Mexican immigrants make up more than half of workers on the dairy farms of western Wisconsin, where the Latino population has exploded over the last two decades. In Trempealeau County, near the Minnesota border, the number of Latino residents surged from 240 to 1,667 between the years 2000 and 2010—a 595 percent increase.
In this heavily Republican area many of the same white, rural voters who helped elect Donald Trump are passionately devoted to their Mexican employees.
Lately, especially since Donald Trump became President, farmers and workers say local cops have been pulling over Latino drivers. (In 2007, a state law requiring driver’s license applicants to provide Social Security numbers and proof of identity effectively made it illegal for undocumented immigrants to drive.) They report incidents of racial harassment at local stores and gas stations. The workers don’t go out as much.
“You go to Walmart and there used to be Hispanics walking up and down the aisle. You go now and they’re just not there,” says Bill Traun, a dairy farmer who employs two Mexican workers to help feed and milk his cows.
Traun, a shy, older man with glasses, speaks lovingly about his first Mexican employee, Blanca Hernández. “She was just a great person. Always done an excellent job, and always trying to learn me Spanish—but it would just go in one ear and out the other,” he recalls.
Like a lot of his neighbors, Traun made the transition from an operation staffed entirely by family members to employing Mexican workers about twelve years ago, when he was expanding to try to keep up with the pressure to produce more milk.
Hernández and her partner kept the place clean, named the cows they cared for, and took a lot of work off Traun, who still gets up at 3 a.m. for the first milking. “It was just a huge relief,” he says.
Hernández went back to Mexico, but her nephew now works for Traun. He lives on the Traun property with his wife and their one-year-old son.
“They kind of become part of your family. They’re not just an employee,” says Traun. “Farm work ain’t an easy life . . . . They get up with me every morning, and we work side-by-side.”
One strange fact of life in this heavily Republican area is that many of the same white, rural voters who helped elect Donald Trump are passionately devoted to their Mexican employees. Dairy farmers are worried about the threat of mass deportations, which would cripple their industry. And many get worked up defending their workers against the kind of smears that President Trump has launched at Mexicans.
Shaun Duvall, a Spanish teacher in Alma, Wisconsin, who counts both dairy farmers and Mexican workers among her closest friends, has a theory about that.
“People around here are kind of like hobbits,” Duvall tells me as we drive through Alma, a picturesque town, population 781, perched on rocky bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River. For generations, people in this area have lived on the same land, and their lives have revolved around their farms. The rest of the world seems far away. “It’s like the Shire,” she says.
Duvall is taking me on a tour of the dairy farms where she has served as an ambassador of cultural understanding for the last two decades. As we head into the rolling green countryside, a bald eagle soars overhead.
In the late 1990s, when the first Mexican dairy workers began to arrive, the University of Wisconsin-Extension contacted Duvall to ask if she would teach a Spanish class to farmers. Soon after, a handful of old dairy hands began meeting once a week in her classroom at Alma’s K-12 school.
It quickly became clear that the farmers, and their workers, needed more than a little remedial Spanish to help them manage the massive transformation taking place throughout the Upper Midwest.
Duvall began traveling among thirty farms in the area to offer her services as an interpreter. Then she came up with the idea of taking the farmers to Mexico.
Through a nonprofit Duvall founded, Puentes/Bridges, fifteen delegations of farmers have gone to visit their workers’ families in Mexico since 2001.
Dairy farmer Chris Weisenbeck went on the first trip. After a frustrating experience relying on high school students for help, he hired two workers from Mexico, Lamberto and Romiro, in 1998. They were a godsend, he says.
“These guys who travel halfway across the world to work—I have so much respect for them,” Weisenbeck says. “I don’t know that I could do that.”
Traveling to Mexico helped cement the relationship.
“They have the same family structure I have,” Weisenbeck says. “You go there and meet their grandpa, grandma, aunts. That’s what really struck me when we went. It’s small-town USA, small-town Mexico—same thing.”
