HOLYOKE — Within the walls of a small classroom papered with posters of the alphabet, rudimentary English words and a sombrero, students Elizabeth Enriquez and Esther Figueroa wrestle with intricacies of the language at the same desk, but at different ends of the immigrant timeline.
Figueroa, 54, has spent the past 18 years since her arrival from Mexico rearing four children while her husband works at a nearby farm. Now, she has ventured into the workforce with a job at a local grocery and hopes this advanced class could lead to an even better opportunity.
Enriquez, 32, arrived from Mexico only two weeks earlier with her husband, who works at Seaboard Foods, the giant pig producer that stands as the biggest employer in this swath of northeast Colorado’s agricultural economy. College-educated and already near-fluent, she hones her speaking proficiency with an eye toward fitting in.
“On Sunday,” she says, “we went to church and everything was in English, so I want to learn some vocabulary. And maybe in the future, I want to work here for a company.”
The two women embody the ethic and aim of a portion of the local population that has grown steadily over the past 35 years — a rising number of Latino workers and their families, many of them immigrants, who have significantly shifted the region’s demographics.
That trend, while perhaps most striking here in a bucolic, one-stoplight town once overwhelmingly white, has appeared throughout the rural West. It reflects a general movement toward diversity, regardless of rural or urban areas, but also one that also can serve as a brake on declining rural population, fuel economic revival and transform regional culture.
In a study released this year that looked at 278 rural counties in 11 Western states, Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit research group out of Bozeman, Mont., noted that the growth of minority populations has done all of that.
“The vast majority have minorities increasing, in many cases either slowing or reversing overall population decline,” says Kelly Pohl, researcher and co-author of the study. “The implications are significant. School districts are staying open, jobs are available in those districts. And it certainly has impact on other cultural influences in those counties.”
Over the past 35 years, 40 percent of Western counties have seen population declines either slowed or reversed by minority increases, according to the study. While minority populations are increasing everywhere in the U.S., rural areas loom significant because of the influence they exercise over key economic sectors such as agriculture and energy, as well as their political clout.
And the demographic shift brings another factor into the conversation: age. In Colorado, about 40 percent of the under-24 population is non-white.
“Minority populations tend to be younger than non-Hispanic whites, so it’s important to note that increasing minority population brings in a lot of youth, a lot of vibrancy,” Pohl says. “The overall trend means these places are younger, that schools stay open, local services become available and they diversify the economy in a lot of ways.”
In some places, including Phillips County, the presence of a large employer such as Seaboard Foods helps drive the change, she adds. With the non-Latino white population in rural areas “aging in place” and young people leaving those communities, there are fewer locals to take those jobs, leaving a job gap filled by new minority arrivals.
But there are also places such as Eagle County, the second fastest-growing Western county since 1980, where a burgeoning overall population has been augmented by robust minority growth. Proximity to the Vail resorts, and their accompanying jobs, has fueled much of the expansion as the Latino population spiked from just 849 in 1980 to more than 15,000 in 2015. During that stretch, Latinos accounted for 38 percent of overall growth.
New arrivals often bring with them cultural diversity, with all its attendant enhancements and adjustments. In Morgan County, where the Cargill Meat Solutions beef-processing facility created jobs filled not only by Latinos but also by a surge of refugees from Somalia and other East African nations, the transition — both for white locals and the new arrivals — has not been without its challenges.
That ongoing experience serves as a reminder that melding racial and ethnic backgrounds can be a long, gradual process.
When Estella Dominguez arrived in Holyoke in 1969 as the fifth-grade daughter of Spanish-speaking parents who migrated from the Texas Panhandle to do farm work, she and her siblings found themselves one of perhaps a half-dozen Latino families in the area.
That she’s still here 46 years later — occupying a loan clerk’s office at the Holyoke Community Federal Credit Union, having married, reared three children and put them through college — speaks to the connection she felt from the moment she got here.
“I don’t think there’s been a day in my time here when I haven’t felt like it was home,” Dominguez says. “Even though we were minorities, I never felt outcast.”
In a way, she became one of the bridges that links Holyoke to its expanding population. Though an American citizen like her parents, she grew up speaking Spanish in the home and came to English as a second language. Eventually, she taught in an ESL program at the local school, which led to her landing a job as a bilingual teller at the credit union.
Gradually, efforts by other businesses and institutions to close the language gap reflected the new reality: This population had reached critical mass. While Latino residents were barely a blip on the radar in 1980, they now push 20 percent of the county’s nearly 4,400 residents, according to 2015 census estimates.That number spikes even higher in Holyoke, to 36 percent of the town’s nearly 2,200 residents.
Today, the Latino population here spans generations, sometimes growing “by word of mouth,” as immigrant workers settled in the community and urged others to come join them. They’ve become homeowners, business owners and fixtures in the community — sinking cultural and economic roots into the region’s fertile soil.
“A long time ago, most of these folks didn’t have checking accounts,” says Jessie Ruiz Jr., who arrived in Holyoke when he was 3 and now, at 52, works as an account manager for a health care provider. “Now they learn the system where they have a checking account, have a savings account, a debit card. Now they have a credit card. Now they get a loan for a house or a car. It’s taken years, but they’ve been … Americanized.”
