Anchorage Daily News

A crowd of more than 1,000 people, most of them Hispanic, pours onto the Delaney Park Strip to protest changes to national immigration laws.

A police dispatcher calls a Hmong translator to the scene of a homicide.

Lao immigrants stand in line at the Red Apple Market in Mountain View on a Sunday morning, picking up rice crackers, Twinkies and papaya pudding cups to offer to Buddha at the temple down the street.

An emergency room doctor discovers red abrasions on a child's back from "coining," a traditional Asian healing practice of vigorously rubbing a warm coin on the skin to cure illness.

A court hearing proceeds half in Vietnamese, half in English through a telephone interpreter.

New, growing populations of immigrants and minorities have changed the feel of the city, from high school dances to funerals, election campaigns to restaurant food, church pews to the emergency room.

Diversity doesn't just mean new faces and more languages spoken. It also means changes to the way people think and how they see themselves. It builds tolerance, but it also brings conflicts. It ripples through every segment of the community.

The biggest changes are still on the way as the children and young adults who make up a large segment of minority communities come of age and exercise their power as consumers, voters and community leaders.

The new Anchorage isn't a melting pot, where small ethnic groups are merging smoothly into the mainstream. Instead, it's a mosaic, where smaller communities, with their own languages and customs, exist side by side as part of a bigger picture. Looking at the community as a whole, the diversity makes for an integrated, multicultural scene, but, pulling in for a close-up, some pieces fit better than others.

Bill Ennis, a physics teacher at East High for more than 20 years, says the ethnic makeup of the students who fill the halls has undergone a momentous change, and the school itself has not yet caught up.

Minority students, low-income students and students who speak English as a second language are more likely to drop out and are consistently scoring lower on proficiency exams in the Anchorage School District. Ennis' higher-level classes remain mostly white, even though the school's student body is more than 60 percent minority students.

"These guys look in here and see a white guy in a tie teaching a class with lots of mathematics and obscure jargon," Ennis said, sitting in his physics classroom near the end of the year. "It can't be welcoming for a percentage of the population, it can't be."

The next generation of teachers is going to have to do something differently, he said.

The challenge for every institution, from schools to hospitals, will be to accommodate new cultures, said Kerry Feldman, an anthropology professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage who has been studying the changes.

Making provisions for languages, assisting people as they enter the work force and helping them succeed in school are ways to help newcomers invest in the community. When immigrant communities become isolated and people have problems succeeding in school and work, poverty and crime result, requiring more social services in the long run, he said.

Cultural issues sit at the heart of at least some of the city's gang troubles. Leaders of Anchorage's Pacific Islander community, which has been recently plagued by gang and gun violence, say young people are joining gangs because they have a hard time finding community and structure in other places, such as church and school. Schools, community leaders, police and politicians have been meeting for weeks to look for ways to help Islander youths acculturate.

While institutions rethink old practices to accommodate new cultural groups, businesses are changing their advertising practices and inventory to take advantage of new opportunities.

"Look at the number of Asian markets," said Susan Churchill, executive director of Bridge Builders, a multicultural organization in Anchorage. "The restaurants, too. Before it was just Italian, Chinese and Japanese. Now we have Polynesian and other types of restaurants."

Politicians see opportunity in ethnic communities. Aside from attending an ever-increasing number of ethnic church services and picnics, many campaigns are beginning to think about ways to specifically target minority communities, translating materials and recruiting volunteers from ethnic churches.

Each party has a spin on why its message will resonate more with immigrants and minorities. Democrats hope to appeal to immigrants with working-class issues such as health care. Republicans target minority churchgoers and entrepreneurs, pushing Christian values and governmental thrift.

Immigrant and minority groups don't have as many registered voters as other groups, such as seniors, but second-generation immigrants and young minorities, now almost a majority in the schools, are the face of the city's future voting populace, said Randy Ruedrich, chairman of the Alaska Republican Party.

"They will only become more important," he said, adding that his party hopes many will become candidates for office.

The sheer variety of cultural groups makes for a new multiculturalism, where everyone becomes more tolerant and educated about other cultures. Unlike many countries and communities in the Lower 48 where there is one dominant ethnic group, Anchorage has sizable pockets of people from across the world, from Russians to Dominicans to Hmong.

"It is a mosaic, but there also is a melding that's starting to occur," said Mayor Mark Begich. "Name me the part of town that's the Alaska Native part of town. You can't. Name a part of town that's Filipino. You can't. It doesn't work that way."

Cultural intermingling is relatively new for longtime Anchorage residents and for new immigrants. For Ker Lee, a Hmong refugee who works as a janitor at the Red Roof Inn downtown, the most shocking thing about Anchorage, aside from the weather, was the diversity.

"Ever since I was a kid, I never saw mixing of all kinds of races," he said through a translator. "It totally surprised me."

Daily News reporter Julia O'Malley can be reached at jomalley@adn.com or 257-4325.

Tomorrow

More bilingual children are serving as interpreters for their parents in Anchorage. Some thrive with the responsibility. Some resent it. Some abuse the privilege. Schools, hospitals and courts struggle to keep up with the growing need for translators.