IF you think the mid-west is too cold and white for Latino culture, take a stroll down 26th Street in Chicago's Little Village. Two miles of shops are flush with goods from Mexico: cowboy hats, snakeskin boots, and the flouncy white dresses that teenage girls wear for their quinceañera parties. An old man from Michoacán, peddling mango and papaya from his pushcart in the freezing weather, says he arrived 21 years ago and still doesn't speak English. No need, he adds, in la Villita.
Altogether the seven main mid-western states are now home to 9% of the Mexicans living in America, up from 7% in 1990 (see chart). Having overtaken San Antonio, Chicago now has the second-biggest Mexican population in America, behind only Los Angeles and well ahead of places like Houston. The number of Mexicans in the Windy City rose by 50% during the 1990s to reach 530,000 in 2000, according to the census. Twice that number live in Illinois.
This trend has been repeated in other less urban mid-western states. Mexican populations more than doubled in Minnesota, Iowa, Indiana and Wisconsin during the 1990s. In St James, an agricultural town of 4,695 people in south-west Minnesota, nearly one-quarter of the population is Latino (largely Mexican). In a string of towns running south from Minneapolis to the Iowa border, some of the country's largest meat-packing operations are kept going principally by employing Mexicans, sometimes in appalling conditions. In October, the remains of 11 undocumented Mexicans were found inside a locked box-car near Des Moines, Iowa.
The mid-west, with its cold winters, distance from home and lack of historical ties, seems an odd choice for Mexicans. Why do they come? A few have been there for a long time. In the early 20th century, Mexicans were brought in to work on railway lines, to tend sugar-beet fields or even as “scab” steelworkers during strikes; some stayed and founded communities like la Villita. Every year, migrant farmworkers added to the numbers during harvest time.
The recent wave of immigration is partly driven by economic opportunism: the mid-west offered more diverse and better-paid jobs than the south-west. But it has also been caused by measures to keep immigrants out. Sterner border controls in the 1990s made it harder for Mexicans to move back and forth easily, prompting many migrants to settle—and bring their families. The controls also meant that there was less incentive to live near the border and more incentive to find well-paid jobs wherever they existed. September 11th has only tightened things further; it also seems to have dampened hopes of a formal guest-worker programme.
These new arrivals have an enormous economic effect. Elizabeth Handlin, an official with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, says about $9.2 billion in remittances were sent from America to Mexico in 2001. Many of the mid-west's agribusinesses, factories, hotels and restaurants rely heavily on Mexican labour. A 2000 study by HACER, a Latino advocacy group, estimated that undocumented workers (most of them Mexican) added $1.5 billion to Minnesota's gross state product and contributed more than $1 billion in state tax revenue. “The meatpacking businesses in south-east Minnesota would have to close up shop without them,” claims James Kielkopf, author of the report.
Identity cards, sort of
The Mexican government, trying to come to terms with the fact that about a tenth of its population lives in America, is now trying to formalise its relationship with these exiles. These moves seem to have gone further in Chicago than elsewhere, partly due to an unusually energetic consul-general, Carlos Sada, a former mayor of the Mexican town of Oaxaca.
In Chicago the number of local “Mexican clubs”, which funnel money back to specific towns in Mexico to build schools, roads and churches, jumped from 35 in 1995 to 181 last year. Every morning hordes of Mexicans cram into the consulate seeking a matrícula consular—an identity card that allow them to open bank accounts and which is recognised by the city, regardless of the holder's legal status (the consulate doesn't ask). The Chicago consulate now issues about 1,200 cards per day, triple the rate of a year ago (and, it adds proudly, well ahead of the rate in LA).
This is not just a tribute to Mr Sada's enthusiasm. Jorge Santibáñez, president of El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana, Mexico, argues that geography also forces the mid-west's Mexicans to be more organised. Over time, he predicts, a split will open up in America's Mexican communities: those in Los Angeles and Texas will become ever more like Mexico, but the more isolated northern Mexicans around Chicago will integrate better.
That does not mean that they will do particularly well—as the wretched Mexicans in the box-car proved. Mexicans in the mid-west are typically poorer and less educated than other immigrants, and many worry they will become a permanent underclass. In Minneapolis a Latino group known as CLUES runs a distance-learning centre, set up with help from both the Mexican government and the state of Minnesota, that allows immigrants to follow a Mexican curriculum for high-school before testing for an American diploma.
Such collaborative efforts, argues Mr Santibáñez, show a change of emphasis. Rather than trying to forge great treaties with the federal government over things like guest workers, the accent now is on smaller bottom-up schemes, involving the states and communities like 26th Street.