Mayberry Meets Mexico
March 6, 2009
Aunt Bee would have felt right at home in the Siler City of 1973. In fact, she was. The similarities between the fictional Mayberry and the very real Siler City were unmistakeable. The sleepy southern town was home to about 10,000 people, mostly white, some African American; many worked in the textile industry or making furniture for America’s living rooms. They got their news and their music from the AM radio. There was a lot of Mayberry in Siler City.
But after the 1990 census, the mostly white, Southern, small-town culture of Siler City changed significantly. The town was home to several meat-packing plants which recruited heavily in Mexico and Central America. And within a decade, Siler City went from having almost no Latinos, to a town where half the residents were Latino.
Such a sudden and massive change couldn’t help but alter a town’s culture.
This week on Latino USA, the story of Siler City told by the people who live there. John Biewen and Tennessee Watson, of Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, chronicle the demographic changes in Siler City, in “Nuevo South.”
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John Biewen directs the Audio Program at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.
