There’s not a lot to say about today’s walk! After the American Discovery Trail’s northward march from the border to Cedar Falls, this stage set about a course correction with a vengeance, leading me 26 miles south, with only a handful of miles’ worth of westward progress. This walking was entirely spent on roads, though they were often unpaved and with minimal traffic. That said, as my shoes near the end of their 500-mile lifespan, asphalt may be more favorable than gravel, as any pointy stone that lands just so under my shoe is a tiny agony.
The biggest surprise, ultimately, was the size of my destination, Marshalltown. I entered from the north (of course) and just kept going and going, through a lengthy stretch of worn down houses and Spanish-language marketing, a large cemetery, and an aged Dairy Queen. Main Street offered a welcome distraction, as it’s quite sizable and well tended, organized around the regal county courthouse. Already there were signs of some urban pride, even with some rougher real estate, as large Ms were positioned around town, a unifying symbol of the city.
After Main Street, a large overpass led me above the cluster of train tracks passing through the city center, as well as the industrial core. Marshalltown’s Hy-Vee followed–a required element of any self-respecting Iowan city. I thought this meant I was close, but my hopes were thwarted by a lengthy residential neighborhood, before I finally crossed into the commercial zone. As it happened, my hotel was the first of many, many hotels that followed, so I patted my back for the selection–a blessing today, a curse tomorrow–as I checked in to what might be the cheapest hotel of the whole trip, just $49 total. The woman in charge even gave me a goodie bag, with a cold bottle of water, a juice box, and two granola bars!
The prevalence of Spanish-language marketing earlier in town had piqued my curiosity. Like most outsiders, my impression of Iowa had been that the state demographics were overwhelmingly white. And yeah, that’s true–the 2020 census has the white population at 84.5%, though that’s down 3% from 2010. In Marshalltown, though, the major story centers on the Hispanic/Latino population, and it’s a story that begins even earlier. After the farm crisis of the 1980s, rural Iowa was in an immensely vulnerable position, with a shaky economy, recent grads moving away to cities, an older population, and a declining birth rate. There just weren’t enough people to fill the jobs.
Luis Lua at Grinnell tells the story of how this played out in Marshalltown specifically, noting that the city’s Hispanic population jumped from 0.9% in the 1990s to 12.6% in 2000. Today, it’s 33.6%. And that’s just the beginning–an ABC article from 2019 notes that “the Marshalltown Community School District estimates that 70% of the town’s kindergarten students would be counted as an ethnic minority.” The meatpacking industry proved to be a major draw, with the Swift Company–the third biggest pork processing plant in the world–already having a majority Hispanic workforce in 1998.
Despite the demonization of immigrants in recent years, Marshalltown has recognized how indispensable Hispanic immigration to the city has been for its preservation–and now–its humble resurgence. I was struck by this quote from the Chief of Police, Michael Tupper: “The rhetoric at the national level has definitely made our job harder. People are afraid to call the police, people are afraid to interact with the police, and that makes it more difficult for us to keep the community safe.” Nowhere does that tension between local and federal interests play out more prominently than in the discourse surrounding the ICE raid on Swift Company plants in 2006, the largest ever conducted at that point. Mayor Beach, pushing back on the action, explained how immigration has effectively saved the city: “Had the Hispanics not come in and set up businesses – for instance, we have 44 businesses owned by Hispanics in our community today that had they not come in and brought their culture and basically revitalized our school system as well, even though there are pressures there, we would be a different community.”
