Lucy Vasquez's life's work has ensured Wilmington-area Latinos have a friend

Not long after Lucy Vasquez moved to Wilmington in 1995, she put out a call to the universe, a plea to God for guidance and purpose.

Almost immediately, she said, she got three phone calls in a row, all from people asking for her help doing outreach to the area Latino community, including for migrant workers in Pender County.

And just like that, the course of Lucy Vasquez's life for the next quarter-century was set.

"I like to say God brought me to Wilmington," Vasquez said. "I really thought God had a reason and a purpose for me to be there. There was a need. I had to answer the call."

Vasquez is one of three people in 2021 to receive the StarNews Media Lifetime Achievement Award. The other two are developer Gene Merritt and businesswoman Wilma Daniels.

Vasquez moved away from Wilmington in 2019 to care for her mother, who lives near Raleigh. But Festival Latino, which she started in 1998 as a bridge between area Latinos and the wider Wilmington community, is still going strong. (The 21st annual event is set for May at Ogden Park.)

And, in her nearly 25 years in the Wilmington area, Vasquez was one of the most prominent people advocating for area Latinos and making sure they had a voice.

Vasquez moved to Wilmington from Lenoir in Caldwell County near the mountains, but she grew up in Los Angeles, where her family was part of a vibrant Mexican-American community.

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The Latinos she knew were voluble and walked with their heads head high. So she was surprised to find in Southeastern North Carolina in the mid '90s a Latino community that existed on the fringes and almost tried to be invisible.

"The Latino community was hidden," Vasquez said, in large part because of language barriers and concern over their immigration status. Many at that time were undocumented. They were reluctant to ask for help, if they even knew where to look for it. Shopping was often done during odd hours, early in the morning or late at night, and many Latinos were largely isolated from the community at large.

"They were afraid. When I saw that, it's what moved my heart," Vasquez said. "I asked God, how can we break these barriers?"

The Latino population in Southeastern North Carolina in 1995 was much smaller than it is today. In 1995, Latinos made up just above 1 percent of the population in New Hanover and Brunswick counties, and about 1.4 percent in Pender County. Compare that to the most recent U.S. Census data, which estimated the Latino population at 6.3 percent in New Hanover, 4.9 percent in Brunswick and 7.5 percent in Pender.

Even in the '90s, though, people and agencies were trying to reach Latinos to let them know about health and social programs available to them. They could be a hard community to reach. (At one time, Vasquez said, many Latinos in the area were migrants from the Mexican state of Oaxaca, and some didn't even speak Spanish but rather their indigenous language, making their isolation even more pronounced.)

Vasquez said she met with officials at what was then New Hanover Regional Medical Center, and they told her, "We have these programs, but the (Latinos) don't come," she said. "People were trying to reach and help them."

Eventually, Vasquez, who is bilingual, realized she could be a conduit of sorts between the Latino community and the wider community of Southeastern N.C.

"That's how I started in radio," she said, doing some of the area's first Spanish language programming on stations including WAAV, public radio WHQR and The Dove (WDVV), a Christian station.

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One of the first Spanish language newspapers in the Wilmington area followed, as did the nonprofit Amigos Internacional and Centro Latino, an umbrella group that offered Latinos links to all kinds of services in the area. Their motto, she said, was, "You're not alone: You have friends."

Much of her work at that time — before smart phones and widely available Internet — consisted of getting information to Latinos they couldn't get from local media because they didn't speak English.

Vasquez said she remembers talking to one group of Latinos in 1999 when Hurricane Floyd was a few days away from North Carolina. She said they didn't even know there was a storm.

"We've got to get information out there in Spanish, and fast," she said. She then contacted multiple media outlets, posted signs, even went to work sites and trailer parks to let people know about storm shelters and other important storm information.

"Quite possibly," she said, "lives were saved." One official told her that, pre-Floyd, they didn't remember seeing any Latinos at shelters during storms. For Floyd, Vasquez said, some shelters were majority Latino.

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Among Wilmington's non-Latino community, Vasquez's best-known accomplishment might be Festival Latino, an annual celebration of Latino food, music and dancing.

"God told me to do a festival," Vasquez said, and she sees it as an ongoing introduction of two cultures that exist side by side but, even today, have limited interaction.

The festival was a success from the start, even though that first year "there was very little Latino involvement," Vasquez said,

"The American community showed up," Vasquez said. But rumors that immigration enforcement was going to be at the festival kept Latino attendance low that first year.

"It's a set up," she heard over and over again, she said. "They thought it was a trap."

Vasquez said she even called area immigration agents begging them not to come. Vasquez said they told her they had no intention of disturbing the festival, something that has continued to hold true.

Eventually, the Latino community grew to trust her, Vasquez said, and by the third festival attendance was close to half Latino, where it has stayed. Festival Latino outgrew its original home of Long Leaf Park by the early 2000s, and after a stint at the fairgrounds one year the festival has been at Ogden Park since the middle 2000s.

Overall "the festival has been a huge success" at introducing the area Latino community and Wilmington to each other. She said she thinks that non-Latinos have learned that the Latino culture is not a monolith, but is composed of a wide variety of traditions from many countries.

The Festival Latino scheduled for May of 2022 will be only the third since 2017, with a combination of hurricanes and COVID-19 wiping out three festivals since 2018.

Vasquez stopped running Centro Latino when she moved from Wilmington in 2019 to take care of her mom, but she said she's happy to see that the network of support for Latinos in the Wilmington area is much more robust than it was in 1995.

"There was so much need back then," she said. "There was very little if any help."

Vasquez gives credit to St. Mary Catholic Church and other groups for doing outreach to the Latino community, but added one invention in particular has made it easier for Latinos new to Wilmington to navigate their surroundings: the smartphone.

Directions to WalMart or any number of support services are available at the swipe of screen, and "you can use it in whatever language you know," she said.

It's not something she could've imagined when she moved to Wilmington in 1995, but then neither is the growth of Wilmington's thriving, and thanks in part to Vasquez, more visible Latino community.

Contact John Staton at 910-343-2343 or John.Staton@StarNewsOnline.com.

This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: Lucy Vasquez nominated for Wilmington Lifetime Achievement Award