He lived it
Immigration changed Abbotsford
Wisconsin grew more welcoming for Hispanics as the decades passed
ABBOTSFORD - Jose Olvera stood at third base, hoping he wouldn’t have to wing the ball to first.
Olvera, 38, was on Red Arrow Park’s ballfield in Abbotsford on July 4, and after playing baseball for more than half his life, his right shoulder can act up. “I can still hit the ball,” he said. “But I feel a sharp pain if I have to throw too hard.”
The grass on the field was trimmed, and two American flags hung on the backstop. A crowd of nearly 200 milled and chatted, the low-key buzz peppered with intermittent cheers. The game is a long-standing Independence Day tradition, and although baseball is popular, many come to watch the fireworks show afterward.
If you grew up in the area and returned after, say, a 40-year absence, the whole familiar scene would have had a pleasant nostalgic glow.
But the fact that a man named Jose was playing third base and many in the crowd were, like him, Hispanic, are signs of the deep changes this small town in central Wisconsin has undergone.
Immigration has always been a part of Abbotsford’s story, but most of those incomers were from northern Europe. Most of the newer residents come from Mexico, and now make up about a quarter of Abbotsford’s population of about 2,100.
For some, what’s happening in Abbotsford and other communities is an unsettling erosion of “traditional” American culture.
But others see the Hispanic arrival as a continuation of the influx of immigrants — Germans, Norwegians and Swedes — who helped build Abbotsford.
In 1911, the Abbotsford Clarion newspaper touted the opportunities available in the city to newcomers. The piece features names such as Ole Berg, Guleck Olsen and August Meyers, and it encouraged people to come to the town with “pure water and a climate that is a joy to live in. Its people are cordial and always ready to extend a welcome to any strangers.”
That cordial welcome was not universally extended to Jose Olvera 80-some years later, until he found a place on a baseball field.
He moved from Mexico to ‘Little Mexico’ in central Wisconsin
Olvera was 12 years old when he and his
family moved to Abbotsford from Zacatecas, a state in the middle of Mexico.
“I first moved here in 1992. We were not the first, but one of the first (Hispanic) families to move here,” Olvera said. “My dad brought us here . ... I didn’t know anything. No English, no nothing.”
Olvera’s father landed a job at an Abbyland Foods Inc. meat processing plant in Curtiss, an even smaller town about five miles west of Abbotsford. The family lived in a mobile home park there.
The place became home to many Hispanic workers in the meat plant. Some began to call the place “Little Mexico,” and it wasn’t a compliment.
When Olvera moved to central Wisconsin with his family, the company was taking steps toward becoming a major business in central Wisconsin. It hired Hispanic labor to provide an engine for that expansion.
Still, as Olvera moved through middle and high schools, he was one of a small group of Hispanic students attending the Abbotsford School District, he said, and they faced hostility from some of their classmates.
“There’d be racist comments, they always made horrible comments,” he said.
“We’d try to stay away from the bullies as much as we could,” Olvera said.
Although Olvera didn’t know much about U.S. culture, he did know how to play America’s game.
He doesn’t remember exactly how, but he summoned the courage to go out for the Falcons baseball team when he was a freshman in high school.
His skills were raw, and he was one of only two Hispanic guys on the team, he said, but he bonded with other players .
At the end of the first season, he received an award: “Most Improved Player.”
The bullies didn’t bother him much anymore.
Engine for growth
Alejandro Vazquez is the editor and publisher of Noticias, a regional Spanish- and Englishlanguage newspaper, and he operates a Spanish-language radio station, El Primerito, out of his basement.
Vazquez was trained and worked as a journalist in Mexico City before he came to America. Like the Olveras, he moved to Abbotsford in the 1990s, and witnessed the growth of Abbyland. At the same time, the entire dairy industry was evolving too, moving from small familyrun operations to large businesses milking thousands of cows. Those larger farms also needed low-cost labor. Hispanic workers were eager to take those jobs and gain a toehold in America.
In 2000, only 39 people who identified themselves as Hispanic lived in Abbotsford, about 2 percent of the 1,956 people living there, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
As of 2016, Abbotsford’s total population was 2,166, and 550 were Hispanic or Latino.
