Posted on 09/23/2007 6:52:13 AM PDT by Sybeck1
They wore black police uniforms and pounded drums and keyboards, making music that sounded something like a polka band on amphetamines.
The crowd loved it, dancing in pairs or pressing close to the stage to sing along to songs that have become standards on Memphis radio.
Spanish-language radio, that is. The band was Patrulla 81, a Mexican group that tours internationally and has sold hundreds of thousands of recordings. About 1,300 people filled a Whitehaven nightclub for the band's July appearance in Memphis.
The show wasn't advertised in English. But then, many things in Memphis aren't.
The concert was just one event within a Spanish-speaking universe that most Memphians rarely see. A city long divided by race now has another barrier that's perhaps even more powerful: language.
Memphis is home to immigrants from countries ranging from Sudan to Vietnam, but Mexicans and other Latin Americans are by far the biggest group. Estimates of the metro area's Hispanic population range from 34,000 to 100,000, and about one in 10 babies born in Shelby County last year was Hispanic.
The size of this population has led to the development of a parallel society where Spanish dominates.
Churches have added Spanish-language services and built Hispanic congregations. Mainstream firms are chasing the new customers and many immigrants have started businesses, resulting in an explosion of services in Spanish. Immigrants use the language to hire a wedding photographer, find a computer repairman or arrange a funeral.
Governments have reacted with less agility. Various agencies have created outreach programs but no large-scale plan exists to integrate the newcomers into society, and efforts to communicate in Spanish are uneven.
This ambivalent response reflects local officials' lack of experience with immigration and a lack of direction from the federal government. Many Hispanic immigrants are here illegally, but federal enforcement away from the border has traditionally been light.
The situation leaves state and local governments to deal with the strains on public services -- from law enforcement to schools.
State legislators from around Tennessee have introduced bills meant to cut illegal immigration, but Memphis officials have taken a gentler approach.
In some cases, though, they lack the language skills and cultural knowledge to accelerate the process of successful assimilation. Even after more than a decade of steady Hispanic immigration to Memphis, some elected officials seem amazed to discover this world exists.
These are uncertain times within the parallel society. Proposals to loosen immigration laws failed in Congress this summer, and in August, the Bush administration announced rules to make it harder for businesses to hire illegal immigrants. If these rules are enforced, they could rattle the Spanish-speaking world within Memphis.
On that Friday night in July, Andres Loya was making final preparations for the Patrulla 81 concert at the Brooks Road club he leases, El Internacional Shell Entertainment Complex, also known as the International Ballroom.
For about nine years, Loya has brought some of the biggest names in regional Mexican music to Memphis, advertising exclusively with local Spanish-language radio stations and newspapers.
But the scene isn't what it was. Loya, who runs a concrete company during the week, says fewer people are coming to his shows.
There's stiff competition from similar clubs, and a slump in the construction industry and concerns about immigration policy mean people don't spend as freely, he said.
"A lot of people are saving money to go back to Mexico if they need to," he explained in Spanish.
A tall, lanky 42-year-old from Chihuahua, Mexico, Loya matched alligator-skin belt and boots with a white cowboy hat the night of the concert -- not unlike many of the young men who had paid $45 to $60 for tickets.
Security guards frisked the men and made them lift their hats to check for hidden weapons. A female guard frisked their dates.
During the warm-up acts, Berto Camarena, 25, and Ivon Gonzalez, 22, left the noisy ballroom to smoke cigarettes on a couch near the club's entrance. Camarena owns several Patrulla 81 CDs and said the concert provided a welcome break from his six-day-a-week job as owner of a Mexican restaurant. "I like this kind of music. I like to come to dance."
Plenty of people dance to the music of Patrulla 81, which formed in 1981 but became a commercial success after a hit live album in 2004. The band is based in Durango, Mexico, and is one of the premier groups in a peppy regional genre called duranguense (pronounced doo-rahn-GEN-say).
The band's name, pronounced "pa-TRUE-ya 81," means "Patrol 81," and their act has a law enforcement theme.
The group has toured in Europe and plans to release an English-language album for international fans, said band leader Jose Angel Medina, 47. His 25-year-old son, Jose Angel Medina Jr., is a member of the group, and another son, 14-year-old Christian, was spending part of his summer vacation dancing onstage.
By the time the headliners went on, it was just after 2:30 a.m. They finished around 4 a.m. and the crowd cried for more.
There were some ugly moments in the parallel universe that night. The worst came after Patrulla 81 had finished and security guards caught a young immigrant skulking with a knife in the parking lot, apparently after a fight with another man.
The guards brought the man in handcuffs to Loya, who took the knife and let him go with a stern warning.
But there were glimpses of beauty, too. Before the main act, a Memphis-based troupe of Mexicans danced to a pounding drumbeat as they wore huge feathered headdresses. One dancer said it was an expression of indigenous heritage. Like almost everything else said in the club, it was in Spanish.
Why not learn English?
Mexican immigrant Jose Nunez speaks English with a slight accent and polished turns of phrase such as "that being said." His language skills have helped him run his construction business. But limited English has stopped his brother Armando Nunez from doing the same.
Why the difference? Armando, 39, points to education.
"He has more school than me," he said in his heavily accented English. "I went to the seventh grade."
Jose, 34, didn't go much further, leaving his town in Mexico's Jalisco state before finishing his ninth year of school. But he moved from Los Angeles to Memphis in 1994, when there were fewer Hispanics here, and he had to use English on the job. Armando lived within the huge Spanish-speaking population in Los Angeles for much longer.
