Latino Immigrants' Influence On Southern States

"The language training is the latest sign of how immigration is altering the face — and voice — of the modern South, a part of the country with few home-grown Spanish speakers but plenty of work in crop fields, construction sites and poultry plants during the last 15 years. The presence of immigrant workers here, a novelty not long ago, has fairly quickly been accepted as a fact of life.While cities such as Charlotte, N.C., and Atlanta have seen fast jumps in the number of Latino residents since 1990, the immigrant wave has shown up too in rural areas — from Athens, Ala., to Shelbyville, Tenn. — where it once would have been unusual to hear anything but English".