Las Urbanistas

RIVERSIDE, N.J., Sept. 25 — A little more than a year ago, the Township Committee in this faded factory town became the first municipality in New Jersey to enact legislation penalizing anyone who employed or rented to an illegal immigrant.

Within months, hundreds, if not thousands, of recent immigrants from Brazil and other Latin American countries had fled. The noise, crowding and traffic that had accompanied their arrival over the past decade abated.

The law had worked. Perhaps, some said, too well.

With the departure of so many people, the local economy suffered. Hair salons, restaurants and corner shops that catered to the immigrants saw business plummet; several closed. Once-boarded-up storefronts downtown were boarded up again.

Meanwhile, the town was hit with two lawsuits challenging the law. Legal bills began to pile up, straining the town’s already tight budget. Suddenly, many people — including some who originally favored the law — started having second thoughts.

So last week, the town rescinded the ordinance, joining a small but growing list of municipalities nationwide that have begun rethinking such laws as their legal and economic consequences have become clearer.

“I don’t think people knew there would be such an economic burden,” said Mayor George Conard, who voted for the original ordinance. “A lot of people did not look three years out.”

In the past two years, more than 30 towns nationwide have enacted laws intended to address problems attributed to illegal immigration, from overcrowded housing and schools to overextended police forces. Most of those laws, like Riverside’s, called for fines and even jail sentences for people who knowingly rented apartments to illegal immigrants or who gave them jobs.

In some places, business owners have objected to crackdowns that have driven away immigrant customers. And in many, ordinances have come under legal assault by immigration groups and the American Civil Liberties Union.

In June, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against a housing ordinance in Farmers Branch, Tex., that would have imposed fines against landlords who rented to illegal immigrants. In July, the city of Valley Park, Mo., repealed a similar ordinance, after an earlier version was struck down by a state judge and a revision brought new challenges. A week later, a federal judge struck down ordinances in Hazleton, Pa., the first town to enact laws barring illegal immigrants from working or renting homes there.

Muzaffar A. Chishti, director of the New York office of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonprofit group, said Riverside’s decision to repeal its law — which was never enforced — was clearly influenced by the Hazleton ruling, and he predicted that other towns would follow suit.

“People in many towns are now weighing the social, economic and legal costs of pursuing these ordinances,” he said.

Indeed, Riverside, a town of 8,000 nestled across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, has already spent $82,000 defending its ordinance, and it risked having to pay the plaintiffs’ legal fees if it lost in court. The legal battle forced the town to delay road paving projects, the purchase of a dump truck and repairs to town hall, officials said. But while Riverside’s about-face may repair its budget, it may take years to mend the emotional scars that formed when the ordinance “put us on the national map in a bad way,” Mr. Conard said.

Rival advocacy groups in the immigration debate turned this otherwise sleepy town into a litmus test for their causes. As the television cameras rolled, Riverside was branded, in turns, a racist enclave and a town fighting for American values.

Some residents who backed the ban last year were reluctant to discuss their stance now, though they uniformly blamed outsiders for misrepresenting their motives. By and large, they said the ordinance was a success because it drove out illegal immigrants, even if it hurt the town’s economy.

“It changed the face of Riverside a little bit,” said Charles Hilton, the former mayor who pushed for the ordinance. (He was voted out of office last fall but said it was not because he had supported the law.)

“The business district is fairly vacant now, but it’s not the legitimate businesses that are gone,” he said. “It’s all the ones that were supporting the illegal immigrants, or, as I like to call them, the criminal aliens.”

Many businesses that remain are having a hard time. Angelina Guedes, a Brazilian-born beautician, opened A Touch From Brazil, a hair and nail salon, on Scott Street two years ago to cater to the immigrant population. At one point, she had 10 workers.

Business quickly dried up after the law against illegal immigrants. Last week, on what would usually be a busy Thursday afternoon, Ms. Guedes ate a salad and gave a friend a manicure, while the five black stylist chairs sat empty.

“Now I only have myself,” said Ms. Guedes, 41, speaking a mixture of Spanish and Portuguese. “They all left. I also want to leave but it’s not possible because no one wants to buy my business.”

Numerous storefronts on Scott Street are boarded up or are empty, with For Sale by Owner signs in the windows. Business is down by half at Luis Ordonez’s River Dance Music Store, which sells Western Union wire transfers, cellphones and perfume. Next door, his restaurant, the Scott Street Family Cafe, which has a multiethnic menu in English, Spanish and Portuguese, was empty at lunchtime.

“I came here looking for an opportunity to open a business and I found it, and the people also needed the service,” said Mr. Ordonez, who is from Ecuador. “It was crowded and everybody was trying to do their best to support their families.”

Some have adapted better than others. Bruce Behmke opened the R & B Laundromat in 2003 after he saw immigrants hauling trash bags full of clothing to a laundry a mile away. Sales took off at his small shop, where want ads in Portuguese are pinned to a corkboard and copies of the Brazilian Voice sit near the door.

When sales plummeted last year, Mr. Behmke started a wash-and-fold delivery service for young professionals.

“It became a ghost town here,” he said.

Immigration is not new to Riverside. Once a summer resort for Philadelphians, the town became a magnet a century ago for European immigrants drawn to its factories, including the Philadelphia Watch Case Company, whose empty hulk still looms over town. Until the 1930s, the minutes of the school board meetings were recorded in German and English.

“There’s always got to be some scapegoats,” said Regina Collinsgru, who runs The Positive Press, a local newspaper, and whose husband was among a wave of Portuguese immigrants who came here in the 1960s. “The Germans were first, there were problems when the Italians came, then the Polish came. That’s the nature of a lot of small towns.”

Immigrants from Latin America began arriving around 2000. The majority were Brazilians attracted not only by construction jobs in the booming housing market but also by the presence of Portuguese-speaking businesses in town. Between 2000 and 2006, local business owners and officials estimate, more than 3,000 immigrants arrived. There are no authoritative figures about the number of immigrants who were — or were not — in the country legally.

Like those waves of earlier immigrants, the Brazilians and Latinos triggered conflicting reactions. Some shopkeepers loved the extra dollars spent on Scott and Pavilion Streets, the modest thoroughfares that anchor downtown. Yet some residents steered clear of stores where Portuguese and Spanish were plainly the language of choice. A few contractors benefited from the new pool of cheap labor. Others begrudged being undercut by rivals who hired undocumented workers.

On the town’s leafy side streets, some residents admired the pluck of newcomers who often worked six days a week, and a few even took up Capoeira, the Brazilian martial art. Yet many neighbors loathed the white vans with out-of-state plates and ladders on top parked in spots they had long considered their own. The Brazilian flags that flew at several houses rankled more than a few longtime residents.

It is unclear whether the Brazilian and Latino immigrants who left will now return to Riverside. With the housing market slowing, there may be little reason to come back. But if they do, some residents say they may spark new tensions.

Mr. Hilton, the former mayor, said some of the illegal immigrants have already begun filtering back into town. “It’s not the Wild West like it was,” he said, “but it may return to that.”

Swept Up in Area’s Demographic Shift, Loudoun Neighborhood Wrestles With Immigrant Presence

By Sandhya Somashekhar; Washington Post Staff Writer; Tuesday, August 14, 2007; A01

 

In some ways, Sterling Park is the same as it was 40 years ago, when it was founded as Loudoun County’s first suburban-style planned community — a place where working-class families could find jobs, affordable homes and a piece of the American dream.

In other ways, though, the community has never been so different. One recent morning, Spanish ballads blared from the open door of Pepe’s Mexican Restaurant. A cadre of Latino children zoomed along the sidewalk on scooters in front of Sterling Elementary School, where a sign urging parents to register their children was printed in English and Spanish.

 

For decades, the conservative, largely white neighborhood of a few thousand families was isolated from the sweeping demographic changes that transformed Northern Virginia into one of the most diverse regions in the nation.

Today, Sterling Park is on the front line of that change. The number of Hispanics has surged since 2000 in Loudoun, the Census Bureau reported last week, with many of them settling in Sterling Park. The community is at the heart of an intensifying debate over illegal immigration that led the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors to join Prince William and several other Virginia jurisdictions last month in approving resolutions promising to crack down on illegal immigrants who use county services or commit crimes.

Many Sterling Park residents have praised the board’s action, saying the newcomers have brought with them a flood of illegal immigrants, whom they blame for everything from run-down houses to what they perceive as an increase in crime.

Immigrant advocates agree that the aging neighborhood — where nearly every block has a house with peeling paint or an unkempt yard, and gangs are a persistent problem — has seen better days. But they say the critics, and the politicians who have responded to them, are connecting a jumble of issues that have nothing to do with illegal immigration.

The debate has sharpened largely because of a backlash among longtime residents upset by the changes in the town.

“People I talk to are very concerned about degradation of their neighborhoods, property values, overcrowding, lack of maintenance on homes — that type of thing,” said state Del. Thomas Davis Rust (R), who represents Sterling Park and nearby Herndon and supports the resolutions. “Most people that have talked to me blame illegal immigration and believe there is a direct link. Do I have proof that there’s a link? No. But that is what people believe.”

One such resident is Fran Brocke, 76, of Ashburn, who lived in Sterling Park for 43 years but moved in October because her neighborhood, she said, was being “taken over by illegal aliens.” She is a member of Help Save Loudoun, a group that opposes illegal immigration.

“It really breaks my heart,” said Brocke, recalling the brick split-level house on Church Road where she raised her five kids. “People thought I’d never leave. But it just got to the point where I didn’t feel safe anymore.”

Defenders of the immigrants say many of the criticisms are not supported by statistics.

For instance, although there is a widespread perception that crime has increased in Sterling, sheriff’s office data show that nearly every kind of crime has decreased since 2000. Last year, Sterling Park saw a few high-profile shootings and gang-related incidents. But according to the Loudoun sheriff’s office, only one in 20 gang members in the county is in the country illegally, and most are U.S. citizens.

Brocke and others say Sterling has been plagued by illegal boarding houses that rent rooms in single-family homes to illegal immigrants.

From July 2006 to June 2007, officials received 198 complaints of overcrowded homes, said Keith Fairfax, head of the county’s residential overcrowding enforcement office. Only a few turned out to be boarding houses in which landlords rented homes to more than a dozen people, he said.

The county doesn’t track what percentage of inspections turn up violations, Fairfax said. The most common examples of violations were people sleeping in basement rooms with windows that were too small under Virginia law or three people sleeping in a room considered big enough for only two.

