertaking - but we try to do it when it’s feasible,” Catlin said.

“We try to approach this from the entire-family standpoint. We truly believe that you have to take care of the entire family,” Laney said. “That’s why we got into the business of parent liaisons. They assist the parents with the registration process and the testing to begin with, and they also provide support to direct them to agencies in the community - to be their advocates, translation services, interpretation services.

“We just think it’s important to take care of the entire family so the family can support their children,” Laney said.

“We’re finding more and more that educating parents is a big part of the job that we do, too,” Castaneda said. “A lot of parents from immigrant backgrounds don’t come from a background of higher education. A lot of them are coming here with advanced degrees from their countries, but a lot of them don’t - and have never gone to college, and have not had anyone from their families going to college, and their children represent the first generation of their families going to college. And so working with educating parents about what it is and what it means is a big part of what we do - because if the parents aren’t on board, the kids aren’t going to be able to have the same opportunities.”

Another kind of learning

Katy Pitcock of the Latino Connection in Winchester commissioned a survey a few years back to get a sense of community attitudes toward Latinos in the Lower Valley.

“What we found was that most of the Americans assumed that most of the Latinos that lived in Winchester were unemployed - and were dangerous because they were unemployed, because they milled around in parking lots all day,” Pitcock said.The rest of the story has to do with the reason why so many people saw large numbers of Latinos milling around in parking lots.

“You’d see people milling around in the early afternoon waiting for this van or that van getting ready to go to work. They took the vans together to go to work in the poultry plants or manufacturing plants,” Pitcock said.

“I even had a superintendent of schools who admitted to me that it had been his assumption that they were all unemployed because they were visible outside in the middle of the day - and the only person who is not at work in the middle of the day is an unemployed person. But that’s because the majority of Americans don’t do shift work,” Pitcock said.
“Can you imagine the negative implications of a large group of single men who are unemployed? I mean, that’s a scary bunch of people. They were making an assumption when the truth was that all of these guys were working nearly 12 hours to support young families - and they were the finest of the fine, family values, hardworking. And yet the assumption based on what people thought was an observation - they didn’t understand what they saw,” Pitcock said.

The message from the survey was clear - that there is still a lot of work to be done to fully assimilate Latinos into Virginia society.

“I have heard from people who come to us who say there is rejection. I don’t know if I can say the feeling I see is welcoming, but it is different,” said Danitza Porras of the Winchester unit of The Salvation Army.

“The media, unfortunately, sometimes portrays things that feeds into these misconceptions that all Hispanics are bad people and all of them are illegal and all the Americans hate Latinos. I think that is part of the problem,” Porras said.

“Everybody has a different opinion on different issues. That is OK. But I have had people look at me as if I was a piece of trash,” Porras said.

Those attitudes are changing - glacially, it might seem sometimes, but they are changing. One reason for that is the public presence of people like Porras who serve in professional capacities. And more and more of those professionals are, like Rick Castaneda in Harrisonburg, homegrown.

“We’re seeing more and more kids who are born here in the U.S., born here in the Valley, so they’re U.S. citizens by birth, who are going through their entire school experience here, and increasing numbers of them are graduating from high school. Small numbers of them, at least at this point, are going on to college in the area - and we’re already seeing small numbers of the second generation who have completed their college educations and who are going into professional kinds of jobs,” said Laura Zarrugh, the James Madison University professor who has committed her research time to studying the local Latino community.

The next step is for these young Latinos to step up into community-leadership roles.

“There are obviously people who identify themselves as Latinos involved in the various community groups serving Latinos who are not of this wave of immigration that has come to the Valley. Those are people who came way before that who are highly educated - who, yes, share the language, and know a lot about this kind of culture. But they are not true representatives of that community, and they are very aware of it, and they would like to work themselves out of that job. But I don’t see yet at the grassroots level anybody raising their hand and saying, Me, me, me,” said Elzbieta Gozdziak, the Georgetown University professor who has been conducting research on the Valley Latino community for several years now.

“What are the reasons for that? One that I would point to is poverty. If you have to have more than one job, when is there time in a person’s life to engage in community organizing?” Gozdziak said.

“Another is that a large part of this population came from lower parts of Mexico and other places in Central America, and not necessarily from the kind of community-organizing tradition that we have here, but more from the tradition of having a patron who will take care of you, the village mayor or whoever. That does not necessarily serve the community well - because it is hard to know what the real needs of the community are if you are not part of it. People are going to tell you what they think you want to hear,” Gozdziak said.

Castaneda, for his part, has been trying to instill in Latinos in Virginia the notion that they need to be more involved politically.

“I try to give pep talks to get people more involved - communicating with your legislators, communicating with elected officials about how they deal with legislation or things that are on the books now, and just being more involved as citizens, and not just sitting back and complaining if things don’t go their way, but getting involved, making sure they vote, making sure they communicate with each other and with their state and federal representatives. I’ve been pushing that, and pushing for leaders in the Hispanic community who aren’t involved in this group yet, to get them more involved,” Castaneda said.

A new American

Jorge Matalana started from scratch when he left Peru to come to the U.S. in 1989.

A college graduate whose first job in the States had him driving a truck, he now works at James Madison University as a staff recruiter and employment advisor.

The Shenandoah Valley “is home now,” he said - so in 2001, he made another decision as hard as the one that led him to leave his native country 14 years earlier.

“I am now an American,” Matalana said.

“The hard part is to give up your nationality. Because it’s your name. And I was dealing with that for a long time. I was saying, you know, I’ve been a Peruvian all my life, I will never change my nationality, blah blah blah. I’m proud of being a Peruvian and so forth. So I went through that process of the feelings and trying to adjust myself,” Matalana said.

Matalana doesn’t regret either decision - to leave Peru for America or to later become a full-fledged American citizen.

“There’s always an opportunity here in this country - no matter who it is, whether you’re an immigrant or an American,” Matalana said.

“I am proud now to be an American,” Matalana said.

Filed under: 8-January 2007 Issue