But she also says some of the white people were rude to her. “It’s a small community where everybody knows everybody,” she explained. “They kind of feel like they kind of own part of Arcadia. It seems like you were just…coming to their place.”

When she finally did get hired at a bank, some customers implied that she didn’t know what she was doing. One woman screamed at her and called her stupid for not performing a simple transaction the exact way she specified—a more convoluted way than necessary.

“You feel kind of awkward,” Gloria said. “Sometimes you don’t know if you should say something or just stay quiet. After a while…you kind of learn their way. You kind of learn when to step up or when just to move out of the way.”

Gloria told me she would only speak up for herself when she felt like some good would come of it. Everything else, she let go.

For most of our interview, Gloria sounded upbeat, but when she talked about situations like these, in which she was talked down to and insulted, her energy drained. “You know you have to go to work because you need the money,” she said at one point. “You come to the house, and sometimes you are in a bad mood.”

“Physically,” she added, “it destroys you.”

At the time, anti-immigrant sentiment in the region was just beginning to percolate. In 2006, Arcadia’s then-mayor John Kimmel proposed140 making English the town’s official language and penalizing businesses that employed undocumented workers. This prompted such an outcry that most of his proposals were scrapped.141 However, when an immigration raid in 2010 led to several arrests, one local news station wrote, “Several people in Arcadia who did not want to appear on camera told us they’re glad illegal immigrants are being arrested and deported.”142

In news reports, some locals called the newcomers “a blessing,”143 but others worried they would bring crime.144 On social media, whenever a Hispanic committed a crime, one resident told me, it seemed like the comments would turn into a fury about how “all” Hispanics are criminals.

It’s commonly thought that the main reason behind opposition to immigration is a fear that immigrants will take Americans’ jobs, but research on anti-immigrant sentiment suggests that’s not quite true. Instead, what seems most important is how culturally different the immigrants are from the native population. Specifically, what matters is if the immigrants speak English. To wit: more than 90 percent of Americans believe a person “must speak English” to be an American.145