When Neal Kight looks at Siler City, he sees a turf war brewing beneath the sleepy Southern town’s quaint surface.
“Even in your religious communities you have turf war,” he said. “It’s just that everybody wants to do their own thing.”
Kight, a pastor at the Siler City Church of God who also works as a chaplain for the town’s police department, moved to the area six years ago when his church asked for help diversifying its congregation to incorporate the growing Latino population.
While Kight has found it easy to embrace Siler City’s Latino population, which according to the 2010 U.S. Census accounts for almost 50 percent of the town, he said the town’s different cultures aren’t mixing as well as they should.
For Orlando, an employee at Lazar Industries who has been working in Siler City for more than three years, assimilation has meant adopting American traditions like celebrating Fourth of July and Thanksgiving while also continuing to honor his Mexican heritage.
The hardest part of this transition has been adjusting to the small-town lifestyle in Siler City, where most of the businesses close their doors at 5 p.m.
“You know it’s like in the cartoons,” he said. “(Somebody asks) ‘What you doing?’ I’m watching the grass grow.”
Margarita Basilio, 23, works at a hair salon in town with a 90 percent Latino customer base and said that while the people in Siler City are nice, the town is home to very distinct, independent communities.
“Hispanic people don’t really like you looking at them and pointing them out, so they go to places where they are more comfortable,” she said.
Father Jim Fukes, the priest at the only Catholic Church in Chatham County, said whether it’s in the pews at St. Julia’s or on a downtown sidewalk, many of his parishioners, a majority of whom are Latino, avoid conversing with people in English.
“I’ve been kind of getting the sense that many people have a good amount of English that they can use, but they’re afraid to use it,” he said. “A big reason is because they don’t have the educational experience of dealing with failure and not being perfect in what they’re saying — the same goes for people learning to speak Spanish. We’re very reluctant to say something that’s not right.”
As one of the few non-Latinos at his church, Fukes said it has taken a good portion of his six years in town for him to get members of his congregation to open up to him, especially considering that he estimates as many as 95 percent of the church’s members are in the country illegally.
“People don’t discuss it out in the open; they’re just afraid of being caught,” he said. “They try to keep their identities secret as an illegal immigrant so in public places including here they don’t speak about it so openly unless you ask them.”
Considering Dr. James Schwankl’s recollection of some reactions to the influx of Latino immigrants in the late 1980s, the division that still exists isn’t too surprising.
“Some people didn’t like what was happening and didn’t want it to happen, so they would be obstructionist or really confrontational with some of the folks,” said Schwankl, who has served as one of the town’s main pediatricians since 1976.
Specifically, he remembers the drama the town experienced when David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, protested the growing Latino population in Siler City by holding a rally in town in 2002.
Though most agree that the rally could have been much worse, the building that Schwankl currently works out of was vandalized. The building, which is on Third Street, was then the location of St. Julia’s Catholic Church, and protestors took a baseball bat to the church’s sign and slashed the tires of the church van.
“I never thought that anything like this would ever come to town; it’s sad, it’s tragic, it’s unfortunate and it scares people,” Schwankl said. “When you think about the people who are motivated to act like that, it’s a difficult part of society to deal with. You kind of wonder what more is to come?”
Thankfully, Schwankl has seen the town’s resistance to change lessen in the last 10 years. His neighborhood, which used to be fairly uniform, has transformed into a diverse area where neighbors all come together to celebrate life. Schwankl said he has especially enjoyed the parties his Latino neighbors throw and has frequently attended quinceñeras and baptism ceremonies.
For those working to see Siler City’s residents work past their differences, Schwankl’s situation is something to work toward. Hernan Sedda is one of the key advocates for a united community.
Sedda moved to town less than two years ago and took a job as executive director of El VÍnculo Hispano, a nonprofit group that works to foster cultural understanding in Chatham County.
The organization offers five different programs that provide basic needs, gang prevention, programs for youth, income development help and assistance for crime victims. Through his work, Sedda said he looks beyond the community’s problems of division to see its opportunities.
“I have a great opportunity in this county to change the way people think,” he said. “I have found a beautiful person in Chatham County who wants and accepts help with the immigrants, and also I have found another kind of person. They don’t like the immigrants. They don’t want the immigrants.”
Whether this division is the result of an unfamiliar Southern culture, resentment over jobs, a language barrier, the ease of staying separate or some combination of these or other reasons, Kight is unsure. But he does know that for Siler City to move forward, something has to change.
“It will take a Martin Luther King out of each culture that is willing to step out beyond where they are and make the presentation and become involved,” Kight said. “We need the positive influence of somebody to be the rider on the white horse to come in and make that positive change.”