THE LATINO EFFECT 'Today we march, tomorrow we vote,' Tito V. Hernandez chanted in Spanish during an April rally in Washington. Click here for more photos by DANA ROMANOFF of The Free Lance-Star.

Related images Click here to view more images by DANA ROMANOFF of The Free Lance-Star. PODCAST FLS reporter, photographer discuss this series Editor's note Some of the Hispanics quoted in the series are undocumented immigrants who asked that their last names not be used. Most of them do not speak English. Staff photographer Dana Romanoff interpreted many of the interviews, along with community volunteers Gladys Brackett and Sue Smith of LUCHA Ministries. About the series The Latino Effect is an ongoing series about the Hispanic community in the Fredericksburg area. Yesterday: A better life Today: Immigration regulations Of interest 'There are more Hispanics in the United States than Canadians in Canada,' declares a bulletin board in an Essex County classroom. The United States is home to an estimated 38 million Hispanics, while Canada has 33 million residents. The quote is from the book 'Doing Business in the New Latin America.' It was posted by Veronica Donahue, a Mexican native who teaches Spanish at Essex High School. Focus: Biding his time It took Jorge Torres three years and more than $5,000 to become a legal resident of the United States. And that was with help. His employer, Battlefield Farms of Orange County, let him use the company's lawyer. Torres spent about $4,000 on legal fees and $350 for applications. He also paid a $1,000 fine for being in the country illegally. Now, Torres wants to become a citizen. As a permanent resident, he must be in good legal standing for five years before he can apply. So, Torres will wait until 2009. He's used to biding his time. The Culpeper County resident has spent half his life working to help others and waiting to get what he wanted. The 32-year-old smiles easily and jokes that he looks "more like 42" because he's always worked hard. As the oldest of nine children, he was the first in his family to leave Mexico. He was 16 when he crossed the border into California, alone. That was in 1990. Three years later, he came east after a friend told him about Virginia. He was one of maybe 10 Hispanics in Culpeper at the time, he said, laughing again. He found an entry-level job at Battlefield Farms, which was a small facility at the time. It's blossomed into a massive nursery with 30 acres of greenhouses, almost 200 employees at peak seasons and annual sales of nearly $24 million, said Anthony Van Hoven, assistant manager. Eighty-five percent of the work force is Hispanic. Torres got regular raises and promotions and currently is the company’s shipping supervisor. He makes $18 an hour. He drives a pickup truck that he custom-ordered and lives in a house he had built for him, his wife and three children. From his first day in America, Torres sent money home to Mexico. He put all his siblings through school and brought two brothers, a sister and his father here to work with him. "I don't come here to have fun. I come here to help my family," he said. Battlefield has 14 employees going through the same legal process Torres did. Some have paid lawyers more than $10,000 to get documents and work histories in order, Van Hoven said. Some of the workers want to be legal so they can visit relatives south of the border, then return to America safely. One man at Battlefield hasn't been home to Mexico in 10 years and was told it would take about a month for his permanent-resident paperwork to go through, Van Hoven said. "That was a year and a half ago," he said. "It's tough on a lot of them because there's no concrete schedule. You just gotta wait your turn."

Part of the trend
Immigrants historically follow family, friends to areas

En Español

By CATHY DYSON
The Free Lance-Star

RELATED: Q&A: Complex issues

HISPANICS SHARE information about Fredericksburg the same way an old TV commercial described how word spread about its product.

One person tells another, “and so on, and so on, and so on.”

That’s how 19-year-old Santa Lucas came to live in the area.

She followed her seven siblings, who left two other countries before arriving in the United States.

First, the Lucas family fled Guatemala because of civil war, then left Mexico because they couldn’t farm the rocky land.

Lucas hoped things would be better in Fredericksburg, especially for her infant son, who was born in late May.

“I can give him what I didn’t have,” she said, through an interpreter. “Here I can work. Here there are more possibilities.”

A lively word-of-mouth network—along with plenty of jobs and a lower cost of living—are among the reasons the local Hispanic population has more than doubled in six years.

Immigrants “generally go where they know somebody,” said Sue Smith, executive director of LUCHA Ministries, which serves local Hispanics.

Leni Gonzalez, a statewide outreach coordinator for the Department of Motor Vehicles, sees that all the time.

Groups of workers present their documents when they apply for licenses, and “everybody is from the same town,” she said.

It’s happened that way since the first Europeans crossed the ocean, said Rená Cutlip, staff attorney for the Tahirih Justice Center in Falls Church. Settlers came first, then sent for their families once communities were established.

“It’s just a continuation of historical migration,” she said.

Spanish-speakers may be like other immigrants in that regard, but they differ in other ways, says Samuel Huntington, a political scientist at Harvard University.

Mexican immigrants, especially, cross a desert, not an ocean, and are arriving in far greater numbers than previous waves of immigrants, he wrote in 2000.

They come without legal documents and cluster in areas where there are such large groups of Spanish-speakers, they don’t need to learn English or assimilate into society, Huntington added.

“Mexican immigration is a unique, disturbing and looming challenge ... to our future as a country,” Huntington wrote in a report for the Center for Immigration Studies. At that time, Spanish-speaking immigrants were beginning to find their way to small cities in the Southeast, such as Fredericksburg.

New laws brought about the changes in immigration patterns, said Patricia Goerman, a Maryland woman who earned a doctoral degree from the University of Virginia. She interviewed Hispanics in central Virginia as part of her dissertation and published a book on her findings this year.

Since the early 20th century, Mexicans in particular were recruited to work in the United States, she said.

They filled mining, railroad and construction jobs in the Midwest and picked fruits and vegetables in California and Texas.

Eventually, they also came to farms and seafood houses in the Northern Neck, about 50 miles southeast of Fredericksburg.

The local migrants stayed through the harvest—sometimes working along the East Coast—and went home.

Then, immigration policies began to change.

Congress worried about the increasing number of people crossing the border without the work permits the migrants carried.

More walls were built, and border patrols increased.

Going back and forth illegally became risky and expensive. “Coyotes,” people who help illegals cross rivers and deserts, started charging up to $10,000 for their services.

As a result, Hispanics started staying in America and working full-time jobs, especially in communities like the Fredericksburg area, where there were plenty of opportunities.

Policies that were supposed to reduce the number of immigrants coming to America merely sent them to different destinations, Goerman said.

Since the mid-1990s, states that historically had the fewest number of immigrants have seen the greatest increases, according to the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington.

Virginia was one of them.

It ranked ninth in the nation among states whose foreign-born population boomed between 2000 and 2005, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.

There were 719,000 immigrants in Virginia last year—a 30 percent increase from five years ago.

More than a third of Virginia immigrants are here illegally, according to the Pew Center.

They’re among an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the nation. About half of the illegals are from Mexico, the Pew Center reported.

The illegal numbers don’t surprise Gladys Brackett, a Spotsylvania County resident and Guatemalan native.

She spends hours each week as a volunteer interpreter for those seeking medical help in the Fredericksburg area and rarely sees a valid document.

“I don’t even ask because I know everybody’s illegal,” Brackett said.

She believes Hispanics are used to hardships and can adapt to difficult conditions, including being in a country illegally.

She couldn’t.

“If it were me,” Brackett said, “I would hide under the bed.”

To reach CATHY DYSON: 540/374-5425 cdyson@freelancestar.com