Emporia ? “Ya soy un adulto,” Roberta Shafer says, writing down her words for her first-grade class. “En mi familia tengo un esposo, un hijo, una hija y una mascota que se llama Bubba.”

Welcome to Riverside Elementary School, where 76 percent of the school’s nearly 400 students are Hispanic – most of them immigrants who speak only Spanish.

Nobody knows, however, how many are illegal immigrants.

“We don’t ask,” says Emporia Schools Supt. John Heim, a refrain repeated by officials across the city.

Riverside might be the front line of Emporia’s struggle to adapt to an explosion of immigration over the last decade, as workers are attracted by meatpacking and other jobs. It’s a struggle that has mostly played out quietly – until a national furor over illegal immigration sparked an April 10 protest by as many as 1,500 of the city’s Latino residents, who marched across the city for three hours.

“We hadn’t seen anything like it,” said Mike Heffron, the city’s police chief.

Maria Landeros, who came to Emporia from Mexico more than 30 years ago, helped organize the march, and also last Monday’s follow-up demonstration at the Lyon County Fairgrounds.

“It’s time for people to hear us, and know we’re here,” said Landeros, who owns an import business in downtown Emporia. “We’re a big part of the United States.”

The growth

Emporia, a town of nearly 27,000 people an hour down the Turnpike from Lawrence, is no stranger to immigration. During the early part of the last century, Mexican immigrants flocked here to work on the railroad – settling in the southern part of the city known as “La Colonia.”

Those immigrants struggled to be treated equally, said Phil Solis, a 65-year-old Emporia resident whose grandfather, Gil, came to Emporia in 1910.

“As a youngster it was hard to go uptown,” he said. “They dispersed you if you were in groups.”

By 1990, though, immigrants and their descendants were a relatively small portion of Emporia’s population. Hispanics made up just under 8 percent of city residents; foreign-born residents were less than 5 percent.

Then everything changed.

Drawn by jobs at the IBP – now Tyson – meatpacking plant, as well as other work in manufacturing and construction, the immigrant population exploded during the 1990s. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of foreign-born residents grew from 1,153 to 4,185 during the decade.

The growth only slowly dawned on city leaders.

“I don’t know that there was an epiphany of any kind,” said Steve Commons, the city manager.

Many people believe the Census undercounted, perhaps because illegal immigrants were avoiding the numbers-takers. They point to school district enrollment as proof; 43 percent of Emporia public school students are Hispanic this year, up from 7.7 percent in 1989.

“If you look at the Census numbers and the school district, there’s a disparity,” said Chief Heffron, who formerly served on the Emporia School Board. “The school district is accurate. The Census obviously is not.”

Not asking

The assumption in Emporia is that many, if not most, of the newcomers are here illegally.

“They walk in and report a crime,” Heffron said, “and we’re not going to ask if they’re legal or illegal.”

Indeed, asking might not get you far – no one wants to risk admitting their status publicly and risking deportation.

One speaker at Monday’s “A Day Without Immigrants” rally was Marcos Gordillo, a freshman at Emporia State University, who addressed the crowd in Spanish.

He said many illegal immigrants give false Social Security numbers to their employers, without penalty.

“The government accepts it,” he told the crowd. “You know why? So they can have the money.”

Offstage, he declined to answer a Journal-World question about whether he had entered the country legally or illegally. Gordillo did say, however, that he was a recipient of the state’s immigrant tuition waiver that has been the subject of debate and lawsuits.

Officials with the Tyson beef plant, which employs 2,200 people, acknowledge that more than half their workers are Hispanic, earning between $11.10 and $14.79 an hour in production jobs – and up to $17.20 an hour for maintenance work. They say they use the most rigorous federal programs to screen out undocumented workers.

But Tyson says government screening efforts are not 100-percent effective.

“We have zero tolerance for employing people who are not authorized to work in the U.S.,” said Gary Mickelson, a spokesman at Tyson’s corporate headquarters in Arkansas. “We also realize the tools we’re provided have limitations, limitations that do not help us, for example, in cases of identity fraud.”

A spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said he was unaware of any employment violations by the Tyson plant in Emporia. That didn’t surprise Heffron, who said federal officials usually can’t be bothered to deport illegal immigrants his officers arrest for petty crimes.

The federal government “is so overwhelmed,” Heffron said. “They’re not likely to come here.”

Challenges

Heffron said the large number of illegal immigrants makes it hard to track crime in the community.

