The newspaper pdf article can be found here: http://www.annistonstar.com/PDF/2006/062506_A.pdf
Migration from California to Alabama brings life to Golden Springs congregation
By Josh Keller
Star Staff Writer 06-25-2006
Services at the Jehovah’s Witness congregation, a Spanish-language branch in Golden Springs that was only a few years old, often were conducted in broken Spanish. Two-thirds of the membership spoke English as a first language, and they struggled as they went door-to-door in Hispanic neighborhoods looking for new members.
“It just didn’t feel like home,” said Contreras, who had moved from Fontana, Calif., into an Oxford house with his wife, Eva.
Home was the crowded, quicker pace of San Bernardino County, Calif., a Los Angeles suburb where nearly half the population is Hispanic and the Spanish services are as packed as the freeways.
In the interval since Contreras’ arrival, everything has changed at Kingdom Hall, the small white church in Golden Springs where Contreras worships. Over the two years, about 30 other Jehovah’s Witnesses have followed him here from Southern California congregations in Fontana, Colton and Rialto. He expects another 10 to 20 to arrive in the next six months. The new arrivals have brought their families, bought houses and permanently settled into Calhoun County.
The seemingly improbable migration of Jehovah’s Witnesses from one small region of California to another small region of Alabama has brought life to the congregation and fluency to its language.
The proof is in the pews. At a recent Sunday service, families who lived only minutes apart in California greeted each other as congregation members in Golden Springs. More than half of the attendance was Californian.
And last week, as a few members discussed life back in California over enchiladas at El Mariachi, a Jehovah’s Witness-owned Mexican restaurant in Oxford, Leticia Nevárez had a name for her church.
“The California Congregation,” she said, with only a hint of sarcasm.
A study in migration
The flood of Jehovah’s Witnesses into Calhoun County is a characteristic, if pronounced, example of how minority groups move around the United States, said Larry Iannaccone, the director of the Center for the Economic Study of Religion and an economics professor at George Mason University in Washington.
“At first it looks like some kind of invasion,” Iannaccone said. “What you’re seeing is the leading edge of that process.”
How do so many people decide to move between two widely separated U.S. counties with so little in common? The answers found in the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ stories — in the demographics of the religion, the power of social networks and the differing economics of California and Alabama — pool together to make an unthinkable idea reality.
The pull from Los Angeles to Calhoun County, it turns out, is stronger than it first appears.
The story of the migration starts back before Javier Contreras and his wife spoke to the man who helped him decide to move here. José Luis I-iguez, a “circuit overseer” for the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, in many ways is a scout for the religion.
In order to help spread the word of God, I-iguez must identify where the need is greatest and find intrepid volunteers willing to help support a new congregation. A main goal is to move willing members out of the cities. Of the more than a million Jehovah’s Witnesses in the nation, most, like the packed Spanish churches of San Bernardino County, are concentrated in large metropolitan areas.
Golden Springs probably was attractive for another reason, said Rodney Stark, a professor of the sociology of religion at Baylor University who has studied Jehovah’s Witnesses. As an area with a sizable Latino population but few Spanish congregations, Calhoun County is a good target for any Protestant group looking to expand its membership.
“Latin American Catholicism was pretty tepid stuff,” Stark said. “People come up, they’re not used to going to mass, and they’re fairly available, so all types of Protestant groups are making gains.”
Javier and Eva Contreras, old friends from Fontana, were I-iguez’s seeds for Golden Springs’ Spanish congregation. The congregation’s elders had helped start it in 2001 by crossing over from neighboring English congregations, and many of them were not comfortable with Spanish.
As the congregation gained ground in Golden Springs, Iniguez continued to work in California. He talked to scores of members in the San Bernardino area to let them know that Kingdom Hall in Northeast Alabama could use their help.
“The need is stronger here,” said Leticia Nevárez, I-iguez’s half-sister. She moved from Fontana just two months ago; her sister will join her in a few weeks.
She quoted Luke 10:2: “The harvest is great, but the workers are few.”
The vast unknown
But the narrative of a missionary who relocates purely for religion — in its most extreme form, boldly traveling alone to faraway places in order to proselytize the uninitiated — leaves a few things out.
“You just don’t step out onto the vast unknown,” said Iannaccone, the professor from George Mason University. “As ethnic groups move into the U.S. and from one part to another, they tend to move sort of from one community base to another, rather than being dispersed just randomly.”
The pull of social ties often explains why some groups will stay mired in economically depressed or difficult areas and others are willing to move, he said. It also explains why minority groups, more cut off from the dominant local culture, are often more mobile.
Indeed, the Californians who moved usually were told of the opportunities in Alabama by Iniguez or by a friend who already had moved. Beyond this, Jose Luis Iniguez and Javier and Eva Contreras helped construct a welcoming social network here, helping many Jehovah’s Witnesses to what they called a “soft landing” once they arrived.
The network extends far outside the church walls. It often runs along family lines. If the visitors are not relatives, Javier Contreras and others take them into their homes and introduce them to the area. Juan Rebolledo, a real estate agent for ERA King in Anniston and one of the first to move, helps visitors to feel confident that they will have a place to live when they arrive.
