Corazón de Dixie by Julie M. Weise

Author:Julie M. Weise [Weise, Julie M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781469624969
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2015-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five: Skyscrapers and Chicken Plants

Mexicans, Latinos, and Exurban Immigration Politics in Greater Charlotte, 1990–2012

To see a selection of original historical sources from this chapter, go to http://corazondedixie.org/chapter-5 (http://dx.doi.org/10.7264/N3X928K4).

Like so many school classes captured by photographers in Charlotte, North Carolina, during the 1970s–90s, the 1994 Berryhill Elementary School kindergarten included eleven black and twelve white students smiling at the camera or looking askance (fig. 31). In a country where the racial integration of schools has rarely been achieved even after the fall of legal segregation, the photograph commemorated not just its subjects’ first year of schooling but also Charlotte’s role as a national leader in a social and political experiment: using two-way busing to achieve meaningful school desegregation. In 1965, Charlotte black parents filed a lawsuit, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, which eventually reached the Supreme Court. There, in 1971, it drew a landmark ruling that told school districts around the country they must achieve racial balance in public schools even if that meant putting both white and black kids on buses to faraway neighborhoods. The controversy brought anti-busing white parents’ groups into conflict not only with black and white liberals but also with a mostly white business elite that eschewed open racial conflict, preferring the “Charlotte Way” of closed negotiation to preserve racial peace. The Charlotte Way and its liberal allies triumphed, defeating anti-busing boycotts and successfully integrating the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools. Proud businesspeople, civic boosters, and ordinary citizens celebrated the achievement as proof of their city’s racial progressivism and forward-looking ethos.1

To parents admiring the Berryhill class picture, the presence of kindergartener Eréndira Molina in the second row might have seemed a novel curiosity that did not fit into Charlotte’s usual two racial categories. Still, civic-minded Charlotteans could easily envision smiling Molina as a next logical step in the city’s journey from its southern past toward a more cosmopolitan future. There stood evidence that Charlotte’s booming economy was drawing ambitious new arrivals, in this case the California-born daughter of Mexican immigrants. Eréndira Molina’s mother, Laura, found steady work immediately on arrival in the Queen City in 1992, first as a maid, then as a machine operator, and eventually as a bank teller. She purchased a home within two years, something she had not achieved in her six years in the suburban barrios of Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. Young Eréndira completed her education in this increasingly diverse middle-ring suburb southwest of downtown, thriving in the racially progressive environment on which many of the city’s businessmen and citizens prided themselves.2

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