A landmark conference on Latinos kicks off UGA's public service commitment to Georgia's fastest-growing educational and economic constituency, now an estimated 1 million strong

B Y - A L E X - C R E V A R - ( A B '9 3 )
P H O T O S - B Y - P E T E R - F R E Y

UGA's two-day Latinos conference, held July 30-31, was the state's first forum of such magnitude by a non-Latino entity. Click here for a detail of photo at top of page.

ust a mile northwest of the Athens Country Club on Jefferson Highway sits a structure that looks temporary, with corrugated tin roof panels for siding and a red-white-and-green sign above the door that reads "La Jalisco Super Mercado." Inside, market owner Roberto Arteaga is busy stacking salsa CDs while an employee restocks snacks wrapped in "hecho en Mexico" labels. Piñatas hang from the ceiling, dress boots cover an entire wall, and long sausage chains lie coiled behind glass. Musica romantica plays in the background as a dozen customers push carts on the cement floor, pausing to squeeze fresh fruit that bulges from bins and hunting for bargains in a display of brightly colored clothing. Stationed near a Southern institution like the Athens Country Club, Roberto Arteaga's Latino grocery may look transitory, or even inconsequential. But every week, 10,000 Latino customers shop at the Super Mercado, which is both a lifeline for Athens' Spanish-speaking residents and a cultural reminder of a life left behind in Mexico, Central, or South America.

As Latino census numbers attest, Georgians are living in a different state than they were even 10 years ago. And though actual Latino numbers here may still not compare to those of Florida, Texas, or California—point-of-entry states for many Latinos—Georgia's Latino growth percentages are starting to resemble theirs. For reasons as subjective as weather and as essential as economic strength, Georgia has the nation's third-fastest growing Latino population, officially documented as a 300-percent increase since the 1990 census. And what further differentiates Georgia from other states is its success in accommodating these new residents.

Having studied the achievements and setbacks of point-of-entry states in decades past, Georgia is in a better position to support the more than 13,000 Latino businesses currently operating in the state and to more readily understand the value of a Latino population that may have swelled to 400,000 in Atlanta alone. That 400,000 figure may seem curious, since it is as large as the 2000 census count for the Latino population of the entire state, but demographers feel the actual Latino population for the state may be close to 1 million, owing to undercounts and illegal aliens.

This influx of Latinos is changing both the population and the character of our schools, communities, even our politics. In 1990, only 3.9 percent of Dalton public school children were Latino; in 2001, that figure had skyrocketed to 51.5 percent. Calhoun County has seen a 3,050 percent increase in its Latino population since the 1990 census. One of Gainesville's state house districts is now more than 35 percent Latino. These stats are reminders that "globalization" is not just a term you hear on CNN. It means that your son's or daughter's new playmate at school, your new neighbors, and the new political constituency at the polls is Latino.

In July, UGA's Office of Public Service and Outreach addressed this shift in state demographics by sponsoring "The Power of Latinos for a Stronger Georgia." The two-day conference was the state's first forum of such magnitude by a non-Latino entity, and it framed topics in positive terms, emphasizing the considerable contributions Latinos are making to the cultural and economic life of Georgia—and avoiding the notion that Georgia has an Hispanic problem. For two contemplative days before the bustle of classes, 350 representatives from groups as varied as the Girl Scouts of Northeast Georgia and the U.S. Forest Service were introduced to the University—and each other—as Latino resources. Networking was the watchword of the day.

On one side of Masters Hall at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education, UGA student Ana Florez, a Columbian native and the conference's closing speaker, spoke in Spanish to Sara Martinez-Tucker, executive director of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund.

"College is incomprehensible for many Latinos," said Florez. "But college is also essential. . . . I was lucky because I've always had it in mind."

On the other side of the hall, Carmen Vega of the Georgia Department of Labor handed out business cards to people surprised to hear that farm workers have a strong advocacy group in Georgia.

"I feel that because I have been working 'within government' for so long," said Vega, "I have a responsibility to my community to educate and to facilitate them being able to understand how government works."

And in the back of the room, Gail Hutchinson, executive director of Brunswick's Coastal Area Rape Crisis Center, took mental notes to help fine-tune the Latino conference she was planning for mid-November.

"This conference gives us a picture of where we are today," said Hutchinson, "so we can figure out where to go tomorrow."

Puerto Rican-born Judith Ortiz Cofer (see photo below), UGA Franklin Professor of English and the 2001 Georgia Author of the Year for non-fiction, opened the second day of the conference with a reading from her work. Cofer says people needed the outlet that the conference provided.

