Roberto Zamora may be the face of Milbridge’s future.
Washington County has been losing population due to a high unemployment rate and bleak economic future, but Latino families like Zamora’s have been bucking the trend and moving into the area.
The August blueberry harvest used to be the only time of the year when the county experienced having a diverse population, as Latino workers from the Southern U.S., Canada, Mexico, Honduras, and El Salvador poured in at harvest time. But for the past few autumns, when the blueberry fields have been turning from blue to red, people like Zamora and his family have been staying.
Zamora is employed at a local factory that packages sea cucumbers and glass eels. While in the past, he has migrated back and forth between Florida and Michigan, he has now chosen to stay for the past five years in Milbridge because he feels it’s a safe place to raise his family.
“It’s more peaceful,” Zamora said in Spanish. “There aren’t racists here like there are in Florida,” he said, recalling how people would shout racial slurs at him in other states.
In the past decade, Milbridge and other Downeast communities have seen a rapid influx of year-round Latino residents. The most recent Milbridge census figures counted a year-round Latino population at 6.5 percent; Milbridge Town Manager Lewis Pinkham now pegs that percentage at closer to 14 percent.
Overall, some 100 families have settled into the town of 1,300, with other families settling in nearby communities like Cherryfield, Harrington, and Lubec. Milbridge’s demographic picture reflects current U.S. immigration and population trends, as Latino immigrants and residents account for about half of the nation’s population growth.
Many Latino families here came as migrant workers for the blueberry harvest, but were offered jobs from local seafood processing plants after the harvest was done. Drusilla Ray employs Zamora and more than 60 other people at Cherry Point Productions. It’s no coincidence that the majority of Latinos in Milbridge live in a trailer park that surrounds her factory; the vast majority of her workforce is made up of legal foreign workers from Latin America and Latino, American residents.
Ray said she couldn’t find enough locals willing to work at the difficult and sometimes unpleasant job of harvesting sea cucumbers. Instead, one year she asked some Latino blueberry harvesters to help her out; they, in turn, recruited others.
“They were friends of the people I had working for me,” she said. “It was just easy.”
For a while, Ray supplemented her workforce using a foreign guest-worker visa program known as H2B, but for the past two years she has opted out of that program. A political wrangle over the program created a visa bottleneck, making the guest-worker program unreliable for many employers. Besides, Ray has been able to find enough year-round labor from the Latino population.
Other seafood processing plants have hired Latino workers as well. Latinos also have moved into area seasonal jobs like wreath-making or have found work in construction, said Jorge Acero, a foreign labor specialist at the Maine Department of Labor.
“That’s kind of encouraged the people to hang in there” year-round, said Acero.
Finding bilingual speakers
But the Latino influx took many in Milbridge by surprise and created some logistical problems, especially at the local elementary school. Five years ago, School Administrative District 37, which includes Milbridge’s elementary school, had one ESL coordinator for the entire school system, said the system’s superintendent, David Beal. Now they have more ESL staff, but Beal said it’s not enough.
“It is difficult to find qualified people,” he said.
Thanks to the Latino influx, there are plenty of bilingual speakers who can help in the classroom, but they don’t have the certification qualifications required by the state, said Beal. And the state’s not helping enough to pay for the increased schooling costs, said town manager Lewis Pinkham.
“The state is constantly cutting back,” Pinkham said. “It’s actually gotten worse and worse.”
The elementary school was also where social tensions first erupted in a series of race-provoked incidents at the elementary school several years ago. Pinkham and other community leaders quickly took action. They organized three days of diversity workshops at the elementary schools and organized potlucks and community meetings to create dialogues between white and Latino community members.
One of the results of the meetings was the creation of an outreach organization called Mano en Mano to help bridge the gap between newer and older Milbridge residents.
Mano en Mano’s goal is to help Latino residents accelerate the process of integrating into the community by offering afterschool ESL instruction, health care outreach, and English language classes, said program director Anais Tomezsko. At the same time, Mano en Mano offers forums, classes and events for other Milbridge residents to learn Spanish and about Latino culture.
Tomezsko and Pinkham said most business and community leaders now have realized that the Latino influx is more of an opportunity than a problem. The majority of new Latino residents are under 40, which could counter the economic hardships of the graying of Washington County. New Latino students have slowed the steadily-declining enrollment at local schools and Latino businesses are now generating both money and jobs.
“They’re revitalizing these communities,” said Tomezsko.
Intermarriage is becoming more common among whites and Latinos and some Latino families have stayed long enough that their children have fully integrated linguistically and culturally, said Tomezsko.
She pointed to the Vazquez family in town. The father and mother work in seafood processing and are more comfortable speaking Spanish than English, but their two older daughters are bilingual; one has trained to be a certified nurse assistant, while the other attends high school, works at Mano en Mano as a much-needed assistant instructor, and hopes to become a beautician.
Businesses learn to say hello
Many local businesses have learned to welcome Latino residents because of the money they bring into the Washington County economy.
Alexandra Orcutt helped organize a Spanish language crash course two years ago for the Bar Harbor Bank and Trust branch in Milbridge, where she works as teller. A native of Germany, Orcutt said she understood the fear and uncertainty that comes with a language barrier, and she didn’t like how unfriendly bank transactions used to feel between English-only speakers and Spanish-only speakers.
“Before it was a very silent transaction,” she said. Sometimes adults had their children translate.
Through instruction from Mano en Mano, Orcutt and others learned rudimentary Spanish phrases, both greetings and bank transactions. Now, tellers keep these phrases on a cheat sheet nearby on their desks. A bilingual employee who works in a different department is usually brought in for more in-depth business transactions. But even a few Spanish words can make all the difference for Latino customers, Orcutt said. She recommends that everyone should try to learn some Spanish.
“Just a simple ‘hello, how are you?” she said. “I think it would be in anyone’s interest from the business perspective.”
But the Latino migration to Milbridge is not without its growing pains, and it does highlight an economic paradox, said Tomezsko. There are parts of Washington County with unemployment rates as high as 16 percent, four times the national average, yet there are seemingly enough jobs to employ a new Latino workforce.
“It begs a lot of questions,” Tomezsko said.
While a formal study hasn’t been conducted on the situation, Acero, of the state’s Department of Labor, said the paradox stems from both the seasonality and the physical demands of the jobs available in Washington County. Many non-Latino locals rely on state benefit programs like Mainecare, which often establish eligibility by a monthly income cutoff level. (Mainecare also can judge by year-end tax receipts, as well.) Washington County residents don’t want to jeopardize their benefits by working too much at seasonal jobs like blueberry raking or wreath harvesting, Acero said.
Meanwhile, local employers anecdotally tell Acero that they prefer Latino laborers because they are reliable and willing to work hard at hard jobs.
But such an economic situation may bring trouble as the outlook for the U.S. economy worsens. “Everybody is fighting for jobs,” Pinkham said. “There will be people that feel this group is taking jobs away.”
But there is no sign that most Latinos in the area are planning to move anytime soon. Some, like the Vazquez family, are becoming homeowners in Milbridge. And their resourcefulness and economic clout may be what helps Washington County survive the current economic storm.
“The most diverse ecosystems are the more healthy ones,” Tomezsko said.