You wouldn’t expect to find Maria’s Mexican Restaurant in Centerville, South Dakota.

Centerville is a small farm town founded around 135 years ago by Scandinavian and German immigrants. A café here would more than likely serve hamburgers, steak and mashed potatoes for lunch rather than shrimp street tacos and refried beans.

Maria’s is partly the result of immigrants who have come, mostly from Latin America, to work at new dairies in southeast South Dakota.

It’s also partly the result of the town’s efforts to make new immigrants and their families feel welcome and part of the community.

“Dakota Plains Dairy fielded a team for our men’s softball league, and I thought the food at their picnics during the games was amazing,” says Jared Hybertson, Centerville’s economic development director. “Our town’s only café had closed, and I asked some of the guys if anyone had ever thought of opening a restaurant.”

They suggested asking Maria Martinez, whose husband worked at the dairy. She had restaurant experience and was interested in the idea but didn’t imagine she would be able to start a restaurant. She and her husband didn’t have the cash or credit necessary to buy the building.

The Centerville Economic Development Corporation had a solution. As it had done for some other entrepreneurs, it bought the building and sold it contract-for-deed to Martinez. That was in 2018.

Maria’s has not only become a successful restaurant (Martinez opened a second café in a nearby town), but it also has become a gathering place for the community.

“It’s our melting pot,” Jared says.

Maria’s is one of the success stories documented in a welcoming and integration study commissioned by Central Plains Dairy Foundation (CPDF). The foundation is a non-profit organization that supports dairy in the Interstate 29 corridor in South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska and North Dakota – one of the fastest-growing dairy regions in the country for the past several years. South Dakota’s Latino population increased 66% between 2010 and 2019, the second-largest percentage increase in the U.S. for the period.

The foundation is interested in helping communities welcome new immigrants and make them feel at home, says Deb Wehde, the foundation’s president and a field representative for Agropur’s cheese plants in Hull, Iowa; and Lake Norden, South Dakota. “We need new workers to come here, and we want them to stay here. Our industry depends on them.”

To gauge how three communities with new or expanded dairies were doing with welcoming and integration, the foundation turned to Dr. Athena Ramos, a University of Nebraska Medical Center assistant professor. Ramos has worked extensively on welcoming and integration practices in rural communities in Nebraska and other Midwestern states.

In 2019, she surveyed 272 community leaders, residents and immigrant workers in Beresford (population 2,206), Centerville (population 877) and Viborg (population 786). These communities are in an area that is home to several new or recently expanded dairies.

Welcoming gap

Despite welcoming and integration successes like Maria’s, the survey showed there was a significant difference in how welcoming established community members thought they were being and how welcome many newcomers felt.

Most established community leaders and residents thought they were doing OK, Ramos reports. After all, a school in one of the communities had hired an English-as-a-second-language (ESL) teacher, a church had started holding a service in Spanish, and government offices and hospitals had identified people to serve as interpreters.

Yet, most immigrant workers surveyed reported low levels of integration. Few said they felt a close connection to the U.S.

Half reported they sometimes felt isolated from American society.

Many said it would be difficult to find a job or a lawyer, and only about half reported it would be easy to find a doctor in their community.

Over half thought it was difficult to find housing in their community, in part due to the insufficient quantity of built housing and also because of their immigration status.

There also were stark differences in how established residents and newcomers rated the quality of their lives.

About 60% of established community members rated their quality of life as very good. Only 16.7% of immigrant workers said the same.

Nearly 70% of established community members rated their health as good, very good or excellent compared to less than 40% of immigrant workers.

Only half of immigrant workers reported having health insurance.

Nearly 50% of immigrant workers reported that they had no agricultural work experience prior to getting their current job. Almost half reported receiving no health and safety training from their employer.

Over 57% of the immigrants believed their supervisors could do more to make their job safe.

Nearly 90% of the immigrants believed it was somewhat or very likely they would be injured at work within the next 12 months.

How welcome immigrants said they felt depended partly on how long they had been in the community, whether they lived in housing on the dairy or in town, and whether they were single or married with children. The longer they had lived in the community, and if they lived in town and were married and had children in schools, they felt more welcome.

Though the study was done in South Dakota, it reflects the challenges many rural communities experience with a sudden growth in immigrant workers, Ramos says.

How to improve

Community leaders, residents and immigrants surveyed had ideas on how to improve welcoming and integration. They included creating welcoming ambassadors, holding events to celebrate all the cultures in the community and hosting bi-directional language learning classes where new immigrants could learn English and established community members could learn Spanish.

All are good ideas, according to Ramos.

But perhaps the most important thing for dairies is to provide fair wages and a safe and supportive work environment and to improve communication and trust between the workers and managers.

“Successful welcoming and integration starts at the dairy,” she says.

Dairymen and women can also help to promote positive perceptions about newcomers and their families, helping community members to understand the important role these workers play in the local economy.

The most important things established community members can do are to be open to learning with their new neighbors and to personally make an effort to engage with a smile, handshake or an invitation to participate in community happenings.

It is important to reach out, not just wait for someone to show up and ask to be involved, Ramos says.

Welcoming plan

Communities should be intentional about welcoming newcomers and develop a plan for how to do it, Ramos advises.

“This is not a story of ‘us and them,’” Ramos says, “but instead a story of ‘we’ and how can we do this together. We all want to see the dairies and the rural communities they call home succeed.”

Ramos’ survey has given three small communities a baseline measure of “where we are today,” says Nathan Jensen, a foundation board member who lives in Beresford.

The communities have some great opportunities to do more to welcome immigrants, he says. “Just doing the survey got a lot of people talking. It was a good start.”

To see more survey results and more welcoming and integration recommendations, contact the Central Plains Dairy Foundation or (605) 412-8403.

Lon Tonneson is a freelance writer in Mandan, North Dakota.