Latinos Chasing American Dream Into the Midwest : Immigrants: They come to rural areas for steady work, decent pay and good schools. But the influx has also created hardships.

At midafternoon each day, a sore, sweaty Marco Vargas leaves his blood-and-guts job to face a pile of bills, four young mouths to feed and a world of never-ending struggle.

It’s pressure. But it’s progress, too.

Vargas’ $7-plus hourly meatpacking salary has pushed his family of six a notch up the economic ladder. The income helps put clothes on their backs, food in their bellies and a roof over their heads--even though for most of the year it was a cramped, bug-infested trailer shared with relatives.

Vargas, a Mexican immigrant who moved to Iowa last year from Southern California, is among a growing number of Latinos migrating to small towns in America’s heartland, lured by the promise of steady work, decent wages, good schools and safe surroundings.

“It’s the dream of ‘Up north is good,’ everything up north is beautiful and rich, there’s money up there,” said Father Stephen Ebel, formerly of St. Joseph’s Church. “Many people from the South come with that hope. But it doesn’t always pan out. It’s a very hard row to hoe.”

“The dream is bigger than the reality, but the reality is much better than they had,” said Sister Irma Ries, who helps Vargas and other Latinos settle in nearby Washington, Iowa.

“The work is hard, but it’s much better living here,” Vargas, a beefy former California construction worker, confirms through an interpreter. “I’m content, but I want more for my family.”

In the last seven months, Vargas, who works for IBP Inc., and his wife, Reyna, have contended with frozen pipes and roaches in a company-owned trailer they rented. The family and three other relatives recently moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Washington, where they hope to settle and learn English.

They are not alone. This patch of southwest Iowa and parts of Minnesota, Kansas, Ohio and Nebraska are turning into the promised land for thousands of Latinos finding work in factories, hospitals, food-processing companies and, very often, meatpacking plants.

Some towns already have established Latino populations; in others, these newcomers are pioneers. Though their numbers are small and most Midwest states remain overwhelmingly white, the percentage increases are dramatic.

In Minnesota, the Latino population jumped by nearly 68% in the 1980s; in Kansas, it grew by almost 48%.

In Iowa, where the farm crisis drained the state of 5.5% of its white residents in the ‘80s, the Latino population rose by 28%. Here in Louisa County, it nearly tripled, largely due to the 1986 opening of an IBP Inc. pork plant.

The newcomers include former big-city residents, migrants desperate to escape fickle, backbreaking lives, immigrants legalized in the 1986 amnesty program and the down-and-out from the border.

“It’s that overflowing bucket in the Southwest. The opportunities are not there,” said Jim Ramos, of Proteus Employment Opportunities, a job placement group for migrants. “The competition for any job opening in Texas, it’s almost dog-eat-dog. The wages are minimal.”

So when IBP has recruited along the border, many responded.

“It’s a carrot being dangled in front of people, ‘Come to Iowa, get a job that’ll pay $5 to $6 an hour, be in the mainstream,’ ” Ramos said. “They’re chasing the American dream.”

The Midwest is appealing, too, because of its progressive traditions and liberal social programs, said David Simcox, director of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies.

“It all adds up to a very inviting picture,” he said.

The influx already has created hardships. For towns, it means housing shortages and overloaded social services.

“These communities are having to pick up the costs for folks having been brought in and dumped on them,” said Dave Ostendorf of Prairiefire, a farm activist group. “They get fired, they quit. The communities have to respond with food banks, clothing, shelter.”

For newcomers, there are harsh winters and a world where police, doctors and shopkeepers don’t understand you.

“You walk into a town where nobody speaks Spanish and you don’t speak English--if that’s not shocking enough, then everything else is,” said Rose Rodriguez, an ex-migrant and Proteus worker in Muscatine, Iowa.

Last year, Iowa lawmakers passed a bill requiring companies employing 100 or more people to provide interpreters if more than 10% of their work force speaks the same foreign language. IBP already employs translators.

Meatpackers, many located in rural areas, are among the biggest employers of Latinos because they represent an untapped labor pool. Plant work forces are huge, turnover is high--one study estimates that it is 100% annually--and local residents, usually better educated, find other jobs in towns that already have low unemployment.

Prairiefire’s Ostendorf calls it an update of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” a graphic tale of immigrant exploitation in meatpacking in the early 1900s. “They had this system and they perfected it for over a century,” he said.

But for people who have lived in dirt-floor shacks without beds and struggled to feed their children, the prospects are enticing.

“The meatpacking industry is one of the last in the country where people with basically no marketable skills have a chance to make a decent income,” said Raoul Baxter, spokesman for John Morrell and Co., whose Sioux City, Iowa, plant is about 40% Latino. “If somebody is making $4.25 and can make $8 to $9 with benefits, that’s opportunity.”

That potential attracted many to Columbus Junction, a town of 1,616 with an IBP plant nearly as large--1,500 workers.

Though many workers live elsewhere, growing pains are evident.

Arrests have tripled since IBP’s arrival, and a study found that 45% of those apprehended from 1985-89 were current, former or future employees, Louisa County Sheriff Herb Eustler said.

“Once they get here for some reason or other, if they’re not hired, they just stick here,” he said. “They don’t have any money to go back where they came from. They’ve got to do something to get money, so they resort to crime.”

While Eustler emphasizes that crime isn’t limited to any race, he says the Latino population poses special problems because he has no Spanish-speaking officers.

The changing population also impacts schools, where the number of Latino students has quadrupled to 20% in the last three years, creating demands for bilingual programs.

And the housing shortage has sometimes left IBP applicants sleeping in cars or asking City Hall for a place to stay.

Others, though, are settling down.

Argentina Morato, a 40-year-old Mexican mother of four, followed her IBP-employed husband here two years ago.

“It’s hard for us. We had to start from scratch without knowing anyone,” she said through an interpreter. “In Mexico, if you don’t have anything to eat, you don’t eat that day. Here, you can count on somebody to help you out.”

Still, she added: “Some people, they look at you like they don’t trust you. I feel bad. People stare at you. What did I do wrong? Don’t they know I came here to work and make myself better?”

For IBP employees, the work itself is the problem--bloody, fast-paced assembly lines can be hard on the stomach, hands and arms.

“I expected to have a good job, something that doesn’t hurt me,” said Bonifacio Velasquez. “I have been working the fields forever and I never got hurt.”

IBP spokesman Gary Mickelson said workers are shown videos detailing the jobs, wages, even the weather. “It’s to our benefit for them to be fully informed,” he said.

But Vargas, who has sore shoulders and hands, said: “It’s all contrary to what they told us. Mentiras, “ he said, Spanish for lies.

Yet Reyna Vargas, who was so poor in Mexico that she lived in a dirt-floor room and temporarily placed two of her four children in an orphanage, is happier here. She recently got a job as a housekeeper and bought a used car.

“All the children can learn English, so when they’re older . . . they don’t have to work like I did,” she said, her young daughters translating for her. “I worked hard in order to try to get ahead.”

That’s what motivated Irene Leyva and her husband, Ledimo, who saved $8,000 from his IBP salary to buy a paint-chipped, dingy home in Muscatine.

“The house doesn’t mean that much, as long as I have what I have,” the mother of six said in Spanish. “Even though I worked from 3 in the morning to 8, 9, 10 at night (in Mexico), I still never had enough to feed them.”