The exclamations of evangelical Christian worship are hardly foreign to the Sierra Nevada foothills, one of California's most solidly conservative bastions.
On a recent night, fervent religious song pulsated from within a small tract home in Auburn -- loudly, and in Spanish.
A neighbor knocked on the door, drawn to the ringing chorus of "hallelujah."
The worshipping Central American immigrants froze for a few heartbeats before someone peeked outside. "What is it?" a woman said of the singing. "I heard it from outside. Beautiful."
One of the men mustered his best English to say, in a heavy Spanish accent, "It is Christian music. Church song."
"Oh," the woman said. "Right on."
But some days later, others were less neighborly, asking the immigrants to move their resounding worship sessions elsewhere.
Cross-cultural close encounters are becoming more common in the eastern, upper reaches of the state -- a sign that Latino immigrants have found a niche even in the most unlikely of political territories.
An analysis of U.S. census data shows that increasingly, undocumented immigrant populations have followed economic growth inland to the state's most conservative cultural and political strongholds. Here, more than half of California's new jobs have been created in the last 15 years.
At the forefront of the trend, measured from 2000 to 2005, John Doolittle's 4th Congressional District ranked No. 1 in a study of California districts showing the highest percentage increase in incoming illegal immigration. The district showed a 167 percent hike in undocumented immigrant residents, according to an analysis by the American Immigration Law Foundation in Washington, D.C.
Also in the top four were Dan Lungren's largely Republican 3rd District and Democrat Doris Matsui's urban Sacramento district _ a testament to a sustained period of job growth in the greater Sacramento region.
Still, in the 4th Congressional District in particular, the number of undocumented residents remains small compared with the total population. The newcomers represent less than 4 percent of the total populace, with the estimated count of illegal immigrants growing from 9,000 to 24,000 in five years.
Concurrently, a number of Southern California districts in Los Angeles and Orange counties saw the number of undocumented and foreign-born people shrink significantly, the analysis indicated.
Even as Doolittle and others politicians have denounced illegal immigrants, their arrival has been welcome news to many employers in the sprawling district that includes eight counties from Sacramento all the way to the Oregon border.
Knowingly or unknowingly, businesses have turned to illegal immigrants to fill slots in construction, landscaping, maintenance, restaurants or other service industries.
A Mexican immigrant named Laura moved to the region "because of construction, which I know how to do," she said. Asking that her last name be withheld for fear of deportation, Laura lives in a Roseville apartment, attends a Mormon church, and currently works cleaning houses. "Construction is slower now," she said.
When then-Mexican President Vicente Fox visited the Legislature last year, state GOP Sen. Dave Cox _ whose district overlaps Doolittle's _ wore a button to protest illegal immigrants that said "no mas" _ or "no more."
At the same time, some employers in Cox's district were saying "yes" to hiring the men who join in song to worship in Auburn with a Guatemalan-born evangelical pastor, Juan Pancan. A former farmworker, Pancan became a legal U.S. resident after Congress approved a 1986 federal amnesty program.
"There were hardly any Hispanics back when I came," Pancan said. "Now they've multiplied."
A Salvadoran man who worships with Pancan said he's been treated well by the employers who hire him for landscaping, paying him $10 to $15 an hour. In his home country, the man, asking his name not be revealed, said he barely scraped by at $3 a day.
Other landscapers in Pancan's prayer group, however, have not been so fortunate in their dealings with employers. One contractor gunned his car at them recently, nearly running them over when they confronted him about wages owed.
After prayer one night, the men passed around a local newspaper clipping about two landscaping bosses who were arrested by the Placer County Sheriff's Department for allegedly bilking customers. It turns out they didn't always pay their workers, either. "They used to drive around to apartment buildings where Latinos live and look for people to do work," one of the worshippers said.
In his narrowly won re-election campaign last November, Doolittle zeroed in on illegal immigration, accusing his opponent of favoring amnesty and complaining that undocumented immigrants vote in elections, although evidence is scant.
In a recent interview, Doolittle clarified his views, saying he might favor federal legislation to allow some illegal immigrants to work here on the condition that they first return to their home country, if only briefly.
"There's a strong sentiment that these people shouldn't just get a slap on the wrist," Doolittle said. His primary concern, he said, remains sealing the border and requiring employers to thoroughly check workers' documents before any legalization or guest worker program is approved.
Leaders in the business community, along with President Bush and some labor unions, are urging Congress to enact those same changes _ along with a program to expand work visas because only a few thousand are available every year. If the changes are not comprehensive, they say, the economy will suffer and foreign workers would be forced even further underground.
Said Doolittle: "I recognize that the employers have a point of view, but I'm not particularly sympathetic to it. ... We need to find out what the nature is of the illegal immigrants, and who they are, what they're doing."
Demographic researcher Rob Paral of the American Immigration Law Foundation has an answer. Illegal immigrants, he said, gravitate not just toward economic growth, but also to areas where the work force is aging. In Doolittle's district, the median age is almost 40, four years older than the U.S. median age.
Business associations in Doolittle's district seem to share a consensus more along the lines of President Bush's position.
"There are so many benefits to finding a real solution to this," said Auburn's Chamber of Commerce director, Bruce Cosgrove. "We'd rather beat up on the immigrant. I don't know why, but that's easier to do."
In Placerville, Yessica Castillo, has witnessed firsthand the demand for Latino workers. Her family owns the Tijuana Market, which caters to Mexican immigrants.
"People say they don't like them, but they sure want the work they do," Castillo said of undocumented immigrants. "People come in here and ask me if we can find them some Hispanic workers. They say, 'Make sure they're Hispanic.'"