THE ROAD AHEAD
Guymon, home to a rural rebirth, awaits era of Trump
GUYMON — With her husband working the cash register and her mother-in-law behind the counter kneading flour with her fists to make tortillas, Ana Mora did a final check of the store shelves before the lunchtime rush.
She straightened a bag of red beans that are commonly sought out by customers from El Salvador who shop at Mora’s Market, a small grocery store and restaurant off Guymon’s Main Street.
Next Mora stacked some cans carrying the La Costena label, a popular brand with Mexican shoppers, and across the aisle she gave a quick glance to ensure a crate was full with yucca roots, a standard purchase for the growing number of Cubans moving to town.
“We get customers from all over Central America
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Donald Trump, June 16, 2015, speech kicking off his presidential campaign This is small-town living, it’s safe and kidfriendly and just a lovely town.”
Marisa Gonzalez
and Mexico,” said Mora, herself from Mexico and now living in Guymon, a town of over 11,000 where more than half the residents are Hispanic.
The opening of Seaboard Foods pork processing plant on the northeast edge of town in the mid-1990s attracted a wave of migrant workers seeking steady employment, changing this rural hamlet in the Oklahoma panhandle into a bustling global hub.
While most of those early workers came from Mexico, tighter immigration restrictions in recent years sparked a burst of migrants from Central America, northern Africa and even the Philippines, making Guymon an unlikely international city with levels of diversity far exceeding that seen even in the state’s urban centers.
Today, slightly more than a third of Guymon’s residents are foreignborn.
But following a contentious presidential election where immigration was a central theme, many of Guymon’s nonwhite residents are anxiously awaiting the presidency of Donald Trump, who launched his campaign on a call for sweeping deportation, enhanced border security and a general hostility toward immigration, especially from Mexico.
“A lot of people are scared about what is going to come,” said Ana Mora, whose in-laws have run the market in Guymon for six years.
Brought to the United States by her parents when she was 9 months old, Mora's family is an example of Guymon’s mix of first-generation immigrants learning to adapt to their new home, and their foreign-born children who have known nothing but an American way of life.
“We are here to work; we are not here to do anything bad,” Mora, 25, said. “But if (Trump) does what he says, there won’t be any workers. There won’t be a Guymon without immigrants.”
Beyond campaign rhetoric, Trump has offered few policy details on how he will deal with immigration enforcement after he is sworn into office Friday. It’s also uncertain if he will make changes to deportation relief programs launched under President Barack Obama, including an executive order that allowed undocumented children to legally work and attend college.
Trump support
Hispanic voters supported Democrat Hillary Clinton over Trump by a 2 to 1 margin nationally, but in Texas County, where Guymon is the county seat, support for Trump reached 80 percent.
City officials weren’t surprised by that number. The undocumented status or lack of citizenship for some in the town’s nonwhite community prevented many from casting a ballot. As a deeply conservative county in a conservative state, Trump’s strong support in the Guymon area was expected.
But many said the local support for Trump wasn’t necessarily an endorsement of his antiimmigration views.
“I just didn’t see immigration being that big of a deal for people here,” said Kim Peterson, Guymon’s mayor of four years, speaking about those who voted for Trump.
Sitting at a conference table inside Guymon’s new city hall, Peterson, 64, recalled stories of the town’s past; some of which he saw personally and other tales passed down from his ancestors who homesteaded in the area.
“This is home and every (other) place I go has got too many damn trees,” Peterson joked in reference to the desolate fields that seem to surround Guymon in every direction.
When the immigration wave first came to town, Peterson called it a “challenging time” as different cultures clashed on the Okla- homa prairie. Today, he sees that friction as mostly in the past.
“Here, there isn’t a view that (immigrants) are taking jobs away … because your local middle class Anglo-Saxon guy that grew up in Guymon doesn’t want to go work in that plant and work as hard as they do, even though he could make some tremendous money.”
Peterson said Guymon's support for Trump was more about the political outsider’s pledge to change the status quo in Washington, reduce federal regulations and jump-start the economy.
But Trump’s actions on immigration after he takes office could have a significant impact on Guymon, especially if there is an increased focus on immigration enforcement.
“Are they going to give us more money for police officers?” asked Larry Mitchell, Guymon’s interim city manager. “And where are we supposed to put people that we pick up?”
Despite the large support for Trump, Peterson said there are many in Guymon who would like to see the immigration process made easier. “The biggest thing for most of the people in this area is we want to see that immigration laws are uniform and workable,” Peterson said. “Get the laws to the point where they are understandable, workable, and enforceable and you don’t have to go through all these hoops.”
Rural America
Peterson and other Trump supporters in Guymon said more important to the community was the president-elect’s promise to reinvest in rural America, a large portion of which has struggled from years of lost jobs and a lack of investment.
In Guymon, an embrace of immigration has helped the town avoid a Main Street of boardedup windows, a common
This country is made up of immigrants. (A Hispanic worker) gets up at 3 in the morning to grow the crops, gets up at 3 in the morning to milk the cattle. Most of the Hispanics aren’t troublemakers. There is probably a few like every race.
Ana Mora No matter where you are from, there is the same amount of good people and bad people in every race. Our biggest problems in Guymon since Seaboard has come … has been, excuse my French, but the same white trash that has lived here forever. It’s not so much the immigrants.
