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Large Text Size Large Text Size Change text size COLUMN ONE Our Town -- Or Is It Theirs? People find ways to live with a change they know is here to stay. By Maria L La Ganga, Times Staff Writer September 19, 2006 WILLIAMS, Calif. Anyone wanting some heated conversation need only mention the time six years ago when the board of education extended the Christmas break to three weeks to give Mexican families more time to go home for the holidays. ADVERTISEMENT The realignment of the calendar maximized classroom time, resulting in lower truancy and improved test scores. But it also set off a cultural debate that continues to this day. "The Caucasian community didn't want the change," which meant trimming the treasured summer vacation by a week, said Colusa County Supervisor Mark Marshall. But in Williams, a place that demographer Hans Johnson describes as "the most ethnically transformed city in California," the story is not that simple. Williams "serves as an almost natural experiment about what these changes mean for all of us," said Johnson, of the Public Policy Institute of California, who estimates that as much as 20% of the city's population could be undocumented. This city of 5,087 (and rising fast) is the closest thing to a "Petri dish" for observing the effects of immigration in their most concentrated form, said Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center. Practical people, for the most part, residents of this agricultural outpost are slowly -- sometimes reluctantly -- coming to terms with the dramatic changes wrought by immigration. "All of the families like mine and my husband's, who grew up here all their lives, have had problems with the change in culture," said Kara Alvernaz, who works for the local fire district. But the last thing she'd do is give up on the schools -- calendar change or no. It was Monica Ordaz, a business owner of Mexican descent, who issued her daughter's teacher an ultimatum last year, when bilingual Nicole hit kindergarten: "If my daughter was ever used as a translator, taken away from her time to learn to teach someone else, I'd take her out of the school," she recalled saying. "I just don't think it's fair for the kids," said Ordaz, who with her husband runs El Campesino, the combination general store, tax service and translation center that largely caters to farmworkers. As immigration touches nearly every facet of life here, it's been a slow march of two steps forward and one step back, of honest effort meeting harsh reality. The police and fire departments now have healthy percentages of bilingual members, but elected boards lag far behind in representing the Latino supermajority. An expensive subdivision largely for commuters has been welcomed; At the Church of the Annunciation, Spanish Masses outnumber English 2 to 1 But when a shortage of priests drove Father Francisco Hernandez Gomez to trim one poorly attended English Mass a month, white parishioners revolted. "They thought I was favoring the Hispanics," he recounted, "and that I was kicking out the whites from their own church." Hernandez Gomez, who has reinstated the English Mass, said the prejudice he sometimes senses in Williams is mostly passive and, perhaps, rooted in feelings of fear and loss. "Yes, after being the majority just a few years ago, now they are just a few people among a big new community," he said. "The whites could feel they are losing their town, their church, their school, their stores, their language." Small enough to be featured in a guidebook called "Wide Places in the California Roads," Williams has been a farm town since its early history. But rice's dominance is slipping in the region -- and therein lies one key to the city's metamorphosis. Rice is a relatively low-labor crop, with increasingly slim returns. Agriculture Commissioner Harry Krug predicts that, for the first time, almond revenues will surpass rice in Colusa County this year. "The almond orchards have increased dramatically," said Krug. Changing immigration law also has boosted Williams' population. The federal amnesty program in 1986 paved the way for thousands of illegal immigrants to become legal residents. Most of the city's new small businesses cater to Latinos: Toro Loco Mercado; Roberta's Taqueria, which sells lengua (tongue) and cabeza (head) tacos hard by the Burger King. Even longtime grocery stores like Shop n' Save stock pork skins in vinegar, mango lollipops, bottled cactus and cones of dark sugar called piloncillo, along with Campbell's soups and People magazine. Members of Alicia Zamudio's family have trekked to Williams since the 1940s -- three generations of campesinos from the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, all in search of work. Zamudio, 49, her husband and children started coming each summer in 1990. Today, two of her children, grown and married, have settled in Williams. "There are many more Latinos here," said Zamudio, who works in the fields six days a week tending tomatoes and vine crops grown for seed. Maybe because the work here in Williams is farm work and not a lot of Anglos want to be in the field hoeing and picking tomatoes." When Linda Granzella describes the Williams High School homecoming game of 1993, her words come out in an emotional rush. She is sitting in the office of her family's combination restaurant, motel and olive packing company, barely looking up as the tale bursts forth. Granzella was in the bleachers, waiting for the Yellowjackets to take the field, when the high school band struck up the national anthem. The loudspeaker's disembodied voice asked everyone to stand. They were Hispanic children, and they didn't stand for the national anthem ... "I didn't want her to be in a school where she was a minority in her own country, and they didn't have respect," Granzella said. Families like Granzella's began transferring their children to nearby districts with fewer Latino students a decade or so before the school board began debating a change in the academic calendar. Tiny Maxwell, 10 miles north on Interstate 5, has been a popular destination, with its plush athletic fields and a high school that's more than twice as white as school enrollment countywide. "The calendar was a good excuse," said Williams Elementary School Principal Cyndee Engrahm, to explain what for years has been "white flight, pure and simple." Changing the calendar took a year of acrimonious debate and laid bare the chasm between white and Latino work lives. To some, it also became an argument over whose time was worth more. They thought that their time was more important during summer than winter break," said Carlos Velazquez, a real estate agent and chairman of the Williams planning commission. "Most of us are off during the winter, at least three months." Rice farmer Bob Freed, a school board member at the time, said the final result rankled nearly everyone. "I had people call me on it: 'You're giving in to the Hispanic population,' " he recounted. As he walked into his department's small offices one steamy July day, a resident was conducting a bit of routine business. Two police officers, the records clerk and the city's code enforcement officer were all chiming in -- in Spanish. When Saso joined the Williams Police Department as a sergeant in 2001, there was one bilingual police officer. Today the department is more than 50% bilingual, a change Saso credits to recently retired Chief Dick Waugh, who Saso said recognized "that the demographics are changing." Similarly, the volunteer Fire Department, which once was nearly all white and open to candidates by invitation only, just promoted Jaime Davalos to captain. Twelve of Williams' 42 volunteer firefighters are Latino, seven joining up in the last six months alone. Most of the new recruits, drawn by word of mouth, are people who have lived in the agricultural city for many years. To Chief Jeff Gilbert, who has headed the department since 2003, it's a sign that the Latino community is changing: "We're getting into a new generation. The Latino majority remains largely outside the political arena, however. Mayor Virginia Frias was appointed in 2004 to fill a vacant seat on the...
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