Down East, Hispanics’ future intertwined

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MILBRIDGE – The little round fruit that’s scooped up with rakes. The hulking, knobby-kneed animal that wanders onto the road at night. The slimy sea creature, slick as an eel, that’s cut open and scraped out for $1.75 per pound of meat.

These are three touchstones of life for Spanish-speaking immigrants in this seaside town, and an illustration of how new their life here really is. All three are things that they simply didn’t have words for back home.

Now, it’s la blueberry, el moose. The third one has a difficult name even in English – “sea cucumber” – so the workers who slice them up say pepinos, “cucumbers.”

“Muy raro,” said Victor Flores, 28, remembering the first time he saw one. Very unusual.

That goes for a lot of things now in Down East Maine, the jagged, lightly populated coast that helps make up America’s northeast corner. It has a population of several hundred Mexicans and Central Americans, a sign that the demographic wave of Hispanic immigration, and the debate over what to do about it, now matter in even the most remote corners of the country.

“All of a sudden you have a new language and a new culture coming in,” said Anais Tomezsko, who heads an organization that helps Latino immigrants living near the town of Milbridge, population about 1,300. “That’s something that hasn’t happened here since basically the English came.”

The influence of the new Hispanic residents has been felt especially keenly here in the past few weeks, as Congress has weighed changes in immigration policy. Tomezsko has been trying to organize a group to attend a pro-immigration rally in Portland later this month. Local Hispanic residents have been pressing officials for more details about proposals that would ease the path to legal-resident status.

Local employers have watched the same debate with great concern, fearing that the same industries that seemed so foreign to immigrants a few years ago – from blueberries to sea cucumbers to el brocal – might collapse without them.

As in other parts of the country, it’s difficult to say exactly how much this area now relies on undocumented workers. Juan Perez-Febles, a monitor advocate with the Maine Department of Labor, said that perhaps about half of the Down East area’s several hundred Hispanic immigrants may be undocumented, an estimate he said was based on national figures. He said many of these work for smaller agricultural operations.

“They’re about like migratory birds. I mean, we don’t have to do much, and they show up every year,” said Ed Flanagan, president of Jasper Wyman and Son, a berry harvester. He said his workers, now at least 75 percent Hispanic, must present papers to prove they are in the country legally.

Down East is newly attuned to the issue of immigration because of a trend that has transformed rural areas outside traditional immigrant destinations in the South and West. Since 1980, a U.S. Department of Agriculture study found, the number of Hispanics living in “nonmetro” places – in all, about 80 percent of the country’s land area – has doubled.

“Now, in that 80 percent, that nonmetro portion of the country, they’re everywhere,” said William Kandel, a USDA sociologist. “And the completion of that expansion really happened in the last 10, 15 years.”

One of the last places it has happened has been this northern tip of New England. In 1990, Maine had the second-smallest percentage of Hispanic residents of any state, just 0.6 percent. Down East’s Washington County – a place where even people from neighboring towns were considered “from away” – had only 0.4 percent.

But then change came in the blueberry barrens, where in the early 1990s Latinos started showing up to rake the berries from their bushes. They eventually came to dominate crews once filled with local whites and members of nearby Indian tribes.

The first large group of permanent Hispanic residents settled here around 1997, to work in a local factory that processes sea cucumbers, tubular cousins of the starfish whose meat is prized in Asia.

Drusilla Ray, president of the processing company, said she initially thought the factory would employ Maine natives. But, she said, the work “was dirty. It was cold. It was wet. It was repetitive. It was smelly. It was – how many adjectives are there? It was everything that was not appealing.”

There were few local takers for the work, which involves slicing the creatures open and scraping their insides out with a metal blade, so she hired Hispanic blueberry rakers. There are now 86 immigrant workers at the plant, all of them in the United States legally, according to Perez-Febles.

For the new year-round residents, life in Maine took some getting used to: Although the Spanish language has words for “moose” and “blueberry,” Perez-Febles said, the immigrants often didn’t know them. He also had to explain the need to layer clothes in the bitter winter and the local taste for sweetened canned beans.

“They started adding salt to them,” Perez-Febles said of the immigrants. “They cannot take New England baked beans and turn them into Mexican refried beans. It just doesn’t work.”

There was also some real friction with longtime residents in the first years, including a shoving match at the local elementary school. After that, the school put pupils through workshops on tolerance and genealogy, tracing everybody’s roots.

The town also organized potluck suppers for adults, with both immigrants and natives bringing home-cooked food, on the theory that “most people get along pretty good when there’s food, anyway,” said Lewis Pinkham, who is town manager and police chief in Milbridge.

So far, the town’s approach seems to have worked. In an area where young people had been steadily departing for bigger cities, Milbridge natives say they’re glad somebody’s keeping the school open – 17 of the 106 students are now Hispanic – and buying something at local markets.

“It’s refreshing to see people stay,” Pinkham said.

Indeed, the economic impact that the immigrants have here is visible in the Mexican Store, up the road in Harrington, which sells a huge variety of hot sauces, hats emblazoned with the names of Mexican states, and a whole lot of warm blankets. It also can be seen in just about every aisle of the BaySide supermarket in Milbridge’s tiny downtown.

“There’s like a whole Goya line of food that we brought in,” said owner and operator Leola Carter, mentioning the Hispanic-foods company whose logo now appears here on products including seasonings and tamarind-flavored soda. “Never heard of it” before, Carter said, looking at one orange-brown bottle of the soda on a low shelf.

Immigrants, for their part, say they feel safe in this unlocked-doors town.

“Distance is not important,” said Gustavo Ortiz, 39, from the faraway Mexican state of Michoacan, one recent night over a dinner of chicken mole at his family’s trailer home near Ray’s factory. “What’s important is to be happy wherever you are.”

This placid coexistence in Milbridge has held in recent weeks, even as other shared American towns have been roiled by anger over current immigration policies. It might just be that this is Down East, where people don’t get excited about anything.

Or maybe, state Rep. Edward R. Dugay, D-Cherryfield, said, it is because people in this distant spot think they know something the rest of the country doesn’t.

“People have just figured it out here,” Dugay said. “It works here, maybe.”

Elsa Ortiz, 39, a native of the state of Michoacan in Mexico, slices open and scrapes the meat out of hundreds of sea cucumbers (in black bin) each day at the Cherry Point processing plant in Milbridge. The bottom-dwelling sea creatures are harvested for their skin and internal muscles, which are shipped to Asia for use in food. Ortiz, 39, and her family are part of a permanent community of several dozen Mexican immigrants drawn to Down East Maine to work in the plant.