Shifting Borders and Destinations: New Locations of Mexican Settlement
BY DEBRA SHUTIKA
On the whole, Northern Virginia is not often associated with the U.S.-Mexico border. In the summer of 2005, however, it seemed as if the border had moved into the region’s backyard. In Herndon,Virginia, a group of male Latino day laborers had been gathering at a local 7-Eleven each morning looking for work. Residents wanted the men to stop congregating in town, but when local community activists proposed to build a day labor center to formally resituate Latinos within Herndon, they met strong resistance from some in the community. Many of the same residents who were unhappy about the men waiting by the 7-Eleven were incensed by the proposal to use tax dollars to build an official day-labor center that would be located adjacent to a residential neighborhood. These residents argued that funding a day-labor center would officially encourage illegal immigration and feared that a town-supported center would encourage more undocumented workers to come to Herndon. As plans for the day labor center moved forward, a local chapter of the Minute Men, a civilian organization that usually patrols the U.S.-Mexico border, took up positions in Herndon to photograph workers and potential employers in an attempt to systematically discourage people from hiring day laborers.
Much of what transpired in Herndon was reminiscent of the events I have documented for the past decade in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Since the mid-1980s, Kennett Square has transitioned from a majority Anglo-European farming village into a multiethnic community as Mexican families have steadily moved in and around the area. The issues at stake in Kennett Square ten years ago were nearly identical to those in Herndon: how the community would find a physical and cultural place for the rapidly growing number of Mexican families moving into the community, frustration with failed national immigration policies and the search for local alternatives, and anxiety about the changing local character and communal identity of a once majority Anglo-European farming village. Both communities demanded cheap local labor, but opposed sharing neighborhoods with Latinos filling those labor needs.
The events in Kennett Square and Herndon are part of a larger national trend in Mexican immigration that has occurred since the mid-1980s: Mexicans and Latinos settling permanently in communities outside the border region. At one time, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands were the familiar destination of Mexican immigration and immigration controversy. Throughout the 1980s, national headlines documented borderland community problems: the porous, yet militarized border, coyotes and drug smugglers, migrant deaths in the desert, and the siphoning of public funds by undocumented workers. Mexican immigration, once considered a localized problem, has moved beyond the borderlands and is now dispersed across the United States.
These demographic changes were in part the outcome of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), a watershed in U.S. immigration history, which provided amnesty and legal residency for previously undocumented laborers throughout the U.S., the majority of whom were Mexican nationals. The legislation permanently altered Mexican migration and settlement patterns by providing formerly undocumented laborers the option of permanently settling in the U.S., and facilitated the establishment of Mexican communities outside the historic gateway states along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as new destinations for Mexican immigrants.
IRCA was not the only event that has shaped new immigration and settlement patterns in the U.S. A housing boom and rapidly expanding suburban communities have increased labor needs in construction and landscaping and subsequently fueled Mexican settlement in Kennett Square from the mid-1990s onward. In other parts of the U.S., the demand for domestic assistance created a labor market for immigrant women and promoted a more diverse settlement pattern. Taken together, the resulting demographic shifts have not only disrupted American suburbia’s long-standing homogeneity, but have forced changing communities to reconsider notions of local identity.
My work in Kennett Square has focused on the meanings and interpretations of “community” in a context where the English-speaking majority contested Mexican communal membership and belonging. New destinations of Mexican settlement like Kennett Square have no prior history of Mexican presence and thus do not provide the longstanding social and political support networks that are common in the borderlands. These settlements are also unique in that the changes accompanying unexpected growth are often fraught with controversy as the very character of long term, local identity shifts with the population. In Kennett Square, the last ten years have been characterized by periods of active resistance to Mexican settlement that have alternated with a slow and sometimes reluctant integration of Mexican residents into the community fabric.
KENNETT SQAURE: THE MUSHROOM CAPITAL
Kennett Square is situated thirty miles Southwest of Philadelphia and has been home to the nation’s largest commercial mushroom industry for the last century. Despite its rural ambiance and farming community history, Kennett Square is a sophisticated town with upscale boutiques, restaurants, and its own symphony orchestra. The village is approximately one square mile and home to some 6,000 residents. Kennett Square, like surrounding Chester County, is known as a Republican Party stronghold. Founded as a Quaker settlement in 1855, Kennett also has a local reputation of being a more socially progressive community than its neighbors, a point frequently emphasized by local residents.
