Nebraska is evolving with immigration spurring growth in many rural counties

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. She pours a beer for a woman from Nicaragua, then brings out a burrito for the town’s only newspaper reporter.

On the TV behind the bar, sportscasters run through soccer highlights in rapid Spanish. Taylor Swift blares over the restaurant speakers as Brambila’s gaggle of grandkids sing and dance among empty tables. They spend their summer days with Grandma at “the big yellow house” – their name for La Michoacana, the restaurant Brambila has run in this northeast Nebraska town for the past 25 years.

Brambila has spent a quarter century greeting the town’s old timers when they crave Mexican food, and also meeting newcomers to town, introducing herself in Spanish.

She has rented rooms upstairs to workers from Morocco and Somalia, Paraguay and Mexico. She exchanges recipes with immigrants from Central America and Cubans from Florida newly arrived to work at Michael Foods, the egg processing plant up the street that’s the town’s economic backbone.

These new people have changed Wakefield. They also may have saved it.

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In 1990, Wakefield was home to 1,082 people. The census that year recorded the town as being 99.9% white – the remaining .1% was one single person of Asian descent.

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.

“There is a reality that a lot of rural communities in Nebraska are shrinking,” said Matt Farup, superintendent of the Wakefield school district. “But that is not true of Wakefield.”

For years, the perception of rural Nebraska is that it’s old, overwhelmingly white and dying.

The reality: 21 Nebraska counties outside the Omaha and Lincoln metro areas actually grew between 2010 and 2020. In 16 of those counties, according to census data, the growth was 100% because of residents of color.

It’s growth driven by first-generation immigrants who moved to Nebraska for work, and also propelled by their children and grandchildren who stay. It’s growth, experts say, key to the survival of small-town Nebraska, even though it can cause housing shortages, strain school systems and create cultural chasms that may take generations to bridge.

“They’re younger, they’re working, they’re going to have families, and then they’re going to grow those communities,” said Josie Gatti Schafer, director of the Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. “Population growth leads to economic growth, it leads to social growth, it leads to entrepreneurship – all these other important facets of life. So, those counties can say, ‘thank you.’”

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.

For 20 years, Barb Stout has given history tours of her hometown. She points out the old pump organ that traveled to Wakefield by covered wagon in the late 1800s. The lace wedding dresses worn by long-ago brides. The 3,000 antique farm wrenches that fill the museum’s basement.

Wakefield began as a community of immigrants, working class people from Germany and Sweden who came to farm in the 1880s, or followed the railroad tracks laid through town, said Stout, co-chair of the Wakefield Heritage Organization.

Her own grandfather came to Wakefield from Sweden, landing here because he had family members who had come before him.

“They would write home, ‘It’s a good place. Get on a boat,’” Stout said.

Starting in the late 19th century, Europeans poured into the Great Plains, people running from economic turmoil, poverty and famine and running toward free or cheap farmland and railroad jobs in the middle of the United States.

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.

Then, in the 1920s alone, more than half a million people moved to Nebraska.

Towns across the state boomed. Irish immigrants found a home in O’Neill; Germans from Russia in Scottsbluff; Czech families in Columbus and Wilber.

That boom proved short-lived. The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drove people out in the 1930s. The mechanization of agriculture into the ’70s and and a crippling ag recession in the 1980s further emptied out farming communities. The descendants of those European immigrants who populated Nebraska’s small towns started moving where the work was – bigger cities.

But that’s only one half of rural Nebraska’s immigration story.

In the 1990s, meatpacking and manufacturing plants in the Midwest, wanting to avoid unions and keep wages low, started moving out of cities and into rural communities like Wakefield.

They also started recruiting immigrant labor to fill jobs.

In 1990, Nebraska’s population was 1.8% foreign born, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

Now, Nebraska is 7.2% foreign born. The state’s share of people of color has exploded as well – from 6% in 1980 to nearly a quarter in 2020 – fueled by the immigration of the past 30 years and the extended families that followed. Nebraskans of color are far younger than their white counterparts and more likely to participate in the workforce and have children.

“They’re second- and third- generation Nebraskans,” Schafer said. “The diversity … is today driving the growth.”

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.

The result of this new chapter in Nebraska’s immigration story: From 1990 to 2020, Nebraska added 383,110 people.

Nebraskans of color were responsible for 93% of that growth.

And if you remove Nebraska’s two biggest cities – pulling Douglas, Lancaster and Sarpy counties from the data – diversity’s impact on rural Nebraska becomes clear.

In the state’s other 90 counties, between 2010 and 2020, population shrank by a total of 1,218 residents.

In that same time frame, those counties added 48,438 people of color.

“People will say, ‘How come they’re all coming here?’ And I’ll say, ‘how did your family get here?’” Stout said.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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?”

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This story was originally published by Flatwater Free Press and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.