WAKEFIELD, Neb. (AP) — It’s lunch, and Rosa Brambila rings up an order of enchiladas and rice for a man from Guatemala, here in Nebraska to work.
WAKEFIELD, Neb. — It’s lunch, and Rosa Brambila rings up an order of enchiladas and rice for a man from Guatemala, here in Nebraska to work. She pours a beer for a woman from Nicaragua, then brings out a burrito for the town’s only newspaper reporter.
Today, Wakefield has jumped to more than 1,500 residents while transforming into a community roughly half white and half Latino. Mexican men came to work at places like Michael Foods. Soon their families joined, keeping the local economy alive, the school bustling, the demand for housing high – and becoming the first wave of immigrants that continue to grow the town.
Two giant dogs made of fiberglass guard the entrance to Wakefield’s history museum, their faces painted in the stern likeness of the early 20th century farmers of American Gothic. The male holds a pitchfork. Only 30,000 Americans lived in Nebraska in 1860, a figure that ignores the thousands of Native Americans forced off their land by the U.S. government.Towns across the state boomed. Irish immigrants found a home in O’Neill; Germans from Russia in Scottsbluff; Czech families in Columbus and Wilber.
This is happening as white Nebraskans leave the state more than other white people move into Nebraska. From 2010 to 2020, out-migration drove a population decline among white Nebraskans. 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.
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. 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.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.”
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. “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.”
“Hispanics owning commercial buildings … I’m sure at one point, would have never imagined that,” Tello said. “I would have never imagined owning this.” 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.
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