Thread: Hispanic Heartland

Hispanic Heartland

Sunday, November 20, 2005


LEXINGTON -- At halftime, when the announcer tells the crowd about a game the high school won by 15 touchdowns 100 years ago, it fits with the Friday night illusion that things haven't changed much in this small town on the plains.
The few brown faces scattered throughout the stands barely hint at the enormous wave of immigrants that has turned Lexington, in just one decade, into the only place in Nebraska where Hispanics are the majority.

But some clues are hard to miss.

Crowned homecoming queen this fall was Cruz Cabrera, whose Guatemalan mother clambered over a fence at Tijuana almost 20 years ago while seven months pregnant with Cruz's older brother. The king was born and raised in Mexico. Last year's king and queen were Hispanic, too.





"There's talk that a white girl will never be homecoming queen again," said Neal Randel, the school athletic director.

"Tradition is so important to people here, and I know it just eats away at people's hearts that the things they held near and dear are never going to be the same again."

Some 700,000 Latin Americans -- 57 percent of all immigrants -- came to the United States last year legally and illegally, according to a study by the Pew Hispanic Center, a Washington, D.C., think tank. The Center for Immigration Studies, another Washington research group, pegs the number closer to 900,000.

As their numbers grow, more Hispanic immigrants are spreading out from California and Texas, moving to the heartland, to towns like Lexington, with little experience of diversity.

Will these new immigrants overcome language barriers and ethnic differences, as Italians, Germans, Poles and many others did a century ago? Or can the melting pot only hold so much?

Lexington's story
Fifteen years ago, Lexington was mired in the farm crisis and bleeding population when a meatpacking plant opened in a vacated factory on the outskirts of town.

The new plant, now owned by Tyson Foods, offered jobs for people in town who wanted them. But like meatpacking plants throughout the Midwest, most workers here are Hispanic migrants, for whom the work is a step up from low-paying farm and construction jobs.

In 1990, the year the plant opened, 329 Hispanics lived in Lexington. Within a decade, more than 5,000 lived there, and the town suddenly was 51 percent Hispanic.

And they keep coming, lured by $10-an-hour wages, replacing those whose stamina succumbs to a disassembly line that slaughters 4,000 cattle every day.

Manager Mark Sarratt figures he brings in 20 to 25 new workers each week to replace those leaving. Over a year, that works out to more than 1,000 jobs, half the plant's payroll.

About 80 percent of the plant's employees are Hispanic. Sarratt said Tyson recruits legal Hispanic workers in the Southwest, but not outside the country.

When immigration agents scoured the plant's payroll in 1999, nearly 200 workers quit rather than explain inconsistencies in their documentation. But the enforcement stirred up such an outcry -- led by the Republican governor -- that no further sweeps have been conducted.

As Hispanics poured in, Lexington's population of non-Hispanics dropped from 6,300 to 4,900 during the last decade.

Most left for Omaha, Lincoln, or spur towns to the east or west along Interstate 80. Others moved nine miles south to Johnson Lake, once a tiny haven for summer cottages, now a burgeoning suburb.

"I can remember when every house on the street was for sale except ours and our neighbor's," said Barry McFarland, 29.

McFarland returned to his hometown after college to "prove the people here are just as good as everybody else." Within four years, he was principal of Morton Elementary School, where last year 336 of 370 students were Hispanic.

The district preschool, in offices attached to the Tyson plant, has 140 children and is planning to add another classroom to accommodate long waiting list.

The huge influx of Mexican, Guatemalan and Salvadoran children strains a district where only three teachers speak fluent Spanish. Thirty teaching assistants translate in the classrooms and at parent meetings.

Schools are packed, yet voters rejected tax levies to raise $10 million for expansion projects last year. Lexington is suing the state, claiming education funds don't cover the costs of educating Spanish speakers.

Nebraska law permits school choice, so parents can move their children to another district without paying.

Marvin Peterson, a senior manager at the Tyson plant, pulled his 16-year-old son out last year. The young man aspires to be a college wrestler, and Peterson said changing demographics have taken a toll on the athletic department and the daily classroom pace at Lexington. So the boy drives 40 miles down the interstate to another district each day.

"I want to support Lexington. I live in Lexington. I'm a big Lexington supporter. But I'm also a parent ... and I have to do what's best for my kids, in my mind," Peterson said.

Bilingual classes

This year, the district became only the second in Nebraska to offer a dual-language curriculum, with class entirely in Spanish one day, English the next.

The voluntary program has two kindergarten classes of 20 students each. Classrooms are mixed, with desks nametagged "Rafael" and "Yajaira" sitting next to "Ethan" and "Kaitlyn."

"We think it's going to be really great for community-building, not just language," said Jane Edelman, who oversees the program.

To keep it going, the school must hire a new Spanish teacher each year who knows enough English to pass the state teachers exam. The one now, a former preschool teacher from Colombia, was the only applicant last year.

"There are probably a lot of qualified teachers on both coasts, but we're in Nebraska. Who are we going to get from California to relocate here?" Edelman asked.

Ernesto De Leon, 53, thinks his daughters might be good candidates. Brenda and Diva, born in Mexico, are both studying education at the state university in nearby Kearney.

