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The Plains Belongs to Anyone Hardy Enough

KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

My name is Megan Hope. I’m a native of Garden City, Kansas, now living in Denver, Colorado. I’ve spent most of the last two decades working among immigrant communities, a path that has everything to do with growing up on the High Plains.  

As I was settling into grade school in the early 1980s, southwest Kansas was being transformed by an influx of Latino immigrants and resettled Southeast Asian refugees, the primary workforce for two new meatpacking plants. My childhood was the picture of stability—I grew up as a fourth-generation Garden Citian in the house where my father was born and would later die. So, it was both fascinating and frightening to think of people so far from home and often separated from their families. I heard about Vietnamese taking harrowing boat rides and Mexicans transplanting themselves, just like generations of local sugar beet workers before them. And now, they were cutting tongues out of cows, living in trailers on the margins of town, and drawing criticism for their understandable ignorance of traffic laws, English, and so-called “American” customs. I can see my mom leaning against the kitchen counter with The Garden City Telegram open, wincing at the long lists of foreign surnames in the police reports. She’d served on the local school board years before, supporting the controversial introduction of bilingual education, and worried that the lists of names would fuel—and perhaps reflected—a new wave of xenophobia.

But fortunately, that wasn’t the majority response to the new migration. Instead, most established residents were practical and saw the phenomenon for what is was: an opportunity to learn about how   not just our community, but the whole country, was changing, to adjust proactively, and to model for others how they might respond positively, too.

By the time I graduated in 1991, 49% of Garden City’s residents were foreign-born, more than 20 languages were spoken at the high school, and the Kwik Shop convenience store behind our house had become a Buddhist temple. One of my friends and I later scoffed at our supposedly more wordly college classmates who didn’t know how to begin to pronounce the exceedingly common Vietnamese last name N-g-u-y-e-n, roughly, “nwhen.” (I mean, come on!)

One summer while I was a KU student, I did some research to follow up on part of the Ford Foundation’s Changing Relations study, which had examined how ethnic groups in six U.S. communities, including Garden City, were learning to live among each other. I met some of the most admirable and devoted people, including a newly-arrived student from Vietnam who took to calling me “Honorable Teacher”—ironic, since it was he who later helped me set up my first non-school e-mail account. One day I went with my mom to interview for The Telegram a group of Somali men living in an old boarding house on the west side of Garden City—not unlike the place my mom had lived (albeit, with many fewer roommates) when she first came to town as a young reporter close to 50 years before.

My High Plains-inspired adventures have taken me to El Paso, TX, to live with and work among newly arrived immigrants in houses of hospitality; orchards and fields in Missouri to do legal and social services outreach to migrant farmworkers; 32 countries to travel and learn about other migrations; and an immigration detention center near Denver. I currently spent a couple of afternoons a week there, as a social worker and accredited legal representative, working with asylum seekers, human trafficking survivors, lawful permanent residents, and others--all in deportation proceedings--on all that their immigration cases mean for them, body and soul.

Though longtime High Plains residents, my parents and others like them always promoted the sense that the region wasn’t our home more than anyone else’s, and they were right. The Plains belong to anyone hardy and resilient enough to make a go of it, and the Plains, like any place, is its people. We belong to each other.