BY ANDRES VIGLUCCI
 MIAMI HERALD REPORTER
 Photography by Candace West

 SILER CITY, N.C. -- The outsiders came first in a trickle, then in a flood, speaking a foreign
 tongue, bringing foreign ways and consuming pungently unfamiliar foods.

 When as-yet-uncounted numbers of Mexicans and Central Americans descended on tiny Siler
 City, they forever altered a sleepy rural burg where the black-and-white population mix had
 not changed since Reconstruction.

 In a scant six years, Hispanic immigrants drawn by jobs at Siler City's busy chicken
 slaughterhouses and textile mills have swollen its official population of 4,500, probably by
 several thousand. By conservative estimates, they now make up as much as one-third of
 Siler City's population, crowding into its aging neighborhoods, filling its schools, and testing
 townfolks' capacity for tolerance and accommodation.

 Not incidentally, the immigrants have also helped fuel an economic boom the likes
 of which Siler City has not seen since the railroad arrived in the 1880s.

 The oldtimers, many of whom liked things just fine the way they were before the
 immigrants came, have yet to recover from the shock.

 ''You know what they call Siler City now?'' a clerk at a farm-equipment store in
 town, Joe Langley, inquired good-naturedly of a visitor. ''Little Mexico!''

 In sharp contrast is the giddy delight of newcomers who are getting a first taste of
 American prosperity. After struggling in California, Wilfredo Hernandez came to
 Siler City with his wife and two young daughters at the urging of a cousin.

 ''I could never dream of buying my own place in Los Angeles,'' said Hernandez,
 35, a native of El Salvador who builds trailer homes by day and on weekends
 helps his growing Hispanic Baptist congregation erect a sleek new church
 building. ''After three years here, I saved enough to buy a mobile home . . . I'm
 really happy.''

 The story of Siler City's transformation is the story of U.S. immigration at the end
 of the 20th Century, writ small.

 A 30-year wave of mass immigration, legal and illegal, has brought millions of
 newcomers to the country, half or more from Latin America and the Caribbean,
 most of those unskilled workers from Mexico.

 In search of jobs and better pay, many are pushing out of saturated Texas and California
 and into towns in the Old South and the Midwest where immigration was formerly an
 abstraction. Some now bypass those traditional entry points, lured by word of mouth
 to places they never heard of.

 Almost overnight, Hispanics have become the main source of labor for meatpacking
 plants in Omaha, Neb., carpet factories in Dalton, Ga., the construction industry in
 Atlanta, and poultry plants in Delaware and North Carolina, where they also haul in
 the tobacco harvest -- all jobs native-born Americans seem unwilling to fill, at least
 at the pay employers seem willing to offer.

 Wherever they go, spouses and children in tow, the immigrants' arrival raises
 anew the familiar debate over their impact on taxes, schools and services. And as
 they settle in, they inevitably upset oldtimers' fixed notions about America.

 Nowhere is the trend more dramatically on view than in Siler City, a conservative,
 tight-knit town long mistrustful of outsiders -- a category that encompasses not
 just poor, Spanish-speaking immigrants, but also Yankees and suspect liberals
 from nearby Chapel Hill, home to the University of North Carolina.

 Now that immigration has come to Siler City, longtime residents find themselves
 caught somewhere between welcome and animosity.

 ''The sentiment is, 'Send 'em home,' '' said Rick Givens, a Siler City businessman
 and chairman of the Chatham County Commission. ''It's old-school, and it's
 unfortunate.''

 But Givens says his constituents also have a point. Local taxpayers have been
 left to absorb a large, unforeseen influx of often-needy people with little outside
 help, he said.

 Town and county officials have had to hire more police officers, English teachers,
 and interpreters for its courts and public health clinics. The county clinics must
 absorb the cost of care for some immigrants, many of them undocumented, who
 can't pay their bills.

 The public outcry prompted Givens last fall to write a letter asking federal
 authorities for help in getting undocumented aliens legalized or ''routed back to
 their homes.''

 And the neophyte commissioner promptly got a stinging first lesson in the politics
 of immigration: He was pilloried by some of Siler City's emerging Hispanic
 advocates and rebuked by the governor's office for insensitivity.

 Givens said he has learned to couch his opinions more diplomatically, but
 insists the point of the letter still stands.

 ''I have eaten a lot of crow. But we're not racists or bigots. We need help,''
 Givens said. ''I ran for office to lower my taxes and we ended up passing the
 biggest tax increase in years.''

 But the complaints are tempered by a dawning realization among many that,
 economically and culturally, immigrants have been a boon to what might
 otherwise be a dying town.

 ''They're buying houses like crazy. Business is growing,'' said Holly Kozelsky, 29,
 who grew up in Siler City and was working as an interpreter when the town's main
 real-estate agency hired her to sell to Hispanics. ''There is a cultural richness and
 diversity we didn't have before. Our churches are different, our music is different.
 It's changed completely.''

 Yet even Kozelsky -- who picked up Spanish working at a local Mexican
 restaurant and married a Mexican immigrant -- is not without trepidation.