Weisenbeck takes exception to the insults Donald Trump has heaped on Mexicans: “How can he say these people are terrible people? They are the salt of the Earth! They’re like you and me!”
So, I have to ask him, did he vote for Trump?
“Yes, I did,” he says. “I more voted against Hillary than I did for Trump,” he says, adding that he also voted for President Barack Obama. For all Trump’s embarrassing behavior, Weisenbeck says, there is more to the presidency. NAFTA, in particular, was a big issue for Weisenbeck.
He liked the idea of getting a better deal for U.S. farmers. And he is hopeful that the new trade agreement Trump has reached with Mexico will make things better.
So far, though, 2018 has been a terrible year for dairy farmers. Wisconsin was just beginning to rebound from three years of depressed milk prices when Trump’s tariffs triggered retaliatory moves from Europe and Mexico. Cheese and butter prices slumped, and Mexico, one of Wisconsin’s biggest cheese export markets, slapped tariffs of between 15 and 25 percent on cheese. That meant a loss this summer of 20 percent of milk income on Wisconsin farms.
Nora Lindstrom, one of Weisenbeck’s neighbors, starts to cry when she talks about it.
The Lindstroms, who rely on four Mexican workers to keep their operation going, have been losing about $180,000 a month lately, Lindstrom says.
She loves working on the farm that has been in her family for five generations. “I get choked up thinking about, ‘God, what am I going to do if this doesn’t work?’ ” she says, as her three-year-old son, Jack, squirms on her lap.
“But it’s a cycle,” she says, wiping her eyes. “We’re due for a turnaround.”
Wisconsin lost more than 500 dairy farms in 2017. In 2018, as of August, another 429 farms had quit milking cows.
Lindstrom confers with Duvall on some problems her workers are having. One of them was pulled over recently for driving without a license, and she wants advice about going to court.
“The work Shaun did, I don’t know if they would have survived without it,” she says of her workers. “Just creating cultural understanding—we never had diversity here before.” Her own kids have developed a deep attachment to the Mexican children they call their “farm friends.”
Lindstrom went on a Bridges trip ten years ago and calls it a “life-changing experience.”
“There’s a whole other world they leave when they come here,” she marvels, “though they never seem to lose their closeness with their family there.”
Wisconsin lost more than 500 dairy farms in 2017. In 2018, as of August, another 429 farms had quit milking cows.
“It’s an agrarian society,” says dairy farmer John Rosenow, speaking about his Bridges trips to Mexico. “They find working on a farm honorable, where most Americans don’t consider working on a farm honorable. It’s like it was here 100 years ago.”
Rosenow’s employee, Roberto, comes in from the milking parlor to chat.
He’s thirty-nine years old, he says in Spanish, and has been working on and off in the United States for twenty years—including picking fruit, harvesting tobacco, and a pleasant stint grooming a golf course in South Carolina. When he heard about regular, year-round work on the dairy farms in Wisconsin, he took the bus up north.
All in all, “I’ve worked half my life here,” he says, sounding sad.
“I like it, because it pays better,” he adds. “But there’s not much celebration here, like in Mexico—not as much life.”
Like most workers, he plans to go back. It’s almost festival time in his hometown, he tells me, and people will be partying for two weeks with fireworks and food and dancing. “Here, only young people go to dances,” he says. “Everyone else is just dedicated to work.”
Roberto’s wife and three children are back in Mexico, and he has no plans to bring them up—at least not now, with family separation in the news, and the cost of crossing the border ballooning to $10,000.
“Those who have families here, they suffer a lot more,” he says, “They are afraid that they will be grabbed and the children will stay here.”
He hopes our country will recognize how much it relies on Mexicans, he says, and create a visa so year-round workers can come and go. He’d like his children to visit and get to know the cows.
The farmers agree. “We need these workers,” says Traun.
“It’s not rocket science,” says Weisenbeck. “We ought to be able to solve it.”