Five years ago, in the early morning of the anniversary of
assassination,
Immigration and Customs Enforcement
agents burst in the
factory in Beardstown, Illinois.
The agency arrested more than 60 undocumented immigrants who worked for a cleaning company hired by Cargill. Many of these people were ultimately deported, a decision that left close to 50 children without their parents and fractured whatever semblance of security the town’s small but growing Latino community had established in the previous decade.
We returned to Beardstown exactly five years after the raid.
What we saw surprised us.
Previously predominantly Mexican, the Latino community has continued to expand, but to become far more diverse. Responding to the ICE raid, Cargill, the world’s second-largest meat packing company, has continued to hire Puerto Rican, Dominican and Cuban workers who do not have the same immigration issues as their Mexican counterparts. The company also has employed Africans from countries like Togo, Guinea and Congo.
These new additions have only further diversified the cultural stew of a town that sociologist
identified as a
, a community in which non-white people had to leave before the sun fell or face often deadly consequences.
Beardstown has been the site of charged ethnic violence in the not so distant past.
In 1996, a Mexican man killed a white man and ran away, according to
professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Angry whites burned a six-foot-tall cross in the town’s central plaza, then burned the Mexican tavern where the shooting occurred, she said.
The
marched the next day.
Although the Beardstown we entered appeared far more peaceful than that turbulent era, the city’s political power reflects the previous time. The city’s mayor and eight council members are all white, and all but two are male, according to Miraftab.
More broadly, the majority of the community is still firmly white-in 2010, 75 percent of the town’s 6,123 residents identified themselves as white-but the demographic trend is unquestionably tilting in a different direction.
More than half of the 644 students enrolled at the town’s two elementary schools in 2011 were Latino.
At
, the larger of the town’s two primary schools, signs greet visitors in English, French and Spanish. A large mural honoring Mexico and its people can be seen on a wall right after one enters the school. The sounds of French bounce along the hallway, near the poster of the Africaribe festival that was held on Good Friday.
The community’s more diverse Latino and larger African community has been a welcome addition for some of the earlier Latino arrivals.
One Mexican resident and homeowner said he considered the Puerto Rican arrivals his salvation. “They know how to defend themselves better than we do,” he said, referring to reports of Puerto Ricans’ asserting themselves in interactions with a police department that some say has targeted its Latino residents.
Community organizer and educator Julio Flores attributed this behavior not only to having legal status, but to being sophisticated consumers of public services with higher levels of service expectation.
For her part, Claudia Zabala, a fourth-grade dual language teacher at
who is originally from Mexico, said she enjoys the African newcomers’ love of soccer and music as well as their dressing in bright colors.
But if there are positive developments, so are there also accompanying tensions, enduring wounds and practices that trace their roots in the earlier period.
Fights have broken out between Mexican and Puerto Rican men, according to Sabina Torres, a Cargill employee since settling in Beardstown in 1999 who owns a clothing shop in the town center. She added that few Africans live in town or attend the town’s many cultural festivals.
Gard’s dual language program, designed to have equal numbers of Spanish- and English-speaking students, is almost completely filled with Spanish speakers, according to
, Gard’s dean of students and director of the school’s migrant student language acquisition program. This numerical disparity is due to the English speakers who drop out of the program, he said.
The problems extend outside of school.
One resident told me two of the town’s halls had a standing policy not to rent to Hispanics. She explained that one of the bans arose from a local golf course being trashed during the course of a party held by Latinos.
For her part, Torres said she still remembers the hostility she faced from her Cargill coworkers shortly after she moved to Beardstown. Her face clouded with pain as she recounted white parents instructing their white child not to “eat that shit” when they realized the Halloween candy their child had just received came from a Latino home.
Torres stopped distributing candy for years after the incident, resuming only this past year when City Hall told store owners in the town square to do so, she said.
The painful memories held by Torres and other may explain some of the difficulties Rodney Martin, owner of the recently opened Riverview Restaurant around the corner from the main square, could face.
A glance at the menu and facility reveals his efforts to cater to the rapidly emerging demographic and, perhaps, an evolving understanding of the town’s changed social landscape. His newly renovated event hall will hold its first quinceaneras in upcoming weeks. In addition to offering American staples like steak and French fries, diners can order burritos and enchiladas.
Although Martin said he has not employed a Mexican chef-he called the cooking he and the other chefs is “not real Mexican, but it’s good enough”- but did say that he accepted the Latino presence in the previously all-white town where he spent part of his childhood.
“They’re looking for a better future just like I am,” he said.
