Section A · Page 6
The University Daily Kansan
Tuesday, January 30, 2001
Three Mexican-American students, Jennifer Martinez, Gustavo Reyes and Isadora Bonilla, joke at a Buffalo Jones Elementary School lunch table. The majority of the student body there is ethnic.
Community deals with diversity, change and growth
One-year-old Miriam Solorzana cries in pain as Nurse Linda Roemer, Garden City resident, administers an immunization shot. Mexican-American Ministries provides free health care for many Mexican Americans in Garden City.
Continued from page 1A
Schwab said she doubted that ConAgra would choose to rebuild in Garden City — local government and business owners hope other wise.
Tony Sumaya, Garden City senior, has relatives who worked at the ConAgra plant.
"A lot of families moved to Texas or Oklahoma," Sumaya said. "If everyone has to move, they'll lose a lot of funding and aid. Pretty much all those families know is working at a beef plant."
Steve Dyer, director of membership services at the Garden City Chamber of Commerce, said more than $3,000 had been donated to the community and that the United Way was administering the aid to help ConAgra's employees with rent, utilities and food.
A model for change
The city's expansion because of the plants is apparent when passers-by roll into town. An Applebee's just opened across the highway from the SuperWal-mart. There is also a Lone Star Steakhouse and a Golden Corral.
Typical restaurants in a cowtown.
But ethnic foods diversify the dining scene — La Playa Dorado, known as The Golden Beach to most Anglos, is an El Salvadoran seafood restaurant tucked into a strip mall. The Asian Plaza across town features a Vietnamese grocery store and a Vietnamese noodle shop with a golden Buddha behind the cash register and a disco ball hanging from the ceiling.
Diverse fare for a western Kansas town.
In fact, experts say that other cities in the nation should look to the city as a model.
Garden Citians are used to handling change successfully. The transition from a typical midwestern cowtown to a diverse city was also relatively smooth.
Don Stull, KU professor of anthropology, studied Garden City in 1987 as part of a Ford Foundation grant. Since then, Stull has studied other
cities changing because of the meatpacking plants.
"It's a model for dealing with changing ethnic, linguistic and cultural worlds," Stull said. "A lot of
More information Kristi Ellott,
features editor,
gives her perspective on
Garden City,
her hometown.
See page 4A
A lot of the city's success can be attributed to the proactive steps taken by social services and the ministerial alliance, Stull said. The school district also passed bond issues to build schools before the immigrants came to work in the plants.
other communities are experiencing the same things but haven't for as long. It hasn't necessarily handled them all well, but they've been thoughtful."
Roxie Thompson teaches English as a Second Language at Victor Ornelas Elementary, a school with a mostly ethnic population.
The Hispanic and Asian students
in her class are eager to learn and recite the days of the week in Spanish, Vietnamese and English. Thompson said the respect given to all languages often taught students to respect one another's culture, too.
Some children in the lower grades can speak their numbers in Spanish, English, Vietnamese and Lao.
Linda Walker, kindergarten teacher, said she thought the elementary population was getting more diverse.
"I've got some blondies now because there are houses being built around when there used to just be the trailer park," she said. "The kids don't see the differences. They can play in any language — it doesn't matter to them."
The diversity at Victor Ornelas is apparent throughout the district. Two elementary schools are bilingual and last year's kindergarten class was more than 70 percent ethnic.
Four different languages mark the signs in the high school hallways which offers three levels of ESL classes — Level 1 is the class for students with little to no understanding of English. Most of the students — from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Mexico, Honduras, Laos and Somalia — had only been in Garden City since school started in August.
Helping hands
Other public service agencies are trying to overcome language and
cultural barriers. James Hawkins, chief of police, first came to Garden City in 1979 as an ESL teacher. In 1983 he decided to use his Spanish-language skills in law enforcement.
Hawkins said the department used translators for most cases, but if it ran into a language that no one could translate, they had subscribed to an AT&T language line that can access interpreters for 140 languages in 20 minutes.
"We do a tremendous amount of translating materials into other languages," he said. "If we can't translate oursels, we have someone else do it."
The packing plant's insurance covers the family's medical expenses. Their oldest son died of a genetic degenerative disorder four years ago. Now their remaining son, Fabian, suffers from the same disease. He is kept at home, in bed, most of the time because his immune system is weakened. When kids at school catch a cold, Fabian will inevitably come down with pneumonia. Although Fabian's disease can not be cured, Maria says that her son would not have the same level of care in Mexico.
