GEORGETOWN, Del. -- Having changed the face of Delmarva agriculture during the past 75 years, the poultry industry now is changing the face of its culture, adding new hues, accents and languages to an ethnic landscape once rendered mostly in black and white.

The impetus is the industry's growing appetite for Latin American workers, which has transformed the Eastern Shore's seasonal wave of migrant harvesters and crab pickers into a more rooted scattering of enclaves in rural towns, trailer parks, apartment houses and labor camps.

With the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service watching closely and sometimes uneasily, the past decade has ushered in Delmarva's biggest surge of foreign labor since the slave trade forcibly delivered tens of thousands of Africans.

By the conservative estimate of Ignacio Franco, who surveyed the Latino population in 1997 for the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington, the Maryland-Delaware part of the shore is now home to about 40,000 Hispanics among its approximately 500,000 residents.

Perhaps 9,000 are there illegally, based on state and federal estimates. Thousands more arrive every year, and the poultry industry -- no longer able to entice locals to take the grueling jobs in its dozen Delmarva plants -- is exploring ways to import more.

The result now is what Franco calls the shore's "invisible community."

But in school classrooms and retail stores, on main streets and playing fields, it grows more visible by the day -- hard-working newcomers with a dawning awareness that, while their new living standards far exceed what they left behind, they're starting out on America's bottom rung.

"It is part of the old American story of immigrants coming and trying to scramble their way up the social ladder to something better," says William H. Williams, a University of Delaware professor whose 1998 book chronicles the history of the Delmarva poultry industry.

"It won't happen with this generation, but maybe with the next."

Williams sees the scrambling firsthand. He lives in Georgetown, a small town of stately homes and quiet streets that had virtually no Hispanics a decade ago but now counts as many as 2,400 Guatemalans among its 6,000 residents.

One of them is Sergio Morales, 23, a tailor who came here illegally six years ago but later obtained the legal documents necessary to let him stay.

He lives with five others in a shabby three-bedroom apartment where the shared rent is $850 a month. "There is no other way," he says.

He has endured layoffs from two poultry plants. Both happened just before he was a due a wage increase -- not an uncommon experience among the Hispanic workers, they say.

A 1997 report on conditions in Delmarva poultry plants, by the nonprofit Public Justice Center, agrees, saying the industry often takes unfair advantage of its Latino workers.

"Latinos were routinely identified as the targets of disparate treatment," the report concludes based on interviews with 74 workers, who cited "verbal abuse and harassment, denial of scheduled bathroom breaks, being assigned the worst and dirtiest jobs, failing to receive promotions, and other forms of disparate treatment."

Morales hopes to soon find a job at another company's plant, at the same low wage of about $6.50 an hour. But for all his privations, he says, "It is better here. Because there is peace. There are jobs. I wouldn't want to go back."

Like Morales, most of Georgetown's Guatemalans came from the country's mountainous and impoverished San Marcos region in the southwest, which bore the brunt of a decades-long civil war. Descendants of the ancient culture of the Mayan Indians, many work and sleep in shifts, timing their schedules to the round-the-clock rhythms of the poultry plants.

The majority live in ramshackle houses on the north side of town. A woman who would give her name only as Edemina, because she is in the country illegally, pays $150 a month for a 7-by-18-foot space on a paneled-over front porch, where she lives with her 2-year-old son.

The thin walls aren't insulated, and on winter nights their only comforts are a glowing space heater and a 19-inch television.

Until a few weeks ago, top-dollar accommodations included a sagging two-story wooden house crammed with 10 residents, for $1,300 a month. On an afternoon in early January, it caught fire, killing Transito Verduo, a Guatemalan who was sleeping before his night shift.

Those who don't walk to jobs at the local Perdue Farms Inc. processing plant, where Hispanics make up 46 percent of the payroll, travel to nearby Delaware plants in Millsboro (Townsends Inc.), Harbeson (Allen Family Foods Inc.), Selbyville (Mountaire Farms Inc.) or to another Perdue plant in Milford.

Franco has counted some 15 other Hispanic enclaves on the shore, with Mexicans and Salvadorans usually in the greatest numbers along with Guatemalans.

The biggest may be in the Salisbury area, where community leaders say Hispanics number about 7,500, accounting for almost 10 percent of Wicomico County's population of 80,000.

Latinos Unidos, a grass-roots group formed in 1997, helped organize the city's first Latino festival last summer and sponsored a community meeting for city and county officials to answer questions about community services. The city's police force, which has only one Spanish-speaking officer, is working with the group to recruit in Hispanic neighborhoods.

But you'll hear more than just Spanish being spoken.

