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"The magic number is 12," Dunn said, or "un doce" in Spanish. "If you can drink 12 beers, you're a man."

Others say heavy drinking is part of a lifestyle dominated by long work days building homes, painting or picking crops.

Walking down Buck Jones Road to his apartment in West Raleigh, Alberto Gonzalez figured he would drink most of the 12-pack he had just bought that night, even though it was a weeknight.

Gonzalez, 29, said he hadn't given much thought to spending a night without a beer in hand. "I just sit and drink," he said. "Maybe a friend will come by. Other than work, this is what I do."

Hernandez was part of an early wave of young men who came to North Carolina to pick tobacco. There were so few Hispanics in North Carolina then, he said, he couldn't find a store that sold hot peppers or corn tortillas.

He had been a drinker in Mexico, he said, but it got worse in the United States. He didn't have a family to tend to, and he felt very alone in a place where no one understood him.

"When you are young, you don't think anything will happen to you," he said. "When you have a family, you care more about your life."

In fact, the increasing number of Hispanic women and children in North Carolina may explain why the prevalence of drunken-driving accidents and arrests among Hispanics has not grown with the population.

By some measures, DWI accidents and citations among Hispanics are actually diminishing.

Hispanics made up 18 percent of the 75,000 DWI arrests last year, while they accounted for 6 percent of the population. The portion of DWI citations going to Hispanics has crept up slightly since 2000, even as the growth in the state's Hispanic population has outpaced overall population growth by more than 500 percent.

Since 2000, alcohol-related crashes among Hispanics have dropped from 9 percent of all crashes that involve Hispanics to 7 percent.

The pressure to reverse the trend is intense. Each fatality brings calls for deportations and tighter immigration controls.

Luke Steele, 49, adds up the deaths and sees a growing problem that stems from immigration. He said his daughter lost her college roommate to a Hispanic drunken driver in October.

Steele, a longtime fire rescue worker, also remembers a 1991 wreck in which a teenage girl was killed by an illegal immigrant who "skipped town before the case ever went to trial."

"We've still got plenty of stupid white, black, pink and purple people that drive drunk. That's plenty to go around," he said. "The reality is if they weren't here, they could not kill people [while] driving drunk."

After the March wreck in Johnston County, U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick, a Charlotte Republican, reintroduced a bill that would require the deportation of all immigrants convicted of drunken driving.

And anti-immigration groups have seized on the issue as an effective marketing strategy for their cause.

"The effect on the labor force is real, but it's indirect," said Mark Krikorian, director of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tighter controls on immigration. "Whereas, an illegal alien who drives drunk and kills some newlywed couple is tangible."

Asion, who leads El Pueblo's effort to curb drunken driving, works to separate the DWI problem from the immigration debate.

Many Hispanics have not grown up with anti-drunken-driving messages, and it will take time for the ideas to take hold.

"It's not something that you can do easily," Asion said. "If it was, then the U.S. population would have already done it."

(Database manager David Raynor contributed to this report.)

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