Listening to the county commissioner’s words it’s easy to wonder whether this is 2006 or 1965.

 
“Our intent is to integrate, not segregate,” Todd Vonderheid says, sounding like the antithesis to George Wallace, in a statement he could have made on the streets of Selma.

 
Except Vonderheid isn’t from the South and this remark wasn’t made during a heated debate over civil rights. Instead, the Luzerne County official spoke during a recent commissioner’s meeting in the innocuous and ironically named (at least on this night) borough of White Haven.

 
The subject: Little League.

 
Vonderheid and his fellow elected officials had been thrust into the middle of a nasty debate begun when a hopefully well-meaning fellow named Juan Oriachi announced plans to form a separate baseball league in Hazleton that would include only Hispanic kids. The proposal infuriated residents of Hazleton, a northeastern Pennsylvania town many years ago dubbed “Mob City” by the Philadelphia Inquirer and these days struggling mightily to cope with a massive influx of Spanish-speaking peoples.

 
The commissioners got dragged into the furor when they inadvertently approved a $10,000 grant for Oriachi’s outift, the Pro Sport, Culture and Recreation Organization. Residents throughout the county went ballistic, as did several public officials and Little League leaders.

 
Ultimately, Luzerne County officials took the money they had earmarked for Oriachi’s plan off the table and the Hazleton City Council went on the record at a meeting shortly thereafter in favor of chopping the funds up and distributing them to the various baseball leagues operating in and around the city. The goal is for the leagues to expand their programs to accommodate the swelling numbers of Hispanic kids who want to play ball.

 
If this was just one person sticking his cleats in his mouth, the story might end here. But it doesn’t, not in these times.

 
For his part, Oriachi and other Latino leaders in Hazleton said his proposal was misunderstood. They told council members that they were concerned with finding ways to get kids off the streets and into doing something productive. Creating separate entities, they agreed, probably isn’t the answer.

 
A happy ending? Maybe. Opening Day in the local Little League went off without a hitch, Hispanic and white kids playing together happily.

 

But dark clouds loom over small cities like Hazleton trying to cope with their new neighbors.

 
According to local news reports, there were some people from the Hispanic community in the city council meeting audience who thought Oriachi was on to something. That’s dangerous.

 
More than 7 percent of the students in the Hazleton Area School District are in its Limited English Proficiency program. It’s a number that stresses how important interaction between whites and Latinos is if the area is going to see racial harmony in the future.

 
Many Hazleton residents, beset by a sharp increase in big-city crimes and a shrinking economy, are at odds over how to handle their changing community. The reaction has often been impolite and at other times shockingly narrow-minded.

 
Democrat John Quigley, a consistently decent and impeccably competent guy who now heads the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, got run out of Hazleton after serving two terms as mayor when the city’s Hispanic population first started to multiply in the early- to mid-1990s. Hazletonians by the thousands still blame him for the surge, and the current mayor, Louis Barletta, a Republican on the party’s short list for lieutenant governor four years ago, also has come under fire for the increasing minority population.

 
That Latino adults would suggest extending that divide to a place so supposedly sacrosanct as a Little League field is reflective of both a local and bitter national mood when it comes to relations between Americans and their new neighbors from south of the border.

 
Fences in ballparks are meant to hit home runs over, but these days they’re being constructed more often in both figurative and literal ways to keep us apart.
 

Whether it’s 1965 in Selma or 2006 in Hazleton, that’s a losing game.

 

Jeff Cox is a freelance writer based near Easton, Pa. Reach him at: jeffcox65@hotmail.com.