Postville, Iowa: The Most Diverse Small Town in America

Postville was founded in eighteen forty-three as a quiet northeast Iowa farm town. In nineteen eighty-seven, an Orthodox Jewish family from Brooklyn purchased a shuttered slaughterhouse and reopened it as Agriprocessors, the largest kosher meatpacking plant in the United States. The plant brought in Hasidic Jewish managers and supervisors, along with workers from Mexico, Guatemala, Ukraine, and Somalia, transforming a nearly all-white rural town of roughly two thousand people into one of the most ethnically diverse communities in the country.

Journalist Stephen Bloom documented the collision in his two thousand book Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America. On May twelfth, two thousand eight, nearly one thousand federal agents descended on the plant and arrested three hundred eighty-nine undocumented workers, one of the largest immigration raids in United States history. The town was left reeling.

It has since rebuilt, with the plant still operating and Postville still unusually diverse for a small Iowa city.