‘City is a laboratory’
Interaction of populations old and new can result in volatile mix
All night, word spread through the Latin bars and cafes in this small northeastern Pennsylvania city about the secret after-hours party at the big house on Laurel Street. By 3 a.m. – 30 minutes after Hazleton’s taverns were required to shut – more than 200 people, most of them Dominican immigrants, had crammed into a sprawling, cream-colored Victorian house with a porch swing and a “Welcome” sign by the door. Then the cops stormed in. A raiding party of more than two dozen officers, drawn from Hazleton’s police force, the Pennsylvania state police and the state liquor control authority, broke down the door.
“You’ve got two minutes to leave, or I’m locking you up,” shouted Hazleton’s police chief, Jerry Speziale.
As the alleged organizers were led out in cuffs, immigrant patrons filed out of the house, many of them taken aback by the police response. “I don’t know why all these people are being arrested,” said Jay Ramirez, 28, a truck driver from the Dominican Republic, who said he didn’t realize the after-hours party was illegal.
“We’re not going to put up with this stuff,” Mayor Jeffrey Cusat said as he watched officers carry trash cans filled with empty liquor bottles and hookah pipes out of the house. “I’ve been saying for years we need to inform the people moving here from the Dominican Republic what our local laws are.”
The raid was an example of the simmering tensions between Hazleton’s largely white political establishment and thousands of new Hispanic immigrants who came here seeking a home.
A century ago, Hazleton was settled largely by families from Poland, Germany, Italy and Ireland. The blending of those cultures was so successful that in
1964, Hazleton was named an “AllAmerica City.”
Today, the city offers an unsettling window into America’s national debate over immigration.
Hazleton officials said nearly 60 percent of the city’s 25,300 residents are Hispanic – a significant increase since
2000, when the 6-square-mile city was home to only a few hundred Hispanics. Large numbers of the city’s longtime residents moved away, many lamenting that their city changed to the point that they no longer recognize it.
What is playing out in Hazleton is a familiar scene from America’s long-running immigration narrative. New immigrants replace ones who arrived decades earlier, changing the community’s social and political dynamics and raising the question: Can this nation of immigrants find ways to comfortably welcome people of disparate backgrounds?
When she heard of the party and the number of Dominicans who attended, Vilmarie Budde, 54, a FedEx warehouse security guard, said, “The town has turned into garbage.”
Budde, a native of Puerto Rico, moved to Hazleton with her husband eight years ago from New York City in search of affordable housing. “The quality of life has gone down,” she said.
Not so, said Pasco Schiavo, who grew up in Hazleton and has run a law firm in the city for more than 50 years. Schiavo voted for Donald Trump even though he’s a registered Democrat, but Schiavo does not favor many of the strict curbs on immigration that President Trump proposed and implemented.
“One of the best things that happened to Hazleton is immigration,” Schiavo said. “I think the city is a laboratory where the experiment is working well. You tell me another place, another city, where this has happened, and it has not had problems.”
In July, a Gallup poll reported that immigration had become the nation’s most pressing concern, more so than crime, terrorism or economic woes.
More than 60 percent of those surveyed in a Harvard-Harris poll in January called for tougher measures, including the building of a wall along the Mexican border and the adoption of a meritbased system for choosing who may legally enter the country. A few months later, a majority of Americans sharply opposed the Trump administration’s policy of separating undocumented immigrants from their children at the Mexican border.
A mayor’s hard line
In 2006, then-Mayor Lou Barletta pushed through an ordinance that barred landlords from renting apartments to undocumented immigrants, imposed fines on business owners who hired them and specified that English would be the city’s official language.
Barletta, 62, who was elected as a Republican in a largely Democratic city, insisted he was trying to curtail a flood of undocumented immigrants.
“In a small town, quality of life changes very quickly,” Barletta said. “If you’re from New York, you don’t recognize an illegal immigration problem. But in small-town America, you see it.”
Barletta’s Illegal Immigration Relief Act – the first law of its kind in the nation – was quickly ruled unconstitutional by the federal courts, and Hazleton was ordered to pay $1.4 million to cover the fees for the civil rights lawyers who opposed it.
In 2010, touting his attempts to crack down on undocumented immigrants, Barletta won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, defeating a 10-term in- cumbent Democrat. Six years later, he became one of the first House members to endorse Trump for president.
Thanks in part to Barletta’s support and his focus on immigration, Trump won Luzerne County, the longtime working-class, Democratic stronghold that surrounds Hazleton, defeating Hillary Clinton by nearly 20 percentage points.
With Trump’s backing, Barletta is angling to unseat Sen. Bob Casey, a twoterm incumbent Democrat.
Barletta said he doesn’t favor a ban on immigration; his concern is undocumented immigrants and authorities’ inability to develop reliable, humane methods of improving border security. “I’m the strongest voice in the country for immigrants because I want people who came to this country to have an opportunity for a better job,” he said. “Illegal immigration is a threat to all of that.”
