WILLIAMS, Calif. — There has been discord enough in the shady streets of this rice-growing city north of San Francisco, where the population has shifted from three-quarters white to nearly three-quarters Latino in just two decades.
Anyone wanting some heated conversation need only mention the time six years ago when the board of education extended the Christmas break to three weeks to give Mexican families more time to go home for the holidays.
The realignment of the calendar maximized classroom time, resulting in lower truancy and improved test scores. But it also set off a cultural debate that continues to this day.
"The Caucasian community didn't want the change," which meant trimming the treasured summer vacation by a week, said Colusa County Supervisor Mark Marshall. "It was very controversial."
Now, if this were a story about Hazleton, Pa., or San Bernardino, places where federal immigration battles ring as loudly through City Hall as they have at recent congressional hearings, it might have culminated in angry denunciations, protests and television cameras capturing them-against-us conflict.
But in Williams, a place that demographer Hans Johnson describes as "the most ethnically transformed city in California," the story is not that simple.
Williams "serves as an almost natural experiment about what these changes mean for all of us," said Johnson, of the Public Policy Institute of California, who estimates that as much as 20% of the city's population could be undocumented.
This city of 5,087 (and rising fast) is the closest thing to a "Petri dish" for observing the effects of immigration in their most concentrated form, said Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center.
The experiment has not always had predictable results. Practical people, for the most part, residents of this agricultural outpost are slowly -- sometimes reluctantly -- coming to terms with the dramatic changes wrought by immigration.
"All of the families like mine and my husband's, who grew up here all their lives, have had problems with the change in culture," said Kara Alvernaz, who works for the local fire district. But the last thing she'd do is give up on the schools -- calendar change or no. "I chose to keep my kids here. They've gotten a good education."
