That’s just fine with Henry Sanchez, a Chicano who never mixes with Mexicans. He lives in nearby Dodge City, also home to the meatpacking industry. His family has been there since the turn of the century, back when Mexicans came to Garden and Dodge to work on the railroads. You’d think he’d trace a connection between the plight of the newly arrived and that of his kin. But “there’s no comparison,” insists Sanchez, 52. “They don’t have the respect we had back then. They don’t have morals.”
Sanchez and Perez reveal two conflicting faces of Hispanic identity in a little patch of the heartland that’s taking a crash course in multiculturalism. Throughout the Midwest and the South, scores of towns have browned virtually overnight. Immigrants are streaming to where the work is–the carpet mills in Dalton, Ga., the pork plants in Storm Lake, Iowa–and have strained the infrastructure and social fabric of these communities. In Garden City and Dodge City, now each about 40 percent Latino, the newcomers are taking jobs in the meatpacking industry–five plants in southwestern Kansas that employ about 12,600 workers in an area of roughly 85,000 people. The beef industry has brought prosperity: the smell of dung, as the locals say, is the smell of money. But it has also convulsed the towns, creating a tangled knot of relations among whites, Chicanos and immigrant Hispanics.
Some white old-timers are seething about the influx of newcomers. Jim Konrade, who’s lived all his 56 years in Dodge City, wishes he could send the immigrants back. “I think it’s bulls–t the way they’re running this town down,” says Konrade, who plans to move away with his wife. “The S.O.B.s live like riffraff.” His contempt is especially virulent, but many more coolheaded members of the community sympathize with his grievances: overcrowded schools, rising crime, chickens in the yard–and, of course, people yakking in Spanish everywhere. It’s getting to where he’s become the minority, says Konrade. “I feel like I’m white trash.” Yet even he makes the distinction that Perez, the meatpacking worker, learned to make. Ask Konrade about Chicanos like Sanchez, and he replies, oh, they’re different–“the best people you ever seen.”
It’s taken generations for Chicanos to achieve harmony with whites. Back in the 1950s, when Lydia Gonzales was growing up in Garden City, she was confined to the south side of the tracks and couldn’t swim in the public pool. She was so scorned for speaking Spanish that she decided against teaching it to her kids. “We became Americanized to the point that we lost a lot of our traditions,” says Gonzales, 62. But they did become more palatable to the whites. Over time, seeing a Chicano marry a gringo or buy a house in the formerly Anglo part of town ceased to get anyone riled up.
That apparent serenity was disrupted when the meatpacking plants were built and immigrants began arriving in droves in the 1980s. Though most of the recent immigrants remain segregated in trailer parks on the fringes of town or in areas that remain heavily Hispanic, they still mingle with the locals at Wal-Mart–and cultures inevitably clash. For Chicanos, that has led to the unsavory experience of being mistaken for immigrants. Now they’re met with the glares that their parents once endured. “It does kind of tick you off,” says Sanchez, the Chicano from Dodge City. At one point he couldn’t contain himself when a white woman at the supermarket mistook him for a Mexican. “Lady, I speak English!” he bellowed.
What it means to be Hispanic has become jumbled. “We’re caught between two worlds,” says Lou Mendoza, the brother of Lydia Gonzales. Shamed when they were kids for not speaking English correctly, they now get ridiculed by Mexicans for mangling their Spanish. The tension is economic as well as cultural. Mexicans might “resent you because you’re doing a little better,” says Mendoza. But Perez, the meatpacking worker, contends that Chicanos resent Mexicans for not doing a little better, for reminding them of the poverty of their ancestors. As he sees it, Chicanos may be his raza (race), but they’re not his gente (people). Their heritage, he says, has been perverted by the more vulgar features of American culture–the lack of respect, the breakdown of family.
Yet cultural collisions can be as enriching as they are threatening. And eventually many people negotiate their own meeting point. Look at the Prieto kids, whose parents immigrated to Garden City from Mexico in 1980. Leo, 23, just graduated from college and is about to start a fellowship at the White House; yet when he visits Garden he hangs with his old homies, some of whom have done a little time in jail. His 18-year-old brother, Richie, drives a lowered Crown Victoria with chrome rims and sometimes dresses like he came straight off the range in Chihuahua; but he’s delivered the morning weather forecast for the high school’s TV news network. Older Chicanos have learned to adjust, too. In fact, many say that the fresh infusion of Hispanic culture brought by immigrants has revitalized their identity as Latinos. Their girls are celebrating quinceaneras, the equivalent of “sweet 16” parties. They’re singing to their departed relatives at the cemetery. They’ve resuscitated their language. When Lou Mendoza and his wife revert to Spanish these days, “sometimes we don’t understand what the hell each other’s saying,” he says, “but it’s a joy.”
As Garden and Dodge feel their way into the future, both communities have recognized that their complexions will become only more richly hued. And Chicanos, who in a way are the arbiters between what the towns used to be and what they’ve become, are uniquely qualified to lead. No surprise, then, that the mayor of Garden, Reynaldo Mesa, is Chicano, and that his brother, Dennis, was also mayor. The Mesas “are established in the community… [and] culturally comfortable with Anglos,” says Donald Stull, an anthropologist who has studied Garden for a Ford Foundation project. “But they have a strong sense of obligation to the new immigrants.” If the people of Garden and Dodge hope to reap the rewards of their cosmopolitanism, they’ll need many more leaders who can straddle cultures. Maybe they’ll know they’ve succeeded when a descendant of the new wave, rather than one from the old, is running the show.
