Immigrants from around the world are transforming Houston

A refrain rises inside Jerusalem Halal Meats, through crowded aisles and hidden alcoves.

It is in the eye-popping posters advertising Shan Ready-to-Eat cuisine. In the "swoosh" of automatic doors welcoming customers with signs in Spanish and Arabic. In corners stacked with Islamic gowns, ornate prayer rugs and hookah pipes.

It echoes in the voices of customers who hail from Angola and Afghanistan, Brazil and Bangladesh. It reverberates in the hum of employees from Cuba and Guatemala, Ethiopia and Egypt. It dances in the words of co-owner Khaled Atieh as he greets regulars - "Assalamu alaikum" (peace be upon you) - and chats with workers in Castilian Spanish, complete with the signature lisp.

It resides in his story, a man affectionately known as "Shawish," Arabic slang for "Sarge." A Palestinian born in Jordan, Atieh came to the United States 30 years ago to study. He built a life, a family, a business.

Today, his store in a strip mall on Hillcroft Avenue is a gathering spot for immigrants from every corner of the globe, who are drawn by the panoply of products stocked on his shelves.

There are Alafia grape leaves, Goya adobo, Al Badaway date vinegar and Tazah garbanzos. There is black molasses for Egyptian palates, date molasses for Iraqis, carob molasses for Lebanese, and Attiki honey for Greeks.

There is Jumbo seasoning for African shoppers, Mabalah for Middle Easterners and arroz con leche for Latinos.

And, in the back by the halal butcher shop, there are sacks of flour and rice from every continent: Yucca. Semolina. Chickpea. Teff. India Gate Basmati. Jasmine. Uncle Ben's.

The litany rolls off Atieh's tongue.

In that list, in this store, in the customers and owners and employees, there is poetry. It is the chorus of people who boarded rickety rafts and traversed rocky terrain, who shed comfortable lives for the promise of education or business, who fled war and hunger and poverty.

It is an ode to a better future, a requiem for all that was left behind, a hymn to the intersection of cultures, countries and languages.

It is the ballad of Houston.

***

This is a city of contrasts. It is a hub of first-rate medical institutions with almost one-fourth of its population uninsured. One of the nation's most ethnically mixed metro areas and, at the same time, one of its most economically segregated. Routinely ranked top in the country for job growth, with a school system where 80 percent of students are disadvantaged.

An amalgam of promise and pitfalls.

It is also a region of dazzling diversity - and becoming more so every day.

More than 1 million immigrants – nearly one of every four residents – call Harris County and the surrounding 10-county metro area home.

From 2000 to 2010, Houston gained 400,000 foreign-born residents, more than any other U.S. city except New York. Last year, the county received 4,818 refugees from 40 different countries, the most of any county in Texas.

The newcomers have done more than shift our demographics. They have created a metropolis where one-third of business owners are foreign-born, where the number of Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus has tripled in the last three decades, where more than 100 languages are spoken by students attending Houston public schools.

Even in a nation where the number of immigrants has doubled since 1990, the Houston area stands apart.

In other cities with large immigrant populations, newcomers often cluster in ethnic enclaves. In Boston, for example, the once-Italian section of East Boston is now home to Latinos from Central and South America. In Chicago, recent Ethiopian arrivals are concentrated in the Edgewater neighborhood.

But here, immigrant communities are dispersed across Harris County - from the southwest side to The Woodlands, from Spring to Pasadena. Over the last two decades, even as the number of foreign-born residents has increased, segregation levels have decreased. Two out of every five people speak a language other than English.

For a glimpse of a city shaped by a million immigrants, look no farther than the one-mile stretch of Hillcroft Avenue from Beverly Hill Street to the Southwest Freeway.

Along this bustling commercial corridor, streets bear Mahatma Gandhi District markers, stores boast signs in Arabic, Spanish and Urdu, and shops sell glittering sari gowns and elaborate quinceañera dresses.

El Quetzal Bakery specializes in treats from Guatemala, the Sweet Factory tempts with pastries from the Middle East, and the Agha Juice & Cafe whips up falooda smoothies from Pakistan.

On a Sunday afternoon, a match of fútbol rapido (fast soccer) spins across a field behind Pulga Loca, a flea market pulsing with Central American, African and Middle Eastern customers and vendors. A half-mile away, Radio Masala stages an impromptu Bollywood contest in a parking lot, while listeners snack on food truck dosas, a South Indian staple.

Worshippers pray at Mercy Community Center Masjid, Jalaram Saibaba Temple and Iglesia Palabra de Restauracion, where the Guatemalan congregation holds services at 11 p.m. because so many work late into the night.

Every stop along Hillcroft is a microcosm of the new demographics of Greater Houston. But this ribbon of shops, restaurants and markets also represents something more. It serves as a model for what the region can become.

A place where the immigrant experience is a point of commonality - not a source of contention, where acceptance does not require assimilation.

***

Jonathan Nguyen Trinh scans the expanse of the Lee High School cafeteria, also known by the self-affirming acronym: UBU Lounge. The lunchtime din is deafening.

