There are Latinos in Kansas. I saw them on my way to interview a farmer in Lakin, one of those towns on the Plains so disparate and spread-out that the only cross street the farmer could give me to his house was a mile-marker off the highway in between the fields. We drove through Dodge City and Garden City and Holcomb to get to Lakin from Topeka, and here, where the meat-packing industry and coal plants are, Latinos are as well.
And they are everywhere — carnicerias all along the street (real dives with peeling paint and misspelled signage written in Spanglish, not restaurants with cactus murals painted on the front), stores advertising SE CAMBIAN CHEQUES/WE CASH CHECKS, dried chili peppers in the market — this is not a marginal population in this prairie town, population 24,000, but the driving cultural force.
Mostly I saw men who appeared to be in street gangs, so many of them. In MacArthur Park we have a mix — we have men who wear cowboy hats and cowboy boots and belts with large buckles on their way to what seems to be the ranch, but is actually the 99ยข store, and we have men in MS 13 and the 18th Street Gang and the Crazy Riders and more. Here there seemed to be only the latter. Sixteen, seventeen year-olds with the red, backwards baseball cap in very, very low-riders with thin mustaches and many, many tattoos that often reference a recent death: RIP BAM BAM. They looked extremely familiar to me, and then upon coming home, I see that they are more or less a part of the same affiliations as some of the men in LA. Active gangs in the small heartland towns of Garden and Dodge Cities include: Surenos, Brown Pride Villians, Brown Pride Gangstas, Brown Pride Aztecs, Latin Kings, South Side Orphans, Folk Nation, KBC, TSV, Norte. None of this is very new; The New York Times reported in 1993 that there were 3,100 gang members in the state, most of them kids in between the ages of 11 and 21 involved with drug dealing, gun smuggling, theft, even murder. (The man I spoke with at KBI said that they do not have numbers on the amount of gang members currently in the state.) When I mentioned this at Ferret Camp (really) a few days later, it was old news to the Kansas State biology students as well. Oh yeah, they said, we have drive-bys.
The farmer in Lakin was white, his wife Latina. He admitted that it was almost impossible for him to find white people willing to work, anywhere anymore, that they would rather stand around and get paid to watch other people flip burgers. The only kids he could find to hire to help on the farm were the ones with Mexican parents or grandparents, he said, as they are only one or two generations removed from real work.
Interesting view of Western Kansas towns. Being a native Kansan I am not attuned to look for evidence of Mexican gangs although the evidence of Hispanic culture is certainly apparent driving through towns such as Dodge City. But to claim the Hispanics are the driving cultural force may be a bit much. Perhaps in Garden City and Dodge City there is truth to that but in a area as rural as Southwestern Kansas the weather, cattle prices and the grass economy usually have the last word. If the cattle industry dries up, so will the job basis for our Hispanic friends and they will move back to LA.
Latinos have been in Kansas for a long time. My husband’s family hails from Arkansas City and Wichita, and we attended a Hernandez family reunion in Wichita several years ago. His grandparents left Mexico when Pancho Villa was around, and both of his grandfathers worked on the railroads. His parents faced lots of discrimination, and weren’t allowed to swim in the public swimming pool, drink from the Whites Only drinking fountains or attend college.