Kim Peterson, Guymon’s mayor
site in many other western Oklahoma towns.
The new city hall located in a renovated bank building on Main Street is surrounded by independent shops, restaurants and a multistory hotel converted into apartments. Trucks rumble along most of the town's main arteries, many loaded with pigs making their way to Seaboard Foods.
“We are lucky that we have Seaboard,” Marisa Gonzalez said about the pork plant. “(Trump) said he was going to get rid of immigrants, but a lot of people who work there are immigrants. Seaboard is the one who maintains this town. If that shuts down, this town won’t have its main source of income.”
Like Guymon, immigration bursts can be found in a handful of rural towns in Kansas, South Dakota, Idaho and many other growing communities in middle America, examples of how immigration is an economic driver for for rural areas avoiding population declines and economic neglect.
"Guymon is what it is because of immigration," Gonzalez said. "This is what it looks like to invest in a rural community."
While Guymon has been a diverse community for several years, it’s transitioning from a town of mostly residents who recently arrived into one where the children of foreignborn workers are now completing school, launching businesses and starting to shape the community in deeper ways.
“Their children are becoming of university age and they are looking at different ways of life,” said Tim Faltyn, president of Oklahoma Panhandle State University, where 25 percent of students are Hispanic, the highest rate of any state college or university.
While their parents may have come to work long hours in an animal processing plant, second-generation Americans living in Guymon tend to open their minds more to other career choices that are not solely about survival.
“They are not going to go just where they can get work, they are going to try to get a job doing what they want to do,” Faltyn said. “You are going to see them have more of a multidimensional impact on the local economy.”
Amada Alvidrez moved to Guymon at age 9 from Mexico, following her father who found a job in construction. After graduating from Guymon High School and Panhandle State, she was hired by a local bank and said the town has become more accepting since she first arrived 29 years ago.
“We are so remote that we welcome anyone who wants to come out here,” Alvidrez said.
Like Faltyn, she sees Guymon’s local business community growing largely through the children of original immigrants and believes the once-challenging divide between longtime Guymon residents and the “newcomers” has largely fallen away.
Alvidrez said last year’s presidential campaign seemed to increase racial tensions, but she broke away from many in her family by voting for Trump.
“His ideas (on immigration) are too extreme and I know he won’t be able to do it,” Alvidrez said. “He’s a businessman and he is going to look at what is going to make this country run, and immigrant labor is cheaper and I don’t think he will want to send 11 million people back.”
Rather than base her vote on Trump's immigration sound bites, Alvidrez was drawn to his views on reducing business regulations, especially in the banking industry, something she believes can have a positive impact on Guymon, which is dealing with a large housing shortage.
With such a strong agriculture and energy industry in the Guymon area, many Trump supporters were also encouraged by his desire to reduce environmental regulations, along with a perception that he gave some attention to neglected parts of the country.
“There is an assumption that people who live in rural America aren’t smart,” Faltyn said. “But if you take an animal producer, they know as much about science as anyone working at any chemical company in any urban area in the world. Because we talk slower doesn’t mean we don’t know what we are talking about.”
Faltyn said the limited resources of a small town require a higher level of pragmatism than in urban centers like Oklahoma City. He also believes rural communities don’t get enough credit for being open to other people.
“I think we do a better job of treating people like people no matter where they come from,” Faltyn said. “There are a lot of people who are very interested in telling other people how the world ought to be, but here, where you have more limited resources, you are more focused on how to make it work. Because you are focused on how to make it work, you are less judgmental on who should and shouldn’t be here.”
An ongoing struggle
As the town has learned to move past some of the early struggles that came with changing demographics, some challenges remain, especially for the local school system.
“It was not fun for a while,” Doug Melton, superintendent of Guymon Public Schools, said about the initial growth in diversity 20 years ago.
Melton said a diverse student population is no longer a new phenomenon, but it remains a difficult reality that makes teacher recruitment problematic.
“But the kids are here and we are going to educate them the best we can,” Melton said.
Today, 80 percent of the district’s 3,000 students are nonwhite and 34 languages are spoken by students and parents.
“If you were in Mexico, sixth grade was it and you went to work, that’s the way life was,” Melton said. “Here we have to convince them that sixth grade is not it; that you are not going to survive in the United States with a sixth-grade education.”
The push to graduate students from high school and college has been made easier in communities like Guymon with programs like the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which gives undocumented students a path toward higher education. That program's fate is now uncertain.
Trump's position has ranged from saying he would scrap it to taking a more measured stance since his election.
For Mora, the relative peaceful coexistence between Guymon’s white and nonwhite residents took a turn for the worse during the presidential election. She recalled a trip to the bank when a man told her “to go home.”
“We found out there is a lot of racist people here,” Mora said.
There doesn’t seem to be much disagreement between Trump supporters and opponents that the president-elect took a hostile tone toward immigrants, both undocumented and otherwise.
But the difference was found in how serious each side thought Trump was, or at least how likely they thought it was he would deliver on those promises.
“We’ve got bigger issues in this country and I don’t think he will do that stuff,” Peterson said about Trump’s tough talk on immigration.
Mora wasn’t as optimistic.
“I hope he doesn’t do what he said he would do,” Mora said. “A lot of people are scared about what is going to come.”