Text by Rick Martinez | Photos by Villa Photography of Asheboro

• Introduction
• Cooperatives Respond
• Learning English is a Priority
• Statistics
• Download the full article as a

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Introduction

The signs of North Carolina's changing face are everywhere.

Sometimes they’re subtle, such as running across a Spanish-language station when scanning the radio dial. Other times they’re as literal as the signs over the hundreds of tiendas and mercados that dot the rural landscape.

“I used to say North Carolina was an emerging Latino state,” said Andrea Bazan Manson, founding executive director of El Pueblo Inc., the state’s largest Hispanic advocacy group. “But I don’t say that anymore. Hispanics have arrived and we’re an important part of the state.”

The numbers prove her point. State census data says that in 1990 the state was home to 76,726 Hispanics. By 2000, that number exploded to 378,963—a jump of 393 percent. No other state had a higher growth rate during the 1990s. The latest U.S. census estimate (2003) pegs the state’s Hispanic population at 456,334, but conventional wisdom among advocates and public officials is today’s number probably tops 500,000.

It’s no secret that many Hispanic immigrants in North Carolina and elsewhere are here illegally. Why they remain undocumented is a complex question. U.S. immigration policy makes it relatively difficult for most low-skilled Latin Americans to legally migrate here. Businesses that hire illegal immigrants (which is against the law) typically do so unknowingly because they cannot determine the authenticity of documents and employment information provided by applicants.

Hispanics have flocked to North Carolina for the same reason most folks have come to the state: jobs. Manual-labor jobs in the construction, agriculture, textile, manufacturing, maintenance, services and hospitality sectors have fueled North Carolina’s explosive Hispanic population growth, according to Dr. Nolo Martinez, of the Center for New North Carolinians at UNC-Greensboro.

A look at the state’s Hispanic population distribution confirms Martinez’s observation. Counties with the highest percentage of Hispanics—Duplin, Lee, Sampson, Montgomery and Chatham— remain rural, with strong manufacturing and agricultural economic sectors. The wealth of jobs in construction, landscaping, maintenance, food service and hospitality industries in Mecklenburg, Wake, Cumberland, Forsyth and Durham has attracted many Latinos to those urban areas.