Often, inspectors found Bible study groups, people coming by to assist sick relatives, well-wishers visiting newborn babies and similar get-togethers, Fairfax said.

Laura Valle, executive director of the Hispanic advocacy group La Voz of Loudoun, agreed that Sterling Park has seen better days. But she has a different explanation for the changes. Since the community was founded in the early 1960s, the buildings are beginning to show their age, she said. And in a county where the average single-family home costs $660,000, Sterling Park has less expensive, relatively affordable houses that attract people for whom survival, not household maintenance, is a top priority.

That includes new immigrants, especially Hispanics, who were attracted to the construction jobs that proliferated in fast-growing Loudoun during the past decade, she said.

Valle believes there could be a connection, though tenuous, between some of the problems the residents complain of and illegal immigration.

“There is a connection to the extent that if you are an undocumented immigrant, your capacity to improve your economic situation and integrate into society is greatly reduced,” she said. “But in the scope of things, that’s really insignificant. Even if you were to miraculously deport every undocumented person, these issues wouldn’t go away.”

A 37-year-old Sterling Park woman, who asked that her name not be used because she came to Virginia illegally from Mexico last year, bristles at the suggestion that her neighborhood is run down and overrun with gangs.

The Sterling Park home she rents from a relative is modestly furnished but tidy. A sprinkler sits idle in her yard. Four cars are lined up in the driveway, and the lamppost is wound with Christmas lights. She said she and her husband, their three children and three other family members live there.

“All of us — my kids, too — we work all the time, and it’s sometimes hard to keep up with the house,” she said with the aid of a translator. “But I think it looks pretty good.”

Some activists believe the longtime residents’ concerns reflect a desire to return to a time when their community was more homogenous.

The Census figures released last week show Loudoun’s minority population is one of the fastest-growing in the nation. Sterling Park, in particular, has seen a striking increase in the Hispanic population: Last year, one in three students at the neighborhood’s Park View High School was Hispanic, compared with about one in 10 in 2000, according to the state.

“The community has been changing very rapidly, and maybe much to the unhappiness of some residents, many of those new people are not lily-white,” said Mukit Hossain, president of the Virginia Muslim Political Action Committee, which is based in the Sterling area and has been organizing opposition to the resolutions. “There has been an influx of a lot of immigrants into this area, which I’m sure makes some people nervous.”

The residents who called for the county’s action say they are not racist; they are simply fed up with those who show up uninvited and then treat the community with disrespect.

“The issue is coming over here illegally, staying illegally and doing things illegally. It’s about the rule of law,” said Larry Wilber, 61, a remodeling contractor who has lived in Sterling Park for 11 years.

Mike Amos, 32, a paralegal who grew up in Sterling Park, said, “I’ve seen my home town completely transformed from what it used to be, and not for the better.”

The strong anti-illegal immigrant stand among longtime Sterling Park residents is not surprising considering its political history. Until 2005, when Democrat David E. Poisson was elected in his place, Richard H. Black (R) represented the Sterling area in the House of Delegates for four terms. He was known as one of the state’s most conservative politicians.

The area’s representative on the Loudoun Board of Supervisors is Eugene A. Delgaudio (R), executive director of an anti-gay organization based in Falls Church. Delgaudio, who is up for reelection in November, was the main sponsor of the Loudoun resolution cracking down on illegal immigrants. In a note to constituents last month, he warned of “invasions of illegal aliens who turn safe neighborhoods into filthy, crowded slums.”

The rhetoric disturbs Jeanne West, his Democratic opponent. She believes illegal immigration is a distraction from the real problems of the neighborhood: its age and the lack of attention paid to it by elected officials.

“I don’t want to be this Pollyanna who says this it is not a problem, but I don’t want to lay all of it at the feet of illegal immigrants,” she said. “This is still a nice family neighborhood. Something needs to be done to make sure we get the amenities and the resources so we can keep the neighborhood desirable.”

Brocke, Wilber and others say that they’re not without compassion and that they welcome those who are in the country legally. It’s those who flout the law that bother them, they said.

“I don’t want someone coming to my country and building another dang country inside of it,” Wilber said. “It’s like if you came home and found someone in your house and you said, ‘What are you doing here?’ And they said: ‘Oh, the door was open; I just came in. By the way, I’m going to change some other things in your home, too.’ “

Researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.

Sigwalt and her fellow village trustee Paul Humpfer this past April, they were, understandably, feeling assured, if not emboldened. A few weeks earlier, with the endorsement of the two local newspapers, they were elected to their village board on the platform that their town, Carpentersville, Ill., should do everything in its power to discourage illegal immigrants from settling there. They vowed to pass a local ordinance that would penalize landlords that rented to illegal aliens and businesses that hired them. They also pledged to make English the official language of the village, which would mean discontinuing the practice of printing various notices — including building-code violations and the monthly newsletter — in both English and Spanish. The third candidate on their slate also won, giving them a majority on the board. Sigwalt and Humpfer considered their election a mandate. Indeed, many in this village consider them heroes. Their supporters wear buttons that read, “Illegal Means Illegal,” and: “I’m tired. Are you? Ask Me Why!” with a

At that first gathering, we sat at Sigwalt’s dining-room table, trying to keep our voices down because the four toddlers whom Sigwalt cares for as part of her day-care business were taking their afternoon nap. “People feel like they’re not in their town,” Humpfer told me. “They feel alienated.” In the 1990s, the texture of the town changed significantly. An estimated 40 percent of its 37,000 residents are Hispanic, a jump from 17 percent in 1990. And this has not sat well with everyone. Humpfer and Sigwalt insist that their stance has nothing to do with this demographic shift but rather with the contingent of undocumented immigrants living in the town. There’s no way to measure the actual numbers, but it’s probable that a sizable portion of the Hispanic population living in Carpentersville is without papers. (Nationwide, the Pew Hispanic Center estimates that one-fifth of all Latinos are here without proper documents.) One priest at St. Monica, a local Roman Catholic church, estimated that more than half of the 3,500-member congregation is here illegally. “The American taxpayer,” Sigwalt told me, “is becoming secondary in their own country.”

Sigwalt and Humpfer have become inseparable, at least politically, and people refer to them together in one breath as if they were a theatrical act, like Penn & Teller or Siegfried & Roy. Sigwalt, who is 54, is short and square-shouldered. With her close-cropped haircut and scolding manner, she can come across as a stern, no-nonsense schoolteacher. Humpfer, who is 43 and an accountant at Zurich Financial Services, a Swiss-based company with operations in the U.S., seems less comfortable with all the attention. His sentences are often punctuated by a nervous, uneasy laugh. He has large, handsome features and a dark complexion; as a result, he’s often mistaken for being Latino, though he’s actually part American Indian. His maternal grandfather was Arapaho. “I don’t like that it turns into that I’m somehow against Hispanics,” Humpfer said. “I want to deal with the crime and the overcrowding in our town. And we’re doing anything we can to influence the outcome nationally.”

It’s in places like Carpentersville where we may be witnessing the opening of a deep and profound fissure in the American landscape. Over the past two years, more than 40 local and state governments have passed ordinances and legislation aimed at making life miserable for illegal immigrants in the hope that they’ll have no choice but to return to their countries of origin. Deportation by attrition, some call it. One of the first ordinances was passed in Hazleton, Pa., and was meant to bar illegal immigrants from living and working there. It served as a model for many local officials across the country, including Sigwalt and Humpfer. On July 26, a federal judge struck down Hazleton’s ordinance, but the town’s mayor, Lou Barletta, plans to appeal the decision. “This battle is far from over,” he declared the day of the ruling. States and towns have looked for other ways to crack down on illegal immigrants. Last month, Prince William County in northern Virginia passed a resolution trying to curb illegal immigrants’ access to public services. Waukegan, another Illinois town, has voted to apply for a federal program that would allow its police to begin deportation charges against those who are here illegally. A week after the Senate failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform, Arizona’s governor, Janet Napolitano, signed into law an act penalizing businesses that knowingly hire undocumented immigrants. “One of the practical effects of this failure” to enact national immigration reform, Napolitano wrote to the Congressional leadership, “is that Arizona, and states across the nation, must now continue to address this escalating problem on their own.” Admittedly, the constitutionality of many of these new laws is still in question, and some of the state bills and local ordinances simply duplicate what’s already in force nationally. But with Congress’s inability to reach an agreement on an immigration bill, the debate will continue among local officials like those in Carpentersville, where the wrangling often seems less about illegal immigration than it does about whether new immigrants are assimilating quickly enough, if at all. In Carpentersville, the rancor has turned neighbor against neighbor. Once you scrape away the acid rhetoric, though, there’s much people actually agree on — but given the ugliness of the taunts and assertions, it’s unlikely that will ever emerge.

Carpentersville is without a center. It has no downtown. It has no clear identity.

Forty miles northwest of Chicago, Carpentersville is a bit too far to be a commuter town and not distant enough to be a self-contained village. The town, which sprawls over seven and a half square miles, has grown without much planning, and feels less like a suburb than it does an adventure in navigation. The languid Fox River, which cuts through its midsection, is what orients. East of the river and west of the river have clear connotations.

To the east is the town’s older housing stock, including a 6,000-house development, which, in the spirit of Long Island’s Levittown, was built in the 1950s for returning war veterans who were looking to escape the crowded and increasingly expensive tenements of Chicago. These affordable and unadorned ranch homes (they can be bought for $150,000), all roughly 1,000 square feet in size, have long lured first-time home buyers — first the war veterans and more recently first- and second-generation immigrants from Mexico. The town’s proximity to Elgin, a small working-class city that has a sizable Latino population, has also been an attraction. Elgin, once the home of the Elgin National Watch Company, is still the site of some factories as well as a riverboat casino, and thus a number of entry-level jobs. In Carpentersville, Hispanics have mostly settled on the east side, and so that part of town is dotted with Mexican grocery stores, beauty salons, restaurants and bakeries. Along the river is the older part of the village, mostly white working-class families along with a smattering of small manufacturing firms and a cornfield, which is still harvested annually. To the west of the river lies the town’s new wealth, a collection of labyrinthine subdivisions where home prices start at $250,000 and can go for as much as a million dollars. Many of these residents work professional jobs at nearby corporations, like Sears and Motorola.