 ''The cost is that we're losing our sense of place. A lot of the oldtimers are sad
 and feel intimidated,'' she said. ''We're becoming like any other big place. I
 prosper from it, but there are parts of it that I hate.''

 Just over an hour south of the sprawling Raleigh-Durham metro area and the
 high-tech Triangle Research Park, Siler City is solidly Bible Belt. It has also been
 Klan territory.

 The town's fortunes have long rested on a marriage of agriculture and industry:
 feed and cotton mills and, for at least a generation, two plants where locally
 raised chickens are slaughtered, sliced and packaged, hard labor with high rates
 of injury.

 By the early 1990s, though, the town was in decline and losing people, much of
 its compact, brick-front downtown boarded up. Since the immigrants' arrival, the
 shuttered corner pharmacy and soda fountain, where Kozelskly once sipped
 Cherry Cokes, has become Tienda Gabriel, one of several immigrant-owned
 downtown stores stocking Latin American foods, Spanish-language videos and
 Latin-music CDs.

The big commercial action is out on the Highway 64 corridor that bisects Siler City
 and now functions as its main street. New chain motels and fast-food stores are
 opening; Wal-Mart has broken ground.

 Plumes of steam pour night and day into the sky from the poultry plants, which,
 fed by plentiful labor, have expanded and added work shifts. In the surrounding
 farmlands, sophisticated automated hatcheries have sprung up to supply the plants.

 The economic spillover extends to local makers of furniture and mobile homes
 and even the town's AM radio station, WNCA, whose once-sagging ratings
 are now buoyed by a nightly Spanish-language show.

 Town Manager Joel Brower credits some of the boom to urban sprawl, not
 immigration. But like many others, he says the presence of a ready labor pool
 and immigrants' demand for goods and housing have doubtlessly accelerated the
 wave of development.

 ''I hate to think what would happen if the immigrants left tomorrow,'' Brower said.
 ''Our industry would disappear.''

 No one is sure how the immigrants found Siler City.

 Most likely, Hispanic field workers who had long been migrating through the
 South, more or less invisibly, were drawn to the steady jobs at the poultry plants
 once they gained legal status under a late-'80s amnesty.

 At first, the newcomers were mostly young, single men. As they legalized their
 status, many began sending for their families, and by 1994 the influx was
 impossible to miss.

 Byron Barrera's story is typical. An uncle came to Siler City several years ago for
 a poultry plant job. Within a short time, Barrera and 16 relatives from Guatemala
 had joined him, most of them also to work at the chicken plants.

 ''The base for all this is having someone for support,'' said Barrera, 23. ''My uncle
 had an apartment, a place where we could stay when we arrived.''

 The immigrants find in Siler City plentiful jobs combined with a low cost of living.
 Starting pay at the chicken plants can exceed $7 an hour with benefits, a windfall
 for immigrants accustomed to scraping by on less and willing to work double
 shifts.

 Ninett Perez is emblematic of how rapidly some newcomers have adapted. A few
 years out of Guatemala, Perez, 31, has parlayed a job inspecting textiles at a
 fabric mill into homeownership, and is now hunting for a bigger house for her and
 her 9-year-old daughter.

 Roberto Vazquez, a Salvadoran generally acknowledged to be the town's first
 immigrant, preceded the influx by a good 15 years, having wound up in Siler City
 after running out of money while on his way to Washington, D.C. But he, too, has
 benefited: He brought his four brothers to live and work in Siler City.

 ''I have my job, my own home, my children,'' said Vazquez, 48, who has worked
 at the local Food Lion supermarket for 22 years and preaches at a small Hispanic
 Christian church. ''I want for nothing, and I live a peaceful life.''

 Longtime residents, however, have tended to focus on the less-positive aspects of
 the influx, especially at first, when the benefits were hard to see. The first source
 of friction was fundamental: For most Siler City residents, communication with
 their new neighbors, many of whom spoke little or no English, was impossible.

 Donna Weaver, a Siler City native, went away  to college in 1985, when
 there were virtually no immigrants in town.

 ''I came back and they were here,'' said Weaver, who later studied Spanish
 and is now an interpreter at a private medical clinic. ''I didn't like it at first. I
 didn't understand why they were here.''

 Police were soon flooded with complaints about immigrants blasting music
 late at night and about rowdy, drunk young men. Cops found themselves
 grappling with the tendency of some newcomers to drive without licenses
 or insurance, sometimes under the effects of alcohol, sometimes with tragic
 consequences.

 Along with the legal immigrants have come the undocumented, prompting a
 flourishing trade in fraudulent documentation and phony immigration ''experts'' who
 cheat naive newcomers.

 While countless immigrants have bought mobile homes and houses, many newly
 built, others are stuck in dilapidated housing, crammed into tumbledown frame
 houses or sagging trailers for which landlords charge exorbitant monthly rents,
 sometimes $100 a head.

 As some locals see it, some immigrants also brought a little too much Los
 Angeles to Siler City. A small but visible criminal element has arrived, quickly
 taking its place in the local drug trade, which predated the Hispanic influx.

 ''Within the past two or three years, we started getting Hispanics busted with
 kilos of coke worth a quarter million in their car,'' said Mitch Million, a veteran
 bilingual teacher who also interprets in local courts. ''That didn't use to happen.''

