Marc Becker

Milan is a small rural community in northeastern Missouri. About a decade ago, Premium Standard Farms (now Farmland) set up a meat packing plant in this community, and began to bring in Hispanic migrants to work in the plant. This changing economy has dramatically altered the face of the community.

As part of a service learning project in a Junior Interdisciplinary Seminar (JINS) on race, class, and gender in Latin America, students from Truman State University conducted a oral history project in Milan. Students interviewed community members from varying socioeconomic, racial, and gendered backgrounds. The class compiled these interviews, together with reflections from members of the class, into a small print-on-demand book Voices of Milan

 (http://www.lulu.com/content/1900420).

On January 31, the class presented the results of the study and the book at a Global Issues Colloquium on the Truman State University campus. Students discussed a range of themes that they touched on in the study,and various issues that immigration has brought to the forefront in Milan. Milan had been a conservative, primarily white, community, and immigration has introduced dramatic cultural shifts.  There is little mixing between the older white population, and the new immigrant workers.  Church services, for example, are now offered in both Spanish and English.  The older population, however, sometimes resents encroachment on their spaces, and they make little effort to learn Spanish in order to facilitate interactions with the immigrant population.

Milan is increasingly gaining a third-world face, with dramatic and growing class divides between the rich and the poor.  Some older residents complain about the pressure that new immigrants place on the housing, even as they benefit from the income from slum-lord type conditions that pack many workers into small spaces for significant rents.  Property taxes go up, as do utilities.  The result is Milan is now a more expensive place to live, both for long-term residents as well as for recent immigrants.

What responsibility does the meat packing plant have to the community? Typical of corporate actions, they bring in workers without consideration for the pressure that it places on local services.  Class sizes in the elementary school have doubled, but there are no more resources for the school.  Furthermore, about half the students are now native Spanish speakers, but there is a lack of bilingual educational experts.  Should the plant be expected or required to assist with the educational and health problems that it creates?

Economic and social changes brought on by a globalized economy introduce a range of complicated issues that are not always easy to solve.  The community of Milan is just one small microcosm of a much broader phenomenon.  It is important, however, to start searching for solutions to these issues close to home.