Whose island is Johns Island?

Part Five

JOHNS ISLAND--For Maria Bordallo, home is still San Pedro, Coahuila, a farming community in northern Mexico. But for the past two decades, this island has given her family better opportunities to earn a living, get an education and buy a home. In 1978, when she was a newlywed, she and her husband, Jesus Bordallo, came to the United States as migrant workers. In the winter, they worked the Florida tomato fields, then moved into the Carolinas for similar work in the spring and summer. When the air turned cool, they traveled to Virginia. "When the apples finish in Virginia, we came back to Florida," she says. As people debate the future of the island, few seem to mention the opportunities it has offered people such as the Bordallos and to what extent those opportunities should be preserved. As the farms disappear, will the chance for outsiders to make a new life on Johns Island disappear along with them? A year after arriving in Florida, the Bordallos had their first child,Cindy. She spent her earliest years traveling up and down the East Coast with her parents, but when she was old enough to go to school, the family began looking for somewhere to settle down. "A friend who used to work in the fields with us in Florida said, 'Why don't we go to Johns Island to work?' He was like a crew leader," Maria Bordallo recalls. "We said, 'OK, let's go to Johns Island.' " Around that time, they had their second child, a son named Jose. A few years later, they had another son, named Israel. Unlike in the past, when families would work the fields of Johns Island for generations, the Bordallos are very much upwardly mobile. The family lived in a farmer's labor camp for almost a decade, but in 1993, Sea Island Habitat for Humanity and a local church gave them the chance to help build -- then own -- a home of their own. Today, they still live in the same one-story house they helped build on Esau Jenkins Road. At the same time they moved into their home, they stopped working in the fields and took better-paying jobs. Jesus Bordallo now works for a landscaping company. Maria Bordallo took a job cleaning homes on Kiawah and Seabrook islands, then later went to work for a Johns Island Head Start program. They still send money back to their families in Mexico every month, and they can afford to travel back to San Pedro for a few weeks every Christmas. They also plan to put all their children through college. Cindy already has a degree in Spanish from the College of Charleston; Jose is majoring in business at the University of South Carolina; and Israel just finished his junior year at James Island High School. "Education is very important to be successful in life. This is what I always tell my sons," Maria Bordallo says. "I tell them here in the U.S., if you don't have education, where are you going to work?" Because of their success in school, she fully expects them to have an easier life. "Their jobs won't be like working in the field, in the sun." She is setting an example. In her job with Head Start, she works with the young children of migrant workers, but in her spare time, she goes to Trident Technical College to work on a degree in childhood development, which she hopes will increase her effectiveness -- and her paycheck. She's come a long way for someone who didn't speak any English when she first arrived in the United States 26 years ago. "When somebody talked to me, I just smiled," she says. Today, she is fluent, although both her accent and the deliberateness of her English sentences are proof that the language is still new to her. She likes the way the island is changing, especially the new bridges that make it easier for her to get to discount stores and to the Catholic church on Savannah Highway that offers a regular Mass in Spanish. But she also indicates ambivalence about the island's growing numbers. "In 1984, we came here to work, and then I like Johns Island to raise my family because there was not too many people like today. It was very quiet." She expects to see a growing number of immigrants on the island, although the farms are disappearing. "A lot of people who used to come and work in the fields have done like us. They stayed. Now I see a lot of people on the island living everywhere." Some of her neighbors on Esau Jenkins Road also emigrated from Mexico, and she needs to look no further than her local grocery store to see proof that Hispanics are choosing to live on the island in ever-greater numbers. "Maybe they think like I do -- 'I'm not going to travel no more,' " she says. "Before, you didn't get many hot peppers, and now every store has a lot of them."

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