A week later, the council unleashed a legislative landslide against undocumented immigrants and the foreign-born. It designated English as the city's official language, seeking to "preserve the rights of those who speak only English" by taking down municipal signs in Spanish and by scrubbing foreign languages from city paperwork.
It authorized the city manager to pursue an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to train a police officer to screen for suspected undocumented immigrants.
Nomi Vaughan
At the height of the immigration debate, then-Mayor Bob Phelps appealed for calm.
Someone chucked a rock through his window.
Naomi Vaughan
Restaurateur Elizabeth Villafranca, one of a string of Latino candidates unable to break Farmers Branch's Anglo voting bloc.
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The council accepted a report from a group of locals tasked with creating a plan to revitalize the city. A few factors, the task force concluded, had prevented Farmers Branch from seeing the kind of development taking place in booming outer-ring suburbs. There was plenty of housing, but it was mostly affordable, 1,200-square-foot single-family homes the task force saw as the city's bane. But that wasn't Farmers Branch's only problem. "The City's Hispanic population increased from about 5 percent to 37 percent between 1970 and 2000 and continues to grow at a rate exceeding all other ethnic and racial populations in the City," the task force observed.
It identified the same "barrier" in the Four Corners area, once the city's dining and shopping hub. "In the Metroplex, retailers are responding to demographic change by increasingly marketing to growing ethnic populations, which in turn is giving rise to shopping centers devoted exclusively to ethnic populations, especially Hispanic, African American, and Asian populations. "
They were doing business, but not with the right people.
That night, after a closed session, the council unanimously approved the legal residency measure. A fine of $500 a day would be levied against any landlord who leased to an "unlawfully present" tenant. If the federal government refused to round them up, Farmers Branch would simply deny them shelter.
To understand the demographic shift in Farmers Branch is to comprehend the class and racial tensions shot through the immigration debate. Farmers Branch is the oldest settlement in Dallas County. The county's first cotton gin was built here. So, too, its first Baptist church and its first school. Farmers Branch was a land grant for "free and white" settlers. In 1946, the town incorporated, boasting some 800 inhabitants. By 1980, the population grew to more than 27,000. Roughly 8 percent of them were Hispanic. Five percent were foreign-born. Twenty years later, a quarter of the population was foreign-born, but not all of them hailed from Latin America. They were from the Pacific Rim, India and from all over Asia. But the most growth was among Latinos, who were 37 percent of Farmers Branch in 2000. By 2010, they had become the majority. City leaders despaired as home ownership rates fell and rental rates rose.
Historically speaking, a nearly direct antecedent for the council's actions can be found in 1870s San Francisco, according to an SMU anthropological study. Targeting the Chinese, the city banned carrying laundry tied to poles on the sidewalk. Another ordinance regulated the square footage apportioned to each adult, since many Chinese lived in cramped quarters.
Skeptical school board members have said the Farmers Branch council may have tried the latter by soliciting the names and addresses of children in the overwhelmingly Hispanic Carrollton-Farmers Branch school district. Some speculated that the council may have been attempting to determine whether the number of children per household violated a square-footage requirement.
Before long, the two rec-center televisions once set to Spanish-language channels were switched. A ban was placed on the opening of new cash-advance businesses. And when rumor spread that the Minyard grocery-store chain might open a Latino-centric Carnival grocer in Farmers Branch, council candidate Tim Scott organized a campaign to stop it. "I think it is a reasonable thing to wish for to have a grocery store that appeals to higher-end consumers," O'Hare told The Dallas Morning News. (At the time, Carnival had become Minyard's most profitable line of stores.)
Latino residents may be forgiven, then, for feeling singled out. Father Michael Forge of Mary Immaculate Catholic Church says his congregation lost some 500 parishioners in the years since the debate began. "There is kind of a mild fear, an insecurity, when coming into Farmers Branch," he says.
Manuel Aguirre, a Mary Immaculate parishioner, delivers liquor and wine for a local distributor. Aguirre emigrated from the Mexican state of Michoacán 30 years ago. He was 16 at the time, and he brought with him his new wife. They settled in this area, raised three children and never left. His son is a teacher at Vivian Field Elementary. Aguirre doesn't begrudge the town the right to craft its own rules, but believes they're counterproductive. "Right now, the sentiment of the Hispanic community is that this is against the Hispanic people. They feel like it's an attack to the whole community."
Hugo Ramirez, another parishioner, is an electrical engineer at Nokia Siemens in Irving. He emigrated from San Miguel, near Guadalajara, after graduating from the Universidad de Autónoma Guadalajara. "When I came and I'm asked where I go to church, I say Farmers Branch. And they say, 'Why do you go there? They hate Mexicans,'" he says. "That's the first time I know this. You see the people is afraid. They cannot live in peace, and they're good people, just working. ... It's a way of terrorism, in my opinion, in terms of scaring people."
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