It careens off walls plastered with inspirational posters, scoots around tables shared by students born continents apart, bounces off pillars embellished with mosaics depicting cultures from around the world. One column bears the word HOUSTON, another a portrait of the Statue of Liberty.

Trinh, dapper in a well-pressed suit and carrying a walkie-talkie labeled with his name, ignores the clamor. The 48-year-old principal is too focused on his students.

They are exiles from countries tattered by civil war, famine and privation. English-language learners still skittering their way through unfamiliar grammar and vocabulary. Children scrapping for a square meal.

He catches ghosts of his own past in their present.

About The Million In Harris County and the surrounding 10-county region, more than a million residents – nearly one in four – are foreign-born. Immigrants continue to be drawn to Houston. This is the first installment of a yearlong series, as the Chronicle and La Voz explore how that diversity shapes this city. Go to HoustonChronicle.com/TheMillion to see an interactive map of the diversity along Hillcroft Avenue, and be sure to check back for future parts of this series.

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He, too, has known hunger. Belly-churning, desperation-spawning hunger.

As a child in Vietnam, during communist rule, Trinh scurried after trucks carrying loads of fruits and vegetables, hoping some of the produce would tumble off the back. When it did, he scooped it up off the street and gobbled it down.

He, too, has been a refugee. Bereft, blistered, sunburned.

Trinh was just 11 when his family fled Vietnam on a homemade raft, padded with straw and asphalt and kept afloat by blocks of Styrofoam. The only supplies for his family of seven: some bags of dry rice, 55 gallons of water and 55 gallons of fuel.

He has no idea how long they floated, the engine dead, the raft adrift.

He just remembers the muddled thoughts roiling through his mind.

"When will the pain stop? When will we eat? If we die, we die."

He, too, has been a newcomer. Stumped by a strange language, standing under the hot sun for food handouts, shopping for clothes in secondhand stores.

After being picked up by the Chinese navy, the Trinh family spent a few months in Hong Kong before arriving in Houston in late 1978. They were resettled in an apartment in the Allen Parkway housing project. Nothing to their name.

In school, Trinh scrambled to untangle the Spanish of his ESL classmates from the English of the mainstream students, not realizing at first that they were two separate languages.

He, too, has known kindness.

A Christmas gift from his ESL teacher. Marbles for Trinh, a Monopoly game for his sister.

It was not until years later, when he ran into the same teacher working at a pretzel stand in Sharpstown Mall, that he realized that it was no small gesture. She had taken on a second job to give her students gifts she otherwise could not afford.

Trinh cried as he stood in the mall that day. Thirty-six years later, recounting the story, he cries again.

His path from refugee to high school principal, from ESL classes to master's degree, from poverty to suburban Pearland home, was carved by charity from religious groups and government agencies, by his parents' teachings and his own determination, by gestures of compassion like his teacher's.

The road from then to now was not easy for Trinh ­- and he knows it won't be easy for young immigrants like his students.

Seven out of 10 Lee students failed the STAAR English test; 96 percent are economically disadvantaged. Many are coping with problems at home.

Some, like the young man edging into trouble after his parents were deported, will falter. They will act out in school, fall into gangs. Others, like the senior whose mother worked two jobs until being sent back to Central America, will fly. That girl, active in sports and school clubs, just received a full scholarship to the University of Texas.

The difference might be in something as essential as the school's backpack program, which provides students with two days of meals on weekends, or as casual as a fist bump at lunchtime.

"Just like my family, we all sometimes need a helping hand," says Trinh. "When an immigrant kid comes here, my hand's always here. Grab it, and I will pull you."

***

The women sit around a table in the bridal room of Apsara Beauty Center, where the walls are painted turquoise and mogra incense perfumes the air with a sweet jasmine scent.

In one corner, Indian wedding gowns in shades of marigold, hot pink, emerald and ruby sway from hangers. In another, mannequins wear beaded saris and black cowboy hats.

It is Sunday morning, time for Sangeeta Dua's eyebrow threading class. The students, from Honduras, Guatemala, Vietnam, India and Pakistan, lean in, take notes, absorb Dua's every word.

One translates the lesson into Spanish for her companions; another jokes with Dua in Punjabi.

"We are in this country now. We are all Americans," she tells her students. "We are all in this together."

Dua is poised and professional, her honey hair perfectly coiffed, her manicured nails topped with French tips. It is hard to imagine her as a scared young bride in an arranged marriage.

Twenty-three years ago, that's who she was.

On her way from India to the United States with a husband she barely knew. A 21-year-old leaving her family and homeland. "A small little girl who didn't know any better, who didn't know how cruel the world is," Dua describes herself.

In Connecticut, where the young couple first moved, she grew up quickly. There, she was met with hostility and targeted by name-calling. She wondered why recent arrivals could be treated so poorly in a nation forged by immigrants.

A few years later, the family moved to Louisiana, where her husband lost his job in the dot-com bust of the late 1990s. Dua had just become a mother for the second time. The family needed a fresh start.

