Tucked between a dry cleaner and a hair salon, across the road from a Polish deli and a Chinese chop suey restaurant, is Mt. Prospect’s only Filipino grocery.
When Remedios “Remi” Balitaan bought the grocery eight years ago from a friend, she closed a loop between her new life in the northwest suburbs and her native Philippines, which she fled in 1971.
“My mother ran a grocery store in Manila,” said Balitaan, 51, who now owns a home in Des Plaines with her husband, Enrique, and their two sons. “I never thought I would wind up running a grocery store here.”
Balitaan and her family are among a growing number of immigrants weaving their way into the increasingly diverse fabric of Chicago’s northwest suburbs. They are starting businesses, buying homes and forging communities within communities.
Like generations of immigrants before them, many of the newcomers are blocked by language barriers and rudimentary educations. Some don’t attain much more than menial jobs and tiny apartments in pockets of poverty.
But others, such as Balitaan, are carving out working- and middle-class lives with all the amenities sought by earlier waves of immigrants: nicer homes, safer neighborhoods and better schools for their children.
About half of the Chicago region’s immigrants now live in the suburbs. And in the process of making their lives here, they are altering the very soul of suburbia.
Schools and employers are wrestling with language and cultural differences. Retailers are adapting their inventories. Churches are adding foreign-language masses. And providers of health care and social services are searching for ways to reach the poorest of the new arrivals.
Some, like Balitaan, moved to the suburbs from Chicago. Others journeyed directly from their native lands. Bonnie Skoja, who emigrated from Krakow, Poland, lived in Chicago for 12 years before buying a two-bedroom ranch house in Niles, which she shares with her teenage daughters.
“I am from a village in Poland, and it’s also like a village here,” said Skoja, 40, who commutes to a job at an electronics firm in Elgin. “There are not too many cars, not too much crime. I came here to look out for my kids’ future.”
No longer are the northwest suburbs the nearly all-white, middle-class enclaves of the postwar years. They are being remade by influxes from Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Mexico and elsewhere. In March, 2,000 immigrants from 78 countries were naturalized in Arlington Heights, the largest such ceremony ever held in the suburbs.
“Our parents’ and grandparents’ generations came here looking for a better life. The current immigrants are no different,” said Supt. Robert Varga of East Maine Elementary School District 63 in Des Plaines.
Public schools are feeling the changes most acutely. Teachers struggle to educate children who speak nearly 60 languages. In some districts, simple instruction notes to parents are translated into Spanish, Albanian, Greek and the Philippine language of Tagalog. Newsletters in Varga’s district are translated into seven languages.
Meanwhile, classes teaching English as a second language are booming–for students and adults. Public schools and community colleges say they are adding classes every year.
Citizenship classes also are on the rise. In Schaumburg Township and Palatine, such classes have grown 12-fold over the past decade and still have waiting lists.
Palatine’s Harper College helps more than 1,000 people a semester learn English. Even so, scores of others must be turned away.
“The demand is clearly there,” said Jean Chapman, of Harper’s Department of English as a Second Language and Linguistics. “It is the story of our area.”
When Diep Nguyen’s family left Vietnam for America, they landed in West Virginia, where bilingual education not only wasn’t available, it was illegal. In her senior year in high school, a Spanish teacher was assigned to tutor Nguyen. To communicate, they spoke French.
Today, Nguyen is director of bilingual and multicultural programs at Schaumburg Elementary School District 54, the largest elementary school district in Illinois. The district has bilingual programs at most of its 28 schools as well as three specialized language centers, two for Japanese and one that teaches Polish and Russian.
“It certainly changes the way the staff thinks about education,” Nguyen said of the surge of immigrant students. “They have to think, `How will I teach my students this lesson since I don’t speak their language and they are just learning mine?’ “
Employers have historically exploited immigrant workers who often have no alternative but to accept dirty, difficult jobs that pay little. But more manufacturers are learning the value of teaching workers English before teaching them to run machines. Workers unable to read simple instructions reduce productivity, many businesses have found.
