Mexicans in the Modern Southern Plains: Migration, Labor, and Community

In the past three decades Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans have become a substantial population segment of the Southern Plains, a vast region that stretches from central Texas and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands of far west Texas to southeastern Colorado and southwestern Kansas. Indeed, since the late 1980s, Latinos have kept the region’s population from faltering as Anglo-American out-migration from the mostly rural Southern Plains continually increases. This paper, based on archival research, census data, and dozens of oral histories, tracks the Mexican community of the Southern Plains from the early 1900s through the present. First, it demonstrates how ethnic Mexican workers were central to bringing modernity to the Southern Plains during the early twentieth century—an argument that has not been made by the few other Chicana/o and Latina/o historians that have studied the region. I further explore the intersections of race, gender, and class within the plains to provide an analysis of Mexican community building. More broadly, I elucidate upon the social-cultural world of the Southern Plains, which I find to have several centers of Mexican culture. I then describe these centers’ economic and cultural influence upon the Anglo-American population of the region. Untimely, my paper argues that Mexicans have become the plains’ laboring, entrepreneurial, buying, and demographic dynamo. Significantly, the Southern Plains is an example of the quickly changing demographics of the rural United States.