The Engine Of Change

"You know when you see a place, and you feel you belong there?" Polanco asks.

On her say-so, the entire clan picked up and moved. Her twin sons graduated from the high school and now are in college.

"Now I feel as if I am in the Dominican Republic," she says. "When I visit there, people say, 'Are you going to move back here?' I say, 'No, I'm happy in Reading.' "

Forging Change

Postindustrial, post-outlet Reading is the kind of place like Buffalo, or Flint, Mich., where sincere, tireless, true-believing civic missionaries undertake second careers trying to forge hometown destiny in a labor every bit as dramatic as that of their ancestors smelting steel from iron.

Up in his office on the second floor of city hall -- a repurposed stone edifice that used to be a boys school -- Reading Mayor Tom McMahon is one of those. He's a retired engineer who came to Reading in the 1960s. Framed on the wall is a caricature of the mayor: bespectacled, with the slogan "Naysayers Begone!"

He thinks Obama, with his cross-racial appeal, sets an example for him. The mayor's challenge is to govern a city where half the population cherishes Reading as a memory that has little meaning for the other half of the population.

"Reading has been going through some real assimilation problems," he says. "We have such cultural differences now. It is a threat to a whole lot of people. It is an opportunity to a whole lot of other people."

Only one of the seven city council members is Hispanic. Counting the city school board and the county commissioners, the majority of the city's population is almost completely absent from the elected power structure. The police department has 14 Latinos on a force of 206 sworn officers.

The disparities have led to lawsuits over lack of police diversity, over lack of bilingual elections assistance. In each case, federal judges made sure Reading or surrounding Berks County addressed the issue.

Now most official communication, including the message on the mayor's office answering machine, is available in Spanish, to the annoyance of some, such as Mark C. Scott, 56, one of two Republicans among the three county commissioners.

"I voted against publishing the ballots in Spanish," he says.

Scott -- a loquacious, law school-educated part-time farmer who hatches trout and bottles a condiment he calls Commissioner Scott's Berks County Ketchup -- says Latinos are being led to abandon the old-fashioned values of people such as his own German-immigrant grandfather. "I maintain that all the well-intentioned hand-holding we do for Latinos and other groups is in a perverse way holding them back," he says.