Latinos are Saving Small-Town Midwest
The sun falls on the town center in Schuyler, Neb., October 13, 2021.
Construction workers Carlos, Jorge, Christian and Tony pose for a photo while on a break from maintenance work in Schuyler’s downtown October 11, 2021.
A taquería stands in front of a church in Schuyler, Neb., October 11, 2021.
Pastor Rudy De León poses for a photo Ministerio Internacional Dios es Amor pentecostal church in Schuyler, Neb., October 12, 2021. De León preaches to a hundreds-strong congregation of mostly Guatemalans and Hondurans, in Spanish.
An empty chiropractic center near Schuyler's downtown October 13, 2021.
Community organizer Luis Lucar poses for a photo in his office in Schuyler, Neb., October 12, 2021. From Peru, Lucar moved to Schuyler to help Latinos advance professionally and politically.
A broken sign in an abandoned building in Schuyler, Neb., October 13, 2021.
Schuyler resident Rodrigo picks parsley outside of his home in Schuyler, Neb., October 13, 2021. He is one of many who lives in a trailer in Schuyler—a town with limited available housing .
Night falls on Schuyler's railroad, October 12, 2021.
Store owner Laura and worker Betsy pose for a photo in Chichihualco Supermarket in Schuyler, October 13, 2021.
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At 15 and with barely a word of English, Guadalupe Marino Ramírez left Mexico for Nebraska. After three-and-a-half years of arduous study, she became the first Hispanic person to ever graduate from her town’s high school system.
Today, 27 years later, Schuyler, Nebraska, is one of many Midwestern towns that owes its prosperity and likely its existence to Latino immigration. With 69 of Nebraska’s 93 counties losing population, Schuyler's Colfax County is growing.
The now-6,500-person town was settled by Czech, Irish and German immigrants in the 19th century. It was quiet and, for many, a place to retire. But things started changing in 1982. The beef packing plant that Schuyler revolved around closed. It reopened two years later, but the salary almost halved and the work now involved killing cows and lacerating them, not just shipping carcasses to big cities. Few from the largely White workforce returned, and the company, Excel (now Cargill), used exploitative tactics to bring in Latinos from the South and from south of the border.
Today, Latinos — Mexicans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Peruvians, Hondurans and more — make up about 75% of Schuyler’s population. The downtown hosts dozens of Latino-owned businesses, and Schuyler Central High School does better in association football than in the American persuasion. “No doubt about it, if Latinos never came, Schuyler would be a ghost town,” says Luis Lucar, a community organizer at the Heartland Workers Center and a longtime resident.
This line is certainly not unique to Nebraska. Throughout the Midwest, Whites are on average older than Latinos, and they reproduce more slowly. In small towns like Schuyler, to which Latinos have come in a short timeframe, many White people are moving to bigger cities, such as Omaha, Kansas City and Chicago. Simply put: Whites are dying off and leaving, while Latinos continue to move in and stay in.
Big numbers, though, haven’t translated to political representation. Marino Ramírez is now a School Board Member in Schuyler. In a place where education levels for Latinos are lower than they are for Whites — only 6% of teachers are Latino, while 87% of students are — and where political aspirations are low, Marino Ramírez defied the odds. She’s one of only a handful of Latinos in the town’s entire batch of elected officials.
The Midwest is often classified, monolithically, as a White region. Indeed, it is still 77% so, but the figure is steadily decreasing. With Latino migration shifting from the urban to the bucolic, Schuyler has seen its benefits early. It should be looked at with alacrity as a harbinger for other Midwestern towns.
The changing demographics concern some Whites. Various residents in Fremont, a town over from Schuyler, worry about it becoming “the next Schuyler.” They argue their culture, their jobs, their way of life would be taken from them. But the small towns that haven’t been bailed out by immigrants are crumbling to dust.
With low unemployment rates — an astonishing 1.8% in Nebraska, for one — the Midwest has no shortage of work opportunities. The old guard should not blame newcomers for changing society. Rather, it should recognize that it’s because of immigrants and their descendents that their schools, businesses and economies still exist. The real question is whether they’d rather they’d rather have Spanish names on the doors or no names at all.
In the gallery above, I juxtapose the emptiness of old vestiges of the town with the life Latinos have breathed into it.