It would be easy to live in Carpentersville and have nothing to do with people on the other side of the river, and as the number of Hispanics increased, most in town barely paid attention. People tell me that everyone got along reasonably well. Indeed, in 1999, the village leaders established the Hispanic Committee in the hope that they could help acculturate and celebrate the new arrivals. It encouraged Hispanics to participate in the 2000 census and registered newcomers to vote. Judy Sigwalt was a part of this committee.

Sigwalt describes herself as “just a Joe Blow who at 54 works 10 hours a day at a service job.” Her husband is a diesel mechanic for Wonder Bread. Sigwalt was first elected a village trustee in 1999, and shortly afterward agreed to join the Hispanic Committee. For three summers, the committee was the host of Celebration Latina, a one-day festival of Mexican food and music. But Sigwalt said she believed that non-Hispanic residents in town did not want to attend such an ethnically specific festival, and so she urged a name change, to Community Pride Day. That year attendance dropped off from 2,500 to 500 people. Shortly afterward, the Hispanic Committee disbanded, but it all happened quietly, without much notice.

For 23 years, Sigwalt, along with her husband and her son, lived on the east side of town and watched as their neighborhood slowly changed. Hispanic families moved in. Her son’s best friend, Eddie Morales, was the son of immigrants. The two were on the high-school wrestling team together, and Sigwalt would drive them to weekend matches. But Sigwalt told me she became terribly lonely. There was no one to have coffee with because so many of her neighbors didn’t speak English, and so three years ago she and her family moved to a subdivision west of the river.

Last fall, Humpfer, who had initially been appointed to fill a vacancy on the village board, approached her about passing an ordinance similar to the one that had been proposed by the mayor of Hazleton. Humpfer had been upset by a couple of matters. A restaurant owner and his family, who were Hispanic, had been abducted from their nearby village to a home in Carpentersville. The six kidnappers, all members of a street gang, believed the restaurateur had a stash of drugs or cash, which they wanted. Everyone was eventually freed safely, but in the aftermath the newspapers reported that one of the kidnappers was here illegally. “It scares you,” Humpfer told me. “It’s just a matter of time before it ends up in my neighborhood.” Around this time, Humpfer also learned that the village was having little success in collecting $372,000 in ambulance fees. The collection agencies hired by the village were unable to locate many of the individuals with outstanding bills. A number of them had Spanish surnames, Humpfer said, and he concluded that many gave false addresses because they were without documents and so feared deportation.

Moreover, Humpfer and Sigwalt said that constituents had expressed dismay at the number of businesses in which the proprietors spoke only Spanish. “I’ve gone into the Polish deli and the German deli, and they’re so friendly,” Sigwalt said. “When I go into the Hispanic grocery store, I feel like an intruder; I feel unwelcome.” Humpfer added, “It’s gotten to a level where the number of illegals is so big, these stores can cater to only one culture.”

So, together, Humpfer and Sigwalt introduced a Hazletonlike ordinance that would penalize landlords for renting to illegals and businesses for hiring them. At the next village meeting, more than 2,000 protesters showed up to denounce the ordinance. A number of them were from Chicago and Elgin, members of a club for people from the Mexican state of Michoacán, the original home of many in Carpentersville. Such a demonstration was unprecedented for this small town. The trustees tabled discussion of the ordinance that night because the village hall seats only 210 people, and they couldn’t find a large enough space to accommodate everybody. (Since then, the village has purchased speakers, which are set up outside so that the proceedings can be heard by those who can’t fit into the rotunda.) The rally made the Chicago newspapers, and it seemed to encourage Humpfer and Sigwalt as they, along with a first-time candidate, formed a slate to run in the coming election. They called themselves the All American Team.

During a tour of Otto Engineering, a family-run business, Tom Roeser, its president and owner, saw that I had noticed alarm signs, which were in both English and Spanish. “Those are going,” he assured me. Roeser prohibits bilingual signs in his factory, and these signs, which had been put up by an outside cleaning company, didn’t sit well with him. Nearly half of Otto’s 502 employees are Hispanic, and Roeser insists that they learn English. Prospective hires must first pass a language test. He requires supervisors to give instructions in English. He also has a full-time instructor on staff who offers English-language classes to employees; they won’t receive pay increases unless they have achieved a certain proficiency. “If you learn the language, it’s the first sign you’re assimilating” he told me.

Otto is the town’s largest employer, which gives Roeser stature in the community. The company designs and produces customized switches and audio products for NASA, the Air Force and the like, so its work force is a combination of highly skilled engineers and low-skilled assembly workers (most of the Hispanics are among the latter). According to Roeser, Otto’s revenues last year were roughly $77 million. Roeser, who’s tall and lanky, is modest in his appearance, favoring khakis and open-collared shirts often with “Otto” stitched above the pocket. (He does, though, covet fancy wheels, driving an Aston Martin two-seater, which he parks in the lot along with his employees’ pickups and older-model American-made cars.) The company was founded by his father, Jack, a conservative who started a political action committee, the Family Taxpayers Network, which takes on both fiscal and social issues, like high taxes and same-sex marriage; he has vigorously and successfully opposed at least two school referendums, criticizing what he considers out-of-control spending and overpaid teachers. Tom, too, is conservative — he told me he was hoping Newt Gingrich would seek the Republican presidential nomination — but he doesn’t have the same political zeal as his father, who is semiretired from the company. As a result, people in town were surprised when he took on Humpfer and Sigwalt, and did so with an unusual bluntness. “They’re bigots,” Tom Roeser told me. “They’re walking around like roosters.”

About 12 years ago, Roeser began to see the ethnic makeup of his hourly work force, which is predominantly female, change. Initially the company hired a handful of recent Korean and Laotian immigrants; then Hispanics increasingly got jobs there. Roeser takes great pride in his relationship with his employees. Most call him by his first name. Each year, he gives them a picnic, and at the one I attended earlier this summer, Roeser knew the name of just about all the employees there, as well as their spouses. At a Christmas party in 1995, Roeser approached a group of assemblers and boasted of the family atmosphere at his company. One longtime employee, Darlene Hutchins, shook her head. “Tom,” she said, “that’s what you think, but there are people who are unhappy. Some of us older ones, we don’t feel like we’re being recognized for what we’ve done for this company.” Hutchins, in recounting this moment, told me: “We were just uncomfortable because they” — the newer Hispanic hires —”seemed to get everything. We felt lost in the crowd.”

In response, Roeser formed the Wise Owls Club, recognition for those at Otto for 15 years or more. He gave away Wise Owls shirts and sponsored an annual luncheon. It was a small gesture, but Roeser realized he had to retain his older employees, most of whom were white and all of whom would soon be in the minority, while also trying to assimilate his newer Hispanic workers or, as he puts it, “Ottoize” them. This is essential to Roeser, and he maintains it is at the heart of the contentiousness in Carpentersville: that longtime residents don’t trust that their new neighbors are becoming Americanized fast enough.

Hispanics, Roeser told me “are more social. They’re more in your face. So if you live next door to a Hispanic, they probably have more levels of family living there. I’ll call it overcrowding. They may live in a low- income house, so they have only one bathroom, and the men go outside and urinate on the tree. You live next door to this family, and you don’t like that the man urinated outside, and you don’t like the fourth car in the front yard. And you don’t like the loud music and the picnicking, and so what you say is they must be a bunch of damn illegals. But once they’re all legal, you still have the same problem. You need to assimilate them.” And for Roeser, the quickest way to assimilation is to learn the language, which is why he’s so insistent that his company not operate in both Spanish and English. English, you might say, is the official language of Otto.

As with many, Roeser’s thinking about immigration is complicated and at times conflicted, infused with a sense of American practicality, compassion and nationalistic pride. For instance, he won’t allow employees to hang a Mexican flag in the plant, and he refused to allow employees who wanted to attend a large immigration march in Chicago to take the day off. On the other hand, he celebrates Cinco de Mayo every year by bringing in two mariachi bands, one for each cafeteria, and a catered Mexican lunch. (He’s quick to tell me that he has also arranged for festivities on St. Patrick’s Day and Casimir Pulaski Day.) At this year’s Cinco de Mayo celebration, which I attended at Roeser’s invitation, Roeser took the hand of one of his assembly-line workers — she was wearing a T-shirt that read, “Kiss Me, I’m Mexican” — and pulled her onto the floor to dance. Soon others joined in. Those along the walls and at the tables cheered them on, as this tall, gangly white man dressed in loafers, chinos and a green plaid shirt clapped his hands together with some semblance of rhythm along with six Hispanic women, most wearing flowing peasant dresses and adorned in red and green ribbons.

Roeser is an engineer by training, and if there’s one thing he hates, it’s inefficiency. He saw Humpfer and Sigwalt’s proposed ordinances as just plain bad management. While Otto, he says, already screens new hires for false papers (it refined its process after the Immigration and Naturalization Service performed an inspection 11 years ago and found 30 workers with false documents), the proposed ordinance would be especially tough on smaller businesses and landlords. Moreover, he was concerned that if the village stopped translating official notices into Spanish, some residents wouldn’t abide by local regulations.

Roeser considers himself an exceptionally rational decision maker. But it became clear as we spent time together that he took great satisfaction in getting to know the Hispanics who work for him. He has come to know their travails and at times has offered a hand. A number of years ago, Antonia Garcia, who was a supervisor, came to Roeser for help. Her teenage daughter had stopped going to school, and she wondered if he might give her a job at the factory. Roeser told her, sure, he’d hire her, and put her on the assembly line next to “a big, fat, smelly man” in the hope that she’d find the work so distasteful that she’d return to school. (She did eventually quit.) When the I.N.S. audited Otto in 1995, one employee who had used false papers to get hired told Roeser that she was a permanent resident but had gotten caught up in a bureaucratic tangle. Roeser hired an attorney to help her.

The southeast corner of Carpentersville, which is mostly Hispanic, is particularly blighted and overcrowded; that upset Roeser. He tried to persuade Habitat for Humanity to come in, but they told him they don’t do renovations, so over the past couple of years, Roeser has bought 20 town houses that he then fixed up. He rents the houses to employees for $600 a month, which according to a local real estate agent is well below the market rate. He also purchased a nearby restaurant to keep it from being converted into a tavern.

Roeser’s wife, Betty, who disagrees with his stand against Humpfer and Sigwalt, often teases him. “What is it about ‘illegal’ that you don’t understand?” she’ll ask him. She told me that he has a soft spot for his Hispanic workers. “He’s biased,” she said, “because he has so many good Hispanic workers, and he’d be hurting without them.” (When I told Roeser what his wife said, he took exception. “It’s my objective view,” he insisted, “and not the biased view of someone who owns a company that hires a lot of Hispanics.”)