Overall, Seaboard says, 80 percent of its workers have at least a high school diploma. The company, whose local office sits on the west edge of town, ventured into northeastern Colorado in the 1990s, and with the purchase of a local competitor around 2000 became the Holyoke area’s economic driver. Currently, it has a $9.4 million payroll spread over 226 employees making anywhere from $11.50 an hour to salaried management positions, according to the company.
Seaboard says its priority is to hire locally for the operations that produce and raise pigs before sending them out of state for processing. But the company can’t fill all its positions that way and relies on documented workers from outside the U.S., primarily Mexico, that account for about 30 percent of its workforce, says Kay Stinson, Seaboard’s vice president of human resources and animal care.
In some cases, the visa program used to procure the workers can lead to extended employment and even citizenship.
“We intend to do business in small communities for a long time, so anything we can do to stabilize the workforce, add good people and support their efforts to have communities that are vibrant is absolutely what our strategic goals are,” Stinson says. “There’s zero short-term thought process. It’s all long-range commitment.”
Glimpses of the future come into focus within the Holyoke school district, the mini-melting pot of the community, where nearly half of the roughly 600 students are Latino and about one-fourth of those are English-language learners.
At Holyoke Junior-Senior High School, teacher Allie Balog helps about 45 students adapt their fledgling English skills to the academic setting. Most arrived from Mexico, but some are refugees from Honduras who often have endured a more stressful path.
“This has opened my eyes to how life can be difficult and what journeys people go through and how kids are resilient, bounce back and can be successful and go to college,” Balog says. “Kids in Holyoke, in general, are very accepting of each other.”
The district recently found that more than 90 percent of the 124 minority students at the junior-senior high participate in a school-sponsored activity — anything from Future Farmers of America to the football team — and about one-third of those kids are English-language learners.
“If engagement in extracurricular activities is an indicator of student success in school, and the research shows it is, this is a really good indicator of the overall health of this demographic in our school system,” says district Superintendent John McCleary.
Across the decades, many locals say, adjustment to a changing racial and ethnic norm has been fairly smooth. Not that some haven’t struggled with it, but those attitudes tend to be generational.
“I think for the older generation, it’s harder for them to accept the town has changed,” says Nancy Colglazier, executive director of the Melissa Memorial Hospital Foundation and an area native who years ago worked in a migrant school. “But for the children who’ve grown up with it, it’s natural, it’s good. It used to be taboo to date a Hispanic boy. But I noticed how many integrated dates there were for homecoming this past September. I think it’s totally changing in a very good way.”
Ruiz points to several ways the cultures have merged. Thirty years ago, he recalls, you wouldn’t see a white face at a quinceañera or a Spanish wedding. Now, the Anglo girls know all the Spanish dances. A Latina was homecoming queen — and not for the first time.
“The funny part is that 20 or 30 years ago, you never saw that, never,” Ruiz says. “You’re seeing the community accept that. Those kids are all participants. The Johnsons and Thompsons know the Ruizes. They break bread together, they go to church together.
“We’re all together.”
Ninety minutes away from Holyoke and situated along Interstate 76 dead-center in otherwise rural Morgan County, the town of Fort Morgan has experienced a similar demographic shift over the past 35 years, but with a significant twist.
Inside a white-brick storefront about a block off Main Street, Khadar Ducaale sits behind a desk helping a woman in traditional Somali dress understand some medical forms she has brought for translation. This, along with help filling out paperwork for green cards, passports and employment applications at the nearby Cargill beef-processing plant, is primarily how Ducaale, 48, has made his living here for nearly 10 years.
He followed the refugee migration from Somalia, as well as other African countries such as Ethiopia and Eritrea, that coalesced here after landing in other parts of the U.S., drawn largely by the promise of good-paying jobs at Cargill. Ducaale began his American sojourn in Minnesota, obtained his citizenship in 2011 and became a fixture in an immigrant community that is also his clientele.
“My wish to stay here and make a living,” he says, “is just as good as the refugees coming.”
Like Phillips County to the northeast, Morgan County has seen a marked decline in the share of the white population, and most of the change has to do with a rising Latino population. From more than 87 percent white in 1980, Morgan has morphed into a much more diverse place — now only 60 percent of its slightly more than 28,000 residents are white, while Latino representation has swelled to 35 percent.
And like Holyoke, Fort Morgan has been the epicenter of its county’s transition. Whites account for 48 percent of the 11,377 population and Latinos 45 percent. But what sets this area apart has been the arrival of the Somalis and other East Africans starting in 2005. Blacks now account for 4 percent of Fort Morgan’s population, 3 percent of the county’s and 10 percent of the city’s foreign-born residents.
That has put a different spin on diversity and presented another set of challenges for integration in a region with a long immigrant history.