"I got a standing ovation," she says, "but they weren't applauding me. They were simply moved that someone had written about them, for them. The information at the conference was like the bread, but bread alone is not enough—you have to have soul food. My poetry was the soul food, the art."

"But mainly, if my art can open a dialogue, then I have accomplished something. Like when one Latina in the Athens conference audience said that my reading sounded like I was describing her. And then another woman walked up and said, 'Oh, are you from New Jersey?' and the first woman said, 'No, New York.' And then the two started talking about New York and then about different Latino issues. Two people, previously strangers, talking."

Being Mexican 101 A three-week cultural immersion program in Veracruz gives Georgia teachers and UGA education students a crash course in what it means to grow up Latino by Alex Crevar (AB '93) It rained the day a dozen Georgia educators and UGA students took a weekend field trip to Lechuguillas, a tiny coastal community near Xalapa in the Mexican state of Veracruz. Under an open-air, cement shelter with cinder block columns, the visitors sit with folded arms and despondent faces as gulf waves crash and the summer rain—turning to hail—beats the beach, strewn with empty plastic bottles and driftwood. The locals hardly seem to notice the weather. Brown-skinned children pile mounds of sand with discarded ceramic pots, while their parents splash waist-deep in the gulf, framed by lightning bolts extending to the not-so-distant horizon. Amanda Marshall, a sophomore foreign language education major from Marietta, enjoys Mexican life in her host family's home. The visitors from Georgia have just finished their first week in Mexico as participants in a three-week cultural immersion program made possible by a partnership between UGA's Office of International Development and the Universidad Veracruzana. (They were part of the June session, but there is also a Maymester.) It has been a long week, but, by design, an important crash course in Being Mexican 101. "If you notice, a few in the group don't feel right here," says Phyllis Childs (BSEd '92), who teaches English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) at Athens' Chase Street Elementary School. And she is talking about more than just the weather. "It's one thing to talk about leaving your comfort zone, but it's another thing to actually do it." Over the last three summers, 43 UGA undergraduates, eight graduate students, and 41 teachers from Northeast Georgia have shelved their comfort zone for the "Xalapa Experience." "It's hard on some people," says education professor Jim McLaughlin, who, along with colleagues Martha Allexsaht-Snider and Julia Atiles, brought the first group of teachers and education students to Xalapa in May 1999. "You come to Mexico and the food is different and you can't drink the water and, for most, communication is limited." But that is the point of a program that seeks to better prepare English-speaking Americans to teach the ever-increasing number of Latino students in Georgia schools. Latinos now constitute the largest U.S. minority at nearly 13 percent, and the Latino population of Georgia has increased 300 percent since 1990. "We have Mexican families in the U.S. and we have not been prepared to educate them," says McLaughlin. "Without some knowledge of how they feel or where they come from, all someone sees are foreigners in the Winn-Dixie checkout lines. But if we go to their country to learn something of their origin and feel a similar dislocation, then we learn how to live together." During the three weeks in Mexico, participants live with host families and are involved in program activities 12 hours a day. Morning visits to social agencies, cultural sites, or local schools are followed by an intensive Spanish language and Mexican culture class, taught by a faculty member at the School for Foreign Students. After comida (afternoon meal) with their "home-stay" families, the group reconvenes for evening seminars. UGA professor Jim McLaughlin (left) and Mike Padilla, UGA's associate dean of educator partnerships, teach La Caña children about Georgia. "Mexican styles of teaching are very different from what we are used to, but they work," says Sara Krumpelman, a senior education major from Marietta, during a visit to San Marcos Elementary, where third-graders sit on make-shift benches fashioned from thin planks screwed to bent pieces of rebar. To teach numerical place-values, the teachers use red string for 10s and blue string for ones. "The room is almost never silent like in an American classroom," Krumpelman adds. "The students work on problems out loud and chatter with their neighbors, but they still give full respect to the teacher and work together wonderfully." This kind of reality training comes at the expense of participants' summer vacation, and teachers aren't paid by their respective schools systems. But it's worth the effort to those working toward an ESOL endorsement, which carries more weight when it's earned on-site in Mexico rather than in a Georgia classroom, as are most ESOL endorsements. For UGA students, the endorsement is part of their undergraduate coursework. In either case, time in Xalapa satisfies one of three ESOL-required courses—"Language and Culture"—and four credit hours. Jennifer Westbrook participated in the program as a UGA senior in May 1999, and found it invaluable. "My experience in Mexico was extremely beneficial in my personal and professional development as a teacher," says Westbrook, who teaches at Enota Elementary School. "I observed, discussed, and wrote about a variety of teaching methods worth implementing in my own classroom in the U.S. And the children were a joy to interact with. "Living with a local family in Xalapa was also very valuable. My roommate and I enjoyed our time with the Mexican family as much as we enjoyed the school visits. The trip was a wonderful time for me to experiment with and develop my Spanish language skills. I spoke so much Spanish during the days that I would have headaches and want to speak English at night. The experience was priceless. I would return in a heartbeat." UGA professor Martha Allexsaht-Snider leads a reading lesson at San Marcos Elementary, near Xalapa. Atop the College of Education's Xalapa wish list are semester-long and year-long educational experiences for undergrads and graduate students. Another proposal calls for three courses—a professional certification in education, a foreign language requirement, and an ESOL endorsement—to be included as part of the regular six-week summer itinerary. The courses would be co-taught by UGA and Xalapa faculty and could include students from both countries. Five schools, colleges, or departments have taken advantage of the partnership, making it UGA's third-largest study abroad site. Social work was first in 1994, followed by education, family and consumer sciences, anthropology, and agricultural and environmental sciences. But intensive professional development training represents only one facet of the partnership. The association also focuses upon collaborative research and professional exchanges between the state of Georgia and Veracruz. In the last three years alone, 15 visitors from Mexico have visited UGA as guests of the College of Education to attend and teach classes, meet people in their field of study, and spend time in Athens. "We chose Xalapa for the partnership because the main campus of UV and the state capital is there," says Boyle. "It's a traditional, historic city with a minimum of crime and pollution and many scenic sites—at nearly 5,000 feet in the tropics and away from the border culture. But also, the UV faculty is very welcoming. Many personal and professional relationships have resulted." At 6:30 a.m., a week and a half after their arrival in Mexico, the Georgians' faces have brightened considerably. Home-cooked Mexican food is no longer an unfortunate reality but an exotic treat. The inconvenience of carrying their own water bottle has become just that—an inconvenience. The group boards a bus headed for sugar cane country, 500 feet above the Actopan River Valley—La Caña. UGA students and teachers from Georgia schools enjoy comida in La Caña. In front of the school in the center of town, beaming school kids take the hands of the visiting Georgians and lead them from bus to their host family for the day. Following comida, the town and its visitors gather in the courtyard for punch and music. Mexicans and Americans sit amongst one another and dance together when the stereo plays "La Vaca Loca" (The Crazy Cow), making the children, and adults, squeal with silly laughter. "When I first got to Mexico, I hated it," says Athens' Brandy Tiller, a senior social work student. "I got sick and wanted to go home. Then I had an epiphany and realized a lot of people feel this way in the U.S.—isolated and disoriented. The Xalapa program is organic, and, for it, I am stronger."