Companies “want to be more productive, and they want to be able to give their employees instructions in English,” said Marie Griffin, of Harper College, who helps run English classes at 23 suburban firms.
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In addition to hiring immigrant workers, many suburban businesses are catering to immigrant consumers. Inside Balitaan’s store, the shelves are lined with Oriental foods, batik blouses, canned specialties, such as sugar palm and papaya pickles, and Filipino videos.
At the cash register, Tita McGuire, 38, who rushed from her Schaumburg office on her lunch hour to shop at Balitaan’s on a recent day, paid for a can of coconut milk, a jar of soy sauce and a video rental of “Batman en Robin” dubbed in Tagalog.
“My son loves Batman,” McGuire said.
The influx of immigrants also is reshaping religious life in the northwest suburbs. Community churches are adding foreign-language services and, in some towns, being joined by mosques and temples.
When some Laotian Buddhists organized in Elgin in 1992, they held their first ceremonies in a three-bedroom apartment. Today, their temple has four resident monks and, on a recent Sunday, attracted more than 500 people.
The congregation now is considering adding a community center, a Sunday school, a summer school and additional housing for the monks to serve Elgin’s 4,000 Laotians.
At a recent Sunday service, it was clear that the temple is intended not just to comfort Laotian elders but also to help children maintain ties to their heritage as they come of age in America.
“Hopefully, the temple can be a bridge between the old and the young generation,” said temple secretary Boonyod Xayasarn.
Kneeling before one of the monks in a crimson-colored robe during the Sunday service, Roger Thongsamouth, 10, of South Elgin, held his left palm up as a sign of respect, then extended his right wrist to a monk who gently tied a white string around it, forming a blessed bracelet.
“The Buddha stays with you when you have this,” a smiling Thongsamouth said afterward.
Jobs are a main attraction for the Laotians, who in 1975 were arriving at a rate of 200 a month after Laos’ coalition government fell to communists. The Elgin YWCA Refugee Project has helped about 3,700 refugees find jobs over the last 13 years.
“We are from the country and from the cities, educated and not educated. We are mixed,” said Khamleck Thanadabouth, one of the vice presidents of the temple.
Added Thavisit Sayasanea, the temple treasurer: “We want to be a part of the community and make it a better place to live.”
But many immigrants who are locked into menial jobs by language and educational barriers lack the money, insurance or information necessary to obtain health care and social services. Now, specialized clinics are finding new ways to reach out to them.
The Genesis Clinic was the first health clinic in the suburbs to assist the Hispanic community in and around Des Plaines. Two years after it opened with one full-time and one part-time doctor, the clinic has four full-time doctors and a role in the Hispanic community that goes well beyond diagnosing medical problems.
“We’re trying to unite the Hispanic community and trying to solve our own problems,” said Ramon Sanchez, the clinic’s community coordinator.
Medical care is still its main mission. But it also provides immigrants with on-site access to social services and support groups. And this year, for the first time, it helped Hispanic residents flex their political muscle, Sanchez said.
During the Des Plaines mayor’s race, the four candidates appeared before Hispanic residents to answer questions.
“Some (residents) were saying this was the first time they ever got to see the candidates,” Sanchez said.
Even as their numbers increase, recent immigrants often face the same prejudices that previous generations endured when they arrived in America. They are blamed for attracting gangs and crime, and for drawing an inordinate share of public aid.
But the reality is much more complex.
In the Midwest, immigrants who are U.S. citizens generally are more likely to own homes than U.S.-born citizens, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
“A lot of people think all immigrants here are on welfare,” said state Rep. Rosemary Mulligan (R-Park Ridge), whose district is heavily populated with immigrants attracted by good housing and schools. “They’re much more self-sufficient than the public thinks.”
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MORE ON THE INTERNET: Get more details about immigration in the northwest suburbs, and take in the sights and sounds of a local Filipino grocery store at chicago.tribune.com/go/communities