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Group more than 33 percent of city population. W-B also high in percent increase.
Dr Agapito Lopez talks with Cecilia Bisono, who operates the Hazleton Food Grocery Store on Wyoming Street. Nestled in the heart of the city’s Latino business district, the store is one of the largest Hispanic markets there.
s. john wilkin/the times leader
As word spread among Latinos living in the New York Metropolitan area that life in Hazleton, Pa., was quieter, the cost of living cheaper and the streets safer than their own, a steady migration that began in the 1990s has exploded in the last decade, U.S. Census figures show.
Hispanics now make up more than a third of the city’s population, which increased 8.6 percent since the year 2000. Ten years ago, 1,132 Hispanics lived in the city; now they number 9,454 – a sevenfold increase.
Latinos are migrating to surrounding communities as well.
The borough of West Hazleton saw its Hispanic population increase nearly 2,000 percent since the year 2000, leaping from 79 Latinos to 1,624, census numbers show. Increases were more modest in the townships of Butler, Hazle, Foster and Sugarloaf and the boroughs of Conyngham and Freeland.
Cecilia Bisono, who operates the Hazleton Food Grocery Store on North Wyoming Street with her husband, Manuel, and her brother, Daniel Diaz, said 95 percent of her business is from Latinos.
Nestled in the heart of what has become Hazleton’s Latino business district, the store is one of the largest of the Hispanic markets there.
Bisono’s brother bought the vacant building that once housed an office supply store and the family opened the store in 2005, not long after moving to the city from Long Island.
“Life was getting too expensive there. My brother was coming here, he was buying houses and property and told me, ‘Why don’t you come, take a look around and see if you like it?’ So we came, we saw a house, we liked it, we sold the one in New York and moved here,” Bisono said.
Dr. Agapito Lopez, a retired ophthalmologist and a Latino community leader in Hazleton, said he and his wife moved to the Hazleton area from Dallas – about 40 miles north – in 1992 to shorten his wife’s commute to her Hazleton job.
A native of San Juan, Puerto Rico, Lopez lived and practiced in Arizona before taking a job with an eye-care group in Kingston. He was happy with the cost of living in the city as well.
“You could get a half-double house here for $350 a month rent. You could buy a house for $35,000. Not any more; now it’s about $70,000. I was renting a half-double house with three bedrooms for $325 a month in 2000,” he said.
Lopez said that when he moved here, Hazleton’s downtown was filled with vacant buildings.
“There was a decreasing population, mostly an aging population. There was a lot of unemployment, given the amount of people here, but most of them would not want to work in jobs that were too hazardous, like cutting meats or farming. So we had immigrants coming here initially from Mexico to pick the crops or work at Christmas tree farms. More people came after that from New York, Philadelphia and New Jersey,” he said.
It was jobs in Greater Hazleton’s industrial parks, Lopez said, that drew many Latinos to the area. Even well-educated Latinos who earned engineering and other professional degrees in other countries worked in places such as the Cargill meat packaging plant in Humboldt Industrial Park until they could be certified to work in their field in the United States.
The Latino migration has spread northward in Luzerne County during the last decade.
Although the city of Wilkes-Barre saw an overall population decline of 3.8 percent, or about 1,600 people, since 2000, the city’s Hispanic population climbed from 683 in 2000 to 4,690 in 2010, according to census numbers.
In the nearby communities of Kingston and Hanover Township, the Hispanic populations climbed from 111 to 422 and from 69 to 326, respectively, in that same period.