The presence of a large, low-skilled work force has undoubtedly allowed places like Otto to keep wages low. A beginning assembler at Otto earns $7.65 an hour plus profit sharing, which averages to seven weeks of pay each year. I asked Darlene Hutchins, the woman who inspired the formation of the Wise Owls Club, what she earned. She looked away. “My children laugh at me,” she muttered. After 28 years, she makes “a little over $10 an hour” plus, she was quick to add, a health care plan, a 401(k) savings plan, profit sharing and a $200 bonus for perfect attendance. Roeser defends his pay scale, contending that it’s comparable with what other area factories pay if not actually more.

Roeser became so distressed by Humpfer and Sigwalt’s proposals that for the first time in his life he became involved in a local election. He interviewed potential candidates who he thought could defeat them. He mailed two letters to residents urging them to vote for his preferred candidates. He registered voters at his factory and sponsored a political forum there. He sent letters to the editor. And he helped finance one candidate’s campaign. Humpfer, Sigwalt and their supporters suggested in media interviews and letters to the editor of the local paper that Roeser’s interest in this was financial: they insinuated that he hired illegals and that just the presence of undocumented workers in the area kept his wages down. “A lot of my constituents have brought the question to me: What is he hiding?” Sigwalt told me. “I don’t want to get my butt in a ringer, but I wonder what ICE” — the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — “would find if they went in there.”

It was a rancorous campaign on both sides. Opponents dug up a two-year-old case in which Humpfer supposedly struck his wife, and a supporter of the opposing (and losing) slate was arrested for tearing down political signs. Tensions were so high that the Department of Justice sent agents to monitor the voting.

A month before the April election, Roeser received two anonymous voice-mail messages, providing details suggesting that one of his favorite employees was in fact here illegally and had used false documents to get hired. “You have a person working there with illegal papers,” the caller said. “She is in the audio department. . . . You’d better be careful because you’re into politics and this may affect you.” The second message was more threatening: “Do something about it today or tomorrow, immigration will be in there.” Roeser knew he was in the spotlight, so he instructed his human-resources manager to re-examine the papers of all Otto employees and confronted the employee in question. She admitted that she had used her sister’s Social Security card and driver’s license. The employee had worked at Otto for nine years and had been taken to the United States by her parents when she was a baby. Roeser felt obligated to let her go, especially given all the attention on him and his factory. He told his human-resources manager, “The witch hunt’s begun.”

Word got around about the woman’s firing from Otto, and an already anxious Hispanic population became even more so. Over the past two years, the town police helped Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrest and deport 45 illegal immigrants, who had been charged with serious felonies or with being active gang members. In December, the trustees — led by Sigwalt and Humpfer — directed the Police Department to apply for a federal program in which local police officers would be trained in how to inquire about an arrested person’s legal status and to initiate deportation proceedings. A new police effort to ticket motorists not wearing seat belts also fueled rumors that the police were out to deport illegal immigrants. When the roadblocks go up on the east side’s main thoroughfare, neighbor tells neighbor, and those without documents stay off the road.

Many of the Hispanic residents I spoke with achieved citizenship as a result of the national amnesty offered in 1986, but they’d grown up in households where their parents instructed them to be measured and cautious in their activities. That may, in part, have accounted for the low voter turnout in Carpentersville. Indeed, early on, Roeser told me he was “surprised the Hispanic citizens didn’t get more vocal, saying, ‘This is our town too.’ ” But some of that changed when, the day before the election, 2,000 families in town received a flier. It read, in part:

Are you tired of waiting to pay for your groceries while Illegal Aliens pay with food stamps and then go outside and get in a $40,000 car?

Are you tired of paying taxes when Illegal Aliens pay NONE!

Are you tired of reading that another Illegal Alien was arrested for drug dealing?

Are you tired of having to punch 1 for English?

Are you tired of seeing multiple families in our homes?

Are you tired of not being able to use Carpenter Park on the weekend, because it is over run by Illegal Aliens?

Are you tired of seeing the Mexican Flag flown above our Flag?

If you are as tired as me then let’s get out and Vote for the: All American Team … Finally a team that will help us take back our town!

This tract, which was sent out by a key supporter of Sigwalt and Humpfer, and with the knowledge of Humpfer, became a marker of sorts, a moment when the wedge was driven so deep (one resident told me, “It’s kind of like the Grand Canyon”) that there would be no easy reconciliation. Most Hispanics didn’t learn of the flier until after the election, but it so offended many of them — especially those who were American citizens and had a foothold in the middle class — that even those who’d never been politically active began heading out to the village meetings to gauge firsthand the mood of their neighbors. What so alarmed them is that it felt less like a debate on illegal immigration than it did a condemnation of Hispanic culture.

When I first met with Sigwalt and Humpfer, Sigwalt retrieved two items from a kitchen drawer. One was a photograph she had taken of four trash cans filled with household junk. Planted in one of them was an American flag. Sigwalt told me that these were the remnants of a family who felt forced to move because of the changes in town, and that the flag was a symbol of surrender. “You have Americans giving up on their own country,” she declared. She then pulled from a small plastic bag a wall socket that was charred, the plastic melted. She told me that the previous occupants of the house she moved into three years ago were four Hispanic families and that the overcrowding led to an overload of the electrical circuitry. “This,” she said, holding up the burned wall socket, “is what’s going on in town here.”

The charred socket has become a totem for Sigwalt and Humpfer, symbolizing all that they believe has gone awry in Carpentersville: overcrowded homes and schools, rising crime, blighted neighborhoods and residents who speak little or no English. (They complain about the public announcements in Spanish at the local Wal-Mart and Sears.) For them, it boils down to this: many Mexican immigrants are reluctant to adopt the American culture. “They want the American dream, but they don’t want to assimilate,” Sigwalt told me. “Immigrants are what made this country great, but the immigrants of yesterday and the immigrants of today are totally different people. They don’t have the love of this country in their hearts.”

When Italians came here in the late 19th century and early 20th century, nativist Americans chafed at the new arrivals’ inability — or in the eyes of some, their unwillingness — to master English, language being the most visible and tangible measure of whether an immigrant group is becoming American. In 1919, shortly before his death, Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, and American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house; and we have room for but one soul loyalty, and that is loyalty to the American people.” Many suggested back then that the Italians were fundamentally different from previous immigrant groups, that they would live only among their own, that they’d frequent only their own stores, that they couldn’t speak English. Edward A. Ross, a prominent sociologist at the time, wrote in The Century Magazine, “That the Mediterranean peoples are morally below the races of Northern Europe is as certain as any social fact.” But as the new immigrants had children and grandchildren, the once-new arrivals became a part of mainstream culture (influencing it, as well) and, notably, spoke English fluently.

Becoming integrated into another culture is a dynamic process, and one that is undergoing a fresh debate given the most recent wave of immigrants, primarily from Latin American and Asia. After the last large migration to the country — of Italians, Slavs and Poles — there was a political outcry, and in the early 1920s, Congress placed severe restrictions on immigration. It wasn’t until the Immigration Act of 1965 that the gates once again fully opened. Since 1970, according to the Department of Homeland Security , an estimated 27 million foreign-born people have received legal permanent-resident status in the U.S.

There are essentially three camps on the assimilation question, which I would describe, albeit simplistically, as the pessimists, the optimists and the cautious optimists. The pessimist camp includes self-proclaimed populists like Lou Dobbs, who see few parallels between the present-day migration from Mexico and the surge of Italians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “We are a melting pot,” Dobbs said on one of his many broadcasts on immigration. “And while our pot is full, and looks as though it’s going to get fuller unless we do something about it, we are not melting.” The intellectual force behind such thinking is Samuel P. Huntington, a Harvard professor, whose 2004 book, “Who Are We?” makes the argument that Mexicans — unlike the earlier immigrants from Europe — don’t subscribe to what he calls the nation’s Anglo-Protestant values and so have not become Americanized, instead forming their own social and linguistic enclaves. “There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society,” he writes. “Mexican-Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English.”

The optimists suggest that like the Eastern and Southern Europeans before them, second- and third-generation Mexicans will master English and become quite American in their behavior and customs. (And, of course, influence the culture, as well.) According to the U.S. census, 40 percent of Mexicans in this country are foreign-born, or in other words are first-generation and, like new immigrants before them, have not been particularly proficient at acquiring a new language. Numerous studies have indicated that for their children, English becomes the primary form of communication. A survey published in the journal Population and Development Review found that by the third generation, nearly all Mexican immigrants speak only English at home. Another study, by Roger Waldinger, a sociologist at U.C.L.A., found that while 42 percent of first-generation Mexicans have at least a high-school diploma, 83 percent of second-generation Mexican immigrants do. Speaking of Dobbs and others, Waldinger suggests, “What they’re seeing is a lot of people who speak Spanish and live among themselves, but what they’re not seeing, because it hasn’t happened yet, is what happens to the children.”

And then there are the cautious optimists, a small but influential group of scholars who have been studying the influx of Mexicans into this country for years. They argue that many Mexican immigrants are indeed ambivalent about Americanization, and that upward assimilation and downward assimilation are happening at the same time, something they call “segmented assimilation.” They suggest that becoming an American can have both positive and negative repercussions, depending on what aspects of this culture you acquire. For instance, studies conducted by the sociologists Rubén Rumbaut and Alejandro Portes indicate that as immigrant children become more like Americans, not only do they learn English, but they also spend less time on homework, their blood cholesterol rises, divorce rates go up and levels of incarceration increase. They become more like native-born Americans in those ways, too. Moreover, Mexicans may well experience discrimination, which limits their options.

Mexican migration long had a distinct pattern: Mexicans would make two or three trips to the U.S., each lasting several months to a year, so that they could earn enough money to, say, purchase a home in Mexico. (Interestingly, by some estimates, nearly half of the Italians who arrived at the turn of the last century returned to Italy.) Portes suggests for many now here legally, their intent, like their predecessors’, was to come here only temporarily and then return home. But as border security has tightened, it has become more dangerous and more expensive to make those round trips, and so they have settled here reluctantly, with little interest in identifying as Americans. (I remember Humpfer at one point telling me, “I think there are some who are not trying to become Americans.”) Nonetheless, says Portes, who heads Princeton University ’s Center for Migration and Development, “If they have children, they will become Americans.” Rocio, a woman I met in Carpentersville, was frustrated that her husband wouldn’t speak English in their home. Rocio, who would speak on the condition that her last name not be used, was born in this country; both her parents immigrated from Mexico, and Rocio learned English when she began school. Her husband, on the other hand, came here illegally 13 years ago at the age of 15, and he worries that he could at any point face deportation. So he didn’t see the sense in fully investing in becoming American. But that changed with the birth of their daughter. She just entered day care, where she’s learning English, and so Rocio’s husband has agreed to speak English at home, and now for the first time has asked Rocio for help in learning the language.

