Meatpacking Remakes Rural U.S. Towns

This is the home of Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, of Boot Hill and the Long Branch Saloon, of cattle drives, buffalo hunters and the romance of the American West.

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Today, downtown has Mexican restaurants and stores more reminiscent of shops south of the border than Main Street Kansas. The city of 25,176 even has a new nickname: “Little Mexico.”

Signs advertising “Envios a Mexico”—retail outlets where workers send hard-earned wages back home to Mexico and other countries—hang outside many Dodge City stores. Houses occasionally fly Mexican flags, whipped hard by the prairie winds.

Dodge City . .&nbsp. Cactus, Texas . .&nbsp. Fort Morgan, Colo. .&nbsp. . Postville, Iowa: For more than a hundred years, this region provided a bucolic idyll and a ready example of American life and values. Today, iconic farm towns struggle with a new economic model, one that requires a workforce that is poor and overwhelmingly Hispanic.

It’s not easy. The immigrants who have flooded these communities are stretching schools and law enforcement. Still, at a time when other rural towns are slowly dying, Dodge City and meatpacking towns like it boast thriving economies.

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In Washington, the debate over immigration sometimes seems to be a clash of extremes. But here, in the wide-open spaces where one-dimensional economies stoke small towns, there is plenty of room for ambivalence.

HOW IT GOT THIS WAY

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The transformation of the nation’s meatpacking industry began in 1960 when plants began moving out of cities in favor of their livestock sources in right-to-work states like Kansas. The first big slaughterhouse came to Emporia in the 1960s, followed by plants near Garden City and in Dodge City in the 1980s.

For Dodge City—famed as the “Queen of the Cowtowns” during its cowboy heyday—the advent of the slaughter plants seemed a natural fit. Locals have long recognized that the odor of manure here is the smell of money.

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Eventually, mom-and-pop meatpackers were swallowed up by giants like Tyson Foods Inc., Cargill Meat Solutions Corp., Swift & Co. and National Beef Packing Co.

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WEIRD ECONOMICS

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The same story: Decent wages are a magnet for poor immigrants. And the wages paid by the meatpackers are decent, though far from extravagant.

The poverty rate in Dodge City plunged from 28 percent in 1980 to 14 percent in 2000. The poverty rate also was halved in Guymon, Okla., where there are an estimated 600,000 head of cattle on farms within 25 miles of the Seaboard Foods plant.

But no one is living high on the hog, or cow. Dodge City’s per capita income of $15,538 in 2000 may be an improvement, but it still remains far below the $21,587 national average.

In Cactus, the average per capita income has increased, but only to $8,340. Many who work at the Swift plant in Cactus live in former military barracks or in dilapidated rental trailer homes where yards contain little more than dirt, weeds and rocks.

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It’s a hard life. In Cactus, the population is more than 90 percent Latino. There are no doctors or banks. Most plant workers deal only in cash, making them easy targets for theft. As much as 70 percent of offenses in town relate to alcohol use, especially on weekend nights when cars cruise up and down the main drag for hours.

Dodge City grapples with drug trafficking as narcotics flow in across the Mexican border through the Hispanic community. Gangs are a problem, too. But there is some equanimity in a town infamous for its lawless Wild West history.

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GOING TO SCHOOL

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School districts once troubled with aging and tax-resistant local populations and dwindling school enrollments suddenly had to deal with the crowded classrooms that came with young migrant families; Villegas’ modern, sprawling school was built five years ago as enrollments boomed.

Dodge City school officials count 23 different languages spoken by immigrant families, though the town is overwhelmingly Latino.

About 44 percent of students in Dodge City have limited English proficiency, prompting the district to establish a “newcomer program” for immigrant students geared heavily toward language acquisition, and includes help from Spanish-speaking assistants.

Just a decade ago, about 70 percent of Dodge City students were English-speaking whites. Today, that statistic has flipped: about 70 percent of the 5,800 students who now attend Dodge City school are Hispanic, with non-Hispanic whites now comprising nearly 25 percent.

There has been some success. An analysis of high school graduation rates at meatpacking towns nationwide shows improvement between 1980 and 2000: up 9 percent in Dodge City; up 5 percent in Cactus; up 6 percent in Crete, Neb.

Still, graduation rates were below state averages. For example, the graduation rate of slightly over 17 percent in Cactus, Texas, was still well below the state average of nearly 76 percent or the national average of more than 80 percent.

In Postville, Iowa, visitors to Cora B. Darling elementary and middle school are greeted with a world map adorned with red-and-gold foil stars pasted on Russia, Ukraine, Slovakia, Israel, Peru, Costa Rica, Mexico and other nations. Each designates the home country to some of the school’s 370 students.

“The biggest population coming in right now are from Guatemala,” Postville principal Charlotte Tammel said. “The challenge for us is finding teachers who speak all these languages.”

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CULTURE CLASHES

On the high plains of northern Colorado, the latest wave of settlers to hit Morgan County has some worried that the character of its largest city—Fort Morgan, with its neat lawns decorated with gnomes or holiday ornaments—would be altered beyond recognition.

Cargill operates a slaughterhouse here, employing about 20 percent of the town’s population and processing 4,300 head of cattle per day. Morgan County saw its Hispanic population double in the 1990s—jumping to 8,473 by the 2000 U.S. Census.

More than a century before the meatpackers consolidated and Cargill Inc. set up shop in Morgan County, Germans who had settled the Volga region of Russia arrived here after Czar Alexander II took away their autonomy and made them subject to the military draft.

“It’s been a German town for a long time, every morning at 5 o’clock, 5 or 6 o’clock, it’s like a cuckoo clock, German ladies out sweeping their sidewalks,” said longtime resident Perry Roberts. “And now they’re (immigrants) not mowing their lawn, and so they’re trying to pass laws to get people to keep up their lawns and not park their car on them.”

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The first wave of workers required to augment the locals on the payroll were eastern Europeans, immigrants from Bosnia, Poland, Russia and former Soviet Republics who had initially spent time in bigger East Coast cities before moving to Iowa.

But in the last decade, Hispanics have become the majority. The result is that a town that barely covers two square miles is home to people from 24 nationalities speaking 17 languages. In 1990, Postville’s population was 1,472; now, it is estimated at more than 2,500, nearly 33 percent foreign-born.

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HERE TO STAY

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In Cactus, Hispanics dominate politics. The town’s population became predominantly Hispanic by the 1990s, and by the end of that decade, Hispanics began to be elected to the city council.

Now, all but one member is Hispanic.

“Without this plant I don’t know what would happen,” said Mayor Luis Aguilar, who slipped into the country illegally from Mexico 30 years ago, later became a U.S. citizen, and now owns the town’s only grocery store, numerous rental properties and a 575-acre ranch.

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