By Tom Vandenack, Truth Staff
ELKHART -- On Third Street just north of the city center, Silvia Ramirez, a transplant from Mexico, toils at a small beauty shop she recently opened.
"I don't know," she says, searching for words to explain her decision to risk it north of the border. "I just wanted to come and see it."
In a cluster of worn apartment buildings and homes around the corner on Washington Street live a mix of Salvadorans, Hondurans, Mexicans and even a few Latinos from south Texas. Continue down Washington around the other corner onto Second Street and you'll see a flag of Puerto Rico serving as a curtain in one apartment and visible from the street.
"I have a Puerto Rican family," said landlord Rob Baldwin, alluding to the tenants in the structure with the red, white and blue banner, "and a Mexican one on that floor."
The Hispanic population, which has surged as demand for workers at area factories has grown, is deeply woven into the fabric of many Elkhart neighborhoods. Washington Street and environs, north of downtown and south of the St. Joseph River, fit the bill, and though it's just one pocket, it offers a glimpse into the lives of the city's Hispanic newcomers as they struggle to define their place here.
Felipa Hernandez, who assists Ramirez in her shop, came not quite a year ago from Mexico City to live with one of her daughters, who's been in Elkhart for 14 years. Two of the woman's kids, all grown, are still in Mexico, but three others are in the United States, including the daughter here.
"She's made her life here. She's very happy," said Hernandez. "That's why she said, 'Mom, you'll like it, come here.'"
Roberto Carlo, sitting on the porch of his Washington Street apartment house before it's time to head off to work at a Goshen factory, spent two years in North Carolina before traveling north to Elkhart three years ago. Originally from El Salvador, his wife and two daughters are still back in the Central American nation and he remains wistful, alluding to the fierce criticism the immigrant community sometimes faces.
"Immigrants come here to work, to better their situation, and that's what Americans don't understand," he said.
Ramirez, the beautician, moved to Elkhart 13 years ago from Cueramaro, a town in the Mexican state of Guanajuato, leaving behind a small beauty shop she operated there. After years of sweat in Elkhart County's factories, she saved enough to pick up where she left off, opening Estilarez, her Third Street salon, just five months ago.
"It's more to my liking," she said with a laugh, taking a break during an afternoon lull. "You work less and earn more."
Lydia Cantu, who switches easily between Spanish and English, grew up in Florida before moving to Michiana. With an undocumented immigrant boyfriend from the Mexican state of Durango, however, the Mexican-American factory worker is well aware of the backlash that many Hispanic newcomers, at least the illegal ones, face.
"It makes me mad when they say, 'Send 'em back to their damn country,'" she said one day, folding her clothes at a neighborhood coin laundry. "The jobs we don't want to do, they do for us."
A better life
The common thread for many on and around Washington Street -- where a small Salvadoran flag hangs from one car's rearview mirror and Mexican ranchera music floats from another -- is the search for a better life.
Carlo, a yellow sign reading "Eliminate Property Tax" posted in the yard of his rental, worked for an appliance distributor in El Salvador. But he never earned enough to meet all his family's needs. Now he's able to keep afloat here and regularly wire something home.
"You don't come to have a good time. You come to better yourself," Ramirez said. "If you wanted to have a good time, there are better places, like Orlando, Disney World."
Hernandez remembers the smog of her previous home, Mexico City, all too well. Sure she has snow and freezing temperatures to contend with for the first time and misses the hoopla surrounding holidays like Mexican independence day, Sept. 15. But the air is clean and she can actually hear birds chirping in the morning.
"It's very pretty, green," she said. "The houses are very big."
Still, life is hardly perfect.
At Express Laundry, around the corner from Washington on Second Street, Gloria Muñiz, who works there, senses occasional discontent, worries by undocumented clients about immigration crackdowns, for instance. Puerto Rican and bilingual, she sometimes gets called on to translate customers' legal documents and other paperwork.
"We have some from El Salvador, we have some from Honduras and Mexico and a few from Puerto Rico," she said. "Some of them just want to go back. They don't get accustomed to it."
At the same time, Cantu, an Express Laundry customer, says some undocumented immigrants here steer clear of their home countries for lengthy stretches due to the difficulty they would face crossing the border on their return.
"My boyfriend says it all the time -- 'I wish I could go to Mexico to see my mother.' But he can't because he's not legal," she said.
It's all got Carlo harboring a measure of uncertainty, thinking about a permanent return someday to El Salvador. Even so, he can't shake the notion that the United States is one segment of a larger entity, not a fenced-off unit unto itself.
"We're all an American family, starting in Alaska to South America. It's all America," he said. "It's just that this country has created more job opportunities than others."
'Don't blame them'
It's another day and another group of locals sit on the stoop of an apartment building around the corner from Washington Street on Second Street. All U.S. born, they don't seem to have any major gripes with their new Hispanic neighbors, none they voice anyway.
Deanna Shea has been to Mexico -- her sister used to be married to a man from the country -- and has seen the poverty there firsthand. She understands why people from the country would want to make a go of it here. More significantly, they pull their own weight.
"All the ones I know are employed," she said. "They're good people. They work every day."
Baldwin, landlord of the adjacent building, approaches, curious what the discussion is about.
His Latino tenants "rarely cause trouble," he says. "They do like to drink their beer and have fun on the weekend, but I have no problem with that."
James Hamlin hints at a few reservations about illegal immigrants taking advantage of government social programs. But he's skeptical of the notion that Latinos are somehow subversively infiltrating the nation.
"I don't blame them for being here at all," he said. "It's the land of opportunity."