I first met Adam Ruiz, a second-generation Mexican-American, at a gathering at the village hall. The village president, Bill Sarto, who along with the lone Hispanic trustee had taken on Humpfer and Sigwalt, invited an immigration lawyer and the former director of Chicago’s I.N.S. field office to answer questions about immigration policy. The former I.N.S. official warned the 50 residents in attendance that with all the local and state laws being introduced around the country, “my concern is that we’re going to have a Tower of Babel of regulations across the landscape.”

Sigwalt sat on the edge of her chair, fuming. She and Humpfer had, for the time being, chosen to table their proposed ordinances until the courts ruled on the one passed in Hazleton. They didn’t want the town to incur the costs of a lawsuit. But they continued to push the town to adopt English as its official language. “The country has been crying out loud and clear as to what they want,” she heatedly responded. “As far as the law, I don’t expect to get out of a parking ticket. The American people are angry. . . . While illegal aliens are looking for their dreams, the American people are losing theirs.” Her comments were met with applause. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a man who looked to be Hispanic shaking his head. The man, who turned out to be Ruiz, strode out of the room and in the hallway sought out a police officer. I got up and followed him. He was clearly shaken. He explained to me and the police officer that as he had entered the village hall, a man with his young daughter in tow told him, “This is a white man’s meeting.”

Ruiz, I learned, is a product manager for a large communications company and lives in one of the newer subdivisions, among predominantly white families. A neighbor had showed him the flier. “I was hurt,” he said. “It was just mean. . . . I thought, Why are you picking on Mexicans?” Ruiz, as did others, said he believed the flier had less to do with illegal immigrants and more to do with Hispanics, illegal or not. “I feel like I’m branded because I have dark skin,” he told me.

Ruiz, who is 38, is by his own admission a bit of a nerd. He’s balding, with a slight overbite, and he considers himself politically conservative, having voted for George W. Bush in the last two elections. A cautious man, he doesn’t fly the Mexican flag because, he told me, “I don’t want to cause problems.” Like virtually all of the Hispanics in Carpentersville I spoke with, he has a border story. His father crossed into the U.S. illegally when he was 12, entering with an uncle to pick cotton. He eventually was selected for a worker-visa program to pick strawberries in Southern California, then followed a family member to Indiana, where he landed a well-paying job at LTV Steel. Ruiz, who was born in the U.S. but didn’t learn English until he entered school, ended up matriculating at Purdue University, after which he met his wife, who was born in Mexico. They moved to Carpentersville four years ago with their four children, mostly because they could find a new five-bedroom home in their price range.

Ruiz began attending the village meetings this spring after he saw the flier, and at each he would speak during the public comments section. “Trustees Humpfer and Sigwalt, why do you only listen to your people?” he asked at one gathering. A month ago, he told me that he planned to send an e-mail message to his neighbors, informing them about the comments made at the board meetings, generally to let them know how he felt. But in the end, he chose not to send it. He told me that he and his wife are in a bowling league with 13 other couples, and only a few have said anything to him about the heated debate in town. “It bothers me,” he said. “But I’m not going to look for their favor.” Already, he has gotten the cold shoulder from one neighbor. His wife didn’t want him talking with me, in part because she fears for his safety, and in part because she doesn’t want to antagonize their friends.

Ruiz — like Sigwalt, Humpfer and Roeser — says that learning English should be a priority for new immigrants. “You need to be able to socialize and communicate,” he said. But he wouldn’t support the ordinance for English as an official language because of what he sees as the intent of its supporters. “They’re not trying to unite the people, they’re trying to divide the people,” he told me. “And they did it. They divided the community even more.”

As I spoke with Ruiz and other Hispanics in Carpentersville, it became clear that they wanted many of the same things that Sigwalt and Humpfer want: safe, clean neighborhoods and good schools. In fact, one woman I met, Antonia Garcia, the woman whose daughter Tom Roeser assisted, moved out of Carpentersville because she was displeased with the large class sizes at the schools and tired of the noise from neighboring homes with two or three families. It should also come as no surprise that there are divisions within the Hispanic community about immigration, especially between generations. I visited with the Morales family, whose son, Eddie, was best friends with the Sigwalts’ son. They live in a one-story ranch house just down the street from the Sigwalts’ old place, a part of town where the lawns are manicured, the homes well cared for. Paula Morales, who crossed into the U.S. in 1968, at the age of 21, cleans for two families nearby in the prosperous town of Barrington. “Judy’s my friend for a long time,” she told me. “It really hurts me.” She agrees with Sigwalt that some things need to change. She told me that across the street, there were 20 people living in a house no larger than hers, and that there were cars parked up and down the street and loud music late into the night. But why not enforce housing codes, she suggests, recalling that when they first moved here in the 1980s, code enforcers would ticket homeowners who had too many people living in a house. Morales told me she asks herself, Did Judy always have these feelings? She and her son, who served eight years in the Army National Guard, then had a spirited discussion about whether it made sense to make English the official language of the village. “I see my mom’s point of view, but I also see Judy’s,” Eddie said. “If you’re going to try to make a living here, you should try to learn English.”

Sigwalt and Humpfer’s main arguments for ridding the town of illegal immigrants come down to this: their presence has led to both rising crime and overcrowded schools. As it turns out, however, the crime rate in Carpentersville has actually been cut in half over the past 10 years; and while the schools were, indeed, overcrowded four to five years ago (when Antonia Garcia moved her family out), class sizes have now been reduced — although it did require the passage of a tax referendum.

It is clear, though, that Sigwalt and Humpfer have had an impact. Hispanics are leaving town. On the east side, for-sale signs seem as ubiquitous as the cicadas that emerged this spring; the number of homes for sale has nearly doubled from the same time last year. While part of that may be a result of the slow housing market, real estate agents told me that some people say they want to leave town, either because they or a family member is illegal or simply because they feel unwelcome. Ruiz’s father is selling a rental property because he doesn’t want any problems from the village. One woman, Mireya Delgado-Aguilera, who has chosen to stay in town, at least for the time being, told me that she’s considering sending her two children to a Christian school because she’s concerned that the animus will spill over into the public schools.

When I last spoke with Tom Roeser, I asked him if anything was new. He sighed and told me that he just received a call from the Department of Labor informing him that it plans to audit his company’s employment records, specifically checking to see if he has hired illegals. Roeser says he believes it’s a direct result of the controversy. “I’m disappointed in the town,” he told me. Given that one employee worked at Otto for nine years with false papers, it’s very possible, Roeser says, that they’ll find someone else, and he’s already bracing himself for the local headlines and subsequent attacks. “I don’t think they care about Carpentersville,” he told me, speaking of Sigwalt and Humpfer. “They’re demagogues.” Roeser is probably closer to the two trustees on national immigration policy than he or they would like to think. He opposes granting any illegal immigrant citizenship — though he does maintain that if they’ve been here long enough and have been gainfully employed, then they should be allowed to stay, just not as citizens. Humpfer, for his part, isn’t sure what he would do with those who have been here for many years. Maybe, he says, if they have a good track record here, citizenship should be an option. “There are some people who want to deport every illegal alien,” he told me. “I’m not sure I’m there. Not every one.”

In June, I attended my final village board of trustees meeting. They had been long, coarse affairs (one went until 1:30 in the morning), and each has centered on the wrangling over immigration. At one meeting, a woman accused the town president of being psychologically deranged; at another, a resident pointed his finger at Humpfer and, referring to the reported altercation with his wife, tried to turn the tables, declaring, “Illegal means illegal.”

The June gathering was particularly well attended — standing room only — because Humpfer and Sigwalt planned to introduce their ordinance, which would require village employees to use only English for official business. There were three television crews present and reporters from the local papers as well as from The Chicago Tribune. Police officers stood in the back of the room, a common sight at these gatherings. The town’s trustees sat beneath the town’s slogan: “Building a Better Tomorrow Today.”

Carpentersville is very much a small town, and so the proceedings began with the promotion of two police officers, who, to the applause of everyone there, received their new badges. It was the only civil part of the evening. Adam Ruiz was the first to speak, and it quickly became clear that the rhetoric on both sides would be ratcheted up a notch. “They have made this about race,” he said of Sigwalt and Humpfer, and then asked them to publicly denounce the flier that so agitated him and others. (The man next to me mumbled, “This is the United States of America, not a foreign country.”)

One trustee, Kay Teeter, a soft-spoken Mary Kay cosmetics saleswoman, appeared agitated by the suggestions by Ruiz and others that supporting the proposed ordinance was the equivalent of dismissing Hispanics. “I am not a racist,” she said. “We’re a blue-collar people. My grandparents worked hard to assimilate and become Americans. What we’re trying to do here is unite the community with a common language.” Things quickly spiraled out of control. Two Hispanic women who had come with a contingent from Chicago rose from their seats and began chanting: “Viva la Raza. Viva la Raza.” “Speak English,” someone hollered. Two older men in the back row waved American flags. The women were ejected.

A week earlier, the town’s department heads submitted an eight-page memo detailing how an English-only ordinance would hinder their jobs. “If officers are not allowed to speak in a foreign language,” the police chief, David Neumann, wrote, “it will have a chilling effect on the Police Department’s relationship with those who do not speak English, whether they reside here legally or not.” So, Humpfer and Sigwalt chose, instead, to propose a resolution which would be more a declaration of their beliefs than a set of regulations. (English-only ordinances or resolutions have passed or are pending passage in 35 municipalities and counties.)

Sigwalt seemed particularly taut, in large part because she was disappointed that they had to retreat from their original proposal. “The reason we don’t have a unified country is because the second and third generations are not learning English,” she lectured. “What is tearing our community apart is that there are so many different languages I can’t interact with my neighbors anymore.”

Sarto, the town president, who has continually sparred with Sigwalt, got in the last word: “Passing this ordinance is not going to make one person learn English any faster,” he said. “All it will say is this: ‘This is not a welcoming community.’ The immigration problem is not going be solved here in Carpentersville.”