Emporia’s crime numbers have remained static, he said, but probably because most immigrant-on-immigrant crimes go unreported. Crime victims won’t risk deportation to get justice.

And there are cultural problems. The department has three bilingual members, he said, none of them street officers. Recruitment of such officers is difficult.

“We’re not trusted,” Heffron said. “The police in Mexico and Central America aren’t trusted, so when they come here, we aren’t trusted.”

The Emporia school district also has had problems hiring Latino and Spanish-speaking teachers. Bilingual teachers can make an extra $1,200 a year, but Riverside still has only five dual-language instructors – they lead a portion of the school’s students in a curriculum that teaches Spanish literacy before moving on to English.

“Bilingual teachers are at a real premium; finding bilingual teachers that want to move to Emporia is not always easy,” said Heim, the superintendent. “We’d also like to employ more Latino teachers, but they just aren’t available.”

The school district, in fact, has taken the lead in helping immigrant families find their bearings in Emporia. The district has two workers who identify new families and help them find services and other help they need.

“I don’t ask if they’re legal or illegal,” said Armida Martinez, the district’s migrant recruiter.

Changing community

That help, though, gets under the skin of Amanda Logsdon. The 28-year-old Emporia woman organized last Monday’s counter-demonstration, calling for tougher immigration enforcement law.

“Seeing our tax dollars go to welfare and health care (for immigrants) is upsetting,” said Logsdon, who has lived in Emporia since 1983. “I feel this country’s being taken advantage of.”

Her opposition to illegal immigration goes beyond dollars and cents, though. She doesn’t like that the local newspaper publishes a Spanish-language weekly, that she can hear Spanish-language advertisements on a local country radio station, and fears she might one day have to know a second language “to buy a loaf of bread.”

“It’s upsetting to be walking in Wal-Mart and hear today’s specials in English and Spanish,” she said.

And though at least one of her fellow demonstrators on Monday walked around with a placard that used a racial slur to describe Mexicans, Logsdon said her frustrations are “absolutely not racist.”

Landeros, who came to the United States as a 10-year-old – legally, she says – is unapologetic about continuing to speak Spanish. During Monday’s demonstration, she made announcements in that language, and repeatedly lead chants of “Si se puede!”

“I’m am an American and I’m proud of being an American, but I still have all my heritage,” she said. “I still do everything the Mexican way. But people shouldn’t be offended, because there’s lots of Americans who like to … do Mexican dinners at home. We don’t get offended by that.”

‘We’re trying’

On Tuesday, 73-year-old Jose Gallegos walked into a downtown restaurant, turned down the volume on a television, then began playing Mexican ballads.

His daughter, Rosa Aranda, said the musician was visiting from the Zacatecas region of Mexico, and would return at the end of a six-month visit.

Gallegos is rare; most of the new residents are here for the long-term.

Emporia is changing to meet the needs of the city’s immigrant community. There are 10 churches that offer Spanish-language services – St. Catherine’s Catholic Church constructed a new building in recent years, but still has standing-room-only services – and several downtown businesses have signs entirely in Spanish, while others have bilingual salespeople.

“It’s a growing market, a growing opportunity,” said Chris Walker, editor and publisher of The Emporia Gazette. His paper publishes Fronteras, a free Spanish-language weekly newspaper reminiscent of its south-of-the-border tabloid cousins.

The demonstrations of recent weeks, though, may have tested the community’s tolerance for diversity.

“If we have another march, or another rally, in a few weeks, I think you’ll hear people asking what all this is for,” said Commons, the city manager.

But Heim, the superintendent, says he sees benefits to the city’s unexpected diversity.

“I look at my kids and the experience that they’re getting in school. The experience they’re getting is a view of what the world looks like, what our country is like,” he said. “Emporia, Kansas, looks like California and Texas. … I think my kids are going to have the advantage of working with other students from different places in the world, and I think that’s going to make them better people.”

And Emporia’s immigrants say that if they don’t want to exactly melt in, like the model of 100 years ago, they do want to become American.

Rosa Aranda, who came to the United States 16 years ago, said making the transition to American culture was tough. Today, she works with newer immigrants as an employee of the Emporia school district.

“It was hard,” she said. “Hard with new language, new culture, no family of my own. I learned very early that I had to learn the language if I wanted to survive, to live.”

It’s a process she sees repeated every day in Emporia.

“I know,” she said, “that we’re trying.”