hen Roberto Arteaga speaks of his native Mexico, his eyes become crescent moons and the lilt in his voice gives his children the courage to peek from behind papa's legs. Arteaga's family came to Georgia from Zacatecas, Mexico, via California in 1990. They ended up in Gainesville, where his parents worked at the poultry plant until his brother came from California and the family opened a small shop. The store survived originally because of a lack of competition for Latino goods. In the years since, the business has thrived and grown with two grocery stores and a restaurant in Gainesville, as well as the Super Mercado in Athens.

"Everything depends on how much you like to work," says Arteaga. "We came to Georgia because we heard there were not many Hispanic businesses and that the Hispanic population was growing—but we could live anywhere. If you like to work, you can be anywhere. Many of the people are here [Georgia] because their family taught them to work. But they come into this store because they want to see friends and be comfortable . . . 80 percent of them don't speak English."

Language—the key to getting any good job, according to Arteaga—is amongst the many problems immigrants face when they come to Georgia to earn money, improve their lifestyle, and raise a family. The UGA conference looked at language and other problems unique to Latinos, including education, transportation (Georgia requires citizenship papers before granting a driver's license), substandard housing, lack of worker's compensation, and inadequate health care.

Latinos—a term for people from more than two dozen Latin American countries—are also forced to accept one catch-all "Hispanic" classification. The notion that people from Mexico, Central America, South America, or the Caribbean constitute a homogenous culture simply because they speak a common language is a major misconception, according to Cuban-American Armando Sanchez-Aballi (MA '97, EdS '00).

