Emerging Community
Latinos in black enclave seek a sense of community.

  Photos by Irina Bourova

Latinos, Bayview Hunters Point's fastest growing community, are visible almost everywhere in the neighborhood. Crowds gather for Sunday soccer games in the community's parks. The neighborhood grocery store, Super Save, boasts a large selection of "nuevos productos en su tienda favorita" (a new selection of Latino products "in your favorite store") on a sign in its parking lot. Taquerias now rival barbeque and Chinese food as the cuisine of choice for community residents. Strong visibility on the streets and in the stores, however, hasn't translated to a strong presence in community. While other racial and ethnic groups left Bayview Hunters Point, according to the last census, Latinos more than doubled from 2,466 in 1990 to 5,212 in 2000, and now make up nearly one-sixth of the neighborhood's population. However, community services have been slow to keep up with the Latino explosion in a neighborhood that has been plagued by environmental hazards, unemployment and violence.  "What happened was that the increase in Latinos coincided with the close of the Army Street Projects (Army and Harrison's Bernal Housing); they were moved out to the Alice Griffith Projects," says Southeast Health Center Director Dr. Dierdre Epps-Miller. "In the last couple years, there has also been a large migration from the Mission due to yuppiefication," she adds. "This is the last family neighborhood in San Francisco."

Arnulfo Barrera is with the Latino Center for Alcoholics Anonymous.

Others come straight from Latin American countries to find that the famous "La Mission," the traditional Mecca for Latino immigrants, is no
longer an option.

There is only one service center in the neighborhood that focuses exclusively on Latino issues, Grupo Crea, an Alcoholics Anonymous group. However, the group concentrates on rehabilitating Spanish speakers, mostly men, who come from all over San Francisco and is not active in outreach or advocacy in Bayview Hunters Point issues.

Across the street at the Bayview Hunters Point Health and Environmental Resource Center, pamphlets titled "Asma: pueda respirar mas
facilmente" (Asthma: you can breathe easier) sit among others providing the same information in English. The pamphlets are all the center has to reach out to the Latino community since the group's only Spanish-speaking worker left.

Health educator Ann Togia says the center sees maybe one or two Latinos who drop in once in a while, and that she and her coworkers speak with English-speaking Latino children when the group does school visits, but it's not the same. "Having a person that they can identify with works
a lot better," she says. "People feel comfortable identifying with or looking at a person of their own culture - there's a lot that's lost in translation."

One-third of Bayview Hunters Point's 977 Latino households suffer from linguistic isolation, according to the 2000 Census. Residents in the isolated households checked boxes saying they spoke English either not well or not at all. Linguistically isolated individuals total more than a
quarter of the area's Latino population.

About 15 percent of Bayview Hunters Point Latino children are linguistically isolated, half the San Francisco Unified School District average,
where 30 percent of students are classified as "English-language learners."

SFUSD Executive Director of Multilingual Programs Mary Ellen Gallegos says all schools in the district have at least one teacher trained in multilingual education. The teachers are trained in language, culture and second-language acquisition teaching techniques.

Gallegos says it typically takes five to six years for a student to transition from English-learning courses to the regular curriculum, and it can be difficult to teach to kids who arrive in their teens. "We have such a short time to work with them," she says, "so we try to provide them with additional help or hold onto them longer, but many just leave."

Thirty percent of Latino adults in the community don't have a high school diploma; many don't because they were forced to enter the labor force young. Others arrived in the states too old and were discouraged by the education they were getting in a language they couldn't understand.

Unlike the Mission, where English is often the second language, Bayview Hunters Point is still very much a one-language neighborhood. But that's changing as well. While many Latinos commute from the area to other parts of the city for jobs, others come into the neighborhood to work at one of the many auto repair shops, construction businesses or industrial sites. Lucia Villa is an example of the new Bayview Hunters Point workforce. The 19- year-old from Mexico City commutes from the Mission District, an area saturated with taquerias, to work at El Azteca Taqueria. That presence and its buying power are reflected on Third Street. El Azteca is one of two taquerias to open in Bayview Hunters Point in the last three years. It replaced a soul food establishment. The other, Taqueria El Norteno, replaced a neighborhood café. St. Paul of the Shipwreck, one of three Catholic churches in the neigh-borhood, began holding Spanish-language mass on Sunday mornings three years ago. And Super Save expanded its line of Latino products and put up the parking lot sign last year. It's a matter of economics, Super Save owner Sam Aloudi says. "We started seeing people on the street, and we wondered why we weren't seeing them here," he says. So far the move has worked out "all right."

El Azteca taqueria has a growing business that caters to a burgeoning Mexican immigrant population in the neighborhood.

