Melting Point

Shades of Tolerance

Outside the courthouse, a more complicated question than guilt or innocence lingers: Does all of this say something larger, darker, about Shenandoah -- and, by extension, the rest of us?

The soul of an immigrant town is examined, debated, prayed over in a hundred locations within the intimate square mile, from Mrs. T's Pierogies at one end to the crime scene and the football stadium at the other.

"I don't think very many people say there is no prejudice here," says Mindy Heppe, pastor of the historically German St. John's Evangelical Lutheran Church. "On the other hand, I don't think you can call it a polarized community. I think you could say there are parallel communities with very little overlap." She is leading an effort to have everyone make a flag expressing unity.

"These kids are not bad kids," says Joe Sobinsky, a bus driver at the high school. "They're normal coal region kids. They got in a fight and people got hurt." Sobinsky tells the Latino kids on his bus not to speak Spanish because non-Latinos think they're talking about them. Once a Latino sophomore told him, "You're picking on me because I'm brown!" Sobinsky pointed to the Polish Italian olive hue of his own skin and said: "Before you got here I was the brownest. So you got two shades on me -- now get back in line!"

Sobinsky offers Shenandoah's highest praise to that parallel community: "The Mexicans are the hardest-working people I've ever seen in my life. They're from an old country. That's how our grandparents were." The same themes are discussed inside the parallel community -- on front porches where families relax and chat in Spanish, at the Spanish Mass where they pray for tolerance, in the handful of Latino businesses that have opened among the empty storefronts.

Different conclusions are reached. Yet the feelings about Shenandoah are complicated.

"Most of the young people cause problems for Hispanics," Jorge Perez, owner of La Guadalupana market, says in Spanish. "They don't get along with us."

He has lived in Shenandoah for two decades. "There are people who criticize you for coming from another country," he says. "Sometimes you don't want to argue with them. . . . They want to provoke us to go from Shenandoah."

He keeps a collection box on the counter to raise funds for the family of the man he knew as El Caballo. Ramirez's swollen face in his hospital bed fills the cover of a Spanish-language newspaper on a shelf.

"The community is a little intimidated," Perez says. "You're afraid it might happen to you."

"If these kids go to jail, everything will be okay," says Felix Bermejo, a Puerto Rican attending church services in Spanish, in the tradition of local churches that used to celebrate in German, Polish and Italian. "If they don't go to jail, or they get out in six months or a year, there's going to be a lot of trouble."

The Latinos are shocked that the events of July 12 passed so far beyond the frequent hurtful words and suspicious looks. Lethal violence is not part of the Shenandoah they still appreciate, on some level.

"Thank God, and this country, we have the little we do have," says Perez, who recently wired $600 to his family in Mexico to buy seeds for their farm. "There are Americans who are very special and very good" in Shenandoah.

But to survive in Shenandoah, the Latinos learn to take precautions. They avoid appearing on Main Street after dark. The strip is the province of non-Latino teens and 20-somethings who loiter in large groups outside the pizza restaurants. It's sometimes referred to as the "jock block."

Unlike the out-of-town Latino activists, the Latinos of Shenandoah are not the demonstrating kind. They settle for invisibility, except on Heritage Day.

"When things happen, you keep quiet," Perez says.

Fragile Roots

The Blue Devils lost their first game, 19-6, last Friday night.

The names in the huddle (Semanchik, Whalen, Polosky, Sadja, Amberlavage) conjure the same old countries as the names on the Miners Memorial at the top of Main Street and the names on the tombstones dug into the bluff overlooking the town.

The generations came, and they worked and played and then they died -- and then for half a century after the coal business died, they stopped coming. Maybe Shenandoah forgot how to handle the truly new.

The Latinos haven't been here long enough to fill a burial ground yet, nor claim many spots on the football team. Their new roots are fragile, their identity in transition. Ramirez's body was sent back to his mother in Mexico -- with financial help from the Irish and Italian parishes in Shenandoah. His favorite white Michigan State baseball cap was placed on his head to cover the scars.

"I really thought it was so ironic when I saw this thing in the news, because I've always talked about Shenandoah as a model of the American melting pot," says poet Joseph Awad, whose Lebanese and Irish grandfathers worked in the mines, and who once was grand marshal of the Parade of Nations.

"Let's not say we're having a lovefest with one another," says Dennis Yezulinas, Lithuanian on his father's side, Irish on his mother's, sipping coffee on Main Street. He makes doors for a living. "We never did have a lovefest here in Shenandoah. It's people trying to get by, in a low-income blue-collar area, the best way they know how."