Alejandra Nieto looks out over the fountains of Corpening Plaza as she talks about her work, her husband, and her four children, the youngest of whom is in high school. Way across town, Cristopher Ávila sits in a small conference room at King Plaza Shopping Center and, though he admits missing the beauty of his native Guanajuato, Mexico, speaks of nothing but opportunity in the growing number of Hispanics moving to the city.

At Casa Guadalupe, off Peters Creek Parkway, the line stretches back to the door as new residents of Winston-Salem ask question after question, mostly about how they, too, can become citizens.

“We tell them that there are steps,” says Veronica de los Cobos. “Certain things they have to do. Or, sometimes, they want to bring in relatives. But it’s not that easy.” No, it is not easy being both invisible and desperately needed. It cannot be easy to be ignored by most of the people around you except those whose success and profitability depend on you. Nor can it be easy to be largely unseen and yet so visible that your presence is periodically measured by the Bureau of the Census - as if taking a patient’s temperature - down to a tenth of a percent.

At the latest count, an estimated 26,265 Hispanics live in the Camel City, an increase of more than 10,000 in the last five years. That means that Hispanics represent 14 percent of the city’s population, though their economic importance transcends that figure immeasurably. If the newspaper graphs and headlines are to be believed, their arrival is the biggest thing since the Warthogs won their division.

Why Mexicans choose the U.S. Some quick history might explain why Hispanics who live in the United States - now as far as Minnesota and Maine, but also prominent along Sprague and Waughtown streets - share certain characteristics beyond language and appearance. History also explains why they feel so at home here.

Hundreds of thousands of Hispanic Americans are descended from families who lived in Florida and the American Southwest for generations before five wars made them citizens of the United States. Presidents Madison and Monroe directed three small wars in which U.S.-sponsored guerrilla armies drove the Spanish from Florida. Then President James K. Polk led the United States into its first invasion of a sovereign nation, Mexico. The result was to cut Mexico in half and add five and a half large states to the union. In 1848, Mexicans living in the United States got a year to decide whether to stay or go. The new Mexican republic even planned ten towns south of the new border to accommodate whoever came. Few Mexicans, however, went to a home they had never seen.

Although an invisible line had been drawn along the 1,951-mile border, Mexican laborers have always - always - crossed that line to work in the lettuce fields, vineyards, and truck farms of the United States. When the Border Patrol was formed in 1924, it did little but wave at passing workers who were headed for American factories, or to mop the tile floors of Santa Monica homes.

Over the years, many of those Mexicans have become naturalized citizens. It is estimated that the last immigration reform, in 1986, added three million Hispanics to the voter-registration rolls as soon as they were naturalized and their children turned eighteen.

To that mixture add perhaps twelve million illegal immigrants living in the United States, most having entered since 1990. More than half are Mexican, treading paths worn smooth by sandals over a century and a half.

And keep in mind that while this accounting divides them, those three kinds of Mexicans living in America are closer than the hairs on your head, culturally, emotionally and, increasingly, politically. They look out for each other.

North Carolina employers have for decades knowingly hired illegals because when there are orders to be filled, crops to be picked, and garbage to be taken out, somebody’s got to do it. And documentation at the border has simply not kept up. The official count of North Carolina’s illegal population jumped from 30,000 in 1990 to 206,000 in 2000. Immigrant laborers on North Carolina farms are on track to outnumber North Carolinians before the end of the decade.

Drain on the economy, or boost?

“Prejudice?” asks Alejandra Nieto, hearing a word that does not translate directly from English to Spanish. “Do you mean like racism?”

In thinking about her five years in Winston-Salem, Nieto can’t think of an example of discrimination other than the check-out woman who overcharged Nieto - day after day - for coffee at “a coffee shop in the West End.”

“At first it was twenty-five cents or fifty cents,” she says. Then one day she was overcharged a full dollar. “That hurts.”

Nieto, who speaks no English, went to her supervisor, who spoke to the woman and got Nieto’s buck back. But there was no apology. “She gave me back a dollar and said it was, I don’t know what, the traffic at her station; it was so busy.”

Standing up for her right to be treated fairly, Nieto touches a place in an American’s heart. But illegal immigrants’ rights reach into more problematic areas as well. Nieto, like many illegals, came into the country legally, then stayed beyond the prescribed time.

The papers only last for six months, a year,” she says. “Then, if you go back, you will lose your job and it is not easy to come back.”