Father John Heinz, one of two priests who deliver the Spanish-language mass at St. Paul of the Shipwreck, gives a similar reason for the new service at his church - "because there are Hispanic folks in the neighborhood." The church is predominantly African-American, he says, and other than the Mass offers no services specifically targeting Latinos, but staffers recognize that "the ethnicity of the neighborhood has shifted dramatically."

Despite the increased neighborhood conveniences such as Sunday Mass and an expanded selection at the grocery store, many Latinos in Bayview Hunters Point still go to the Mission for their weekly church services, shopping and doctors' appointments. That's one reason why the group may have less of a voice in the community.

"Everything's still up in the Mission, everyone," says El Azteca owner Elpidio Gomez, a 10-year resident of Bayview Hunters Point originally from the Mission. "If there are places that people can be helped out up here, they don't have the information.

Some Latinos interviewed say they keep a low profile because they feel discriminated against by members of the neighborhood's black community. Workers at El Azteca are frequently harassed by customers, Glen Woods, the restaurant's security guard, says. He thinks it could be because many of the taquerias' employees are young women and much of the harassment is done by girls from the neighborhood. That's more of a territory thing, not uncommon in an area where walking on the wrong side of the street can get one in serious trouble. But a harsh tone in an unfamiliar language can be interpreted as racism if repeated enough.

Maria Garcia, a 50-year-old janitor takes a break while washing her clothes at a Third Street laundermat, where business hours are posted in English and Spanish. Has she ever suffered from prejudice in her eight months in the Bayview? "Yo pienso" ("I think so"), says the five-year San Francisco resident from Michoacan, Mexico, by way of the Mission. She relates the story of a previous trip to the "lavanderia," when she was followed by two men who spoke loudly to her in words she couldn't understand. She didn't acknowledge them until they pushed her down. The fall broke her finger, but nothing was stolen from her, so she thinks it might have been a racially motivated attack.

"Some of them don't like us," she says. While not dismissing the possibility of prejudice in individual cases, 19-year-old Co-founder of Literacy for Environmental Justice, Juan Barragan says, "A lot of (Latino) people feel out of their environment. They go from home to work and from car to home. They don't really associate as Bayview Hunters Point residents."

Not only is there a disconnection from the black community for many Bayview Hunters Point Latinos, but from other Latinos as well. Many interviewed said the neighborhood doesn't have the thriving Latino community feel that they'd experienced, or had heard about from friends, in the Mission.

"If more and more Latinos move into the area, people will raise their comfort levels not to be so isolated," said Barragan whose family moved out of the Bayview two years ago after eight years of increasing rents. "Bayview Hunters Point is a lot bigger than the Mission. It's hard for them to find each other." He points to the weekend soccer games as one meeting place - "I don't necessarily think everybody's out in the cold."

Tomasa Oyuela, a 25-year-old from Honduras, says like many, she still doesn't think there's much of a cohesive Latino community in the region, but things have changed in her three years here. "You didn't see (Latinos) before," she says. Woods, who has worked security in the neighborhood for close to a decade, says that until he started working at the restaurant about a year ago, he had no idea so many Latinos were in the Bayview, but then again things have changed. "Before you didn't see Caucasians walking down the streets," he says. "You didn't see Latinos walking down the streets. Most of the people were scared to walk down the street." Neighborhood services have not been able to keep up with the explosion of Latinos, however. For one, many simply lack the funds to actively recruit Spanish-speaking staff, and without that, it becomes very difficult to make Latinos aware of the services available. For another, the Black community has already been underserved for half a century, and the large Asian and Pacific Islander communities still lack adequate representation. It would at best be difficult to move on to Latinos without taking care of the other populations first. After five years on Third Street, Father Heinz says, "In general, we're kind of stretching for resources out here."

Super Save Market on Third Street has responded to the growing Mexican immigrant population by offering specialty products.

And many Latinos are already aware of the resources that exist for them in the Mission and take full advantage of them, rather than seek out what Bayview Hunters Point has to offer.

Barragan says LEJ will grow with the neighborhood, but right now it has its hands full with the block wars in Hunters Point and combating environmental racism, which affects everyone in the area. He says the organization plans to reach out not only to Latinos but to Pacific Islanders and Asians as well - "There's definitely a vast variety of people we need to cater to."

But LEJ works primarily with environmental issues such as the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard and the Pacific Gas and Electric power plant that produces so much pollution in the area, and the concerns for many recent immigrants in the region are more immediate. For one, says Arnulfo Barrera, a 53-year-old resident at Grupo Crea a few doors down from the LEJ office, "The problem for Latinos is that here's no housing."