They found one in Houston.

They moved into a one-bedroom apartment, paid bills with credit cards and faced the end of the month without money for rent.

So Dua, who had trained as an aesthetician in India, posted fliers around the Mahatma Gandhi District, advertising her skills at makeup, threading, facials and waxing. Customers started calling. Soon, the couple had enough to open a tiny salon furnished with used equipment.

The name Apsara comes from a Sanskrit word meaning "the most beautiful woman in the world," explains Dua, who now owns two salons: one on Hillcroft, the other in the Galleria area.

Houston offered Dua more than financial success.

"It was very cosmopolitan, with a whole lot of people, very different people - from everywhere," says Dua. "I thought it was wonderful, because I could mingle in with no problem."

Dua recognizes that the transition will not be so smooth for everyone. She knows that some newcomers will be met with disdain; others will stumble when dealing with people from unfamiliar cultures. She flinches when she hears a student, wrestling to grasp the right terminology in English, unwittingly utter an offensive term. Then she tries to navigate them through the nuances.

She also understands that an immigrant's life carries a special sort of sorrow, an eternal nostalgia.

Dua still misses her native country - the people, the food, the air, the soul. Now, however, landing on American soil, where her children were born, feels like coming home.

And India is never far away. It dwells in the saris in her salon, in the henna mehndi tattoos she applies for traditional Indian weddings, in the nearby temple where she kneels in prayer.

It whispers from the altar behind the cash register, where small figurines depicting Hindu deities - Ganesh, the god of knowledge; Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth; and Shiva, the destroyer - are arrayed on a saffron-colored cloth, surrounded by incense and offerings.

For Dua, the display is a reminder to start with the right intention and never compromise ethics along the way. To follow your dreams and passion.

***

Jorge Suarez, wearing a white lab coat with his name stitched in cursive on a front pocket and a stethoscope draped around his neck, sits in front of a giant red cross painted on the wall of Doctors Care Clinic.

Framed diplomas attest to the Bolivian immigrant's training as a doctor. But when he speaks, the poet emerges.

He elegizes the longing and the loyalty "for one's origins, for emotions, for foundations, for family, for friends, for all those profound connections."

He recalls his first visit to Houston, in 1984 - and his first glimpse of the Texas Medical Center. The cluster of world-renowned hospitals beckoned like "a paradise," so alluring for the medical resident that he immediately knew this was where he belonged.

It would take five years - following a surgical residency in Brazil - for him to return. But his goal of studying medicine in the United States never wavered.

When Suarez came back, it was to Texas Tech, where he completed a program in family medicine.

By 1994, Suarez had opened his first practice in Houston, and the doctor who once yearned to be a surgeon realized he had found his calling in community medicine.

Most of those Suarez treats in his clinics on Hillcroft and Westheimer are immigrants. Many have no insurance and little money for medical care. They live in the shadow of the gleaming medical center that first drew Suarez here, yet are blocked by status and means from accessing its services. Instead, they put off doctor's visits until ache or illness sends them to the emergency room.

There, Suarez laments, what might have been a $100 examination instead mounts to a $3,000-a-day hospitalization, a cost often passed on to taxpayers.

"I see that anguish, that pain, that worry."

In his practice, Suarez ministers to his patients' physical ills. In his writing, he mines their hopes and hardships.

In "America Libertad," he extols those crossing "by foot, in trucks or planes. On rafts and even swimming."

Like rapt children we go …

Looking for lost dreams

In pursuit of the American dream!

Until, at last, here we arrive

And a new destiny we find

In the land of liberty

***

A centuries-old Islamic call to prayer cascades from the loudspeakers of Jerusalem Halal Meats.

The chanted words, honoring God and urging the faithful to worship, thread through the clatter of grocery carts, the chatter of customers and the whine of butcher's saws.

As the azan sounds, some shoppers file into a prayer room lined with rugs and adorned with posters of Mecca. Others simply pause to listen.

It is a moment of communion in a business made stronger by community.

The store's name was chosen to reflect the desire "to bring in everyone from all over the world, setting politics aside," said Maher Hassouneh, Shawish's partner.

Indeed, it seems as if the entire world comes to Jerusalem.

On a typical weekday, shoppers may include Angolan college students looking for picanha beef or newly arrived refugees from Afghanistan. The halal butcher shop, where meat is prepared according to Islamic law, draws Muslims, Middle Easterners, Africans and Latin Americans - some by religious prescription, others because they prefer the taste.

Even Hassouneh, a Palestinian born in Kuwait, has been surprised by the number and variety of immigrants he encounters.

He smiles: "It's kind of lovely to know them."

Hassouneh, who was 15 when he came to study in the United States, takes pride in the business, which has doubled in size since opening in 1992. He has worked hard, 16- to 18-hour days in the beginning.

But he shrugs off talk of adversity or sacrifice. It is just life, he says.

He feels fortunate for the opportunity and thankful that he embarked on his journey. He is delighted that so many others have joined him here.

Each one adds a verse to the ballad.