"Popular American culture would have us all eating tacos, dancing salsa, and wearing sombreros," says Sanchez-Aballi (see photo above), who is hospitality affairs director for the Athens Downtown Development Authority and also communications director for the Athens Area Chamber of Commerce. "This is akin to yoking American culture with, say, Irish or Scottish. Even though English is spoken in all three countries, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who eats haggis, dances Irish jigs, and wears seersucker suits."

"My most valuable course work at UGA examined cross-cultural understanding in community and educational settings."

Jennifer Westbrook (BSEd '00), Kindergarten teacher at Enota Elementary in Gainesville, Ga.

Though assimilating into a new culture is fraught with obstacles, Sanchez-Aballi cautions Georgians not to think of Latinos as hardship cases.

"It is somewhat demeaning to think of Hispanics as charity cases who will perish without our advocacy," he says. "The newly arrived will go through a learning curve and they will succeed and pass the valuable lessons learned to others. We can, however, help to demystify the institutional processes for them, and, of course, to serve as facilitators, friends, or confidantes. But we shouldn't deny them the opportunity to learn some things for themselves."

For many, Latinos simply don't fit the historically conceived definition of Georgia.

"The Georgia in our mind is black and white—but it is becoming brown," says Fausto Sarmiento, an Ecuadorian who teaches geography at UGA and serves as co-director of the University's Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. He also moderated the Latino conference's public safety and legal issues seminar. "And not just brown, but mocha; we must consider the taste. UGA must help the state to accommodate that flavor Latinos bring."

ainesville's Jennifer Westbrook (BSEd '00) wanted to teach elementary school for as long as she could remember. But it wasn't until her senior year of high school, while tutoring kindergarten and first-graders learning English as a second language, that she found her true passion. In the years that followed, she earned her education degree from UGA, which included a three-course English for Speakers of Other Languages component. ESOL classes are particularly important to students from another country because they are limited in size—seven for elementary school, 11 in middle school.

Westbrook is uniquely situated because Hall County Latino numbers rose nearly 500 percent from 1990-2000. In the fall of 2000, she moved back to Gainesville and began teaching kindergarten in the same classroom where she was once a second-grader. She couldn't recall any English-as-a-second-language students when she was a second-grader at Enota Elementary, but as she wrote her name on the board for the first day of school, every student in her class responded in the same fashion:

"Hola, Señora Westbrook!"

Enota Elementary's population is now 58 percent Latino, compared to the mid-1980s when Latinos weren't even a recognized category. With such dramatic increases in Latino student numbers, not just in Gainesville but all over the state, the need for more teachers like Westbrook is immeasurable.

"Between 1994-2001, there has been an average yearly growth rate of 20.5 percent in the student enrollment of the state-funded ESOL program," says State Superintendent of Schools Linda Schrenko. "Georgia faces a real shortage of qualified teachers."

Westbrook believes what Latino students need most are comfortable environments that acknowledge their culture and give them the freedom to experiment with language.

"My most valuable course work at UGA examined cross-cultural understanding in community and educational settings," says Westbrook, whose UGA education included a study-abroad, cultural-immersion program in Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico (see sidebar). "Many educators in Hall County have taken part in that same program, and because of this professional development we are making a difference with Latino students and families."

"The information at the conference was like the bread, but bread alone is not enough—you have to have soul food. My poetry was the soul food, the art."

Judith Ortiz Cofer, Franklin Professor of English, UGA

During a parent-teacher conference, where Westbrook and a mother sit in brightly colored, plastic kiddie chairs, the impact UGA grads with Xalapa experience can have is apparent. In a room decorated with construction-paper fruit labeled in both English and Spanish, Westbrook laughs frequently and speaks in both languages, putting Rocio Martinez, a native of Durango, Mexico, at ease. Westbrook knows how important education can be for immigrants, and she will make repeated telephone calls—without losing her patience—to reschedule a teacher meeting that a parent has missed.

"This means a lot," says Martinez, who came to America illegally 10 years ago when her father loaded the family into a truck and said not to worry because he had the proper paperwork. "Most parents without English are intimidated and avoid meetings. But without parental interest, most kids don't finish school."

With a dropout rate of 66 percent, Latinos suffer economic consequences, and, thus, have less opportunity to send the next generation to college, perpetuating the cycle.