“It’s been a growing process with some fantastic stories and some setbacks,” says Eric Ishiwata, a professor of ethnic studies at Colorado State University who has spent years studying the community’s transition. “As a result, I feel like Fort Morgan stands as a national example of how rural communities that are dealing with these drastic demographic changes that are the result of a combination of foreign-born labor recruitment and U.S. immigration policies all kind of converged in one rural town on the Eastern Plains.”
He notes percentages to build his case: Fort Morgan’s 19.1 percent of foreign-born residents ranks second only to Aurora’s 20.4 percent. And the city’s 39 percent of households that speak languages other than English leads the state.
“My argument,” Ishiwata says, “has been that Fort Morgan has quietly emerged as the most diverse community in Colorado.”
But by the time East Africans began arriving, the memory of an earlier immigrant wave had receded. In the early 1900s, Morgan County witnessed the migration of so-called Volga Germans — Germans who had migrated to farm in Russia but eventually were forced by famine and politics to seek refuge elsewhere. Many settled in Colorado’s farm country, and by the 1970s, they constituted the state’s second-largest ethnic group.
“It gets to the point where it’s easy to forget one’s own immigrant past,” Ishiwata says. “When you lose track of that, it’s easy to view the next wave of newcomers with intolerance or hostility.”
The Somalis’ transition to the community hit rough patches. Some were notoriously hazardous drivers. They loitered and littered, seemed reluctant to learn English and kept to themselves. Then there was religion: The largely Muslim arrivals faced backlash in post-9/11 America — and prevailed in a civil rights case over their demands for prayer breaks at Cargill. Efforts to find a permanent site for a mosque in Fort Morgan have stalled, Ducaale says, and leaders have abandoned the idea and continue to congregate at a rented space downtown.
“For the African population, one of the things that hinders them to get to know lots of folks is the language barrier,” says Ducaale, who was college educated in India. “If you cannot speak English, you avoid people altogether. And to the local folks, it looks like these folks don’t want to get to know them, or they’re rude people. There is no education in refugee camps. For one who is illiterate in his own language, it’s hard to learn English.”
One cultural quirk that rubbed locals the wrong way: Some Somalis held up the checkout lines at the local Walmart by attempting to haggle with the clerks over prices. But the practice didn’t faze Jim and Charlotte Stieb, longtime owners of a carpet and furniture store on Main Street, who found deal-making fit nicely into their business model and even served as a path toward understanding.
Charlotte recalls two Muslim men coming into the store to make a purchase and, in a turn of events not uncommon in the store’s congenial, laid-back atmosphere, “the next thing you know, we’re having a conversation” about the differences in their faiths. But she also recalls that in the early days of the arrivals from Africa, even small cultural differences created a divide.
“I’m certainly more accepting now,” Charlotte says. “At the beginning, it was odd, it was like, what’s going on here? You start listening to people’s opinions, and it would be so easy if you weren’t open-minded to just take that stand, that they’re aggressive or rude. Education has changed that more than anything.”
Education brought Hodan Karshe’s family to the U.S. in 2006 and then to Fort Morgan a couple years later — specifically, the promise of higher education that would propel her to greater opportunity than in their native Somalia. Now, 22, she works as an interpreter at Cargill, pulling the 2-11 p.m. shift like many of the Somali workers, while also attending Morgan Community College in pursuit of a career in radiology.
After years spent in local schools, she speaks perfect, unaccented English. But she maintains her traditional Somali and Muslim roots, covering herself with a hijab atop her long dress. For Karshe, the transition has been, at times, difficult, but she came to grips with her identity — multicultural, in the final analysis — by successfully merging both sides of the cultural divide.
“At school you speak English, you interact with students, you learn,” she explains. “Once you get home, you switch back to Somali and practice your culture. My parents raised us to know who you are. Trying to change that for someone else, you’ll lose your real identity. Why not be yourself? Have your identity, but learn and embrace what you’re learning.”
For many new immigrants, key resources aiding their transition come through the “pop-up” resource center in a Main Street store front run by OneMorgan County, the nonprofit whose work has mirrored the town’s shifting demographic trend. Both Latino and African immigrants filter in for everything from English classes to Zumba, from crafts to computers, all provided for free.
Twenty-four-year-old Susana Guardado, the organization’s new executive director, has been buoyed by the opening of the pop-up center and retains a youthful optimism about cultivating cultural harmony.
“We focus on building relationships,” she says.
But for Ducaale, the once-burgeoning immigrant community in and around Fort Morgan has lost much of its promise.
“This is a pretty segregated town,” he says. “I hate to be so blunt about it. It’s both sides. I think the local community doesn’t like different ethnic people here to mix with them, and I don’t think Somalis want to get mixed.”
Marissa Velasquez, 27, was part of the Latino wave of immigrants after arriving with her parents in 2001. She became a citizen two years ago and now teaches other hopefuls at the pop-up center the elements of citizenship and how to navigate the process.
For her, the arrival of the East Africans just added flavor to a mix she felt already had enriched her life.
“I like the diverse community that we are, that we weren’t before,” Velasquez says. “I have a godchild whose mom is from Ethiopia and dad is from Eritrea, and they’re Catholic. I’ve been exposed to a whole different culture.
“To me, it was like a door opened.”
