Woodburn: Oregon's Most Latino City

Woodburn sits in the heart of the Willamette Valley about twenty miles south of Portland, and today sixty percent of its residents are Latino, among the highest proportions of any city in Oregon. That transformation did not happen by accident. It happened because of strawberries, wartime labor policy, and the stubborn tendency of communities to put down roots wherever they find dignity.

The town was established in eighteen eighty-nine amid the French Prairie region settled earlier by French-Canadian fur traders. By nineteen twenty-three, Woodburn was calling itself the Berry Center of the World, and Marion County's farms depended on seasonal harvest labor to pick marionberries, strawberries, pole beans, and hops.

World War Two changed everything. The incarceration of Japanese Americans, who had formed a significant part of the agricultural workforce, left farms desperate for pickers. Congress responded with the Bracero Program in nineteen forty-two, a bilateral agreement with Mexico bringing contracted workers to the United States. More than fifteen thousand braceros came to Oregon between nineteen forty-two and nineteen forty-seven. They picked the harvests that kept the valley farms running.

Some stayed. Others returned, and their children came back. Mexican-American families from Texas began arriving in the nineteen fifties and sixties, initially as migrant workers following the harvest circuit, then as permanent residents. A Spanish-language radio station opened in Woodburn in nineteen sixty-five. The community began building institutions: a Catholic church with Spanish masses, a credit union, advocacy organizations. In nineteen sixty-four, a festival called Fiesta Mexicana began at the end of the harvest season and has run every summer since, now one of the largest celebrations of Latino culture in the Pacific Northwest.

Today, eighty-three percent of Woodburn's public schoolchildren are Latino. The farms are still here, and so are the people who made them produce.