 Open confrontations between longtime residents and immigrants have been rare,
 however. Locals' resentment has instead played out behind closed doors or in
 conversations among neighbors, especially when Hispanics began buying houses
 in town.

 ''A woman up the block from us sold her house to a Mexican family and the
 neighbor chewed her out for it,'' said Donna Weaver, relating a commonplace
 anecdote.

 When she married a Mexican man, Weaver became herself the object of
 intolerance. From members of her own family.

 ''I hung up the phone after an argument with my Dad and I thought, 'My Dad's
 Archie Bunker,' '' recalled Weaver. ''My husband and I weren't allowed to have
 Thanksgiving dinner with the family for two years.''

 Nor have relations been cordial between newcomers and Siler City's black
 community, once about a quarter of the town's population. Many blacks regard
 the immigrants as competitors for housing, jobs and limited social services and
 medical care once focused mainly on blacks.

 ''We were already down, and now we're even further behind,'' said the Rev. Barry
 Gray, pastor of the 300-member First Missionary Baptist Church of Siler City.
 ''Latinos have rented and are steadily buying a lot of property. They have cash
 money, they have good credit, they're a good liability. People cater to them. But it
 has made housing skyrocket.''

 Racial tensions flared briefly when muggers, some of them black, began targeting
 immigrants, who, lacking bank accounts, were known to carry around wads of
 cash. When a Hispanic man shot and killed a black man in an argument,
 anonymous threats were phoned to people with Spanish surnames picked out of
 the phone book.

 Those tensions have since abated, though, and blacks and Hispanics recently
 found themselves allied in attacking one of the touchiest flash points over
 immigration in Siler City -- apparent white flight from the town's only public grade
 school.

 In just three years, Hispanic kids have overtaken white children as the largest
 group in Siler City Elementary, where swelling enrollment has forced
 administrators to install trailers and shift fifth graders to a new middle school.

 Hispanics now make up a full third of the 670-student school's enrollment, in part
 because some white parents have pulled their children out, said Paul Joyce,
 assistant superintendent of county schools.

 The bright, immaculate school would be the envy of many communities, but some
 white parents complain that teachers spend too much time helping students who
 are not proficient in English at the expense of their children.

 At a fall meeting, school board members became the target of angry complaints
 from both black and Hispanic parents, who blamed them for doing nothing to stop
 white children from transferring across district lines.

 ''The school board was letting it happen,'' said T.C. Yarborough, a detective in the
 county sheriff's department and president of the school PTA, who is white and
 suggests that concern over their children's education is not the only motive for the
 transfers. ''I heard from other parents, 'My child is the only white child in the
 classroom.' ''

 The school controversy is only the latest example of how the town's institutions,
 treading their way gingerly between longtime residents' sensibilities and
 immigrants' needs, have struggled to respond.

 The town produced a well-intentioned Spanish-language video and brochure
 designed to instruct newcomers on how to be American, but that implied instead
 that Hispanic men abuse alcohol and beat their spouses. Rueful town officials
 blamed a poor translation.

 Immigrants and advocates have complained of harassment by police, who set up
 driver's license checkpoints at the entrance to trailer parks where they live, by the
 Catholic Church after Mass, and by the poultry plants at shift change. The town
 has also been reluctant to crack down on exploitative landlords, advocates say.

 In the absence of decisive official action, churches and private groups have formed
 the backbone of Siler City's efforts to absorb the newcomers, with varying degrees
 of success.

 Most of the mainline churches have adopted Spanish-speaking congregations,
 helping them become independent once they are ready to stand alone. The
 churches have been one of the few bridges connecting newcomers and oldtimers.

 After years within the fold of Loves Creek Baptist Church, the Rev. Israel Tapia's
 60-member congregation is constructing a new church, with help from
 non-Hispanic members who pitched in with labor and donations.

 The local United Way hired Ilana Dubester, a Spanish-speaking Brazilian
 immigrant, to run a service and advocacy group. Now independent, Hispanic
 Liaison counsels immigrants on everything from obtaining driver's licenses to
 home buying.

 But it's all patchwork, and insufficient, said Bill Lail, director of the Family
 Resource Center, a nonprofit spinoff of the county health department that provides
 counseling, child care and immigration services to immigrants.

 The bottom line, residents and newcomers said, is that Siler City is for now three
 separate communities whose members rarely mix outside work.

 But there is also reason for hope: At Siler City elementary, most of the
 immigrants' children pick up English with ease, administrators say. After
 Commissioner Givens issued his letter of complaint, he and other local leaders
 tapped Pastor Tapia to organize a forthcoming trip to Mexico, where they hope to
 get a feel for where the newcomers are coming from.

 ''By sheer numbers, it seems inevitable that something has to give. It's already
 giving, in a way,'' said Dubester. ''Both sides are learning how to live with each
 other.''

 The clearest evidence may rest in one oldtimer's change of heart -- Donna
 Weaver's father. ''He's coming around,'' she said. ''He just called to ask what my
 husband wanted for Christmas.''

                     Copyright 1999 Miami Herald