Filling A Faraway Niche

Even in Maine, Latinos' Future Affects Economy

Elsa Ortiz, 39, from Mexico, works at the Cherry Point Products sea-cucumber processing plant. (Photos By David Fahrenthold -- The Washington Post)

MILBRIDGE, Maine -- The little round fruit that's scooped up with rakes. The hulking, knobby-kneed animal that wanders onto the road at night. The slimy sea creature, slick as an eel, that's cut open and scraped out for $1.75 per pound of meat.

These are three touchstones of life for Spanish-speaking immigrants in this seaside town, and an illustration of how new their life here really is. All three are things that they simply didn't have words for back home.

Now, it's la blueberry , e l moose . The third one has a difficult name even in English -- "sea cucumber" -- so the workers who slice them up say pepinos , "cucumbers."

" Muy raro ," said Victor Flores, 28, remembering the first time he saw one. Very unusual.

That goes for a lot of things now in Down East Maine, the jagged, lightly populated coast that helps make up America's northeast corner. It has a population of several hundred Mexicans and Central Americans, a sign that the demographic wave of Hispanic immigration, and the debate over what to do about it, now matter in even the most remote corners of the country.

"All of a sudden you have a new language and a new culture coming in," said Anais Tomezsko, who heads an organization that helps Latino immigrants living near the town of Milbridge, population about 1,300. "That's something that hasn't happened here since basically the English came."

The influence of the new Hispanic residents has been felt especially keenly here in the past few weeks, as Congress has weighed changes in immigration policy. Tomezsko has been trying to organize a group to attend a pro-immigration rally in Portland, Maine, later this month. Local Hispanic residents have been pressing officials for more details about proposals that would ease the path to legal-resident status.

And local employers have watched the same debate with great concern, fearing that the same industries that seemed so foreign to immigrants a few years ago -- from blueberries to sea cucumbers to el brocal -- might collapse without them.

As in other parts of the country, it's difficult to say exactly how much this area now relies on undocumented workers. Juan A. Perez-Febles, a monitor advocate with the Maine Department of Labor, said that perhaps about half of the Down East area's several hundred Hispanic immigrants may be undocumented, an estimate he said was based on national figures. He said many of these work for smaller agricultural operations.

"They're about like migratory birds. I mean, we don't have to do much and they show up every year," said Ed Flanagan, president of Jasper Wyman and Son, a berry harvester. He said his workforce, now at least 75 percent Hispanic, must present papers to prove they are in the country legally.

Down East is newly attuned to the issue of immigration because of a trend that has transformed rural areas outside traditional immigrant destinations in the South and West. Since 1980, a U.S. Department of Agriculture study found, the number of Hispanics living in "non-metro" places -- in all, about 80 percent of the country's land area -- has doubled.

"Now, in that 80 percent, that non-metro portion of the country, they're everywhere," said William Kandel, a USDA sociologist. "And the completion of that expansion really happened in the last 10, 15 years."