“When my parents came, they liked it themselves,” said Denise Felix, a sister of Javier Contreras in Rialto, Calif., who has seen many of her relatives leave for Alabama. “There was no smog, no traffic. My dad could sell his house and retire. My sister sold her house and paid cash for the new one.”
Leaving the rat race
This third reason for leaving California — housing prices — is how Ethan Young, a carpet cleaner, saved money selling his tract home in Colton, Calif. for a large two-story house in Golden Springs.
Young moved about a year ago with his wife, Aracely, and 8-year-old daughter Lauren. He looked relaxed recently as he sat on a couch in his new home after work, the smell of cooking corn tortillas wafting into the living room as he spoke. His carpets are white and make you want to take off your shoes.
“You realize there’s more to life than California,” Young said. “I don’t even think about going back.”
Housing prices have risen sharply in California over the last 30 years. A median home in the state now costs more than half a million dollars, helping drive hundreds of thousands of Californians each year to leave in search of a cheaper place to live. By comparison, the median price for a house in Calhoun County is just above $100,000.
Young said the benefits of Anniston go beyond mortgage payments. Living here has allowed him to work less, move slower and spend more time with his family.
Young likes the friendly atmosphere of his neighborhood, which Contreras said resembles California 20 years ago. Not everything is covered in concrete, he said.
“It’s refreshing: I’m not in a rat race anymore,” he said. “Sometimes it’s not so much the place that you live, but what you can do.”
Members of the Jehovah's Witness congregation, a Spanish-language branch in Golden Springs, sing during a recent service. Families from Southern California congregations have bought houses and permanently settled in Calhoun County. Photo: Kevin Qualls/The Anniston Star
Mario Lopez, an elder at the Kingdom Hall in Golden Springs, reads scripture during a recent worship service. Photo: Kevin Qualls/The Anniston
Spanish as a second language
By Todd SouthStar Staff Writer 06-25-2006
At the front of the room, a fair-skinned man stood at a microphone and read in measured, clear Spanish to the audience seated before him.
Except for a crying baby and the occasional restless toddler, everyone listened intently and followed along in their copies of the article.
To the man’s right and behind a lectern, a tall, dark-haired man asked detailed questions about the reading and waited for responses from the audience.
People eager to answer the man’s question raised their hands.
A small, white hand among the different shades of skin stood out. Beneath the hand a girl, about 11 years old, sat with her head down, staring at the article and the Bible lying in her lap.
The blond-haired blue-eyed girl answered in near-perfect Spanish.
The man at the lectern nodded. “Sí, Sí,” he said, without correcting a word she had spoken.
The girl, Katie Stephens, and the man reading to the audience, Shane Ogle, are congregation members of Kingdom Hall, a Jehovah’s Witness worship center in Golden Springs.
Stephens and Ogle, like many members at the hall, learned Spanish as a second language through preaching to Hispanic people in the Calhoun County area.
Many area churches offer Spanish-language services or share building space with Hispanic congregations. Kingdom Hall does the same. It has three different congregations in one building, two English-language and one Spanish-language.
A small, but telling, difference is in the members of the congregation.
Many of those who attend the Spanish-language meetings and visit homes to share Bible study with area Hispanic residents are not native Spanish-speakers.
In the late 1990s, Petula Yenter, a witness at Kingdom Hall, traveled from Roanoke to Piedmont and many points between to pray and study with Spanish-speaking witnesses. She learned Spanish at Jacksonville State University.
In 2000, when witnesses from the two English-speaking congregations decided to form a Spanish-language congregation to minister to Calhoun County’s growing Hispanic community, Yenter helped teach them the basics of the language.
Yenter said about 45 members signed up for the lessons, but only 15 stuck with the class.
The group met once a week for about six months, and as witnesses felt comfortable they began entering Hispanic communities to share their faith.
Ogle said that although he had studied some Spanish in high school and had visited homes as a witness for most of his life, he still felt nervous the first few times he knocked on the door of a Spanish-speaking household.
“I would say a little prayer before I went to the door,” he said. “I was just trying to communicate with them and hoped that they didn’t think I was some crazy gringo.”
Yenter said that the first time she went to the door of a Spanish-speaking home she had a little piece of paper explaining why she was there, but she didn’t know how to ask anything else.
“You have to have a sense of humor about it,” she said. “You use the wrong word at the wrong time, and they look at you kind of funny.”
Sometimes certain words sound like what people want to say but don’t mean the same thing, Yenter said. One example she noted was the Spanish word “embarazada” which sounds a lot like the English word “embarrassed,” but actually means “pregnant.”
Scott Stephens, Katie’s father, said on his first Spanish-speaking home visit he felt like his “knees were going to melt and thought, “Oh God, please don’t let them ask me a question.”
All the witnesses interviewed said the Hispanic people they had visited were very polite and helped them when they had difficulties speaking in Spanish, which made their work much easier.
Katie’s Spanish skills have come in handy outside of church, she said she helps one of her classmates at Wedowee Middle School understand what is going on in class, because she doesn’t speak English very well, and the teachers don’t speak Spanish.