Since the late 1960s, Kennett Square and its surrounding county saw a slow but steady increase in the population of Mexican men who came to work in the mushroom industry. These single Mexican men first made their way to Kennett Square in significant numbers as Puerto Rican workers left mushrooming for industrial employment in nearby Wilmington, Delaware, and Philadelphia. The longer-term Kennett residents, the English-speaking majority, considered the migrant men visiting Kennett during the peak mushrooming months between October and March as an acceptable and desirable consequence of a thriving agribusiness. Between 1968 and 1990, the majority of laborers were men housed out of sight on farm property in trailers or barracks, where they worked, ate, and lived together. Many of these men worked in Kennett for years, sometimes a decade or more, but their families and lives remained in Mexico. Mexican workers were essential to the mushroom industry, but most migrants never considered Kennett Square “home.” Oral histories from the earliest migrants to Kennett emphasize that their lives were entirely work-centered, with long hours and poor working conditions a matter of course.
These seasonal migrants fit well into the hierarchical social structure of Kennett Square. In this sense, the local body politic has always situated the Mexican labor force in a liminal position in the community, a place in the community hierarchy that has been more or less rigidly fixed. Migrant workers were routinely excluded from community events like the annual Mushroom Festival. Although Mexicans “belonged” to fulfill a specific purpose, picking mushrooms, they were transients, not fully accepted members of the local community. Similarly, most of these men never intended to stay.
The passage of the IRCA in 1986, however, permanently altered the social and cultural landscape of Kennett Square. With a newly acquired amnesty and legal permanent residency, many seasonal migrants elected to settle in Kennett Square and the surrounding county, and shortly thereafter brought their wives and children. The Mexican settlement controversy began in Kennett, as it has more recently in Herndon, when families were reunited and more visible in the local community. By 1995, the Mexican population in Kennett Square was well established, but the English-speaking majority was unwilling to share their neighborhoods and public spaces with Mexican families. In 1995, for instance, English-speaking residents protested the redevelopment of dilapidated properties in town that would eventually house Mexican families. A year later, a local dance hall that had become a favorite gathering place for Mexican couples was closed and torn down, and a vacant field where Mexican men gathered in the evenings after work to play soccer was plowed under. In early 1997, a neighborhood association asked English-speaking residents to place yellow ribbons in their windows to protest Mexicans who were purchasing houses and moving into their neighborhood; the organization claimed their actions were not directed at Mexican families per se, but at the overcrowded housing conditions.
While the protests began as scattered events, the effort to keep Mexicans out of Kennett did not go unnoticed by Mexicans and many in the English-speaking community. Accusations of racism from within the English-speaking population spurred local dialogue about the town’s direction; for several years it appeared that Kennett Square would devolve into a divided community, but the English-speaking community’s progressive self-image, coupled with the need for a reliable mushroom industry workforce and a desire to reduce racist and reactionary actions has gradually (and sometimes reluctantly) moved Kennett Square toward accepting the local changes caused by Mexican settlement. Most recently, the town has approved a request to build low-income houses that will primarily benefit Mexican families and since 2001 has celebrated an annual Cinco de Mayo festival to acknowledge Mexican heritage. Mexicans are not yet fully accepted members of the community, but their numbers have grown to the point that social support networks are in place for Mexican families and overall, adjustment to life in Kennett is much easier than it was ten years ago.
Reflecting on the “borders” that erupted in Herndon last year and Kennett Square even earlier, it is clear that these towns are bound by common experience. Although we cannot predict where new destination communities will arise or what resulting local problems will spring, Kennett Square is an example of how a community can respond to newly evolving Mexican settlement. Its story provides insight into the connection between the demand for immigrant labor, the development of new immigrant settlements, and the integration of former migrants into members of local communities.
Debra Shutika (dshutika@gmu.edu) is assistant professor in the Department of English (http://english.gmu.edu). This article was first published in print and citations have been removed due to space limitations, but are available from the author.
