At Tienda Mexicana Guerrero on Main Street, the shelves are stuffed with cans of tomato sauce, peppers and hominy. Bulk bags of dried chilis and powdered spices line the walls. Boxes of sweet plantains sit next to giant onions and ripening mangoes near the entrance.
This Mexican grocery store is the only grocery store in Wakefield. It’s the only place to get fresh produce. And on this Friday, payday, it’s busy.
Maria Catalan’s family, originally from the Mexican state of Guerrero, moved to Wakefield in the 1990s to work at Michael Foods. They bought the grocery store from a family friend about 24 years ago, her daughter Ashlyn Vazquez Catalan said.
In Wakefield, the family could build their own business after years of working at plants around northeast Nebraska. They could own a house instead of renting a trailer home. Their kids could stay in one place.
Maria Catalan, the owner of Tienda Mexicana Guerrero, stands inside her grocery store in Wakefield. The Mexican grocery store is the town’s only grocery store, and the lone spot to get fresh produce. Catalan has owned the store for for 24 years, allowing her and other family members to leave manufacturing jobs and put down stakes in Wakefield. Photos by Jerry L Mennenga for the Flatwater Free Press
Today, Catalan’s store is a one-stop shop for Latin American cooking – and also a community hub. Sundays after church are the busiest days, Vazquez Catalan said. Catalan put in landline phones customers use to transfer money back home.
If you need a room or a job, Catalan can probably hook you up.
“The joke is my mom knows everyone and everything in town,” her daughter said.
The store has also adapted to new customers. When it first opened, Wakefield was primarily home to immigrants from Mexico. Now more people arrive from Guatemala and Nicaragua.
Nebraska has seen a similar shift. Latino immigrants make up about half of the state’s foreign-born residents. In 2012, the census recorded roughly 12,000 Central American immigrants living in the state. In a decade, that number nearly doubled to 23,000. This year, both El Salvador and Guatemala opened consulates in Omaha.
A more diverse Nebraska
Since 1990, every Nebraska county — even the most rural — has grown more diverse. It’s diversity driven by generations of immigration into the state. And in Nebraska’s rural counties, it’s people of color driving population growth in places that would otherwise be shrinking.
At Wakefield Community School, teachers have felt the shift. The district’s staff of 14 English learner teachers and paraprofessionals knew how to work with Spanish-speaking students. But there are dozens of dialects and indigenous languages spoken throughout Central America. Sometimes, two students, both from Guatemala, can’t understand each other, said Farup, the superintendent.
In 2013, English learners – students not proficient in English – made up 12.9% of the student body. Now, they make up about 33%.
The school is booming. It’s also bursting at the seams.
A decade ago, 440 students attended the K-12 school system. Now: 620. By 2033, projections show the district will reach 750 students.
Wakefield now relies on overflow trailers to fit all its students. Last year, the district tried to pass a $46.8 million bond to build a high school and add an elementary school wing.
The bond issue crashed and burned, 513-129.
In the weeks leading up to the vote, Megan Weaver, the local economic development director, says she would hear the occasional comment in town – “If there weren’t so many Mexicans, then we wouldn’t have to do this.”
To Farup, the melting pot student body should be viewed as an asset. In this small town, students from different backgrounds cross paths daily. It prepares students to go anywhere in the world, he said.
“There’s always going to be people who would love Wakefield to be the quiet little town where nothing changed,” Farup said. “But that doesn’t happen. You’re either growing and adjusting and making the best of opportunities, or you’re dying … the alternative is, this town would be drying up.”
The mighty Wakefield Diablos riding a float in the parade at WakeFest, the town’s annual celebration. The Diablos are a football club, but play soccer, not American football. Photos by Jerry L Mennenga for the Flatwater Free Press
A view from the rear of the small-town parade that snaked down the Main Street of Wakefield on Saturday, Aug. 17, 2024. Photo by Jerry L Mennenga for the Flatwater Free Press
Follow Main Street, and it will lead you directly to the Michael Foods plant at the north end of town, a sprawling facility where employees and semi-trucks come and go at all hours.
Today, the company churns out packaged boiled eggs, dried eggs that go into cake mix, the cooked eggs you eat when you order a Taco Bell breakfast.
In a town of 1,500, it employs about 500 locals. Another 600 or so people travel into Wakefield to work there.
The company started 74 years ago as MG Waldbaum, a place for local farmers to sell their eggs and cream. In the 1970s, the company scaled up production, and needed more employees to process more eggs, said Gerald Muller, who worked at the company for 31 years. Then, in 1988, MG Waldbaum was bought by Michael Foods, which almost immediately started hiring Latino workers.
Michael Foods, the egg processing plant which sits at the north end of Main Street, is easily Wakefield’s biggest employer. It’s also a major driver of immigration to the northeast Nebraska community. Michael Foods employs 500 of the town’s 1,500 residents, as well as 600 other employees who commute in from nearby towns. Photo by Jerry L Mennenga for the Flatwater Free Press
Lack of workers remains a statewide problem. Nebraska had 49,000 open jobs in June, according to federal numbers. To fill them, Nebraska needs people – and the state needs to look outward, said Michael Johnson, chief operating officer and executive vice president of the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce and Industry. This is even truer in smaller communities, he said.
