A Year Without a Mexican: The Debilitating Loss of Economic Lifeblood

By Marcelo Ballve, Mother Jones. Posted April 2, 2009.

The meatpacker expanded, and by the time of the raid boasted nearly 1,000 employees. Rabbis supervised the slaughter and Lubavitch managers oversaw the business end, while white Iowans found jobs as administrative staffers or floor-level supervisors. But the bulk of the bloody work was done by Guatemalans and Mexicans who processed tens of thousands of chickens, thousands of turkeys, and hundreds of cattle daily. (The Agri arrest figures would have been far higher, in fact, had night-shift workers been present for the raid.)

Before long, the Hispanic influx was revitalizing Postville. By 2001, Reverend Paul Ouderkirk over at St. Bridget's Catholic Church was celebrating a Saturday mass in Spanish and had created a Hispanic ministry to cater to immigrants' spiritual needs. Several Protestant evangelical congregations also sprouted up to accommodate the workers, meeting in halls lent by the Presbyterians or Lutherans.

Still more conspicuous were the changes downtown. A Mexican grocery and restaurant called Sabor Latino opened at Postville's main intersection. A Guatemalan restaurant opened up just a few doors down from a kosher deli, while across the street, El Vaquero stocked everything from Spanish-language movies and music to cowboy boots, soccer jerseys, prayer candles, and Vero Elotes -- Mexican corncob lollipops sprinkled with chili powder.

The workers also brought new energy to the school district, which created bilingual programs and built new facilities even as schools in surrounding towns were consolidating due to shrinking enrollment. Local landlords began charging $450 to $750 for homes and apartments, rates unheard of in Northeast Iowa. A few new apartment complexes sprung up, expanding the town's footprint, and property values soared.

There were growing pains, too. The first wave of workers was mainly single men, given to drunken binges on weekends. That led to brawls at the local bar, Club 51, hit-and-runs, DUIs, and rumors of gang activity. But as solo men were joined by women and children from home, things quieted down. By the time of the raid, whole extended family clans had relocated to Postville. "God knows, all we did here was work," said 32-year-old Veronica Cumez, who came here from Guatemala in 2005 with her eldest daughter, joining five brothers-in-law and a nephew working at the plant. "We were grateful for the opportunity."

As a rule, the immigrants' priorities -- family, work, religion -- dovetailed with those of the townspeople, who were thankful for Postville's return to normalcy. A sense of stability, even moderate prosperity, began to envelop the town. The immigrants, and the money they spent, brought "a taste of the good life," said Jeff Abbas, the bearded, Marlboro-smoking operations manager at local public radio station KPVL. "Small towns in the Midwest, especially this part of the Midwest, don't do well economically. They hang on, but that's about it. Postville was doing pretty well."

Then ICE came, and everything changed. When I arrived in Postville a few weeks after the raid, local businesses were already hurting, particularly those catering to the immigrants. El Vaquero, six years in operation, was on the edge; three months later, it was boarded up. The Guatemalan restaurant remained open, but was mostly empty, even at lunchtime; to make ends meet, its owner had a side business shuttling panicked immigrants to Chicago, where they could catch direct flights to Guatemala City.

At a clothing store called Lily's, owner Tomás Hernández watched Spanish-language television to stave off boredom as he waited for customers who were few and far between. When business was good, Hernández said, he was doing $1,000 a week, but sales were down at least 85 percent since the raid. "I'm going to see what happens, but if there's no change in three or four months, I'll have no choice but to close," he told me.

Landlords, meanwhile, had to reckon with suddenly empty units. Many were collecting their remaining tenants' rent checks from Sister Mary McCauley, a Catholic nun and treasurer of a multidenominational fundraising effort to help families whose breadwinners had been arrested. The money was also supporting some 40 arrestees, mostly women, whom ICE had released with ankle-bracelet monitors so they could care for their children while awaiting court dates. The women could neither work nor leave the state, and they had no way to pay their bills.

Agri's managers were scrambling to maintain even a single shift. To avoid a production collapse, the company temporarily brought in Native American workers from its Nebraska plant, and contracted with staffing firms to trawl far and wide for legal workers. Prospective hires were bussed in from as far away as Texas, where many had been recruited at homeless shelters. Among them was Diana Morris, who accepted a three-day Greyhound bus trip to Postville, but balked after being told she'd have to live in a house with 10 male workers, lacking running water or electricity. She went on KPVL to plead publicly for help in covering the cost of a ticket back to Texas.

See more stories tagged with: immigration, deportation, ice, raids, postville

This story was produced under the George Washington Williams Fellowship, sponsored by the G.W. Williams Center for Independent Journalism, a project of Tides Center.

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