Five days a week, after his last batch of untrimmed hams has been deboned, injected with a sodium solution, and sent down the line to be cooked, Raul Vazquez walks out of the Hormel plant on the outskirts of Fremont, Nebraska, and crosses the street to the employee parking lot. He drives west along U.S. Route 30 for the better part of an hour, paralleling the Union Pacific’s tracks and the Platte River. Finally, he arrives at the town of Schuyler, where he and his wife, Miguela, run a small liquor store. Until a few years ago, Vazquez and his family lived close to the plant in Fremont, but then the town changed in ways that made it impossible for them to stay.

In the past twenty years, roughly 3,000 Hispanics have arrived in Fremont — an increase from 0.7 percent to nearly 12 percent of the total population. Latino immigrants have saved the economies of the towns of northeast Nebraska from ruin, but many older residents feel threatened by these new arrivals. Spots on the line at Hormel were once the most coveted jobs in the area, but now they are occupied largely by undocumented immigrants willing to work twice as fast for lower pay. The workers who got pushed aside, many of them second- or third-generation Hormel employees, are angry.