The dining room at the Mower County Senior Citizen’s Center was awash with concerned Austin faces Monday night, there to participate in a town meeting about Austin’s increasing diversity.

Tuesday, October 26, 1999

The dining room at the Mower County Senior Citizen’s Center was awash with concerned Austin faces Monday night, there to participate in a town meeting about Austin’s increasing diversity. The meeting started with a bang, because the first speaker the audience heard was Hugo Luna’s appalling story of her introduction to Austin by the Iowa employment agency that brought her here.

"I’m real happy with the town and I love my work, but I’m here to tell you my story because I want to stop a lady named Bobbi from exploiting people like us," Luna told the crowd. "This is my story …"

Luna was the only person of Hispanic – or any other than European-American – origin to speak at the meeting sponsored by the League of Women Voters Austin. The meeting was the well-attended kick off to a series of Community Circle meetings on "Changing Faces, Changing Communities."

"A recent study found that 73 percent of Americans now are white non-Hispanic," moderator Dan Conradt told the audience. "Of the remainder, 12.5 percent are of African-American origin, 10.5 percent Hispanic and 3.3 percent Asian. In the next 50 years the percentage of white non-Hispanic residents is expected to drop to 53 percent … It’s very obvious at that rate why we must work now to become a ‘community of inclusion’."

Conradt introduced the group of nine panelists – which ranged from educators to law enforcement personnel to labor force specialists – after Luna told her story and left the meeting to go to work at Quality Pork Processors.

While the group didn’t have any set answers to offer the audience, they were in agreement that Austin was changing rapidly: For example:

– the translation portion of the Court Administration and Law Enforcement budgets has "blossomed", as has contact with non-native speakers of English;

– the population of students involved in English as a second language classes in Austin’s K-12 system went from 128 last year to 230 this year;

– the faces one sees in the store, on the street and in school come in a much wider variety of colors and shapes than 20 or 30 years ago.

– even KAUS will begin to give school cancellation announcements in Spanish this year.

Sue Grove, who teaches ESL at Riverland Community College and is a member of Amis Austin, a group which sponsors refugees to Austin, set out to destroy the most pervasive myth about Austin’s newest wave of residents.

"Refugees and immigrants pay taxes the minute they start work," Grove said. "They don’t get a grace period."

Her recommendation for decreasing tensions?

"Get to know individuals," she said. "They’re people like us, who bleed and worry about their children … We had a group of high school kids out the other week, who had been involved in some not very pleasant activities to do with race. Once they got to know some of the international students, their attitudes changed very quickly."

"Invite your neighbor over for a cup of coffee if nothing else," Rev. Mike Juntenen said.

Education, more than one person said, is the key to changing attitude.

"This community is sitting on something potentially explosive," said Human Rights Commission Chairwoman Cindy Lohn. "I hear more and more stories, like Luna’s, … and it breaks my heart to think the community could treat people that way … We can’t act fast enough."

Lohn is also the coordinator of the LWVA’s Community Circle group; she asked that people interested in participating in the League’s pilot project on diversity contact her.