Despite this plea, the English-only resolution passed by a vote of 5 to 2. Undaunted by the Hazleton decision, Humpfer and Sigwalt intend to reword and reintroduce the ordinance that would penalize landlords for renting to illegal immigrants and businesses for hiring them in the coming weeks. They also plan to look for outside legal help and check the insurance coverage in case of a lawsuit.

 

Irvine is being required to accommodate within seven years the second-largest number of new homes by a Southland city, trailing only Los Angeles, according to a housing plan approved this month.

Irvine must plan for 35,660 homes by 2014, according to the Southern California Assn. of Governments. Some would be designated for low-income families.

But Irvine officials say they don’t have enough land to meet those goals.

“This is not equitable,” said Housing Manager Mark Asturias, who said Irvine was dealt a disproportionate share — 43% — of Orange County’s immediate future housing.

Every five to seven years the state Department of Housing and Community Development sets housing quotas under a program called the Regional Housing Needs Assessment.

It is up to SCAG officials to determine where in Southern California those homes should be built. SCAG membership comprises 187 cities and six counties — Orange, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura and Imperial.

Cities and counties are required to accommodate the construction through zoning changes and other policy decisions.

Advocates of lower-cost housing say the quotas are necessary to force cities and counties to designate areas for low-income residential use and keep the median price of those homes from soaring.

About 40% of the 700,000 new homes slated for the Southern California area must be designated as intended for low-income or very low income families, according to the plan.

More than 150,000 homes are expected to be built in unincorporated areas of the six SCAG member counties, according to the plan.

For Irvine to meet its quota, Asturias said, the city would need to find 1,100 acres that he said do not exist.

The idea that Irvine has an abundance of available land is a misperception, he said, because many areas that appear vacant are locked into development agreements.

“From what we see, the choices are limited,” said Mike LeBlanc, senior vice president of the Irvine Co., one of the city’s largest landowners.

He said nearly all of the company’s land had development plans in place.

The quotas are meant to assure that all cities share the responsibility of building low-cost housing and are based mostly on available space and anticipated job growth, said Jeff Lustgarten, a SCAG spokesman.

It’s no surprise that many of the cities being asked to provide large numbers of new homes — Lancaster, Palmdale and Irvine — were recently ranked by the Census Bureau as among the nation’s 25 fastest-growing cities over 100,000 population.

But the quotas have at times been controversial.

In 2000, SCAG initially rejected the state’s mandated number of homes based on complaints by Inland Empire communities that said they were being forced to take on too much of the region’s low-cost housing.

Cities and counties that do not make plans to meet the housing quotas can lose certification from the state and become ineligible for state housing funds.

They also make themselves vulnerable to lawsuits by developers and low-cost housing groups.

This year, 46 cities appealed the number of homes they were assigned, but only 12 secured reductions.

Irvine appealed the order but was denied.

Developed as a master-planned community in the 1960s, Irvine has grown rapidly into a city of 200,000.

At 46 square miles, it is Orange County’s second-largest city by area.

It does not have the high density of its older, more populous neighbors such as Santa Ana and Anaheim, but has increasingly seen construction of high-rise condos — a departure from its suburban past.

Its new housing quota may force the city to plan for even more apartments and condominiums.

That may be the only way to keep up with its job growth as land becomes more scarce, said Victoria Basolo, associate professor in the department of planning policy and design at UC Irvine.

But the city may have to move away from the suburban villages that have become its signature, she said.

“They can build vertically,” she said.

“It doesn’t have to be sprawl, and it doesn’t have to be single-family housing.”

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tony.barboza@latimes.com

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More roofs needed

Irvine must plan for 35,000 new dwellings by 2014 to house a growing population, according to the Southern California Assn. of Governments. The six-county region must accommodate 700,000 homes, and Los Angeles tops the needs list.

Southern California cities with housing needs exceeding 9,000 units*

Los Angeles: 112,876

Irvine: 35,660

Palmdale: 17,910

Lancaster: 12,799

San Jacinto: 12,026

Hemet: 11,243

Riverside: 11,381

Desert Hot Springs: 9,923

Santa Clarita: 9,598

Long Beach: 9,583

Anaheim: 9,498

Hesperia: 9,094

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Total housing need, by county

Los Angeles: 283,927

Riverside: 174,705

San Bernardino: 107,543

Orange: 82,332

Ventura: 26,534

Imperial: 24,327

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*San Diego County is not part of the study area. A report released in 2005 said the San Diego region would need to zone for 107,301 homes by 2010.

Sources: SCAG, San Diego Assn. of Governments. Graphics reporting by

Tony Barboza

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Los Angeles Times

In Alexandria, Forbes Ranking Sparks Soul-Searching, Debate

By Brigid Schulte; Washington Post Staff Writer; Thursday, July 19, 2007; VA10

Susan Lavington was angry. She was pregnant with her fourth child and thinking about kindergarten for her 4-year-old twins. She was paying hefty property taxes in Alexandria and wanted to send them to the neighborhood school, but she was on the fence about it.

Her friends thought she was crazy to even consider public school. Hadn’t she seen Alexandria public schools’ low average test scores? A teacher friend told her the best educators choose Fairfax County over Alexandria. Then came the July 23 issue of Forbes magazine ranking the “Best and Worst School Districts for the Buck.” Of 97 school districts reviewed, Alexandria ranked 97th — dead last.

That did it. Lavington sent the article to neighborhood e-mail groups. “Alexandria was ranked LAST (as in worst.),” she wrote. “Alexandria ranked below Washington, D.C.”

The firestorm Lavington set off has reverberated throughout the city, in e-mail discussion groups, over back fences and around water coolers. The talk caught the attention of the Alexandria City Council and school officials.

Many well-respected education researchers quickly repudiated the Forbes ranking, dismissing its methodology as weak at best and suspect at worst. But its publication and Lavington’s missive have fomented soul-searching in the city and prompted promises of community forums in the fall and talk of creating a task force of City Council, School Board and community members to air long-festering concerns that the city’s public schools aren’t all they could be.

That’s exactly what Lavington wanted.

“I grew up in Alexandria and have been frustrated with our school system for decades,” said Lavington, who lives in the attendance zone for Jefferson-Houston School for Arts and Academics and attended private schools as a child. “We’re a pretty small city. We’ve got a lot of very active wealthy and middle-class people.

“Yes, we have a large population of kids who don’t speak English. But there’s no reason that after decades and decades of trying to fix it that we should still be in this situation. Everyone said that when we went to an elected School Board in the early ’90s, that would be the fix. But now look at the infighting. I find it shameful. They’re so focused on the politics that no one really seems to focus on fixing the schools.”

Other reactions to the Forbes survey have been just as passionate. Parents with children in private schools have posted messages saying the report vindicates their choice. Parents of preschool children worry that the report confirms their worst fears. One parent wrote to a neighborhood e-mail discussion group about taking her child out of a public school because the teachers were changed twice in one year with no communication from the principal. Another wrote about how she was laughed at for wanting a tour of her neighborhood public school when her child was 2.

Some parents have defended the school system and cautioned against jumping to conclusions. “Relying on a Forbes article for your school evaluation may be like asking your school administrators for financial advice,” wrote one.

Others asked how they could band together to improve schools. “If we face our problems honestly and tackle them together, I am confident we can improve results,” wrote Patrice Linehan, whose son attends Mount Vernon Community School.

City Council member Rob Krupicka (D) is listening. He said that the Forbes report was flawed but that he is heartened by the tenor of honest discussion and questioning it has generated.

“Alexandria should be a state-of-the-art system,” said Krupicka, whose oldest child starts kindergarten at Mount Vernon in the fall. “The Forbes report, for all its flaws, has created a conversation that’s really about student achievement and how do we make sure our kids are doing well. That’s a much better conversation than the one we’ve been having for the last three months, which has not been about schools and kids.”

The Alexandria School Board has been embroiled in internal strife the past few months over its 5 to 4 decision not to renew Superintendent Rebecca L. Perry’s contract when it expires next summer.

“I think bringing the conversation back to ‘what does the future of our schools look like, how do we make sure the community understands the work we’re doing to make schools excellent’ is the conversation we need to be having,” Krupicka said.

Forbes used research compiled by the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan Washington think tank that advocates lower taxes, and came up with a list of 775 jurisdictions in the country with populations greater than 65,000 and the highest average property taxes. The magazine then narrowed the list to 97 jurisdictions in which more than 50 percent of school spending is funded through property taxes. It then considered per-student spending, SAT and ACT scores, and exam participation and graduation rates to determine the rankings.

The wealthiest large suburban school districts, on average, ranked highest. No. 1 was Marin County, Calif., which spends $6,579 per student and where 60.4 percent of students took the SAT, scoring 1,133 on average, and 96.8 percent graduated from high school.

Ranking near the bottom were generally more demographically diverse, smaller urban districts with large numbers of low-income, special education or non-English-speaking students. Alexandria, which spends $11,404 per student, ranked last, with 65 percent of students taking the SAT, scoring 963 on average, and 73 percent graduating from high school.

Other area school systems making the list include Arlington County, 64th; Montgomery County, fifth, Howard County, seventh, Loudoun County, 11th; Frederick, Md., 21st; Fairfax County, 28th; Anne Arundel, 75th; Baltimore, 89th; and the District, 95th.

“Winners in this rating system are counties whose schools deliver high performance at low cost,” Forbes wrote. “The losers spend a lot of money and have little to show for it.”

In an e-mail, Forbes editors said they decided to write the story “because education spending has become an increasingly important issue for taxpayers.”

To Alexandria School Board Chairman Claire M. Eberwein, the Forbes analysis is justification of her vote against renewing Perry’s contract.

“The report clearly shows that it is not how much money you spend but how you spend it,” Eberwein wrote in an e-mail. “I think a fresh perspective on our educational system will determine whether too much money goes to bells and whistles as opposed to basic programs that raise the educational bar for all of our students.”

Fellow member Eileen Cassidy Rivera, who supported Perry, said the ranking reflects the board’s lack of vision.

“It’s very convenient to blame the superintendent, but it’s the duty of the School Board to develop a vision for what they need to accomplish,” she said. “This board has never developed a strategic plan.”

Education researchers said larger districts generally come out looking better on per-student spending because of economies of scale — the same administrative costs as a smaller system can be spread among more students. In addition, school districts in states such as Virginia and Maryland show up disproportionately on the list simply because state policies require localities to come up with the lion’s share of school funding through property taxes, they said.

