Immigrants reshape Hillsboro

This article shows how a city has changed from all Anglo to mostly Asian and Hispanic. It tells how there are some good results and some bad ones. DP

The city finds itself a "petri dish" of racial and ethnic relations as a swelling Latino and Asian population puts a new face on the onetime farm community

ANGIE CHUANG and ESMERALDA BERMUDEZ

OregonLive.com: HILLSBORO -- Laurence Hughes and her husband, Steve, are one of the last remaining Anglo families along Southeast Oak Street where they settled 25 years ago. For roughly 10 square blocks, Latinos have moved in. Taco trucks line the streets and Spanish banda music flows from backyard family celebrations.

"You see a lot of families and kids," says Laurence Hughes, a French and Spanish high school teacher who likes dropping into the Mexican bakery down the street for sweet bread. "They live their lives out a lot in the front yard. It makes it lively, makes it human."

Yet she hesitates to walk her dogs because the heavy traffic agitates them and, she says, Latino men sometimes gawk at her.

It's this mix of discomfort and attraction that casts Hillsboro as a real-world laboratory for the forces rapidly reshaping Oregon into a more populous, diverse and, some say, divided state.

Once a traditional farm town, Oregon's fifth-largest city has more than doubled since 1990, adding nearly 50,000 residents because of the surging high-tech economy. Today, migrant farm laborers shift to service and construction jobs while other immigrants design Pentium processors.
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