Often, the shore's small, rural school districts see the first evidence of newcomers, and in Wicomico 198 students are enrolled in ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) programs -- speaking 19 different languages among them. Ranking behind Spanish in popularity are Korean, Haitian-Creole and Urdu, the language of Pakistan.

"We've seen the numbers double in the last five years," says Carolyn Elmore, Wicomico's ESOL director.

The magnet for many of these immigrants is the same one attracting Hispanics.

"It is the chicken industry that brings lots of people here," says Peter Yom, of Delmar, a Korean who has worked as chicken sexer at a Perdue hatchery for 11 years.

"But Koreans are opening businesses in the area. There is an Oriental grocery, a couple gas stations, dry cleaner, a tailor. I think probably there are 200 Korean families living in the Salisbury area now."

In Caroline County, a sprawling 321-square-mile farming community, the school system is one of only three on Maryland's Eastern Shore with bilingual tutors to assist ESOL teachers.

With a large Haitian community established in Federalsburg for nearly a decade, the county has seen a similar pattern in recent years with large numbers of Latinos moving into northern Caroline near the Delaware border.

Karen Gianninoto remembers the moment when educators in Caroline came face-to-face with the need for a program to teach students who couldn't speak English. His name was Miguel Joseph. A seventh-grader whose parents arrived from Haiti in search of jobs in a nearby poultry plant in 1984, the boy spoke only Haitian-Creole.

"I was called in from maternity leave to be a tutor because my records showed I had taken some French in college -- that's how ill-equipped we were," recalls Gianninoto, who heads the county's ESOL program.

"For years, I called him Joseph Miguel. He was probably 17 when he explained to me, in English, that in Haiti you always write your last name first. All those years, he was too polite to correct me."

Gianninoto also runs Even Start, a program at Greensboro Elementary designed to boost English skills and help steer people to health care and other services.

An Even Start participant, 20-year-old Angelica, arrived illegally seven months ago to live with relatives and used fake documents to land a job in a manufacturing plant in Dover. Homesick for her native city of Santa Cruz in Guatemala, she wants to stay only long enough to earn enough money to help her ailing parents.

"I always worry that the INS will keep me in jail," the quiet, well-dressed young woman says. "Here, my only happiness is the money. I can't understand why people here don't help. We don't want anything for free, we want to work."

Years ago, the poultry plant work force was predominantly rural white women. Eventually most jobs were filled by African-Americans. But as Delmarva's economy improved and its towns grew, the plants found it increasingly hard to staff their processing lines.

At $6 to $7 an hour, the jobs rank at the lower end of the manufacturing pay scale, but at the upper end for danger and disability. Throw into this mix a low unemployment rate and you've got an industry ready to greet almost anyone with open arms.

But the wages look plenty high to someone straight out of rural Mexico, El Salvador or Guatemala, and when Delmarva's migrant farm workers began looking for more permanent jobs they gravitated to the poultry plants.

That began primarily with young men. T. A. Fleetwood, principal at Georgetown Elementary School, says that as years passed, "Some of the men starting bringing in their families. Then some of the couples began having children. It was a natural progression, and as it has gotten into the schools it has been a geometric progression."

Six years ago, he had one or two Spanish-speaking kindergartners and first-graders. Now he has 50 among a total enrollment of 185, additions that have enriched the school but also have it "bursting at the seams."

Adds Georgetown Mayor Bob Ricker: "It has just run our poor town to death."

His town has hired Spanish-speaking police and victim services officers. With overcrowded apartments and boarding houses to regulate, it now pays for a full-time and a part-time housing inspectors. Ricker is taking Spanish lessons.

The poultry industry's allure has also fueled an illegal traffic in humans, a shadowy trade that sends workers north, sometimes by the dozens, but often one at a time.

At its worst, it produces scenes like one three years ago at the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, when a fender-bender revealed a rental truck with its 7-by-15-foot cargo bay crammed full of 37 illegal aliens, including four children.

They had been en route from Mexico for two days, riding in the cold and the dark, hungry and thirsty and filthy, gradually filling jugs full of urine and plastic bags full of feces.

Others, such as 19-year-old Guatemalan Amilcar Ortiz, cross the border on their own, often with the expensive help of "coyotes."

Ortiz paid $300 to be helped into the United States, then $900 to get to Delaware. His father and older brother were waiting in Georgetown. He eventually got the documents he needed to stay legally, shortly before Congress passed legislation that would have made it more difficult.

Now he spends eight hours a day on his feet in the processing line at the Townsend poultry plant, his hands freezing as he chops breast meat away from the bone, thousands of pieces per day. Hard, he says, yet preferable to the war he left behind.