Cubs manager comes home
“We have hate here. That’s the bottom line,” said Maria Jacketti, a former professor at St. Peter’s University in New Jersey who grew up in Hazleton and returned shortly after Barletta’s immigration law passed. “The community is even more divided than ever.”
That seemed to be the case in 2010, when Joe Maddon, 64, a Hazleton native and the manager of the Chicago Cubs, came home to spend Christmas with relatives. When he was growing up, Maddon played baseball on teams with Barletta.
As he drove into Hazleton with his wife, Jaye, he felt his hometown had changed in ways that deeply worried him. “It was dark and dirty,” Maddon said. “There was no pulse whatsoever in the city.”
Maddon learned that the city’s older residents – many of them childhood friends – were deeply upset by the influx of Hispanics. He discovered the new arrivals were just as upset with the older residents.
“There was a fear factor in Hazleton, but it goes both ways,” Maddon said. “The new group was afraid of what was here. The old group was afraid of the newcomers.”
The sense of apprehension shocked Maddon. Before he left for college and a career in professional baseball, he viewed Hazleton as a classic example of America’s cultural melting pot, where people from a variety of ethnic groups could live side by side.
Maddon’s mother’s family came from Poland in the early 1900s. His father’s family, the Maddoninis, arrived from Italy. Like many Italian families, they settled for an Anglicized surname, Maddon.
After attending church services on Christmas in 2010, Maddon visited a Hispanic community center. What he saw there, he said, reminded him of his own family. Large pots of homemade food steamed on a counter. Parents lingered at tables, sipping wine, telling stories and laughing. The children played games and chased each other around the room.
“This is exactly what we looked like,” Maddon said. “That’s when I recognized the point that we’re not realizing: We’re getting this opportunity to relive history in Hazleton.”
In 2013, Maddon and his boyhood friend Bob Curry, 68, came up with an idea to bring people together.“We’re all part of the same human tribe,” Curry said.
So began the Hazleton Integration Project, a community center on the city’s west side that offers classes in English and other subjects to adults and children, as well as after-school sports and day care. The goal is to build connections among different ethnic groups.
“I think Hazleton is a model for other cities,” said HIP’s director, Ben Medina, a native of Puerto Rico.
Barletta helped raise money for HIP and referred to it as “a positive step.” To bolster HIP’s coffers, Maddon hosts the “Try Not To Suck” golf tournament each year at a country club near Hazleton.
A divided town inches closer
Victor Perez came to the USA from the Dominican Republic in 1991. When he moved to Hazleton from New Jersey in 2008, he needed a job. The nation’s economic downturn hurt his North Jersey accounting business. A bank foreclosed on his home when he couldn’t keep up with his mortgage payments.
Perez, who speaks English and Spanish, found work with the Hazleton housing office, but he faced a problem: His supervisors told him to speak only English with the Hispanics who came to the office for help finding a place to live.
Perez, who runs a Dominican cultural and social group, quit and went back to being an accountant.
“We want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem,” he said. “But it’s not easy.”
Mayor Cusat, a Republican, traveled to the Dominican Republic in the spring in an effort to forge better ties with families whose relatives moved to Hazleton. Cusat brought along several city officials who helped instruct Dominican officials on Hazleton’s municipal codes and fire safety regulations.
“I also wanted to understand the culture better,” said Cusat, whose relatives came to Hazleton a century ago from Italy. “Back then, nobody liked the Italians. Nobody liked the Irish,” Cusat said. “It’s the exact same thing repeating itself today.”
Until recently, Hispanic immigrants steered clear of joining city business groups, forming their own version of a chamber of commerce. Likewise, a Hispanic group formed a separate youth baseball league and asked the city to build separate fields.
The city refused, and children of all races play on the youth baseball teams. The effort to find common ground was not easy.
“It was like building the Dominican Republic inside of Hazleton,” said former Mayor Joseph Yannuzzi, a Trump supporter and a protege of Barletta.
Like his mentor, Yannuzzi is angry that new immigrants do not take time to learn English. “I feel that if you want to come to America, become an American,” he said. “Speak English.”
John Keegan, a pharmacist, said such harsh assessments of the Hispanic immigrants are unkind and project a message that the new residents are unwanted. Keegan tried to teach himself Spanish to communicate better with his customers.
“They appreciate the fact that I’m trying,” Keegan said. “If more than half of the city is now Spanish, I can’t afford to give up that much of the market. So I have to adapt.”
On the second floor of the Hazleton Integration Project, a group of Dominican immigrants studied math with an English-speaking instructor. Nearby, another group studied English.
From her office, Amanda Lara, 25, HIP’s education director, said such classes are a sign of hope that the divisions in Hazleton can be healed.
“There are definitely people trying to mend those broken areas,” Lara said. “I have faith in the community that we can build a new identity.”