There are *numerous* pages online describing how to fix those awful junk characters in a latin1 column caused by unicode characters.

After spending over 2 hours trying out different methods, I found one that's dead simple and actually works:

Export:

mysqldump -u $user -p --opt --quote-names --skip-set-charset \
--default-character-set=latin1 $dbname > dump.sql

Import:

mysql -u $user -p --default-character-set=utf8 $dbname < dump.sql

Thank you Gareth!

http://www.garethsprice.com/blog/2011/fix-mysql-latin1-utf-character-encoding/