There is one problem. This summer Brenda, a top student and senior class president, was returning from an education conference in Seattle when immigration agents boarded her train and arrested her as an illegal alien.

The De Leons came up from Mexico in 2000 on visitor visas and overstayed them. Brenda faces an hearing in the spring.

"I think they are a great asset for this community and they deserve to be citizens of this country," De Leon said of his girls.

Rough start

A spate of crimes -- including car-theft rings, a rise in methamphetamine traffic and occasional gunplay -- surged in Lexington with the first immigrants, mostly young men.

"I don't care if the guy's pink or purple or blue or green, the age group that's 18 to 29 commits 60 percent of the crime," said longtime Dawson County Sheriff Gary Reiber.

A footbridge over the goose pond in the city park is marred with gang graffiti, and police say L.A. and Mexican street gangs have members in Lexington.

Things have calmed in recent years, now that more immigrants are families putting down roots, Reiber said.

Around midnight on a warm Friday in September, it was so tranquil that a report of three teens drinking in their van outside a KFC immediately brought two police cruisers and a sheriff's deputy.

City manager Joe Pepplitsch said new residents have filled city tax coffers and helped local merchants. The city started collecting a 1.5 percent sales tax nine years ago, and revenues are up from $776,000 then to $1.8 million this year, he said.

"The meatpacking plant, from an economic standpoint, saved this community," Pepplitsch said.

Hispanic immigrants have opened grocery stores, restaurants and a tortilla bakery in town. The local Wal-Mart stocks yucca root and tomatillos, tripe, even non-alcoholic sangria. On the book rack is a phrase book with useful sentences printed phonetically: "ai uork at e POLtri farm," and "uir going tu insTAL a niu FIDing trof."

Americana revisited

Barmore Drug, a town fixture for 70 years, now faces a Guatemalan store that sells clothes, food and beach towels emblazoned with Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Rick Barmore, 50, said people blame the new ethnic shops for chasing out old mom-and-pop stores that closed. He disagrees, faulting big-box retail instead.

"I'm sure somebody somewhere looks at the immigrants as the embodiment of all evil. But there's nothing new about that," Barmore said. "I'm sure there are people who view the immigrant Hispanics the way their grandparents viewed the Irish Catholics or the Italians."

Barmore's son, David, has been friends with Cruz Cabrera, the homecoming queen and this year's class president, since kindergarten. He escorted her onto the field on her big night.

Every day after school, Cabrera, 17, and her mother, Yolanda, make tortillas in their small kitchen. Patting the warm dough is therapy for Yolanda after eight hours in a hardhat and chainmail apron in a near-freezing room, slicing fat off 15-pound beef loins.

Yolanda, 41, and her husband, Nery, 42, were barely educated farm workers when they came north from Guatemala in 1986, fleeing violence and a poor economy. They eventually received political asylum and are now legal, permanent residents.

"It was worth it, because that child that I was carrying is now studying in the university," said Yolanda, as her daughter translated. That child, Wilfredo, plans to become a nuclear engineer. Cruz wants to be a pediatrician or a diplomat.


None of the five cars in their backyard are as shiny as the pickup truck across the street, which has an airbrushed Virgin Mary on the tailgate. But Nery keeps them in good enough shape that the family drove two cars down to Guatemala this summer to visit family, a trip that took four days each way.

Friction

Deanna Goodmundson, 64, is a self-described "adventuress" who lived in Honduras for five years. She learned Spanish there, a skill that comes in handy in her current job running the local homeless shelter and soup kitchen. But it is tiring her out.

"For people who still live in Lexington, it gets like it's not their country anymore. ... It's like a constant battle, and I think the Hispanics are winning," Goodmundson said.

In a bunk in the next room, Francisco Martinez, 39, read the New Testament in Spanish, a bandage from a tuberculosis test that came back positive stuck to his arm.


In broken English, he said he wanted to make $3,000 at the meatpacking plant, then go back to his six children in Mexico. He claimed to be in the country legally, then asked if the reporter was a cop.

At least a quarter of the patients at Tri-County Hospital in Lexington don't pay, and Medicaid has to step in to reimburse part of the costs, said administrator Calvin Hiner. That is eight times higher than the Medicaid rate of similar hospitals in Nebraska, he said.

One especially dismaying adjustment for Lexington is sports. The high school football and basketball teams, once competitive, are now perennial losers.

Exploding enrollment pushed the teams up to a tougher division, but most of the new kids don't play anything but soccer. Playing for the "Minuteman" has limited appeal, considering volunteers of the same name now patrol the Mexican border for illegal aliens.

Things may be changing slowly. In September, the football team finally broke an 18-game losing streak.

Longtime fan Pam Samway cheered for the boys and said she isn't concerned to see so few immigrants in the stands or on the field.

"We'll acclimate 'em to it," she said. "This is America. They're just new."

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune ... 96081.html

This story made front page of the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. I couldn't believe it, we are not exactly overwhelmed with illegal aliens, YET.

Either that or I should get out of the suburbs more, maybe I am missing something.

Western Pennsylvania has the least amount of illegal immigrants in the United States according to some survey I read recently, that is why I am surprised this made front page.