The bigger problem, they say, is that the study reinforces widely held, uninformed and damaging perceptions.

“The method Forbes used is inaccurate and doesn’t really tell us much of anything,” said Kevin Carey, a policy analyst with the Education Sector, an independent think tank in Washington. “All reputable analyses of school funding take into account differences in student populations. If you look at federal studies done by the U.S. Department of Education, they adjust funding levels for the student body, recognizing that some students cost more to educate than other kids.”

Most studies, Carey said, have found that it costs more to educate children who are from low-income backgrounds, require special education or need intensive English-language learning.

“With the Forbes ranking, you’re penalizing districts for having a diverse student body. You’re saying that they’re doing a bad job because they enroll students who have more obstacles to education and require more money to overcome those obstacles,” Carey said. “To compare a very diverse district with a lot of poor kids to a wealthy district says very little about the quality of the district itself. That’s not to say Alexandria couldn’t do better. But this analysis tells us very little about that.”

The percentage of students in Alexandria receiving special education is the highest in the region, according to the Washington Area Boards of Education’s 2007 guide. Alexandria also has one of the highest rates in the region of students who are learning English: 22 percent.

Assistant Superintendent John Porter said poor and immigrant children cost more to educate because they require more time and intensive services to reach academic standards. Becoming fluent in another language can take five to seven years, he said. Classes may be smaller, requiring more teachers. Instructional assistants are needed to work individually with students. Special-education students receive individualized services.

“It’s always good to raise questions about how a school system might do better,” Porter said. “But we do have a track record. We’ve done good things.

“Traditionally, 80 to 85 percent of our kids are continuing their education after high school and going to every college and university in the country,” Porter said. “Kids who longitudinally have been in the system have done very well over the long term, and they have all the academic advantages that they need, the skills to be successful, but they also have the social experience of diversity.”

School Board member Sheryl Gorsuch said that although she disagrees with the report, it highlights the need for better data analysis in the system.

“One of the reasons why education in Alexandria is so expensive is because we’re doing an ‘and,’ not an ‘or,’ ” she said. “We haven’t sacrificed any of the community standards for high-quality education that’s usually afforded to middle-class families, like art and music and Advanced Placement offerings. We’ve expanded them, at the same time that we’ve added resources for our struggling students.”

A more accurate gauge of quality, researchers say, is to compare districts of similar size and demographics, a method used by Standard & Poor’s on http://www.schoolmatters.com . The Virginia Department of Education used that method in its School Division Efficiency Review of Alexandria, performed by an outside auditor and released June 15. The audit, which compared Alexandria with school districts in Charlottesville, Frederick, Manassas and Winchester, made 72 recommendations, whose implementation would cost $2 million over five years.

Monte Dawson, executive director of the Alexandria school system’s office of monitoring and evaluation, said he regularly gauges district and individual school performance the same way. For example, a 2003 report found several weaknesses in reading, prompting the system to rethink its literacy strategy.

“Schools are then able to look at some of their strengths and deficiencies in relation to their comparable school and to further hone their school goals,” Dawson said.

Larry Campbell — whose children attend Cora Kelly School for Math, Science and Technology, George Washington Middle School and T. C. Williams High School — said that they have had good experiences and some great teachers but that he thinks the central office doesn’t listen to the community. For him, the Forbes ranking has raised broader, tougher questions. Such as, why do 16 to 20 percent of Alexandria students attend private schools, compared with the national average of 11 percent and of neighboring jurisdictions, such as Arlington’s 12 to 16 percent? Why do 44 percent of all children born in Alexandria move out of the district before first grade? Why do officials assume demographics is destiny and low-income or English learners can’t be engaged in different ways to become more academically successful?

“Regardless of the Forbes methodology, my concern is the ranking represents a lack of overall involvement and recruitment and retention of families across Alexandria in the public schools,” Campbell said. “Too many families have felt that they need to take their children either out of Alexandria completely and move to a different district or go to private schools.

“The visceral reaction to the Forbes report reflects a basic concern that our schools are not as strong as they ought to be, given all the resources that we provide,” Campbell said. “This is something, hopefully, the community can begin to work together to address. Everyone believes we ought to help every child succeed.

“The question to me is, how do we ensure the children who have the most needs economically receive all the resources they need, and at the same time ensure that all the other families in the community who might otherwise consider private schools are also attracted and retained in the public schools.”

Unlike many of her friends, who she said don’t even bother to find out about public schools, Lavington has visited her neighborhood schools. She has met with principals. She is concerned that Jefferson-Houston School for Arts and Academics has had six principals in seven years. She also sees how communities have helped turn their schools around, such as in the case of Maury Elementary.

“I want to send our kids to our local public school, but I don’t want to jeopardize their education either,” Lavington said. “All the great things about Alexandria, its diversity and the reasons why I want to send them to the public school, are used as excuses, excuses, excuses for poor performance, and I’m just sick of it.”

This is the year she will have to decide. Her twins start kindergarten in fall 2008.

Sithea San fled the killing fields in Cambodia as a teenager and found refuge in Long Beach, where she attended college, got married and bought a house.

Now, more than a quarter-century later, San finally has a place that she and thousands of other native Cambodians say they can call home.

A strip of Anaheim Street was officially named the nation’s first “Cambodia Town” earlier this month — the most recent cultural designation in a county that is home to Little India, Little Tokyo and Historic Filipinotown.

City and community leaders say the designation not only will recognize the contributions of Cambodians, but also will help revitalize the neighborhood by attracting more businesses, visitors and tourists to the area. San and others are making plans to put up Cambodia Town signs and set up a business improvement district and are considering building a community center and a memorial to those who died under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime.

“Now we have the name,” said San, chairwoman of Cambodia Town Inc. “Now we have to make it happen. We have the responsibility to make the place nice.”

Long Beach, known as the Cambodian capital of the United States, is believed to have the largest concentration of Cambodians outside of the home country. Some of the first Cambodians in the United States were students who attended Cal State Long Beach in the 1960s as part of an exchange program. Waves of refugees followed in the 1970s as they escaped the Khmer Rouge regime, which took the lives of more than 1 million people. According to 2000 census figures, about 20,000 Cambodians live in Long Beach, but community leaders estimate a larger population.

Cambodia Town runs along the Anaheim corridor, from Junipero Avenue to Atlantic Avenue. There are already scores of Cambodian-run businesses on the street, including jewelry stores, restaurants, travel agencies and fabric shops.

At Monorom restaurant Tuesday, a lunchtime crowd ate Cambodian noodle soup while Khmer-language music videos played on a television. Owner Sopha Nhoung, who came to the area more than 20 years ago, said he was proud to finally be recognized.

“They have Chinatown, Koreatown, Thai Town,” Nhoung said. “We’ve been living here for a long time. We deserved this.”

Down the street at Angkorwat Art, Sopheap Samrieth said he signed a petition that supported the designation. But his main reason was to draw customers.

“It will bring more people here,” said Samrieth, as he pointed out paintings depicting the ancient temple complex of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. “It will generate more business.”

The drive to get a Cambodia Town began in 2001, when a few community members began meeting to talk about the possibility.

The leaders brought the issue to the City Council last year. Some critics expressed concerns that the designation could lure more gangs to the area and that it would exclude Latinos and African Americans.

But Cambodian leaders argued that the title would help the entire city by making the street safer and cleaner and by developing the neighborhood into a regional destination.

Naming the area Cambodia Town would also highlight immigrants’ cultural heritage and encourage youths to get involved helping their community, San said. In June, the city of Long Beach commissioned a survey that showed wide support for the cultural designation. On July 3, the City Council voted 8-1 in favor of naming the stretch Cambodia Town.

Councilwoman Suja Lowenthal, who voted for the designation, said the new name is a welcome mat for Cambodians, as well as for others who want to experience something different in Long Beach.

“We are leveraging a very unique destination,” she said. “What makes Anaheim [Street] different is this collection of shops, stores and businesses that happen to be mostly Cambodian American owned.”

Not all of the businesses on Anaheim Street are Cambodian. Manny Caldera, manager of La Bodega Market, said the name wasn’t important to him.

“As long as the business is good, it doesn’t matter,” said Caldera. His store caters to Latinos. “They can name it Cambodia Town or any other.”

Veasna Kiet, 40, who runs Phnom Penh Express travel agency, said the new name makes him proud. “We live far away from our country,” he said. “Now we have a hometown here.”

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anna.gorman@latimes.com

NEW ORLEANS — In the parking lot of a drive-thru daiquiri bar that sells frozen White Russians in plastic to-go cups, Fidel Sanchez is running an illegal enterprise that’s too unwholesome to be tolerated, according to politicians here in suburban Jefferson Parish.

Sanchez is selling tacos out of a truck — and judging from the lunch-hour line outside Taqueria Sanchez el Sabrosito, many Louisianans have become fast fans of his flavorful carne al pastor and spicy pork chicharrones.

But not everyone is enamored of the newest cheap eats to captivate the Crescent City. Jefferson Parish politicians, who have long turned a blind eye to whites and blacks peddling shrimp out of pickup trucks and snow cones on the street, recently outlawed rolling Mexican-food kitchens, calling them an unwelcome reminder of what Hurricane Katrina brought. Soon, Sanchez will be run out of business.

“What they’re doing is just mean,” the Texas native, 49, said in Spanish, noting that he’d secured all needed permits before officials changed the rules last month. “I do think they want the Mexicans out. I don’t see any other explanation.”

Nearly two years after Katrina led thousands of Latino immigrants to New Orleans in search of reconstruction work, it’s obvious that the new arrivals are having a cultural influence that reaches beyond repairing homes and businesses — and that’s making some people uncomfortable.

Authentic Mexican food is now widely available here in taco trucks and storefront taquerias, adding a contemporary Latin tinge to a famously mixed-up culinary scene that’s always managed to preserve its unique Cajun and Creole flavor even as most of America has become homogenized.

But the new ethnic eateries are emerging at a time when many traditional New Orleans restaurants are struggling in the face of sagging tourism and a smaller population — one that’s noticeably browner than before Katrina. New Orleans now has about 260,000 residents, down from about 460,000. Roughly 50,000 are Latinos, up from 15,000.

So taco trucks have become fodder for a larger debate over whether to recreate the past or embrace a new future in New Orleans — a discussion that’s thick with racial undertones.

To advocates of reclaiming the old ways, new establishments that do not build upon the city’s reputation, and may not even be permanent, represent a barrier to progress. As New Orleans City Council President Oliver Thomas recently put it in an interview with the Times-Picayune, “How do the tacos help gumbo?”