“Our population is going to decline unless folks move in from somewhere else,” he said. “What this in-migration is able to do is really just breathe new life into these communities … and that life is economic, it’s cultural. It really is something that can reverse the trend that our birth rates would put us into.”
In Wakefield, you can see the new life on Main Street. There are the longtime fixtures like La Michoacana and the Mexican grocery store. There are also newer businesses, started by people who moved to work at Michael Foods, or their now-grown kids.
There’s the hair salon where the owner speaks Spanish – before, people would have to drive to West Point or South Sioux to find a Spanish-speaking hair stylist. There’s a Guatemalan restaurant, recently expanded to neighboring Wayne, a new mechanic, a new coffee shop.
Sidelines, a longtime Main Street restaurant, was bought by a Latino couple, Denise Tello and Jessy Ramirez, this year. Tello moved to Wakefield as a kid in the ’90s, a daughter of one of the first Latino families to move to town.
“Hispanics owning commercial buildings … I’m sure at one point, (my parents) would have never imagined that,” Tello said. “I would have never imagined owning this.”
Jessy Ramirez and Denise Tello recently purchased Sidelines, a longtime bar and grill, from the previous owner. Tello moved to Wakefield in the 1990s, a daughter of one of the first Latino families to move to town. “Hispanics owning commercial buildings…I’m sure at one point (my parents) would have never imagined that,” she said.
Several of the town’s businesses, including brand-new ones, are owned and run by children or grandchildren of immigrants who moved to Wakefield to work at the local egg processing plant. Photo by Jerry L Mennenga for the Flatwater Free Press
Across the highway from Main Street are two new apartment buildings. Their 60 units are already entirely full, said Weaver, the economic development director. Developers now want to build a third.
The demand for housing is sky-high, and the two apartment buildings were made possible by Michael Foods, she said, which agreed to pay employees’ security deposits.
Population growth fueled by immigration doesn’t come without its problems, or its prejudice.
In Lexington, white families fled the school district. Fremont made national news by attempting to bar residents living in the country illegally from renting housing.
And, in Crete, things grew violent earlier this year, when a white man shot four Guatemalan children and three adults. Months before, the family reported he’d told them to go “back where they came from” and to “speak English,” police said.
In Wakefield, tension is present, but generally subtle, residents said. There’s frustration that the school has to play eight-man football – some Hispanic high schoolers prefer soccer, and others work after school. Some white residents tend to blame run-down homes or messy yards on Latino families, sometimes with no knowledge of who lives in the house, Weaver said.
But as the decades have passed, much of the tension and frustration has turned to acceptance, said Muller, the retired Michael Foods operations manager and Wakefield native.
If the community is to survive, he said, many residents realize it must evolve.
“There’s still people that think that we would be better off without Michael Foods and the immigrant population,” Weaver said. “Without Michael Foods, we’d have an abandoned Main Street. It’d be pretty quiet if we didn’t have our Hispanic-owned businesses.”
Rosa Brambila and Eliso Lopez stand La Michoacana Restaurant and Lounge, the Mexican restaurant they own and operate in Wakefield. Behind them are several of Rosa’s grandchildren. Photo by Jerry L Mennenga for the Flatwater Free Press
Brambila’s mother opened La Michoacana in 1999, when a friend already living in Wakefield gave her a call.
“There are a lot of Latinos moving here,” the friend told her. “And there’s not much to do.”
So, she took her life savings to Nebraska and started the restaurant she named after her home state in Mexico.
Brambila followed when her mother was diagnosed with cancer that same year. She’s been here ever since.
Today, Brambila stocks the entrance to the restaurant with pamphlets from the state’s Migrant Education Program and public health department. She’s let public health officials host events at the restaurant, an easy access place for people working at Michael Foods.
Lately, it seems to her that newcomers to Wakefield have become more transient. Like much of Nebraska, Wakefield has a housing shortage, and it’s harder to move a whole family to town when you can’t find a place to live.
Earlier this summer, Brambila met 13 Cuban men who had just moved from Florida to work at Michael Foods. By August, only four remained.
Still, every day, new people arrive in town, she said. Nearly every day, one or two enter her restaurant.
Brambila was once a newcomer herself. Now, a quarter-century later, she’s a member of this small town’s establishment. She knows most everyone in town. She spots the new face as they walk up to her bar.
“Hey, I haven’t seen you before,” she’ll say. “Where are you from?”
A FLATWATER FREE PRESS SERIES
It’s practically gospel in Nebraska that our smaller communities are declining, continuing a population slide that began long ago and will continue forevermore. But many Nebraskans don’t realize that conventional wisdom is being upended, altered by a force powerful enough to turn the tide on decades of decline and offer some communities the chance to chart a new path forward. In a word: Immigration.
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Publish date : 2024-09-05 23:40:00
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