Maui a magnet for Hispanics
| • | Maui's immigrants striving to succeed |
By Christie Wilson
Neighbor Island Editor
"Misa Los Domingos En Espanol" reads a colorful banner tied to a chain-link fence at a busy Kahului intersection in front of Christ the King Church. "Sunday Mass in Spanish."
Eugene Tanner • The Honolulu Advertiser
An average of about 100 Hispanics attend the weekly services held noon Sundays at the Catholic church. At Maria Lanakila in Lahaina, the Sunday evening Spanish-language Mass draws twice that number.
Azucena Ortega, in the pink gown, goes through the traditional quinceanos ceremony for 15-year-old Mexican girls at Maui's Maria Lanakila Church surrounded by both her parents and godparents. See story.
The Rev. Bernardo Gatlin, who leads both services, was reassigned from East Los Angeles two months ago to serve Maui's burgeoning Hispanic community. "Father Barney" is the first Catholic priest exclusively devoted to ministering to Spanish-speaking parishioners on Maui.
"The Catholic Church sees that community is going to grow pretty fast, and they want to get some programs going to help the poor, the undocumented and, of course, to take care of their spiritual needs," Gatlin said.
The Catholic Church isn't alone in taking notice of the growth in Maui's Hispanic community over the past decade.
Evidence of the new Hispanic cultural influence on Maui can be found everywhere. More than a dozen Mexican restaurants have opened on the island in the recent years, all-Hispanic soccer teams compete in local leagues, and it's no more of a novelty to overhear Costco shoppers speaking Spanish than it is to hear Ilocano or Tagalog.
While students in the Department of Education's English as a Second Language program on Maui are predominantly Filipino, Spanish speakers rank second in number. The DOE reported that as of Feb. 28, there were 551 Ilocano students in the program and 127 Spanish-speaking pupils.
Norma Barroga, who runs the ESL program for the education department on Maui, said the big influx in Spanish-speaking students started two years ago.
Michael Gyori of Hui Malama Learning Center, Maui's literacy agency, said he has seen "incredible" growth in the island's Spanish-speaking population over the past 10 years.
With support from Maria Lanakila Catholic Church, Hui Malama started ESL classes in Lahaina about two years ago. Gyori said about half of those who enroll are Hispanic.
Statewide, the 2000 Census counted 87,050 Hispanics among Hawai'i's 1.21 million residents, an increase of 7.7 percent from 1990.
During the same 10-year period, Maui County's Hispanic community grew 29 percent. Hispanics now comprise 10,050 of the county's 128,094 residents, according to the census.
Those familiar with Hispanics here say the numbers do not accurately reflect the growth of this new immigrant community.
"In 1996, '97, I could honestly say I knew 90 percent of the Hispanics living on Maui. But now I know maybe 10 percent," said Cesar Gaxiola of Maui Economic Opportunity Inc., a nonprofit agency that serves as a clearinghouse for newly arrived Hispanics, while also providing a broad range of services to the island's elderly and low-income residents.
Gaxiola suspects many did not participate in the census because of the language barrier and because they prefer to avoid contact with the government.
Bad introduction
Most of Maui was introduced to the island's expanding Hispanic population by two well-publicized criminal cases. It was the kind of introduction Gaxiola and other Hispanic leaders have been working to overcome since.
The first occurred in September 1999, when two Mexicans were involved in a fatal collision that killed a Maui police officer at a road construction site in West Maui. Both men had fake immigration papers.
The next came less than a year later with Operation Power Ball, the code name for a massive drug enforcement operation that unleashed more than 200 federal, state and county officers across West Maui and knocked out two Lahaina-based drug rings.
The list of the 74 people indicted in the two cases included Hispanics and non-Hispanics, but because the three alleged ring leaders are Mexican, Gaxiola feels Hispanics were being stereotyped by others in the community.
The backlash led Gaxiola, Rudy Esquer and Francisco Palencia to form La Voz Hispana (The Hispanic Voice), an education and advocacy group.
"Primarily, La Voz Hispana was formed for community awareness and education that not every Hispanic that's here is a drug dealer or pineapple picker. A lot are mid- or upper echelon," said Esquer.
The group organized last September's "Somos Amigos" ("We Are Friends") street festival in Wailuku and arranges for speakers to educate Maui police officers about the cultural differences they may encounter when dealing with Hispanics.
Gaxiola estimates that 60 percent of Maui's new Hispanic population is from Mexico, about 20 percent is from Guatemala, 10 percent from South America and the rest from other Spanish-speaking countries.
The influx can be explained in one word: jobs.
Even with an improved economy on the West Coast, Maui became a magnet for Hispanic immigrants because the island's tourism industry was able to float above Hawai'i's economic slump of the '90s and there was a steady need for workers. With the competition for labor, most Maui employers pay well above the minimum wage of $5.25 an hour and offer full-time work and overtime.
Just-released state labor statistics for the year 2000 show 5,100 Hispanics in Maui's work force, but the actual number is thought to be bigger because of undocumented workers not included in the count.
"Even though the cost of living is too high, they find the offer of jobs is more open for them," said the Rev. Cirenio Barrera of Centro Cristiano Betel (Bethel Christian Center) in Honokowai.
Young families
Barrera's evangelical congregation has 140 members, and newly offered Wednesday services in Kihei are drawing 25 people a week.
Barrera, who has been on Maui six years, said most of his church members are young families from Mexico. He estimates that about 90 percent arrived on Maui just within the past two to three years.
