Facing Change

Jessamine adapts to new Hispanic residents

Tobacco plants are impaled on a stick to make them easier to hang in barns.
Each stick holds six plants which are fanned out, resembling a tepee,
to keep them upright as they dry out in the field.

Story by Andy Olsen
Photo by Jeff Hutchens

 In 1998, the Mexican food section at Wal-Mart in Nicholasville was no more than four feet wide.  It carried familiar American brands like Taco Bell and Old El Paso. But since then, that section has tripled in size, boasting 12 feet of everything from pickled cactus to Jarritos soft drinks

Facing increased demand and competition from within the community, many stores in Nicholasville are working to accommodate their sudden and valuable new customers: Mexicans.

“We’ve gone more to the authentic items” for the migrant customers, said W al— Mart store manager Jim Sullivan. ‘On weekends and late evenings their attendance has increased dramatically. They are very good customers.”

But Nicholasville is not alone. The city is finding itself in the middle of a new wave of Hispanic migration to Midwestern America as Mexican workers and families arrive daily in cities throughout central Kentucky. They are drawn by a hot economy and numerous job openings at farms, hotels, and restaurants.

More and more, they are deciding to stay, and city planners are racing to keep up. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were just 4,461 Hispanic residents in Fayette and its surrounding counties—Bourbon, dark, Jessamine, Madison, Scott. and Woodford—in 1996. But that number does not include those migrants who are undocumented. By most estimates, the figure is currently somewhere above 30,000.

That number is dramatic when compared to the mere 3,347 Hispanics who were residing in the area in 1990, a time when migration was relatively low. The sudden spotlight on Kentucky is mostly because jobs at tobacco and horse farms that bring Mexicans— mostly single men—have become available only in the last four or five years, according to David Sweitzer, executive director of the Kentucky Thoroughbred Association.

“We started putting out ads in eastern Kentucky” for workers at that time, he said. “They were not successful, and now Hispanics are filling that need.”  Sweitzer said that there is still a large shortage of workers in the agriculture market that will continue to attract migrants as long as unemployment is low and workers seek higher—paying indoor positions. For farmers, competition for help becomes even more intense when the weather gets hot.

“When it hits 98 degrees and you can go in and work where it’s air conditioned, what choice would you make?” Sweitzer said. “The Hispanic population is very important to the agriculture community. It takes a special kind of person to work in this labor market. Many of the migrants come to Kentucky from rural areas and are accustomed to farm work.”

Currently, most of the farm labor force seems to be migrants. The state estimates that between 70 and 80 percent of Kentucky’s 25,000 tobacco workers are Hispanic. Local governments are anxiously anticipating the results of the 2000 census, hoping to pinpoint exactly how many immigrants they will have to accommodate. Mexicans that were interviewed all indicated that most of the area’s migrants lived in Fayette County.

Texas-born Abdon Ibarra serves as Immigrant Services Coordinator with the Fayette Urban-County Government. He oversees the integration of migrants into the community. Though working largely with estimates now, he believes there are about 30,000 Hispanics in the Lexington area.

“It is difficult to say because the numbers are skewed,” Ibarra said. “Only about 40 percent are families that stay constant.  The rest are single men that are scattered and rural.” Many of those who work in the fields also return ho me to Mexico in the off—season, making them difficult to pinpoint. Numbers remain uncertain, according to Ibarra, but fun work force seems to be split equally between flue agriculture and food service/hotel industries.

“There are lets of changes,” he said. “Unemployment, prosperity—43 percent of students are leaving Kentucky, and a lot are refusing to work for minimum wage.”

Those trends are leaving jobs open for Hispanics in the city as well as the field, and Mexican barrios have appeared over night. Immigrants are opening stores, running restaurants, and attending Spanish church services.

Ibarra wants to see those efforts grow. “We are building an infrastructure for a new community,” he said. “I help with banking, small ­businesses, transportation, churches, English classes-everything. We are niche-building.”

A major obstacle to helping Hispanics in Kentucky is that many of them are not legal residents. According to Iberia, 80 percent are undocumented. Of those, many are afraid to report their ethnicity or even talk to Americans-or gringos-for fear of having their papers taken. Also, some business owners with migrant employees are reluctant to talk about numbers, as they often hire undocumented workers. In interviews with five major hotels in Nicholasville and Lexington, three reported having no Hispanic employees at the time, and one declined to comment. Some of those workers may not even want to go through the hassle of becoming legal if they plan to remain only for a few years. In fact, some have come to America for more of an extended vacation. Like Andrés Reyes Alcaraz, the 22-year old who works at Nicholasville grocery store La Chiquita, some Mexicans are here for a simple change of pace. “I’ll stay here for a while, but no more,” said Alcaraz in Spanish. He has been in Kentucky for two years. “One, two, or three years. It’s very different here.” He referred to his time here as a “gran diversión.”

This wave of immigration is new to Ibarra, too. Like those he is trying to help, he is still just learning. “I’ve lived with this all my life,” he said, “but things are different here. It’s like when you move your desk. You start finding paper dips. The more you move, the more you find.”

Whether searching for shelf space or for solutions, Kentucky is in a critical stage of that structure, Ibarra said. But there is a lot of work left to do. “I think we are doing a good job in addressing the issues,” he said. “The more we dig, we are finding we need much more. But we can address these issues.”