Southern Discomfort

Even though the downturn is hitting the South hard—Wachovia Bank in Charlotte announced it will lay off more than 10,000 employees, while Volkswagen's recent decision to open a plant in Chattanooga was greeted with almost as much enthusiasm as the Second Coming—the allegiance of the white business and professional class to the Republican Party seems unshakable. "I think if there were a better economy more people would take a risk on Obama," said Patricia Murtaugh Wise, a lawyer from Nashville sightseeing with her kids at Atlanta's landmark Varsity Drive-In restaurant. Her friends are blaming Bush more than his party, she said. "I'm not sure people are saying, 'Because Bush got us into this, let's vote for a Democrat.' I think people are saying, 'Let's get a new person in there'."

If democrats have hopes for making serious inroads into this Republican bloc, they are probably long term. "As the society becomes more diversified, there's a huge opportunity for the Democratic Party," said Merle Black. Native-born Southerners are a shrinking part of the population, while the numbers of people who are foreign-born like those Spanish speakers, or foreign-born like Yankees, are growing.

" La migra! La migra! " shouted 6-year-old Brenda as I approached the dilapidated trailer where she lives with her mother and siblings and at least one cousin in upstate South Carolina. She thought I might be from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But nobody ran or hid, at least that I could see. Uber, a 22-year-old cousin, said the family had come up from Guadalajara, Mexico, over the last few years. They are among millions of immigrants, legal and illegal, who have moved to the South since the 1990s, heading to Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee for jobs in poultry processing, light manufacturing and construction. Brenda's family does yard work, cuts flowers. "The labor here pays more and it's not so heavy as in Mexico," her mother, Magdalena, explained in Spanish.

The seams in their mobile home were rusted. The driveway in front was covered with aluminum beer cans that one of the older sons flattened by rolling over them with a car, which makes them easier to store and sell as scrap. Brenda's family were among the poorest residents in the poorest section of a poor town. But Brenda and her 3-year-old brother, Kevin, were born in the United States and are American citizens. Brenda speaks English and is starting school. "First grade," she said from behind her mother's skirt. When the elections of 2020 roll around, she'll be able to vote.

Never in the last century and a half has the South been home to so many people who were born and who continue to live outside its history. A Census report estimated that the South's Hispanic population nearly tripled between 2000 and 2006, more than in any other U.S. region; nearly 60 percent of this population was foreign-born. These newcomers have little interest in re-enacting the Civil War, no reason to revive the emotions of the civil-rights movement. They did not move here for iced tea or a more leisurely pace of life. The South to them is future, not past.

In Savannah, Ga., I stopped a pair of women in saris and a young teenage boy pushing a stroller, who were reluctant to talk. Their English was not good and my Hindi nonexistent. They glanced over their shoulders at a young man on a bench who wore casual clothes and a neatly trimmed beard, their in-law. His name was Zuber Malik, from a small city north of Mumbai, he said. He was 29 years old and already had lived and worked in Rhode Island and Wisconsin "in the convenience-store business," when he saw a Dairy Queen franchise up for sale in Glennville, Ga. (population: 3,700). He'd read that Warren Buffett had bought the parent company "and I thought, 'Oh, yes!' " That would mean capital and advertising. His notional idea of the South appealed to him, too. In his hometown in India they still grew cotton. So he came, and then, he said, he prospered. His first child, less than a year old, was born an American. And Zuber, whose wife wears a hijab, or head covering, said he has no problems as a Muslim in the South. "We all believe in God," he tells people. "It says on our dollar bill we believe in God."

Piyush (Bobby) Jindal, the young governor of Louisiana whose parents were Hindu immigrants from India, is an obvious example of how fast assimilation can take place and success can follow for those with educational and economic advantages. At the same time xenophobia, fear of job competition and suspicions of "illegal aliens"—which translates as "criminals" pure and simple in many minds—all work against Hispanic peasants struggling to join the ranks of other upwardly mobile North Americans. Gladys, a 42-year-old maid from El Salvador who fled the war in her country in 1983 (and preferred that her last name not be published) spent most of the last two decades in the Los Angeles area before moving to North Carolina with her two teenage children in 2006. "There is a lot of prejudice," she says. "You hear it when you go to the market, you hear it in the post office. People say they don't want us."