Yet many New Orleanians welcome anyone willing to repopulate the city — and surprising numbers are eagerly munching tongue and cow’s head tacos, broadening their palates in a city where the civic pastime is eating and talking about where to eat next.

Mary Beth Lasseter, who chronicles food history at the University of Mississippi’s Southern Foodways Alliance, said she was helping rebuild Willie Mae’s Scotch House, a famed New Orleans soul food restaurant, when she sampled the offerings of a taco truck in the parking lot of a home improvement store. Most clients then were Latino workers coated in mold and dust. A few months later, half the customers were native Southerners like her.

“That was the first time the dots connected for me and I realized we were about to have a food revolution in this city,” Lasseter said. “Food so often tells the story — that’s our premise here — and that is when I knew that New Orleans would be changing again.”

So far, the revolution looks one-sided: Latino laborers don’t seem to care for shrimp Creole, oyster po’ boy sandwiches — or even hamburgers, as long as there is Mexican food around.

“Crawfish? The little lobsters? I tried it, but to be honest it did not suit me,” Abel Lara, 33, said as he stopped at a taco truck during a quick break from his job laying floors at a medical center. “I don’t understand why it’s so popular.”

More than any history book, New Orleans’ cuisine has memorialized the waves of immigration that shaped and reshaped the old colonial port.

The Creoles’ jambalaya remade Spaniards’ paella with Caribbean spices. The Cajuns’ gumbo melded andouille sausage with African okra and sassafras leaves from Choctaw Indians. Sicilians spread olive relish on a crusty round bread called muffuletta and fashioned a sandwich that every New Orleans tourist now samples.

New Orleans also has a lively tradition of street food that’s humorously represented by the ubiquitous Lucky Dogs, the frankfurter vendors found on every corner of the French Quarter and immortalized in the comic novel “A Confederacy of Dunces.”

But taco peddlers apparently are different.

In New Orleans, the city council president wants them off the streets — although Mayor C. Ray Nagin has indicated he opposes such a move. In neighboring Jefferson Parish, the move last month to ban them was swift.

The vendors were given only 10 days before they’d be cited for breaking the new law. It requires any mobile vendor selling cooked food to offer customers restrooms and washing stations — things a taco truck clearly cannot.

“It’s narrowly drafted, and it’s discriminatory,” said Dr. Vinicio Madrigal, a Jefferson Parish physician and community leader who serves on the area’s economic development commission. Madrigal studied the ordinance and said it clearly aimed to outlaw taco trucks while permitting other street vendors. He fired off an angry letter to the politicians and said he got a call from one who chided him for siding with outsiders.

“I told him, I didn’t know anyone when I got here either,” said Madrigal, a Costa Rican immigrant.

Some taco vendors got the message and immediately rolled out of the suburb, which is now more populous than New Orleans. Others chose to stay and fight.

“It’s racism; they’re basically saying that we are dirty,” said Cristina Falcon, 30, the owner of a taco truck called Tres Banderas that carries the flags of the United States, Mexico and Honduras.

Even before the ban, Falcon said, inspectors kept coming by her truck, which is parked on the same avenue as a Taco Bell that’s still shuttered with plywood, to poke thermometers in her meat. Jefferson Parish Councilman Louis Congemi, the author of the ban, refused to discuss it. Councilman John Young said the motivation was strengthening zoning standards that have deteriorated since the storm, not racism.

“We’re trying to move beyond Katrina, and this is just another example of us trying to get back to where we were,” said Young, who offered to help truck owners open restaurants. “Look, I love Mexican food. But this is not a New York City type of environment. This is a suburb. We did get complaints from some of our civic leaders that the taco trucks were unsightly.”

Jefferson Parish leaders also raised fears that taco trucks were unsanitary. But Louisiana health officials who investigated the mobile kitchens found nothing wrong.

“There are zero valid complaints about taco trucks in Louisiana,” said Lauren Mendes, a spokeswoman for the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals. “The Jefferson Parish officials who complained about these establishments as a public health hazard did not even contact us to learn whether there were violations.”

A fear of change, and a feeling that quality of life will suffer due to the arrival of so many foreigners, are fueling some of the anti-taco sentiment. Many of the workers are illegal immigrants who were lured to Louisiana by the promise of good wages with no questions asked.

“We don’t want to be another La-La Land, that’s for sure,” Rock Pitre, 63, joked as he left a Jefferson Parish restaurant advertising an “All-American Meal” of fried chicken and mashed potatoes. “You gotta have some standards.”

Sanchez, the taco truck operator, said he has already opened one small taqueria in a former snowball stand. But he has a lot invested in his four trucks, which feature a picture of a smiling 2-year-old in pigtails — it is Ashley, his granddaughter who was killed by a drunk driver.

“This is a country of people who came from all over the world, looking for something better,” he said, as a harsh afternoon rain forced him to close down his truck. “Why are we being treated differently?”

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miguel.bustillo@latimes.com

In Prince William, Backyard Birds Are Reminders Of Home for Some but an Annoyance for Others

By Nick Miroff; Washington Post Staff Writer; Saturday, July 14, 2007; B01

When a neighbor’s rooster began crowing in the middle of her pool party last month and everyone laughed, Virginia Paris did, too, but privately, she was seething. Already, marauding hens had ransacked her flower garden; now, an unruly cock was conjuring Old MacDonald for her guests.

“It was embarrassing,” said Paris, who lives with her family at the top of a tidy cul-de-sac in Dale City. She and her husband have since staked a “for sale” sign to their lawn, seeing the rooster moment as a low point in the long decline of their feelings about the area.

“It was too much,” Paris said. “I can’t live with roosters in my neighborhood.”

Backyard poultry have been popping up all over Prince William County recently, to the amusement– and alarm — of residents and county officials. County zoning laws ban farm animals from most residential areas, but in the past year, inspectors have tallied as many as 32 chicken violations, a large increase from 2004, when they had three.

The county does not keep records as to violators’ ethnicity, but in most cases, officials and homeowners say, the offending fowl are introduced by Hispanic immigrant families who want to keep the birds as pets. Fines are rarely levied, because the vast majority of complaints are resolved through voluntary compliance, according to inspectors. But the sight and sound of suburban chickens are one more worry for those who see the birds as part of the escalating culture clash in Prince William, in which previous skirmishes have broken out over illegal construction, overcrowding, vehicles parked on lawns and other “quality-of-life” issues.

This week, the Prince William Board of County Supervisors unanimously approved an anti-illegal immigrant resolution, saying that it will diminish those behaviors by driving out the group. The resolution directs police officers to check the residency status of anyone in their custody they suspect is an illegal immigrant and directs county staff to determine legal ways to deny access to public services and benefits for illegal immigrants.

It’s unclear what effect, if any, this will have on the county’s unlawful chickens, some of which are brought to Prince William by homesick legal residents. As Leiby Rodriguez, a Dale City resident, explained, her younger brother recently brought home a rooster and a hen because the birds reminded him of his grandfather’s farm in the Dominican Republic. When zoning inspectors ordered the family to get rid of the animals, Rodriguez and her mother cooked them for dinner. Her brother bitterly abstained.

“He was really sad about the whole thing,” Rodriguez said.

Other counties with large Hispanic immigrant communities say they do not have a chicken trend comparable to Prince William’s. In Fairfax County, complaints are declining, with only seven registered so far in 2007. Complaints have held steady in Prince George’s County, officials there said, averaging a dozen a year. In Montgomery County, zoning laws allow residents to keep poultry in their back yards provided the birds are not within 100 feet of a dwelling.

So for now, the problem appears to be most pronounced in Prince William, where relatively affordable housing has attracted a large influx of Latin American immigrants in recent years. Many newcomers are from rural areas in Mexico and Central America , where chickens roam without fear of zoning inspectors.

County officials and residents say they are sensitive to this fact and do not want to disparage others’ cultures and customs. “I’m Hispanic; I understand,” said Paris, a native of Uruguay. “We’re open-minded. But this is an urban environment.”

Another neighbor, retired Army Master Sgt. Jim Lovett, sees the situation in less uncertain terms. “The law is the law,” he said. “If they want to raise chickens, they can buy a farm and raise anything they want.”

Unhappy residents have called Supervisor John D. Jenkins (D-Neabsco) in recent months after being wakened by roosters. “We’re trying our best to deal with it and let everybody know it’s illegal,” Jenkins said.

When authorities receive a complaint, an inspector is usually dispatched within a week, said Neighborhood Services Division chief Michelle Casciato, whose office handles 4,000 complaints a year on a broad range of quality-of-life issues. If the problem isn’t resolved voluntarily, the offending party can be summoned to court and fined.

Officials say health concerns about the birds outweigh possible disruptions to a community’s quiet. “You could conceivably keep a pet chicken in sanitary conditions, but more often than not, people aren’t scrupulous,” said county environmental health manager John Meehan. “A lot of what they eat is not digested, so it can become food for other animals. If you’re feeding chickens corn, that would be a very ready source for rats.”

Then there’s the danger of an animal death. “Some chickens have been killed by dogs, and you don’t like to see dogs killing chickens in front of kids,” Jenkins said.

Last month, Cristina Morales thought such a fate had befallen her rooster. Morales and her husband grew up in rural Honduras , and when their kids noticed that another family in the neighborhood had chickens, they wanted some, too. Her husband brought home two hens and a rooster, then turned them loose to peck in the back yard. But there was one problem with this free-range experiment.

“We don’t have a fence, so they got out,” Morales explained in Spanish. When their neighbors complained, Morales said she and her husband gave the hens away but couldn’t find the rooster. The kids clamored for replacements. “My son says, ‘Mami, buy me another chicken; I want another little chicken,’” she said, shrugging. “I don’t see what’s wrong with it.”

Last week, a rooster, hen and numerous chicks were seen in the Morales family’s yard. Neighbors claim the family is keeping the birds indoors, allowing them outside on occasion to peck and scratch in the yard.

But tolerance is running low these days among jittery Prince William residents who say they see too many houses for sale, too many foreclosures, and too many unkempt yards for their liking. That’s why Virginia Paris and her husband, Cavin Mooers, said they’re eager to sell. “We’re afraid our home will depreciate more, so now we want to make a run for it,” Paris said.

They’re looking for a place with a no-nonsense attitude about annoyances. “I used to think that I didn’t want to be part of a homeowners association because of all the politics,” Mooers said. “But I learned my lesson.”