Buenos dias, Lexington

I like arriving in a new town and riding up and down the streets to check things out. Lexington, Neb. looked like an orderly, prosperous town, though one thing stood out: nearly everybody I greeted or saw was Hispanic. Lexington was full of Spanish-language business signs, and I saw a poster for a Hispanic heritage festival the next day. It turns out Lexington is far more Hispanic than the Nebraska cities around it: Gothenburg is 4 percent Hispanic, Cozad, 11 percent, Kearney, 4 percent. Lexington is 51 percent Hispanic.

The short reason is that meat-packing company IBP (now in the Tyson empire) opened a plant employing 2,500 people. Before that, Lexington's Hispanic population had been about the same as its neighbor cities.

When in doubt, google. In Rural Migration News, I read:

"Celebrations of Mexican festivals have become the largest public events in many small towns in rural America... In Lexington, Nebraska, the Cinco de Mayo picnic draws more people than the Fourth of July. Some of these towns went from fewer than 10 percent Hispanic residents to 50 percent Hispanic in less than one decade.

"Integrating immigrants is proceeding unevenly in rural areas of the midwest and southeast. In 1995, Lexington, Nebraska passed a $9 million school bond on the third try to accommodate the influx of Latino pupils—there are 1,100 Latino students in 1998, and they are half of Lexington's K-12 pupils."

And in a newletter of the Julian Samora Research Institute:

"Yet, today, immigrants represent an important economic lifeline for states like Nebraska and, especially, for rural communities like Lexington which could have otherwise been destined to join their neighboring ghost towns in the aftermath of the farm crisis of the 1980’s. Immigrant networks (formed by documented and undocumented workers) also subsidize the costs of hiring, recruitment and training for particular jobs and industries. Contrary to recently popular views about the low quality and diminished chances for upward mobility of this new immigrant wave, and against formidable odds, immigrant families in communities like Lexington, Nebraska, are settling, moving out of meatpacking jobs and into self employment, and buying houses at very high rates."

One other thing I noticed on my scouting ride through Lexington: the high school mascot is the Minutemen.