Census data shows Hispanic population changes

Puerto Rican and former New Yorker Jose Roman doesn’t claim to know much about cows and corn, but he does know that agriculturally oriented York County holds potential as a place for Hispanics to call home.

“I guess it’s because York has been known, in my experience, as a very peaceful city, very tranquil,” Roman said Tuesday. “How would we say it in New York terms? Very homey.”

The growing Hispanic congregation that has answered Roman’s call to Sunday worship this year is one of several signs of growing diversity in rural Nebraska counties.

And York County’s top ranking in percentage gain in Hispanic population since 2000 is one of several noteworthy developments in new county-by-county census results released Friday.

Here’s a summary of some of the Hispanic high points:

* York County gained about 310 Hispanic residents between 2000 and July 2007. That works out to about 150 percent. Saunders and Butler counties are among other Southeast Nebraska counties that finished high on that list even though there are no major meatpacking plants within their boundaries to contribute to ethnic surges.

* Some counties with close ties to meatpacking, including Colfax with its county seat Schuyler, are increasing in Hispanic concentration. The population percentage reached 36.7, up from 26.2 percent in 2000 in Colfax, in the most recent update.

* In Dodge County, the number of Hispanics increased 66.3 percent since 2000, from 1,421 to 2,363. The population percentage increased to 6.6 percent. Overall, the county’s population declined .04 percent over the past seven years.

* The closing of a Tyson meatpacking plant in Norfolk in 2006 may have been a big contributor to a 9 percent decline in Hispanic population in Madison County in a single year.

But a strong community push to retain Hispanic residents in West Point after another Tyson plant closed there the same week appears to have paid off.

David Drozd of the Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Nebraska at Omaha doesn’t see a trend yet in population developments in York County and others of similar profile. Six counties where meatpackers are major employers accounted for more than 50 percent of all of Nebraska’s Hispanic population in 2000 and they still do in the most recent numbers.

But that doesn’t cancel out the significance of what’s happening in York County. “It’s doubling. It’s the fastest in the state,” Drozd said. “And if it continues, they will be up over 1,000 Hispanics, and they’ll be up in the top 10 counties in the state as far as Hispanic population.”

Terry Kenealy, superintendent of the York Public Schools, said English language classes for both students and adults are among the changes made in the educational sector to adjust to changing times.

“I think people looking for work is the major force behind them moving into the area,” Kenealy said.

York also recently lost its Tyson plant, but it was much smaller than those in Norfolk and West Point and many of the workers commuted from outside the county.

That leaves Kenealy thinking that the state’s Hispanic population may be dispersing, to some extent, from the meatpacking-related concentrations that developed in the 1980s and 1990s into non-meatpacking settings.

“I think you’re on the right track, because we don’t have that type of industry, to large extent, in York County.”

Ed Rastovski, Kenealy’s administrative counterpart in Wahoo, cited similar employment underpinnings for a 79.5 percent gain in Hispanic residents in Saunders County in this decade.

“I would say there is a noticeable change,” Rastovski said of the ethnic mix there. “But it’s only from the fact that the numbers were so low, talking 10 years ago.”

The new county-by-county numbers are an opportunity to track the impact of the closing of meatpacking plants in Norfolk, in Madison County, and West Point in Cuming County in 2006.

The numbers show that the Hispanic population declined by 382, or about 9 percent, in Madison County from 2006 to 2007. In the more lightly populated Cuming County, it rose 2 percent, from 794 to 806.

Tom Black, retired school teacher and chair of the West Point Multi-Cultural Action Committee, said one factor there may be that former Tyson workers continued to live there and commuted to meatpacking jobs in Madison and Dakota City.

Black also credits local employers for stepping up and absorbing some of the displaced workforce. And he believes the committee has had an impact as well in convincing workers and their families to stay in a town that only has about 3,500 residents altogether.

“We feel we’re pretty closely knit,” he said, “and non-Hispanic people respect our new residents. And as a result, our multicultural committee doesn’t meet as often as we used to.”