Good schools and safe neighborhoods brought Manuel Casdro from Mexico City to Evanston four years ago.
“It’s a quiet suburb,” the 31-year-old said one Sunday after the Spanish-language mass at St. Nicholas Roman Catholic Church, 806 Ridge Ave.
Although Evanston’s first Latinos came in the 1970s to work in local factories, they come to Evanston today for the same reasons as other newcomers: a downtown with job opportunities, a well-known school system that boasts strong bilingual programs, and public parks and beaches.
As Latinos move to Evanston, local activists face an uphill battle to create community organizations in neighborhoods that do not have a long history of civic involvement.
“What we don’t have is leadership,” said Mario Tamayo, a deacon at St. Nicholas Church. “We don’t have someone who will really say, ‘I represent the Hispanic community.'”
Evanston’s Latino population nearly doubled to 4,539 in 2000 from 2,689 in 1990, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Since the Census undercounts the Hispanic population, there may be as many as 10,000 Latinos in Evanston, said Aracely Canchola, the outreach specialist in Evanston’s Latino Services Office.
It’s a trend that has played itself out all across the country. The overall Hispanic population grew 58 percent between 1990 and 2000 — from 22.4 million to 35.3 million — making Hispanics the largest minority group in the country.
The suburban Latino population grew even more — 71 percent, according to a 2002 report released by the Brookings Institute. More than half of all of the country’s Latinos live in suburbs, the report said.
“Before it was hard to find a job up there,” said Norman Astudillo, an Ecuadorian who moved to Chicago five years ago but works in a cigar shop in Highland Park. “But now, there are small towns and small cities that have everything there, and many people need labor.”
A workers paradise
As suburbs grow, so do service-sector jobs — such as restaurant or hotel workers. Job opportunities attract Latinos to the suburbs, where housing also can be cheaper.
“Once those two things develop, what you get are network structures where people come in from Mexico, El Salvador, and they find migrants who are living out (in the suburbs),” said Nestor Rodriguez, a sociology professor at the University of Houston who also is co-director of the university’s Center for Immigration Research. “They tend to reproduce the migration stream towards the suburbs.”
Not all Latinos come to Evanston — or to suburbs across the country — for service jobs. Casdro, who works as a sales representative for a Vernon Hills company, is one of them. Monica Russel y Rodriguez, an anthropology lecturer at Northwestern, is another.
Russel y Rodriguez, whose specializes in Latino studies and lived in Evanston before moving to Wilmette, said Latinos come to Evanston for different reasons.
“Are we talking about professors, working-class folks or recent immigrants?” she said. “The experience of nannies I know is going to be very different than the professors that I know.”
Still, Evanston’s restaurants and fast-food establishments provide many Latino residents with jobs, said Fortino Leon, president of Organizacion Latina de Evanston, a community group also known as OLE. Others work in local offices or commute to factories in other locations.
“Evanston is still a better place to live than Chicago,” Leon said. “We want to get away from gangs and drug dealing. Evanston has given us a hand and we feel very confident that we can make a better living.”
Need for leadership
One way that Evanston lends that hand is Canchola’s Latino Services Office. The office is a resource center for Evanston Latinos who may not be familiar with city services. She organized a community leadership class in 2002 which culminated in the formation of OLE.
But maintaining the organization has been tough, Canchola said. Despite being made up of dedicated members, many of them just don’t have time for the organization. And it’s difficult to recruit new members.
“People see me as (a leader), but I have to try and explain to them that I’m more of a resource,” she said.
Another problem with community organization is Latinos’ constant movement in and out of Evanston. High property taxes drive some Latinos away, Casdro said.
“You don’t have a lot of opportunity to know the person or to create a community because they move after a certain time,” he said.
But the city has helped the Latino community in other ways.
Evanston recognizes ID cards, called Matricula cards, issued by Mexican consulates to illegal immigrants as an official form of identification. The IDs, which Evanston began recognizing last summer, can be used when opening bank accounts and obtaining driver’s licenses.
“Some of the issues have been taken care of by the city really well, like when they accepted the Matricula,” said 40-year-old Evanston resident Jesus Cordova.
Latinos in Evanston — and in the rest of the country — hail from a wide array of Latin American countries. And with many of those Latinos coming from different economic and social backgrounds as well, Russel y Rodriguez said it’s important not to make generalizations.
“I feel there is a desire to see Latinos as an entirely congealed group that acts in the same way,” she said. “I see this in a lot of different ways, like advertising and TV programs, in which Latinidad is represented as a unified, undifferentiated cultural experience. It’s convenient, but it’s inaccurate.”
Reach Mike Cherney at [email protected].
