POPULATION
Eastworld
When Alicia Martinez moved to the Eastside in 1991, it seemed like she and her husband were the only Latinos for miles around. “There was no TV in Spanish, and there were hardly any Latinos in the area,” says Martinez, a social worker who was born in Mexico City. “We didn’t have a community. Then St. Louise Church in Bellevue offered a mass in Spanish, and that brought Latinos from surrounding areas—but it was so small we all knew each other by name.”
A decade and a half later, immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa have helped make St. Louise, with 4,300 parishioners, the largest church in the Archdiocese of Seattle. Three out of 10 -Bellevue residents are foreign born, and, like St. Louise, public institutions across the Eastside have changed how they operate to reflect that population. Visitors to the City of Bellevue’s Web site can now choose among Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Russian versions; in the cosmopolitan Crossroads neighborhood a “Mini City Hall” provides services in 10 languages. Hospitals, clinics, and police departments use telephone translation services: There’s no way they can hire personnel to cover the dozens of languages they’re likely to encounter.
Some institutions realize that language is far from the only barrier immigrants face. At the Health Care Access Clinic, a free weekly service for the uninsured offered by Kirkland’s Evergreen Hospital, a multilingual staff helps foreign patients navigate this country’s bewildering health care system. “We have social workers who explore all the possibilities of how we can provide care, see if [patients] qualify for Medicaid, find connections to permanent providers, and explain how the system works,” says clinic coordinator Cherie Green. At Bellevue’s Lake Hills Elementary, where 60 percent of students speak first languages other than English, a program called Wrap Around Services serves parents as well as kids, providing adult ESL classes, mental health care, cultural celebrations, and recreation programs in a multicultural setting. The 40-year-old Youth Eastside Services (YES), a social service agency for kids, set up a Newcomer Program to help young immigrants adjust to life in the United States.
But even as they try to reach out to immigrants, some Eastside institutions have lagged conspicuously behind the larger community in diversity. In 2001, a Bellevue police officer shot and killed an unarmed Guatemalan immigrant named Nelson Martinez Mendez, provoking angry protest from the Hispanic community. The Bellevue Police now have a diversity focus group and subsidizes officers who study Spanish at local schools. But only two of the department’s 101 patrol officers are Hispanic. Spokesman Greg Grannis said the department’s restrictive hiring standards are the reason: Recruits must be U.S. citizens and must have attended college. By contrast, Los Angeles and some other cities with large immigrant populations hire candidates whose citizenship applications have been accepted but who haven’t yet become citizens; the Seattle Police Department requires citizenship but not college.
With a shortage of qualified candidates in certain fields, YES director Patti Skelton-McGougan also struggles to make her agency reflect the community’s ethnic makeup: “Everybody is competing for the same people.” Elected officialdom is changing even more slowly. In 1994, when Bellevue’s population was 19 percent minority, Chinese immigrant Conrad Lee became the first nonwhite member elected to its city council. Fifteen years later, with the population about 30 percent nonwhite and 25 percent foreign born, Lee remains the lone elected minority member. (Last March, Hong Kong-born Patsy Bonincontri was appointed to serve out an unfinished term.) Lee laments that getting newcomers interested in local civic life can be an uphill battle: “If you go to Chinese New Year, you’ll see 600 Chinese Americans organizing successfully, but they don’t mix [with non-Chinese].” He acknowledges that immigrants may face particular financial and cultural barriers when they seek public office, but he’s still disappointed that others haven’t followed his lead: “It shouldn’t take more than four years for others to get interested. Once it reaches critical mass, it will catch fire fast—but before then, it’s a long, hard grind.”
Published: February 2009