He said he wants to learn English, but works up to 70 hours per week for his brother, speaks Spanish at home and on the job and has no time for classes.
Even if he had time, there are few high-quality language programs for adult immigrants, said Teresa Dalle, who teaches English as a second language at the University of Memphis.
Professional classes like the U of M's are too expensive and time-consuming for most immigrants, and the many free classes at churches are often run by volunteers who may use poor teaching techniques, she said.
It takes months or years of heavy practice to learn a new language, and Dalle said many factors hinder immigrants: busy work schedules, lack of transportation and child care, and a tendency to exist only within the Spanish-speaking universe.
"It really is unrealistic to expect that we're going to have all these immigrants who come here and that they're all going to learn English," Dalle said.
She said society should focus on teaching children, who learn languages more easily.
But Guadalupe Altamirano said some immigrant mothers in Memphis don't enroll their children in school because they don't know the law demands it. Altamirano, 32, who recently moved from Mexico City and supports her husband's Hispanic ministry at Calvary Baptist Church in Hickory Hill, believes such truancy will lead to drug use and gang activity.
She predicts negative long-term consequences if governments ignore the parallel universe and continue a middle path that neither accepts nor rejects immigrants.
"If criminal activity grows," she said, "one day it's going to come to your door."
Rudimentary assistance
Hispanics living in Memphis hold little political power. Most will never vote unless the federal government changes laws that block illegal immigrants from a shot at citizenship.
Immigration issues haven't been high on the agenda at the Memphis City Council and the Shelby County Commission. Governments have taken some steps -- baby steps -- to work with the parallel world.
Shelby County created a small office meant to help Hispanics. Memphis has an office to help several immigrant groups. It has two employees, neither of whom speak Spanish.
By contrast, Memphis Light, Gas and Water Division hired numerous employees with the language skills to handle the calls Spanish-speaking residents made to the utility: 4,000 in the first seven months of 2007.
To help curb a rash of robberies against Hispanics, the office of Dist. Atty. Gen. Bill Gibbons tries to protect illegal immigrants willing to testify in court. The prosecutor's office provides a special card they can show immigration authorities if they are arrested, Gibbons said.
Gibbons and Shelby County Sheriff Mark Luttrell said immigrants commit few crimes in Memphis, and Luttrell, who writes a column on crime prevention for a Hispanic newspaper, said immigrants make up only 4 percent of inmates at the Shelby County jail. However, the agency is talking with federal authorities about a program to move jailed illegal immigrants to deportation, he said.
At the Memphis police department, one effort to reach out has come from the bottom. Officer Ivory Robinson has learned some Spanish and organized several anti-crime meetings in Hickory Hill.
A July meeting featuring city councilwoman Madeleine Cooper Taylor was marred by poor interpretation. Taylor said afterward that it was one of her first experiences with immigrants as a public official.
"I expected more people to be able to speak English, but I know better now," she said.
Communication success
Other Memphis organizations have had more success in connecting.
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital has employees from around the world and programs in other countries.
That global knowledge showed in its ninth annual fund-raising campaign with radio station WGSF-AM 1030, the most powerful medium within Memphis' Spanish-speaking world.
Nearly everyone working the August event at the station's compound of houses on Park Avenue spoke Spanish. St. Jude employees took pledges by phone and loosened their normal policy of not accepting cash donations, aware that many people in this universe lack bank accounts.
Manuel Alcala, his hands still grimy from a day's work on a framing crew, gave $900 in cash that he and five other workers had collected. The 27-year-old from Mexico's Zacatecas state said he had a nephew who died of cancer.
Earlier this year, radio hosts Ramiro Villagomez and Aroldo Velasquez said the station wanted to raise $250,000, but with less than an hour left in the campaign, it was clear they would fall short. They blamed Hurricane Dean's landfall in Mexico, an economic slowdown, and the failure of the immigration overhaul in Congress -- why donate if you can be deported at any time?
Still, the station raised $175,888 in cash and pledges over two days.
Future is uncertain
It's too early to say if the troubles in the parallel universe signal long-lasting changes. Meanwhile, the music continues.
This month, WGSF has advertised numerous club shows of Mexican regional music, plus a concert of Christian pop sung in Spanish and a show featuring reggaeton, a Hispanic form of hip-hop.
Puerto Rican-born salsa singer Melina Almodovar is scheduled to appear at the Mid-South Fair.
And Loya, the music promoter, plans a December show by Intocable, a Grammy Award-winning Mexican-American group from Texas. He hopes to attract 1,500: Esto va a ser un concierto bueno, he says.
Even to Memphians untrained in the language of the parallel universe, the meaning isn't hard to grasp. That, Loya predicts, is going to be a good concert.
-- Daniel Connolly: 529-5296
It was circa 45,000-50,000 in 2000, the year of the federal census. Officially, the Census counted 27,520 Hispanics in the Memphis MSA, a 239 per cent increase over 1990.
I left in May 2004, though I'd been working out of town for some time.
Memphis will feature in my new book. It won’t be pretty after the New Madrid fault has broken loose.
Mostly, it isn't particularly pretty before.
I assume you heard about the Bell South glitch at Memphis International yesterday, and the result to air traffic within a rough 250-mile radius, including that from the Northwest hub and FedEx?
That is a hub area isn’t it.
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