The hard work and money at the meatpacking plants bought Victor and Maria Felix their two-bedroom house and new pick-up truck. To earn the money for the downpayment for the house, Victor worked two shifts at IBP and ConAgra — going to work at 5 a.m. and getting home at 1:30 a.m. He works on the kill floor at IBP — one of the most exhausting and dangerous jobs in the plant — for $13 an hour.
Toan Nguyen arrived in Garden City from a refugee camp in 1981 and started work as a plumber's helper three days later. In 1994, he started his own plumbing business.
"It's a good place because we come here with nothing," Nguyen said. "I came here with $5 — that's it. The community has treated us well."
Garden City has more to offer than work in meatpacking plants.
Being the only minority plumbing company has its difficulties.
Garden City: demographics
Seat of Finney County
County population: 35,545
Median age: 28
Elementary schools: 14
Fifth and sixth grade centers: 2
Middle schools: 2
High school: 1
Home to more than a dozen
feedyards with a capacity to feed more than 284,000 head of cattle
Home to two meat processing plants IBP, Inc. and ConAgra, with the capacity to process about 9,500 head of cattle a day and employ about 5,000 people.
There are more cattle fed within 60 mile radius of Garden City than anywhere else in the world.
Source: Garden City Area Chamber of Commerce
Kyle Ramsey/KANSAN
"I'm trying to compete with other American companies," Nguyen said. "In a small town, business spreads by word of mouth and I don't go down and hang out at the coffee shops."
Nguyen said that just challenged him to deliver a better product to his customers.
Keeping one's culture and language is also something Garden City promotes — with two bilingual elementary schools. Thompson said teachers at Ornelas urge students to retain their culture.
"We want them to speak their home language at home — not English," she said. When children start speaking English at home, Thompson said the bond between parent and child was often broken because most mothers don't speak English.
Underlying tension
Not everyone likes the changes that have happened in the area.
Crime is up in Garden City — and some of the citizens blame the crime on the immigrant population.
But James Hawkins, chief of police, said the increase couldn't be blamed on the meatpacking plants.
Toan Nguyen came from Vietnam to Garden City in 1981 with next to nothing and since has started his own plumbing business. The variety of ethnic groups in Garden City has made it easier for an individual like Naiven to succeed.
"When the population grows as quickly as ours has, so will the crime rate," Hawkins said. "But there is a transient nature in the population that goes along with the types of employment that are available. When there is a high degree of transiency and a low degree of community ownership, it leads to crime and victimization."
Hawkins also said there was gang activity in the community, but since a gang-related homicide in 1994, law enforcement has formed anti-gang task forces and established a no-tolerance policy for gangs.
He said some of the gangs were ethnically based, but members came from all backgrounds.
"I think there's a little racial tension, Hawkins said. "I'd be lying if I didn't say there some. There's also intra-ethnic tensions. For the most part, though, I think Garden City could get along with almost anyone."
Hawkins said there were at least 5,000 to 6,000 illegal immigrants living and working in Garden City.
"We don't do anything with the documented workers — that's INS' concern," Hawkins said. "It doesn't affect our position on law enforcement at all. They usually get jobs and are supporting themselves whether it's legal or not."
Isela Lermia, community developer at Mexican American Ministries in Garden City, said that immigration laws have become more strict — in effect, the laws are tearing up families.
Until 1998, illegal immigrants could petition for citizenship, but had to pay a fine. Now an illegal immigrant has to go through naturalization proceedings in his country of origin. If he has been the United States for more than six months, the proceedings take at least three years. If the immigrant has been in the United States more than one year, the petition for citizenship lasts for 10 years, she said. It doesn't matter if the person is married to a U.S. citizen.
Most parents work to get out of the meatpacking plants.
Numbers of former meatpacking plant employees now work for schools, hospitals and businesses.
"It's good for the children because the mom and dad have easier jobs so they're in a better mood," Thompson said.
Lupe Dorras, a paraprofessional at the elementary, worked on the trip area of a meatpacking plant for five years. Then she moved to a different job in the freezer.
"It was so monotonous and I thought 'Is this what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life?' I still have nightmares about getting to work late."
Dorras said although she was hap pier working at the school, the plants provided many families with jobs.
"We had seven kids at home — we could ask for extra work or ask for welfare. The meatpacking plants are what are providing our jobs, to because if we didn't have them, they wouldn't need the school."
Editor's note: A version of this story is scheduled to appear in The Wichita Eagle later this week Representatives from IBP, Inc. and ConAgra would not answer questions for the story and refused to allow a photographer to take pictures.
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