Editor’s note: This is the first of a three-part series looking at diversity in the Auburn community.

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“Maria,” her husband and their kids moved from village to village in war-ravaged Guatemala, looking for work.

When Maria’s husband died, she was left with five children. Leticia, the youngest, was 18 months old. The young widow had never held a formal job. In Guatemala, the woman keeps the house and cares for the children, the man provides.

Guerillas had killed many members of her family.

Relatives urged Maria to give up three of her children for adoption and keep two. She refused. Ultimately, she and her kids made the deadly trek over the burning furnace of the Mexican desert to the United States.

Today she is a naturalized U.S. citizen well on her way to full citizenship. Leticia Ostos spoke with pride of the mother who gave so much for her children.

“People really don’t understand how hard it was for people like her,” Ostos said. “Her dream was to provide for her children and have her family together in the United States. She did what she had to do.”

Ostos and her Mexican-born husband, Jay Ostos, manager of the Continental Village at 560 21st. St. SE., a central gathering place for the city’s Hispanic-Latino population, are part of a recent wave of immigrants from Mexico and Central and South America, from Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, the Marshall Islands, Somalia and India and Africa and, it seems, everywhere else, dropping new roots in Auburn.

Ralph Ibarra, diversity liaison for the City of Auburn, described how “diverse” Auburn has become.

“We have a significant Hispanic-Latino community, we have a significant Russian-Ukrainian community, we have a significant Asian community that has its distinct individual groups — Korean Americans, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Vietnamese Americans,” said Ibarra. “But if you look at immigration from different countries in Asia, then you have the South Asian source like Indians, meaning from India, particularly the Sikh community from Punjab, and you have lots of European immigrants. And we have a significant contingent from Italy, the Sons of Italy.”

According to U.S. Census data, between 1980 and 1990 roughly 72 percent of Auburn’s population growth was Caucasian. In the following decade, those numbers flipped: only 33 percent of Auburn’s newcomers were Caucasian and 67 percent were people of different races and ethnicities. Between 1990 and 2000, Latinos and Hispanics passed African Americans as the principal ethnic racial group in the country.

Census data show that of the 4,504 foreign born persons who entered the city between 1990 and 2000, 946 had come from Europe. Before 1980, there were only 282. In 2000, there were 1,462 people of Asian ancestry living in Auburn, 787 of whom had had entered between 1990 and 2000, up from the 370 who had arrived between 1980 and 1989.

Wherever they come from, they are changing the city just as previous generations have done.

Their stories differ, but a common thread links them — a shared belief that a better life for them and for their children is still possible, here and now.

They are the Russians and Ukrainians in downtown Auburn west of City Hall and shopping at Marvel Grocery on C Street Southwest, the women with their hair tucked neatly under colored scarves that mark them as members of a Ukrainian Pentecostal church. They are the younger generation that likes to frequent the Harvey Road Starbucks, pondering their next move on a chessboard.

They are the janitors, maids and office cleaners, some holding advanced degrees but unable to work within their field of expertise here because of their poor English skills. They are South Korean parents, fretting over a colicky baby at 4 a.m., wondering where to go, who to turn to for help.

They are business owners like hair braider Elizabeth Foday-Dodge, not far removed from the days of dodging rape gangs in civil-war torn Liberia on the African continent.

‘Pastor Viktor’

And they are people like “Pastor Viktor” who leads the Russian-Ukrainian Parousia congregation at the foot of Lakeland Hills. Viktor Krushenitskiy and his wife left the Black Sea City of Odessa in Ukraine in 1994 because he was close to retirement. They wanted to join their daughter in Auburn.

Today his congregation, a mix of older and younger immigrants, fields a band called Hope that plays at local events throughout the area.

Krushenitskiy, whose church faced persecution in his native land, praises America, as “a land of religious liberty.”

Of course, making a new life here is not easy. The newcomers must learn a new language, find a job, and feed their families, all while navigating the untold, baffling features of life here that the native born take for granted.

“My experience with immigrants locating to this area is that whatever attracted them here was in part preexisting relationships in their country of origin,” said Michael Hursh, director of community services for the City of Auburn. “They come into a very tight-knit, typically family-oriented environment, where the understanding and the routines of life have been developed, and not always accurately. It’s bewildering to them, and without that strong link to a preexisting group or family, they come on the radar of needing resources pretty quickly. My concern is with how many of the resources are available and ready to really serve them and what they need to create appropriate living conditions,” said Hursh.

Barriers, fears

Complicating things is a common, deep-rooted suspicion of police, the press, and local government, the byproduct of corruption in authoritarian homelands. An unwillingness to turn to police makes it easy for bad people to exploit them, for instance, unscrupulous landlords.

Medical care is a constant concern. For instance, pregnant women of Latin origin are used to a much lower level of health care in their native countries and have no idea of the quality of care they can receive here.

Domestic violence is a major issue. One South American immigrant became a virtual slave to her boyfriend, who had threatened to turn her name and that of her little daughter over to authorities as illegal immigrants unless she did everything he told her to do.

“The double-edged sword is that if you are here without having gone through the proper process of immigration, there is a fear that by inviting a police response, this other part of your life will be found out,” Hursh said. “This allows abuse to continue because it has the upper hand. Domestic violence is a big problem among all communities here, long standing or not.

“… If it’s a woman or children in need of help, I will send them to the City’s Domestic Violence Victims Support Team. If there is an issue related to any kind of need for police involvement or advocacy, or if there is an abuse situation, we have people skilled in diverse languages to help. I send a lot of folks to the Health Point Clinic. I would say 50 percent of who they serve are culturally diverse, first or second-generation people. That’s a great resource.

“Finances and housing are hard. Food is easy. The City through Community Services and the work and focus on the Nutrition Program, has attempted with the YMCA and the Auburn Food Bank and the Senior Center to take what food is typically available at no cost and teach populations that aren’t familiar with that food how to cook it in a healthful way. … Money is difficult, actual benefits require applications and a lot of evidence in order to access them on an ongoing basis. Housing is always scarce for folks who don’t have it. You end up with … six to seven people living in a unit that’s built for two or three, then you have deterioration of the unit that makes it uninhabitable,” Hursh said.

There are 1,000 untold shocks, as Jiji Jalley, part of Auburn’s thriving Marshallese community, related with wry humor. One of the first objects to jolt her was something called an escalator. She had never seen the like, had no idea what it did.

“School was humongous compared to where I came from,” Jalley said. “And there were so many more people. In some places where I come from, we didn’t even have electricity. With myself, I was just another person trying to make it through everything. Now that we are more involved with our community, I see a lot of people having a hard time finding work because of the language barrier and just getting out of their old customs and getting along with what’s happening in the United States.”

When the Marshall Islands — the United States conducted atomic testing over its coral atolls and white sand beaches — became autonomous in the 1980s, the United States signed a compact that grants the people “non-immigrant status,” meaning they can come to this country and stay as long as they want without having to acquire a Visa.

But their special status doesn’t eliminate all problems.

“There’s a lot of things we’re figuring out that we are not qualified for. A lot of people are having difficulties with medical who are not citizens. The main thing I see we’re having a problem with right now is substance abuse. A lot of our young people have a problem with that and don’t follow up with the court system,” said Jalley.

‘Lucky man’

Salvatore Cascone came to Auburn from Sicily more than 30 years ago with his late wife, Rosa, without much formal education and barely able to make himself understood in English. But life has been good for Auburn’s ambassador of bocce ball. This country and city have afforded him a good living, allowed him to own his own house, raise his daughters and enjoy a life that would not have been possible had he not come.

“I’m a lucky man,” Cascone said.