"This is the generation [of Latinos] we cannot afford to lose," says Sara Martinez Tucker, whose San Francisco-based Hispanic Scholarship Fund has awarded nearly 46,000 college scholarships since 1975—and who recently met with both President Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox in Washington to discuss Latino education needs.

Martinez Tucker told her conference audience that the average Latino family spends 61 percent of its income to send one child to a public university in America. According to figures compiled by the Southern Regional Education Board for 1999-2000, the median U.S. household spent only 7.7 percent of its annual income on tuition at a public four-year university. Factoring in room and board, annual expenses at a public university can easily top $10,000. But that figure is much more affordable for the average American family than for Latinos.

Martinez Tucker pointed to the positive aspects an educated Latino population can bring to the state and country in which they live. "If the amount of Latinos earning college degrees doubles from 9 percent to 18 percent by 2010," she said, "the amount yielded in public-societal benefits would be about $27 billion."

Louis Castenell, dean of UGA's College of Education and acting associate provost for institutional diversity, speaks of Latinos' future in realistic terms:

"Georgia can be a model for the 21st century. But if Latinos don't get an education, then they don't get jobs and can't contribute to state funds. Georgia is in a position to make a choice: educate Latinos and gain more in state funds or don't educate them and use limited state funds for more social services."

s a senior official with Georgia's state university system prior to becoming UGA's vice president for public service and outreach, Art Dunning was in charge of investigating ways to encourage Latinos to go further with their education.

"Our desire is to extend the intellectual resources of this campus beyond the borders," Dunning told the audience at the Latino conference. Dunning said the period of growth in Georgia and the U.S. over the last 10 years is comparable to the great European migration of the early 20th century, and that the boom in Latino population is merely a new challenge. "[The office of public service and outreach] is going to ask, periodically, are we listening to our communities?"

As Georgia's flagship institution of higher learning and its land-grant and sea-grant college, the University of Georgia can be the catalyst for statewide initiatives, says Dunning, because of its ability to neutrally engage debates politicians might shy away from and because of its ability to provide statistical perspectives.

From a numbers standpoint, the Latino population is not the largest minority in Georgia; African-Americans constitute 29 percent. But Latinos constitute the fastest-growing segment, in both population and buying power. UGA's Selig Center for Economic Growth calculates that Latino buying power in Georgia is up 251 percent—from $1.4 billion in 1990 to $4.8 billion in 2000. It is Latinos' willingness to work jobs unwanted by others—in poultry plants, in the Vidalia onion fields, on statewide construction sites—that has helped sustain Georgia's economic growth, according to the center's director Jeff Humphreys.

"Their buying power increase is just tremendous," says Humphreys, one of many UGA researchers providing analysis to agencies in need of information on ethnic groups. "The labor Latinos provide helped Atlanta become the largest home-building market in the country. Georgia doesn't have enough people to fill jobs and [Latinos] have allowed the state to keep pace and continue a higher growth profile."

Yet for all the documented and visible growth of the last decade—the Little Mexico in Hall County, the rows of Latino businesses on Atlanta's Buford Highway, the Latino mothers who represent 70 percent of Athens Regional Medical Center's midwifery patients—demographers agree that census numbers could be off by as much as 50 percent.

"Officially, 435,227 Latinos made up 5.3 percent of the Georgia population in 2000—but it is really more like 11 percent with as many as a million people," says Doug Bachtel, a rural demographer and professor in UGA's College of Family and Consumer Sciences. According to Bachtel, the time has passed when people can turn a deaf ear to the dilemmas faced by "undocumented" Latinos, who are immigrants with "the kind of pizzazz and inner-energy this country was built on."

"These are people doing the jobs Americans won't take," says Bachtel, who notes that many Latinos come to the South because they're comfortable with the strong family and religious values they find here. "But this is not a bleeding-heart liberal plea by me. There are real problems when part of the population is afraid. With fear comes a lack of education and a distrust of government, banks, and medical facilities. This puts Latinos at risk for inadequate medical treatment, and for medical problems like tuberculosis. This is spaceship earth—you don't want that guy walking around with TB."

Fear is what drives Javier, a mason in Gwinnett County, to remain as invisible as possible, avoiding contact with anyone who might cost him the ability to send money back to Guadalajara to feed his wife and babies. Deportation would mean another oppressive three-day walk across the desert to re-cross the U.S. border—a journey Javier summarizes with one terse sentence: "My feet were blood from no good shoes." But watching his family suffer from malnutrition—knowing he could better provide for them if he were in America—keeps Javier, and thousands like him, coming back time and again. Dollars sent home from Mexicans living in the U.S. comprise the third-largest revenue source for Mexico, behind oil and tourism. Nearly $10 billion in remittances are predicted this year.

