If Sunnyslope had a patron saint, her name would be the Virgin of Solitude.

The black-cloaked woman is the saint of Oaxaca, Mexico, but her image drapes walls in homes and businesses throughout Sunnyslope, one of the Valley's oldest neighborhoods, nestled at the bottom of Phoenix's North Mountain.

Over the past decade, so many immigrants from the southern Mexican state have moved into Sunnyslope that the working-class community in north-central Phoenix is becoming known as "Little Oaxaca..."

Now, waves of Mexican immigrants fleeing poverty in Oaxaca are drawn to Sunnyslope for its affordable housing and its access to major bus routes..

They are transforming pockets of the neighborhood, and re-creating pieces of the Mexican villages they left behind...The neighborhoods help cushion immigrants' adjustment to the U.S., experts said, and allow them to still feel close to their homelands.

"The new enclaves become a . . . stepping stone for immigrants," said Gregory Rodriguez, an Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank where he studies acculturation.

"It's lonely and disorienting, moving to a land with different expectations. These neighborhoods help ground people and help root them in the past, even as they're obviously charging forth in the future..."

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