Demography is destiny.
For more than 20 years, until 1998, I lived in Brandon, a suburb of Tampa of about 100,000 people. When I was young, nearly all of those people were white, and the rest were black. Despite nearby strawberry fields and the remnants of the citrus industry, there was no noticeable presence of Hispanics. It was essentially the 90/10 white/black split that was the norm in much of the country until the 1970s but that endured in pockets until a bit later. Brandon was one of those pockets.
My high school yearbook from 1988 confirms that my memory is correct: a Hernandez here and a Rodriguez there, but they were very much the exception to an overwhelming white majority. That was just 25 years ago on the calendar, but it might as well be ancient history.
In 1998 I left Florida and moved to Poland, where I still live. At that time, the visible effects of immigration were just beginning to appear. A few more brown kids at the mall, a few more Asians where before there had been basically none; not huge numbers but just enough to notice. I had no way of knowing that these were the first signs of a transformation that would turn Brandon into a town that is now barely recognizable to me.
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