That means there will be a steady stream of Latinos arriving in Georgia to fill the state's labor shortages. And with that steady stream of Latinos will come the kind of problems that UGA professors Jorge Atiles and Stephanie Bohon are skilled to interpret.

In the first-ever study to determine statewide Latino issues, Atiles and Bohon found that the good life, which immigrants (principally from Mexico) come here to find, can be a false panacea, with overcrowded and substandard housing, plus inadequate public transportation, making Latino workers' actual living conditions in America scarcely better than what they left behind in their home country.

"We wanted to focus on the needs of the population, so we began by talking to key people in six counties across the state—people who interact with Latinos on a daily basis," says Bohon of UGA's department of sociology. "We focused on issues like health, transportation, housing, labor, and education."

The study found that one problem seemed to exacerbate another. For instance, without affordable transportation Latinos couldn't attend ESOL courses, make medical appointments, or attend parent conferences at their children's school. And, without transportation, work was a constant problem—jeopardizing Latinos' ability to gain affordable or sanitary housing, a primary concern in the home-minded Latino culture.

"The population shift in Georgia has created a great demand for programs that target Latino audiences," says Atiles of UGA's College of Family and Consumer Sciences. Atiles is also a housing expert with the state cooperative extension service headquartered at UGA. "The problem is that we didn't know what their needs were. We are hoping to focus on the issues and share them with the state and the legislature."

Research expertise, as well as the ability to train teachers, social workers, and demographers to more compassionately and accurately serve the state's population, is what UGA's Office of Public Service and Outreach hoped to show those who attended the Latino conference.

"In the course of any day, University faculty members provide pertinent Latino statistics for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development," says Dunning. "Our staff gives administrative aid to low-income housing projects. And our students volunteer as ESOL teachers and day-care providers. The University must be a beacon for change because of its range of abilities to engage partners on many fronts."

This first UGA Latino conference got people acquainted with new resources and problem-solving techniques.

"The UGA conference gave me a lot of hope," says Carmen Vega, state monitor advocate for the Georgia Department of Labor, whose position was created in 1980 by a court order that found the U.S. Department of Labor guilty of discriminating against people of color. "Academia is acknowledging us as a growing power and recognizing that Latinos have been here for some time and don't plan on leaving."

n the months since the Latino conference, which attracted twice as many participants as expected, the University is expanding its role as a facilitator for Latinos in Georgia.

First, UGA is leading an Hispanic Task Force Initiative aimed at increasing ESOL-prepared teachers through Web-based certification, while heightening ESOL importance among undergraduate students. The statewide initiative focuses on supporting Latino students and encouraging their parents to send them to college or some kind of post-secondary education.

Second, a University-wide, Dunning-led initiative asked departments and units to "examine how [each] can contribute to the improvement of conditions and opportunities for the Latino community." Only days after the University initiative memo circulated, the English department voted to add a Latino culture and literature specialist to its faculty.

"As a university, we are performing our public outreach stewardship," says Dunning, who traveled to Mexico with Gov. Roy Barnes (AB '69, JD '72) and a team of corporate and public sector executives in early November to meet with Mexican President Fox. The object of the three-day trip was to strengthen relationships between Georgia and Mexico. "With the sort of infusion we've seen, in terms of numbers of people within the state, there will be some consequences. We are just doing everything we can to make it a smooth transition."

Columbian native Ana Florez (see photo above), a management information systems/international business major from Duluth, closed UGA's Latino conference. Florez came to the U.S. with no English skills and she received little guidance from her school system. But she decided to get involved rather than be intimidated. She learned the language (becoming an honor English, history, and science student); represented her school on the Gwinnett student leadership team; and, with a school counselor, founded a peer ambassadors program to assist those learning the English language and American culture.

Florez hasn't let up at UGA, where she is a public relations intern, Alpha Kappa Psi business fraternity pledge, Hispanic Student Association member, and Athens airport employee.

"I thank God every day that I experienced what I did," Florez told the Latino conference audience. "I realize how much easier I had it than most who came without papers and education—and without their family's constant support. Although I have a happy ending to my immigration story, I make it a point to remember how it felt when I first arrived, so I may never turn the other way when I am asked in Spanish for help."

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