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n 55 CHAPTER 5 Community Reaction While some states are looking for ways to reduce the numbers of those arriving illegally, at the same time virtually all of them have offices dedicated to dealing with the newcomers already here, as do many communities. In North Carolina, for example, its Children’s Services Division works to educate social workers about “the growing number of Latinos [who] are calling North Carolina home.” It urges child welfare workers, rather than adding to the pressure of adaptation, to learn about their culture and “find out how they have traditionally solved problems.”1 Although many communities are striving to face the challenges, there is still more to be done, say leaders like Charles Short of the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, DC. He hopes that a planned—and long overdue—community center in Langley Park, Maryland, 65 percent of whose residents are Latino, will serve as a model for the rest of the country. A report issued by the National Conference for Community and Justice in the Lexington, Kentucky, area notes that “our businesses , government, faith communities and social service agencies have responded at first with denial, secondly with benign neglect and most recently by making small individual attempts to address the issues that confront us. In our opinion, 56 n Chapter Five we have been putting band-aids on a heart attack.” The report describes the abuses that immigrant workers have suffered, and calls out for more financial and legal support for a vulnerable workforce. “One very disturbing example was the story of the construction worker who died recently. We did not even know his name; we did not even know his name! The last time we exploited people for their labor, without knowing their names, we called it slavery,” say the authors.2 According to a report by a University of Tennessee researcher, the “volunteer state” has been slower to recognize its problems and how to confront them than have its neighboring states of Georgia and North Carolina, but “in the last several years, private institutions, local governments, and practitioners in the fields of health care, social work, and legal services have begun to take stock of the state’s changing demographics.”3 In my own city of Dayton, Ohio, information is available in Spanish on every conceivable topic. The division of housing inspection asks, “Are you infringing?” in its pamphlet on the twelve regulations concerning yards; the garbage collection department gives details on its services; the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel covers public utilities; Children’s Services offers information for its clients; the Red Cross lists equipment to have in case of a disaster; the State of Ohio’s Paternity Enhancement Program explains how to establish paternity; the IRS has notices in Spanish on how to claim reimbursement for Earned Income Credit; and there is information on how to get Medicare and other medical services. Such materials are available through churches, community centers, and at Mexican restaurants. It’s easy to obtain a Spanish language newspaper, like Midwest Latino, which is distributed in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Michigan; La Voz and El Mundo in Kentucky; Mundo Hispánico in Georgia; Mundo Hispano in Tennessee; La Noticia in the Carolinas; and many others. Dayton’s Latino Connection must have been one of the first on the scene to recognize and respond to the challenge. John Pawelski, a major force behind its establishment, describes how it came about: In March of 2001, I was working fulltime at the Dayton Police Department. We had a lot of contact with Latinos, and we realized that there was no place for anybody to go with problems. If a Latino came in and had proper documentation, visa, or whatever and said, “I went down to pay my water bill and nobody speaks Spanish there. What do I do?” there was no place to turn. If you called the Dayton Police Department, there was no organized system to get a translator. If they’d called and said, “I don’t speak any English, but I need the police,” generally you would send it out as domestic violence. You hear a bunch of stuff going on in the background, so I’m going to send two crews out and see what’s going on. But there was no system, there was no group in place. There were a lot of individuals Community Reaction n 57 who cared, but there was nothing—I couldn’t send anybody anywhere. Somebody needs a job...

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