"Most of my people are hard workers. They're really getting ahead in their lives being on Maui. Some of them are buying property somehow, and they're saving money.
"I don't have people on food stamps," he said proudly. "They all work and look out for their own."
Besides feeding Maui's need for workers, Hispanics are having an impact on the local economy, both as business owners and consumers.
Gaxiola said a recent Maui Economic Opportunity microenterprise program conducted in Spanish attracted 30 participants. Out of that class, 20 are now running their own small businesses. He said he knows of at least 20 other Hispanic-owned businesses ranging from condo cleaners, drywall contractors and landscapers to entertainers and Web page designers.
On the consumer level, Latino tastes are showing up on local store shelves, and companies are going after Hispanic dollars.
As part of a national strategy, the Maui office of Irwin Mortgage hired a Spanish-speaking loan processor and advertises in the Christ the King Church bulletin. The company also was a sponsor of the "Somos Amigos" festival.
Irwin's Maui representative, Rose Kirland, said that after helping a Hispanic couple purchase a home, she was able to form a network with Spanish-speaking realtors.
Although they make up a small part of Kirland's clients — 10 mortgages in the past year — she is confident the outreach will pay off as the community becomes more established and affluent.
Long history in Islands
With attention being focused on the new arrivals, Hispanics are quick to point out they have a long history in the Islands.
In the 1830s, King Kamehameha III imported three vaqueros from California to teach local ranch hands herding and other cowboy ways. The word "paniolo" is believed to be a derivative of either "espanol" or "panuelo," for the neckerchiefs worn by the Spanish cowboys.
Puerto Ricans arrived in large numbers during the 1900s to work on sugar plantations, and still account for the single largest group of Hispanics in Hawai'i. In the 1930s, as World War II loomed, Mexicans were brought in to harvest and pack pineapple. More came for construction work during the 1960s tourism boom.
With a shortage of agricultural workers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, pineapple companies on Maui and Moloka'i made arrangements to hire contract laborers, mostly Mexicans from Arizona and California.
While men worked in the fields, several hundred Mexican women were employed at Maui Pineapple Co.'s Kahului cannery.
Like the immigrants who worked in the pineapple fields before them, Hispanics have moved on to hotel jobs and other opportunities, forcing Maui Pine to find new contract laborers from Micronesia.
Gaxiola estimates that now only about 10 percent of the Hispanics living on Maui are involved in agricultural work, either with big companies or small farms in Upcountry Maui.
Gaxiola himself came to Hawai'i in 1989 as a contract farm worker, harvesting tomatoes, macadamia nuts and coffee on the Big Island. When he moved to Maui a year later to work for Wailuku Agribusiness and then Maui Pine, he came into contact with Maui Economic Opportunity's migrant farm worker program.
He took English classes, earned his high school equivalency diploma, and enrolled in English and computer classes at Maui Community College. He eventually joined the Maui Economic Opportunity staff, helping Hispanics with job training, parenting and life skills classes, and other services.
Gaxiola said the American dream is coming true for most of the new arrivals, who invariably are described as hard workers. A small number are distracted by alcohol or drugs, he said.
"Everybody comes with the idea of making a nest egg and returning home. But as years go by, you see people with new trucks, they have car payments, and few are going home," Gaxiola said.
Plentiful jobs
Most of those who have arrived in the past few years already have relatives on Maui. Others learn about Hawai'i from acquaintances who came here and returned home with stories of plentiful jobs and good pay.
Rudy Esquer, a third-generation Mexican-American who works for the county Department of Housing and Human Concerns, believes a "significant" number of Hispanics on Maui are undocumented.
"That's why few are in the public welfare system," he said.
During the first five years of the 1990s, "Hawai'i was an open gate," Esquer said. "If you had an airline ticket to Hawai'i, you were home-free. Word got out real fast and the jobs were plentiful."
The flow of Hispanic immigrants has remained steady, he said.
The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service does not have offices on the Neighbor Islands, and Deputy District Director Wayne Wills said his agency has not received a lot of information from local police or other sources to indicate a large number of undocumented Hispanics.
In the past five years, the INS detained 123 individuals on Maui who were determined to be in the country illegally, according to Wills. Of that number, 92 were Hispanic, he said.
Although employers are required to check an employee's immigration status, Wills said many illegal workers are able to obtain fraudulent documents. A state identification card, Social Security card and resident alien card can be purchased for $50 from street vendors in Los Angeles, he said.
One Maui restaurant official who did not want to be identified acknowledged that there are more Canadians and Europeans working illegally on Maui than Hispanics, but because they are white, few are questioned about their status.
"Four or five years ago, anybody who had a Hispanic accent, people automatically assumed they were illegal. That's really the crime of all this. The rest of the community does racial profiling," he said.
Although they share a common language and a desire to work, the Hispanic community on Maui has segregated itself into close-knit groups based on country of origin.
In general, the large Mexican population lives in Lahaina and is employed in the hotel and restaurant trade, Gaxiola said. South Americans, who generally are better-educated and include engineers and other professionals, have claimed Kihei, while Guatemalans, many of whom work in landscaping, congregate in Kahului and Wailuku, he said.
So while their cultural influence is growing as they become more comfortable in their new home and more visible, Hispanics, who make up nearly 8 percent of the population in Maui County, have yet to find a political voice.
Esquer said it will take a charismatic spokesman, a Cesar Chavez-type figure, before that can happen.