As more people arrived through the pipeline, the INS tried more aggressively to reverse the flow from 1995 to 1997, with high-profile raids at Delmarva poultry plants resulting in hundreds of arrests. Processing lines were slowed or shut down, costing the companies dearly.

Today, illegal aliens still arrive at a steady rate, but the bigger poultry companies no longer worry about disruptive raids. Allen Family Foods, hit hard by arrests in 1996, signed what amounted to a peace treaty with the INS last fall, giving the agency complete access to its payroll and the right to unannounced spot checks in exchange for an end to the raids.

But the best illustration of the new cooperation between INS and the industry may have taken place March 18, at Perdue's Showell processing plant.

Almost four years earlier, the agency put the plant into a tizzy with a roadblock outside the main entrance, demanding documentation from every foreign-looking person approaching the gate. There were 42 arrests, although only 15 turned out to be in the country legally, and for days the plant's production slowed.

This time, INS agents first called Rob Heflin, Perdue's vice president for human resources. Heflin recalls the agency told him, "We think there may be some issues at Showell, maybe 30 or 40 illegals."

So he proposed: "Why don't we work out a manner that's acceptable to you to come down and check our files."

The agency eventually identified 11 forged documents that had been sold by an undercover agent, then risked a leak by telling the company the names. The information allowed Perdue to hire replacements in advance.

On March 18, shortly after noon, two unmarked, white INS vans rolled up to the plant. The company summoned the suspected employees to the office as if it were a routine matter. Three INS agents were waiting. Five arrests resulted. The replacements were already on the job.

"We've gone from busting open the doors and shutting down the plant to doing it this way," says Benedict J. Ferro, district director of the Baltimore INS office. "It's very businesslike now."

There are still exceptions to the new climate, of course. The day after the recent arrests at the Perdue plant, the INS raided the Chestertown Foods Inc. processing plant, arresting 46 suspected illegal workers from Mexico and Indonesia.

The same plant had been raided with similar results a year and a half earlier. At that time, Chestertown responded by turning over its hiring to a contract firm, Chester Labor Services, that incorporated in Maryland a month later.

The Rev. Jim Lewis, an Episcopal priest in Delaware who heads the Poultry Justice Alliance, says the industry could avoid all these problems simply by offering generous enough wages and benefits to attract local labor.

"Why don't they wake up?" he said.

But Laura Reiff, national government liaison for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, is not convinced that even a salary of $20 an hour could fill the industry's labor needs in the current strong economy.

She is part of a growing consensus that immigration restrictions need to be relaxed to give American manufacturers greater leeway in hiring foreign workers.

With such sentiments in mind, Delmarva poultry industry representatives met in December with the INS and Arturo Chevarria, deputy consul general of the Mexican embassy, to discuss possibilities.

Chevarria says industry representatives said they need 500 workers on Delmarva at any one time, and that they'd be happy to hire them from Mexico. He'd be happy about that, too.

Foreign workers send generous amounts of dollars home. The post office in Georgetown, for example, sells hundreds of thousands of dollars in money orders each month to Guatemalans sending money home.

Ideally, the industry would like legislation expanding rules for temporary workers, giving them the same flexibility as seasonal businesses such as crab picking and bean harvesting.

"That would be a disaster," Lewis says. "Go see the crab pickers if you want to see what would happen. The companies control their whole lives."

Even those sympathetic with the industry's needs tend to agree with that reasoning.

"We're very suspicious of guest worker programs," says Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy group for immigrants' rights. "The workers tend to be exploited."

But conditions for workers already seem pretty gloomy in places like Walker's Trailer Park, a dilapidated cluster of about 100 trailers in Marydel, a small town by the Delaware state line.

Tenants, many of them Guatemalans, complain that owner James Walker Sr. does not keep up the property and often charges $100 a month per person, cramming each trailer with eight, 10 or more people sleeping in shifts.

"I wish I was collecting that kind of money," says Walker, who runs a convenience store across the street. "Most of them are very good people. But they bootleg and take in renters on their own."

Juana, a 30-year-old single mother from Vera Cruz, Mexico, says the trailer park is a trap. For her, life is a string of days spent caring for neighborhood children whose parents work, watching hour after hour of Spanish language broadcasts on satellite television.

Recently, Juana's 61-year-old father arrived illegally, got a job at a Delaware poultry processing plant and began helping out with the $420 monthly rent.

"I would go back to my country, but jobs are even harder to find there," she says.

Such are the kinds of people that Sister Maria Delores Mairlot attends to daily at La Esperanza, an aid mission for the Hispanic community of Georgetown.

Often having risked their lives to avoid arrest along their way to the Eastern Shore, they now strive to move beyond the drudgery of their current jobs.

"Their dream," she says, "is to get out of the poultry companies. But there is no other job here."