OTHELLO, Wash. -- In a bleak housing project west of this small rural town, the Mexican farm workers living here murmur to each other in a dialect many of them don't want their children to learn.

It's called Mixteco, one of the dozens of dialects spoken by Latin America's indigenous people.

For these immigrants, Spanish is a second language. Many don't speak it.

"I want my children to learn Spanish," said Isabel Reyes, a 31-year-old who speaks to them in broken Spanish. "And English. I want them to go to school and get good jobs so they don't have to work in the fields like we do."

Indigenous people like her are the Native Americans of Mexico and Central America.

They have been coming to the United States for as long as Mexicans have been immigrating here -- although in dramatically higher numbers over the past three decades.

Nationwide, the federal government estimates that 17 percent of farm workers are indigenous.

They first arrived in California -- at least 500,000 indigenous Mexicans still live there -- and slowly migrated north into Oregon and Washington, following other Mexican immigrants to jobs in agriculture and restaurants.

Now, their migration has brought them over the Cascades and into Eastern Washington, mostly to Othello, Quincy and Mattawa.

Only a few dozen Mixteco-speaking immigrants live in the Yakima Valley.

Othello, with a population of about 5,800, is home to the state's highest concentration of Mixtecos.

As many as 800 people from the highlands of southern Mexico live here -- often in cold, cramped duplexes and mobile homes outside of the city's quiet downtown.

They are neighbors who are related to each other by blood or marriage, having grown up in the same village or worked in farm jobs together in the United States or Mexico.

How so many got here is a story that mirrors that of countless immigrant communities transplanted into rural Americana.

Ramiro Silva, who arrived more than a decade ago, believes one of Othello's pioneer Mixtecos was a man from a Guerrero mountain village who found work picking apples in the late 1980s alongside other Mexican immigrants.

The man sent back money to relatives in Mexico, married Ramiro's cousin and told relatives about this place where jobs were plentiful and life was good.

Back home, where the land was too degraded to grow, villagers already had a history of doing seasonal labor in other parts of Mexico.

As in many stories of migration, word about Othello swept through the villages and hundreds more indigenous Mixtecos -- including Silva and his son -- would eventually follow.

"Only the grandparents and the small children are left," said Silva, 50, a butcher at a Mexican meat market who last year became a homeowner with his son and family. "I haven't been back in a very long time."

In an ironic twist to the immigrant narrative, it is in the United States that many indigenous Mixtecos become more Mexican. Not only do they speak Spanish to their children -- who learn English in public schools -- but they also watch Mexican soap operas they can't always follow on satellite television and learn to make tamales to sell to other immigrants in the fields.

Doing so helps them blend into the greater farm worker community. According to the U.S. Census, more than 60 percent of Othello residents are Hispanic.

It's an attempt to avoid the discrimination that's followed indigenous people for centuries, said James Loucky, an anthropology professor at Western Washington University.

History in Latin America -- as in the United States -- has not been kind to indigenous communities, which have been enslaved, forced off of productive lands and are still marginalized because of their language, copper-colored skin and small stature.

Even in recent decades, the Guatemalan military massacred indigenous Mayans during a brutal civil war while, in Mexico, the government has used military force to quell indigenous uprisings in demand of autonomy.

Salvador Lopez, a 39-year-old migrant farm worker from Guerrero, said the discrimination followed him to Othello.

Other Mexicans "will take our money, yell at us on the job or threaten us with immigration," he said. "It's usually the white people who can't even tell us apart who treat us better."

Loucky, who studies indigenous communities in southern Mexico and Central America, called Mixtecos an extremely vulnerable group within an already marginalized immigrant community.

"Sometimes I think the person that's already being exploited or is in a hard place, then takes it out on somebody who is in a lesser position," he said.

Sarah Leyrer, a lawyer with Columbia Legal Services, an organization that advocates for legal and human rights for the poor, said that many Mixtecos she works with carry that history like a heavy burden.

"We've found that the Mixtecos face a lot of discrimination in Mexico because they're Indian, and they take that here with them -- that feeling that they'll be discriminated against here, too," she said. "They often don't speak up when they don't understand Spanish. They're a more isolated population, less trusting of outsiders."

Over the years, social agencies and immigrant rights groups in Othello have found hope in second-generation Mixtecos, such as Carmela Porfirio and her sister, who have become interpreters.

It's a job the 24-year-old enjoys and lets her embrace her parents' tradition.

"I want to help my people," Porfirio said one evening after interpreting for a Mixtec couple at a Columbia Basin Health Association clinic, which has made significant inroads at building trust among Othello's indigenous immigrants. "What makes you unique if you don't have your own language anymore?"

Mixteco is not a written language, which makes it challenging for parents to teach their children if they don't have much time to spend around them.

"Sure it'd be nice for them to learn all the dialects, but we don't have time to teach them," said Lopez, who learned a little Spanish during grammar school in Mexico. "So we teach them Spanish. It's more useful."

One street away from the Lopez home, another immigrant said teaching her children her native tongue has been a struggle.

"They understand what I say," said Josefina Pineda, a 25-year-old who shares a two-bedroom duplex with her husband, three children and seven other relatives. "But they don't speak my dialect. They say they don't want to, that they just can't.

"I don't know why."

* Melissa Sánchez can be reached at 509-577-7675 or msanchez@yakimaherald.com.