GEORGETOWN, Del. - The birds of Central America have returned to the green depths of Delaware's largest forest The flocks are up from such places as the Maya Forest of Guatemala and the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, a death-defying journey.
In the forest, the bird known as the black-and-white warbler has a cry like a tiny wheel, squeaking round and round and round. The ground-nesting ovenbirds, stirring unseen in the underbrush, cry "teacher teacher teacher teacher." Above, two prothonotary warblers burst into view, two flashes of yellow, one male fending another from a nesting place.
Not all birds migrate. Not every bird has the compass, wing or heart for the job.
"You run out of options," says Roberto Roca, deputy director of the Nature Conservancy's Wings of the Americas Program, in his office in Virginia. "You don't see a clear future for yourself or your family. You prefer to gamble with your life."
The migrants' venture is a high-stakes one. "Where they do land, they don't know whether they'll be secure or safe," Roca says. "Many don't make it."
He speaks with quiet passion. "You could," he says, "be talking about birds or people."
Human migration, too
Indeed, the migration of people from Central America is also bringing asylum seekers from Guatemala and Mexico into the region.
With the new human arrivals, sleepy places that had changed little since Delaware was the nation's first state have become suddenly, sometimes startlingly, Latinized.
Take quaint Georgetown, founded in 1792. It claimed 4,300 souls in the last census, but now has 4,000 new residents. "The 4,000 are all immigrants from Guatemala," Steve Pepper, former mayor, says in a tone of mild wonder. "They want to stay in town so they can walk to the chicken plant."
A wave of immigration is affecting rural communities along the East Coast and in parts of the Midwest and West, drawn often by jobs in food processing. Philip Martin, a professor at the University of California, Davis, calls it the Latinization of rural America.
The broiler-chicken industry began on the Delmarva Peninsula 75 years ago, local officials say. The area still anchors the nation's poultry belt, and celebrates with an annual festival featuring a 650-pound skillet that fries 200 chickens at a time.
Production has soared in the past 20 years, and the number of workers has more than doubled, from 108,000 to 240,000, the federal government says. "We have jobs for anybody who's qualified, " said Richard Auletta, a spokesman for Perdue, which has five processing plants in the Delmarva (Delaware-Maryland-Virginia) area. "One-hundred-year residents, five-day residents, anybody who comes to our door."
Work can be difficult
The work can be difficult and dangerous. Floors slippery with water and poultry fat have been blamed for back injuries, strains and falls. Repetitive-motion injuries are suffered by workers who swiftly cut and debone chickens.
"A lot of people are getting the surgeries," says Maria Martinez, who works at the Mountaire poultry plant in Selbyville. Her plant is one of the minority that are unionized, and Martinez is the shop steward. "People tell me their problems," she said. Some are basic, like the need for bathroom breaks.
To biologists, Delaware is the merging place for north and south, says H. Lloyd Alexander, state wildlife administrator. "We're the southern extreme for cranberries," he said, "the northern extreme for cypress."
The forest where the migratory songbirds come is known as Cypress Swamp, though the giant cypresses were cut down generations ago. It's a triumph that the birds are here at all, said Kitt Heckscher of the Nature Conservancy. They are threatened north and south by deforestation and pollution, fires, pesticides and predators.
But the birds who make it have a chance to succeed.
The food is plentiful. Dragonflies dance in every mote of sunlight, and mosquitoes swarm up from the dark water of the swamp. Green inchworms dangle from long threads of silk. The leaves on the forest floor are alive with beetles and fat baby spiders.
Georgetown is up the road from the forest. On one side of the railroad tracks, the streets are lined with genteel, picturesque old houses. The other side of the tracks is the world of the new residents. The Perdue plant is there, and houses where people sleep in shifts, sharing mattresses.
"I wish every American could go to Georgetown," says one University of Delaware professor. "It tells a big story, a regional story, a national story, even an international story. "
In a big weary yellow house in Georgetown, you go down a quiet corridor and through a door and into Guatemala. There is crackly guitar music from another world, and a woman with a braid of black hair down to her knees patting out tortillas. Other women carry stacks of hot tortillas in their bare hands, serving men who sit quietly around long oilcloth-covered tables eating black beans and rice and chicken.
The men will go into the Perdue plant this afternoon and work the line, set, they say, at 38 birds a minute.
"I like it here because there is peace," says a man at one of the tables. "Plus I have a job and a check every week."
On the wall of the unnamed restaurant there is a beach towel decorated with the quetzal, both the sacred bird of the Mayans and the main currency of Guatemala. An untold amount of the money earned here killing, plucking and boning chickens is sent back to Guatemala, transformed into quetzals.
At La Esperanza
At a bungalow called La Esperanza - "Hope" - Sister Maria Mairlot and other Carmelites of Charity help immigrants renew working permits, apply for asylum, learn English, buy homes. They shuttle pregnant women and children to doctors and shelter battered wives. They provide citizenship classes, and plan to offer driving lessons.
Driving is a sore point. A local cheerleader was killed in an accident involving a drunken Guatemalan poultry worker, and there have been other, less serious accidents.
Then there was the truck transporting 40 illegal aliens from Guatemala and Mexico that crashed into a toll booth on the bridge over the Chesapeake Bay in 1996. That led to an immigration raid on a poultry plant in nearby Maryland and the removal of 124 workers.
There may be as many as 20,000 Hispanic immigrants living in southern Delaware, scholars say, and their daily struggles continue.
"People have been robbed walking from Perdue. They have been cheated also by landlords," car dealers and cashiers, says Sister Maria. She complains that the crowded houses the workers rent are rat-infested and contaminated with lead. "We should," she says, "read what the Bible says about the strangers among us."
With the Rev. Jim Lewis, an Episcopal priest, Sister Maria had just presided over a gathering of Guatemalans without working papers. They had lost all their money to scam artists promising jobs, and after the meeting some lingered around the table, broke and stuck. "That's just symbolic of all the ways they get taken advantage of in this community," said Lewis, a man proud of having made enemies with his charges that the poultry plants are exploitive and unsafe. "You are not looking at a room full of criminals. .... These folks are refugees from war and poverty south of the border. "
'Thank God for everything'
Martinez, the shop steward, arrived here 11 years ago, making the 36-hour drive up from Mexico. She was following the path of her father and grandfather. Like them, she went to work in the cress fields. "It was winter, it was cold," she recalled. As migrant farmers - and the poultry companies - know, her life in the plant is a step up from that.
Martinez is determined to make a life here for herself and her two daughters.
Martinez plans to stay, even change things.
Sitting in her small house not far from the forest, she shakes her head in wonder at the responsibility her co-workers have given her as union steward.
"It's a great feeling," she says. She is trying to get a day care center for plant workers, and in the process she is getting to know plant and school officials, bankers and community leaders. "I know I'm part of something," she says.
But she hasn't forgotten the long risky road between Mexico and Delaware, or the prayer her family always says before leaving: "Thank God for everything, and the most important thing, please, please make us safe."
Pub date: 8/16/98