Abbyland now employs more than 1,000 people working in eight divisions. Although the company would not respond to questions, it has a large manufacturing campus on the Abbotsford’s east side along the old Highway 29 corridor. In addition to manufacturing plants, the company owns the Curtiss Travel Center, which consists of a restaurant, convenience store with truck stop facilities and El Norteno Mexican Bar and Grille.
Farms that surround Abbotsford, and the dairy industry that supports them, employ even more Hispanic people.
Without Hispanic labor, Vazquez said, none of that growth would be possible.
As the demographics changed, Hispanic-businesses catering to the needs of the new population — especially restaurants, groceries and clothing stores — followed. Gone were the downtown mainstays of the past: Coast-to-Coast Hardware, Ben Franklin, Rexall Drugstore.
As this was happening, Vazquez also saw opportunity. In 2004 he began to publish Noticias. He and his daughter, Ivone Vazquez, who was 14 at the time, went to Abby Bank to get a loan for about $1,400 in order to buy a computer. Ivone had to sign for the loan, because she was born in the United States. Vazquez was in the process of becoming a American citizen.
Vazquez found an audience and advertisers in not only Abbotsford, but in other small towns across the state that had concentrated pockets of Hispanic residents.
Ivone Vazquez, now 28, is also part of the trend of Hispanic business owners setting up in downtown Abbotsford. She’s opened a bar on Abbotsford’s main drag, North First Street, called La Botana.
“We are all here to follow and get our dreams,” Ivone Vazquez said.
‘We all want the same things’
Jim Decker is 51 years old, and a 1985 graduate of Colby High School. He is the owner of Decker Automotive, located on the south side of Abbotsford.
He’s lived in the Colby/Abbotsford area all his life, “even though I had my chances to leave,” he said.
An avid supporter of President Donald Trump, Decker is also a supporter of the Hispanic community that has taken root in his hometown. He and Alejandro Vazquez, the newspaper publisher are longtime friends, despite political differences.
Decker hosts a guys’ fishing weekend at his cabin, and Vasquez is a regular.
“Alejandro, he’s always wanting to talk politics,” Decker said. “And sometimes I’m just like, ‘Hey, let’s just fish.’”
Despite Decker’s support of Trump, he doesn’t agree with the harsh rhetoric the president uses when speaking about Hispanic immigrants .
“Look, we all want the same things. We want good schools, decent roads, and a financial safety net for people truly in need . ... And they just want a nice life. They want a job and they want to be left alone.”
Decker hears people say that because immigrant workers are often willing to work for low wages, everybody’s pay drops because they provide a surplus of workers. Without immigrants taking those jobs, the rationale goes, business owners would pay more to get the help they need.
Decker believes that Hispanic immigrants are willing to do work that most Americans don’t want to do, and without them, prices of goods such as milk and Abbyland sausage would be sky high.
Abbotsford felt like home
A few years after graduating from Abbotsford High School in 1999, Jose Olvera moved south to Watertown for family reasons.
Olvera said he never felt comfortable there. The region was too urban for his taste. In 2010, Olvera moved back to Abbotsford.
When he returned, Olvera -who is a naturalized U.S. citizen -- was astounded by the changes. He saw storefronts with signs in Spanish, run by Hispanic owners.
“It was like, holy crap, there are a lot of Hispanic people around here now,” Olvera said.
The schools have changed drastically since Olvera attended, too. Unlike other rural school districts in Wisconsin and across the country, Abbotsford’s is growing.
“We literally do not have the space for the kids we have,” Baker said.
Olvera’s two sons, Marco, 15, and Nickolas, 13,aren’t even in the minority in Abbotsford schools; about half of the students are Hispanic.
After Olvera returned to Abbotsford, he started playing with the Abbotsford Merchants, the city-league baseball team that is part of the Dairyland League. Then, after that sore shoulder began bothering him, he stepped way from playing and into coaching.
The July 4 baseball game at Red Arrow Park wasn’t a league contest. It was sort of a sibling competition, with ball players from Colby taking on guys from Abbotsford. Most of the players regularly play for the Merchants, and each side bolstered their teams with younger high school players or savvy older guys, such as Olvera.
The score was tied after nine innings, and rather than keep playing, the group decided to accept it. The fireworks would soon begin, after all.
“Don’t they say that a tie is like kissing your sister?” one guy in the crowd said. He was joking. No one cared about the score.