Mexican and Latino Meatpacking Workers

In nineteen ninety, the town of Lexington, Nebraska, had a population that was fewer than five percent Latino. By two thousand, it was more than fifty percent. No disaster caused the change. No political upheaval drove it. A meatpacking plant opened on the edge of town, and the labor it required reshaped a community in a decade.

IBP, the Iowa Beef Processors, opened a large facility in Lexington in the early nineteen nineties, bringing several thousand jobs to a corner of central Nebraska that had seen decades of population decline. The company recruited workers aggressively, including through networks that extended into Mexico and through refugee resettlement programs. Mexican immigrants, many from the state of Michoacan, and refugees from Southeast Asia and later from Latin America, came to work the line. The work was physically demanding, repetitive, and dangerous. It paid enough to live on in a place where rent was affordable.

Lexington was not alone. Schuyler, in Colfax County, underwent a nearly identical transformation after an Excel beef plant opened there. Crete, in Saline County, followed. By the early two thousands, these central and eastern Nebraska towns had some of the highest proportions of Latino residents in the Great Plains, with Spanish-speaking churches, businesses, restaurants, and schools growing up within a decade.

The transformation brought tension in some communities, as it has wherever rapid demographic change has occurred. It also brought economic stabilization to towns that had been hemorrhaging population. The meatpacking economy and the immigrant workforce that sustains it are not separate stories. They are the same story, told across the plains in towns that did not expect to become what they have become.

How well that transition was managed, and what obligations the industry incurred to the workers who made it possible, remains a live question in Nebraska's political and civic life.