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Writer's pictureThe San Juan Daily Star

Aid is slow to reach some Latino areas in storm-hit North Carolina



Volunteers from Blue Ridge, Ga., deliver supplies at a mobile home park in Swannanoa, N.C., on Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024. Language and other barriers are hobbling the flow of assistance to hard-hit communities where affordable housing drew growing numbers of Hispanic migrants. (Nicole Craine/The New York Times)

By Edgar Sandoval


As soon as Maria Salgado spotted a pickup truck loaded with supplies pulling into the North Carolina mobile home park where she lives, she sprang into action. She waved it down and began translating for the group of Spanish speakers gathering behind her.


“Quién ocupa agua?” Salgado called out. “Pañales para los bebés?” (“Who needs water? Diapers for the babies?”)


Inside the truck were a family from Georgia who had raced to North Carolina as soon as they learned of the devastation left by Hurricane Helene. They took their cues from Salgado and tried to communicate with the residents in broken Spanish. “Agua, aquí,” one man said, handing out bottled water to eager families.


A close-knit group of immigrants from Mexico and Central America live at the mobile home park, known as Alan Campos. Many residents of the park, on a side road between the hard-hit towns of Black Mountain and Swannanoa, North Carolina, barely escaped with their lives after torrents of water came rushing into their trailers.


A large group of families, many with young children, remain without flushing water or reliable cellphone service Thursday, and electricity remains spotty. Those whose homes are still intact have taken other families in, with one three-bedroom trailer now housing about 12 people.


“We don’t have a lot right now,” Salgado said, “but we have each other.”


Aid has begun to flow into some of the most ravaged parts of western North Carolina, nearly a week after the region was inundated by Helene. But the challenges of getting assistance to non-English-speaking communities like the one at Alan Campos remain steep.


Margarita Ramirez, the executive director of Centro Unido, a Latino advocacy group in Marion, North Carolina, said that organizations like hers were rushing into immigrant communities to help bridge language and other barriers.


Many Latino residents are not receiving information in Spanish about where to go to obtain aid from FEMA and other government agencies. And those who lack legal documents to live and work in the United States tend to avoid the authorities in general, for fear of deportation.


Hundreds of Spanish speakers are showing up at Centro Unido’s offices to report missing loved ones or get help filling out FEMA paperwork, Ramirez said.


“More than a 1,000 people have come by, and we are not done yet,” she said Wednesday. “We are printing flyers in Spanish, telling them where they can go to ask for help. The need is great.”


Outreach to the region’s Latino population has never been more important, advocates said. The population of Latinos has exploded in North Carolina; they are the fastest-growing demographic group in the state, numbering about 1.1 million, or 11.4% of the population, according to the census.


Ramirez believes the actual figure is much larger. “Many in our community are still afraid of filling out the census forms,” she said.


In the hard-hit western region, Henderson County’s population is slightly more than 10% Hispanic, according to census figures; in Buncombe County, which includes Asheville and the Alan Campos park, the figure is just over 7%.


Migrants from countries like Mexico, El Salvador and Honduras are coming to western North Carolina for jobs on apple and peach farms, in tomato fields and supermarket warehouses. Living expenses in the area are affordable, advocates for the migrants said, compared with those in migrant magnets like Florida, Texas and California.


Salgado, 44, a Mexican immigrant, said she had seen the Latino community in the Alan Campos park grow over the last two decades, from a small group she could count on her hands to more than 100 households.


Salgado, who used to live in Miami, followed her husband in the early 2000s to North Carolina, where he had found employment in tobacco fields. She landed a job of her own as a cleaner.


They purchased a three-bedroom mobile home for $19,000. Every morning since then, she said, she woke up to breathtaking views of green mountains and flowing rivers.


“It was a good, quiet life here,” she said. “There are plenty of jobs and cheaper houses.”


Isabel Lobo, 47, and her longtime partner, Isaias Chicas, 50, moved to the park from El Salvador seven years ago. Lobo found work as a forklift operator at a warehouse for the local grocery chain, Ingles, and Chicas took a job as a dishwasher at a local senior center. They recently finished paying off their $35,000 mountainside mobile home.


“We thought we had found our perfect home here,” Lobo said. “Our home was paid. Now we were going to enjoy our lives.”


That hope was shattered last Friday when the ferocious storm caused flooding that devoured countless vulnerable structures in its path. Families like the Salgados and Lobos are unsure now of how or when they will be able to return to work, because their places of employment were overwhelmed by the gushing floodwaters as well and were badly damaged.


Like most trailer owners in the area, they did not have property insurance. A new trailer now would cost about $80,000, they estimate.


For the foreseeable future, Salgado is staying with a brother who lives in a trailer nearby, where they must haul water from a nearby river to flush the toilets. Lobos and Chicas are staying with friends in the same park.


Earlier this week, Salgado stood outside her trailer and surveyed the damage. She pointed at a new white sofa she had recently purchased for $1,000 and a table that cost $300.


“All gone,” she said in Spanish. “I can’t believe we are going to have to start all over again.”


Ana Cordova, 30, a newer immigrant from El Salvador with two children, ages 13 and 3, said she felt welcomed by longtime residents like Salgado, who introduced her to the larger Spanish-speaking community.


On the day that the volunteers from Georgia arrived, Cordova marveled that “Americanos” would go out of their way to help people like her, who often feel maligned in the heated political debate over immigration.


“Thank you,” Cordova mustered in English as she collected water and canned food.


She then turned to some of the immigrants around her and said in Spanish, “Isn’t it nice for the Americanos to help us? It does not matter to them that we are migrants.”


Cheryl Dupont, one of the volunteers, said that police officers at a nearby service station had pointed them toward the mobile home park when they asked for places where they could help. “They told us that if we were to come up here that there was a lot of need, because nobody’s been here yet,” she said over the sounds of people yelling, “Agua! Agua!” as they surrounded the truck.

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