The influx of Hispanic children into public schools - with illegals’ children’s place in the classroom protected by law - adds to strains in Winston-Salem as it does elsewhere. Forsyth County schools have historically had to fight for every budgetary dollar as it is, and immigrants’ children in public schools here have ballooned from 8.4 percent in 2001-02 to 13.6 percent this year. Teachers - already struggling to instruct many children whose performances are poor - are on the line now to teach kids whose knowledge of English is poor and whose parents are eager but poorly prepared to help them.

In this country, immigrants have always been considered problematic, they have always taken the worst jobs first, and they have always ended up helping to build the country.

Cristopher Ávila, who handles national accounts for the newspaper and radio operations of Que Pasa, is a fine example of one of those contributors. His accent is Mexican, but his outlook is strictly American Marketing.

Speaking in percentages, Ávila describes North Carolina - where the Hispanic market is growing faster than in any other state - as a capitalist’s dream.

“The Hispanic population of North Carolina is growing at 200 percent per year, according to the Selig Center.” Thirty-eight percent of that growth is new immigrants, 20 percent born in the state, and 42 percent drawn from other states because of North Carolina’s economy.

Ávila graduated from the University of Guanajuato with a business degree, but “in middle school, welding was taught along with computer technology, drawing, and music. In high school you enter classes of business administration, accounting, and chemistry. You have almost a career since high school. You know what you want to do by the time you get to college.”

Ávila was one of only forty-five applicants out of about seven hundred to get into the state university his freshman year, leaving the others to pay tuition at private colleges or not to go to college at all. The draw of America’s economic dynamism is more than matched by Mexico’s educational and economic stagnation. Which brings Ávila back to the market he’s describing.

“Forty-two percent [of immigrants coming into North Carolina] go into construction. There are always jobs.” The best construction jobs, he says, “start at $9 an hour. Then they’re able to go up to $15 or $17 an hour once they show that they know what they’re doing.”

Indeed, a 1996 study of Forsyth County sponsored by the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust found that a significant number of jobs are open to Hispanics in manufacturing (36 percent), construction (19 percent), and professions requiring a degree (14 percent). Nearly seven out of every ten Hispanic workers “do not work in the service-sector jobs that are typically characterized as low-paying or unstable forms of employment,” the survey found.

That workforce has allowed the newspaper Que Pasa, printed in Winston-Salem, to grow to a weekly circulation of 85,000 copies, which are distributed to markets in the Triad, the Research Triangle, and Charlotte. The company - which includes among its operations a temporary employment agency - has ninety employees.

Help with the details When Mexican workers in our area have problems, they are likely to take them to Casa Guadalupe, an agency of Catholic Social Services. There, Veronica de los Cobos, and her supervisor, Lisa Reyna, answer a bewildering array of questions - how to transfer a car title, how to get electricity turned on, where to enroll children in school, and how to just get by.

“It can get pretty busy,” says de los Cobos on a day when a dozen people were waiting for consultation ten minutes after the door opened at 9 a.m. By noon, all the seats were full, children were playing on the rug and in the parking lot, and people chatted quietly in small groups.

De los Cobos says that many questions revolve around the Byzantine regulations governing immigration. Especially since September 11, visas, even for tourists or students, have been hard to get, but still employers use every avenue to bring in labor. Once in the country, many want to elevate their position from temporary worker to applicant for permanent-worker status and even begin the process toward citizenship.

“We also answer questions about ‘50B,’” she says, using the statel code designation for the law designed to protect victims of domestic abuse.

Casa Guadalupe is the first agency in North Carolina to be certified by the federal Board of Immigration Appeals to sort out questions surrounding immigration status. De los Cobos says that at the beginning of every year, Casa Guadalupe deals with the myriad questions of immigrants who are dutifully filling out their income tax forms. Many employers do not deduct withholding from paychecks, saving themselves the trouble during the year, but leaving employees with formidable tax bills.

De los Cobos sighs about the number of area employers who don’t withhold taxes. “We show them [immigrants] the little box [on the check stub] where it says ‘withholding.’ There’s a zero there. But they don’t understand.”

For more than eleven years, since the beginning of Winston-Salem’s great demographic change, La Providencia, the Sprague Street grocery at the heart of the city’s biggest Hispanic enclave, has served as a hub. If you want to see the advertising for whatever mariachi band is in town, find out where to buy snakeskin boots, see posters for the spring Cinco de Mayo celebration or for the Linternas de Paz fete in the fall, or you just want to pick up some habichuelas and Bimbo cakes for the kids, this is the place to go.

Gladys Anzardo manages the store for owner Guillermo Mendoza, ringing up sales, directing co-workers, and answering a visitor’s questions without missing a beat. Yes, she agrees, the store has grown from the time it opened.

Then she raises her eyebrows as she adds: “A lot.”