Faces of change, lessons for living in a small town

Wednesday, Sept. 20, 2006 | 7:24 a.m.

MESQUITE - Pete Wu remembers the days leading up to May 1, when immigration marches spread across the nation's cities.

"We didn't know what to expect," recalls Wu, vice president of customer service for CasaBlanca Resorts, owner of three of Mesquite's four hotel-casinos.

Mesquite's march, about 600 people strong, was as good a sign as any of the town's burgeoning Hispanic population.

Wu cleaned rooms that day. The march included 300 Hispanic employees, and the company's response was to have other employees pitch in.

But evidence of Mesquite's fast-growing Hispanic population, now estimated at 25 percent of the town's total population of 17,000, is everywhere - including the Oasis Hotel classroom where Wu is standing.

Miriam Flores drives more than an hour from Las Vegas every four weeks to teach at the Oasis. The class, on customer service, is in Spanish.

Standing before a group of 13 hotel employees ranging from fry cooks to landscapers, she reminds them of the hotel industry's time-honored chestnuts: smile and say "Good morning."

Aware of her audience, she also points out that the United States is not as "laid-back" as Latin America, and that 10 minutes can seem like a long wait for a missing bar of soap to arrive at a guest's room.

That sort of tidbit may be useful to workers such as Lorena Salgado, 20, who landed in Mesquite only five months ago, straight from Jalisco, Mexico.

Salgado's story was repeated by a few people in the class and at the town's less-than-a-handful-but-growing number of Hispanic businesses. She came because a family member, a brother-in-law, told her there was work. She hit the ground running, applying at a newly opened Wal-Mart and area hotels. She sent for her husband when she got a job as a prep cook in the kitchen of the CasaBlanca hotel-casino.

This scenario has been recurring for about a decade, observers say, but the cycle has accelerated in the last five years or so.

Signs of the quickened pace abound.

About three years ago Guadalajara Market, set in a mall a few miles down Mesquite Boulevard from the Oasis, expanded into a next-door storefront, opening up a taco shop.

A few months later the town's newspaper, the Desert Valley Times, began publishing a weekly Spanish-language insert called La Voz del Valle - Voice of the Valley.

Two years ago, an English-as-a-second-language class for adults began at the local middle school.

And in January, the Rev. Robert Puhlman, a new pastor at the area's only Catholic church - La Virgen de Guadalupe Church - took some Spanish lessons before hitting town. He also took a 10-week Hispanic culture and language course in San Antonio.

For good reason, it seems: half of his parishioners are Hispanic.

All along, as with other cities throughout the West, the main force pulling Hispanics to the small town along the Virgin River has been jobs.

Wu says about half of his company's 2,500 employees are Hispanic. Many live on the town's south side, with retirees and the more affluent in the north.

Of course, change - in this case, new faces and a foreign language - is never completely smooth for any community.

"Obviously, some resist," says Bob Challinor, a Desert Valley Times reporter.

He says a certain type of letter to the editor has become more frequent in recent years.

"One lady wrote in saying she 'missed the way things used to be, and now that everything's in Spanish, it's causing a civil war,' " Challinor says.

A Hispanic student from Virgin Valley High School answered the reader, offering the opinion that diversity is a good thing.

Challinor says Mesquite is definitely not the same place he moved to in 1994, when it was what he called "a white-bread Mormon town" of about 4,000.

Melesio Barrios, a fry cook at the CasaBlanca who attended Monday's class, has also seen those changes.

He came to town in 1997 after a family member said there was work, and he remembers taking an interpreter with him when he applied for a job.

"Now applications are in Spanish," Barrios says.

He also talks about change of another kind: "Before, the police used to bother you more if you were Hispanic. Now that doesn't happen so much."

During the last decade, Barrios says he has told about 10 family members and friends about work in Mesquite, thus contributing to the cycle driving the local Hispanic population.

One challenge facing recent arrivals is affordable housing.

Challinor says some hourly workers choose to live in nearby towns such as Scenic, Ariz., where housing is cheaper.

Others, such as recent arrival Salgado, double up in town. She, her husband and her daughter live with her brother-in-law's family - six people in a two-bedroom apartment.

She's looking forward to learning English and moving on to a better job and place to live.

She's also looking forward to having more of her family moving from Mexico to Mesquite some day.

"Then," she says, "I'll have someone I can visit with."