Photo
By: ABBY WEBER
Janettl Delgado of Blair checks out groceries Sunday,
Dec. 10, 2007 at Eau Claire's Supermercado Sandoval, 2813 E Hamilton Ave.
The owner, Javier Sandoval of Eau Claire, works behind the counter.
Javier Sandoval discusses how he ended up in Wisconsin.
Javier Sandoval describes how difficult it was for him to learn American currency.
Links:
Here is the Center on Wisconsin Strategy's report, complete with a section on the Hispanic population.
An article Katie Hotynski wrote for the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire's student newspaper, The Spectator, inspired this story.
Grocer offers unique flavor, food to Hispanic community
By Katie Hotynski
hotynskg@uwec.edu
Every weekend, Javier Sandoval drives to Chicago to pick up stock for his Mexican grocery store, Supermercado Sandoval. He returns from the trip with chilies, chocolate powder, dried shrimp, packages of tortillas and an array of sweet and salty snacks his customers wouldn’t find in an ordinary American supermarket.
Sandoval said about 50 customers a day, mostly Hispanic people, visit his store. Many of them live in the small towns surrounding Eau Claire, working on farms, in restaurants and in manufacturing plants, he said.
“That’s why I decided to put my store in Eau Claire,” he said. “It’s the ‘big city’ around here.”
A rack of Spanish-language magazines stands near the front of the store. In front of these magazines sits a row of books with titles like “English Without a Teacher” and “Learn English Quickly.” In this strip-mall enclave of Mexican culture, the books serve as a reminder of the struggles Hispanic workers face when arriving in the United States. Knowing little or no English, they have to fight hard for advancement in the job market.
The number of Hispanics in the Eau Claire area, while still relatively small, has increased dramatically in the past five years. Workers come to this area to find jobs in manufacturing and agriculture that offer better pay than jobs in southern states. But workers arriving in the United States from Spanish-speaking countries face a massive barrier — they don’t speak the language and often are too busy working to learn it.
Growing in numbers
Lynette Neibauer, an English as a second language instructor at Chippewa
Valley Technical College, said there are 76 Hispanic students in her program,
more than there have been in recent years.
“We certainly have the numbers in the area,” she said.
Only a small portion of the Eau Claire county population, 1.4 percent, is Hispanic, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2005 report. But their numbers have increased 30 percent since 2000.
Statewide, 4.3 percent of the population was Hispanic in 2005, up from 3.6 percent in 2000. There are 42.7 million Hispanics nationwide, nearly double the population in 1990. The Census Bureau estimates that Hispanics account for half the nation’s total population growth between 2004 and 2005.
Wisconsin’s Hispanics differ demographically from the state population as a whole, according to the Center on Wisconsin Strategy. The average Hispanic person is 22 years of age, while the average age of non-Hispanics is 36. COWS predicts that the youth of the population will lead to a further increase in Hispanics’ share of the workforce in the future.
Hispanics also are predominantly male (55 percent), unlike the state as a whole.
George Belmontes is the recruiter for the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce-Wisconsin JOBS program, an effort to link Spanish-speaking job seekers with the Chamber’s 168 member organizations. He said more people than before have been submitting resumes. Currently, he has about 12,000 on file, and about 4800 of them are from people of Hispanic origin. Most of the applicants have college degrees and speak multiple languages, he said.
As the Hispanic population continues to increase, Hispanic workers will be at a greater advantage in the job market, he said, referring to the HCCW Web site, which says that workplace diversity decreases turnover and increases sales.
“(Diversifying the workforce) benefits clients who may not speak the language,” he said.
Dan Marino works as a translator at North American Trading, a company in Strum that skins deer and other animals and sends their hides to China to be made into finished goods. He said the company has about 75 Hispanic employees, all of whom live in the Eleva-Strum area. People choose to settle in western Wisconsin because they have a job offer or family here or because they can’t find work elsewhere, he said.
“In other states, there are too many Spanish people,” he said. “They are a lot of competition. It’s very hard to find jobs.”
He said he likes that Hispanic artists are becoming a larger part of mainstream media.
“I think more American people should try to learn our language,” he said. “I see on TV and I hear on the radio that some people speak it.”