by Hunter Kolbus
Storm Lake, as we have come to know, is a town filled with hope, change, diversity, and tragedy. Our goal this week: to take a deeper look into the stories that make Storm Lake what it was, and what it is. To do so, we have begun collaborating with students at BVU.
Readers of this blog might wonder how we have been conducting collaborative research to date. We (students at Miami) are organizing and sharing historical research with each other via SourceNotes, an online program. It helps us summarize and organize our notes on old newspaper articles, accessed through the Storm Lake Public Library’s website. We tag keywords and people on each entry. Bit by bit, we are building a large database of entries for our final research papers and other projects. So far, we have more than 300 entries from newspaper archives dating back to 1979, from our previous academic readings, and from current Storm Lake Times issues.
So far, we have more than 300 entries from newspaper archives dating back to 1979, from our previous academic readings, and from current Storm Lake Times issues.
I recently found, for example, a couple of interesting articles from 1984 about a vote to re-unionize at IBP, and how some workers claimed that managers at the plant vandalized their cars because they were in support of the union. One portion of the article stated that “employees favoring unionization would have their cars damaged and were threatened with violence.” Fellow students Travis Shane and Adam Kimble both mentioned how they, too, had found more articles about failed unionizing efforts at IBP. Nathaniel Hieber also found something noteworthy: a story from 1979 about how the community of Lakeside took Storm Lake to court because the price of its water had been increased; Lakeside claimed that Storm Lake was giving a discount to Hygrade, while over-charging them to make up the difference. These stories helped to bring more to our discussions in class and lit the fire under a lot of students to dig out the hidden gems from these archives.
This week also marked the start of a large project called “Small Town, Big World.” This is a joint effort between our class and Dr. Andrea Frantz’s Digital Journalism class to create profile pieces on residents connected to Storm Lake High School. Each of us at Miami is paired with one or two BV students to produce a written and multimedia profile. Soon, we will schedule Zoom meetings to hear our interviewees’ stories. We want to understand how newcomers to Storm Lake are much more than immigrants; they all have their own personal stories of sacrifice and struggle.
Dr. Frantz, Professor of Digital Media at BVU (and also, apparently, a big-time Wonder Woman fan!), shared how excited she was to have historians and journalists working together for this project. This raised a potential challenge and opportunity for us: our disciplinary differences. We history students at Miami need to rely on BV students for their digital media and storytelling skills, and they must lean on us for our historical knowledge and training. To address this, in our first online meeting, Dr. Frantz spoke with us for a half hour on digital journalism and interviewing tactics. A group gathering of all students followed, where we introduced each other. Then, Dr. Offenburger spoke to BV students on the difference between journalism and oral history.
“Journalism is the first draft of history,” the cliché states, but Dr. Frantz spoke of how journalism’s purpose is to empower the informed, foster civic discussion, and be a watch dog of the government. (One interesting claim to fame for journalists: their profession is the only one named in the Constitution.) If we don’t have a free press, we can’t have a democracy. While, in history, we tend to interpret stories, in journalism, they tend to focus on getting information out quickly. This conversation seems very fitting for some of the world events this past year.
When the students were together, we learned some fascinating things about each other. Katie Johnston (Miami) speaks a little bit of Scottish Gaelic. Clayton Van Horn (BV) hosts his own radio show, “The Untitled Radio Show.” Talon Wolter (Miami) is a third-degree black belt in taekwondo. Colin Imhoff (BV) also brought up how he is a second-degree black belt with a national medal in taekwondo. (Looks like there will have to be a match in the octagon to settle this.) Michel Reising (Miami) always wears rock-band tee-shirts. (Apparently, if he is not, it is a cry for help.) When Max Olsan (BV) shared that he performed as Aladdin in his eighth-grade musical, his fellow classmate, Omar Alcorta, chimed in, “He can show you the world!”
Though it was a week of introductions for this group project, some Miami students have also begun conducting additional individual interviews. Student Anna Rottenborn interviewed Emilia Marroquín, who had previously spoken with other SALUD! organizers. This time, Rottenborn wanted to learn more about Marroquín’s personal experiences. She talked about her first move to Storm Lake, to work for IBP, and how difficult the first few weeks were.
When she first came to Storm Lake, IBP had offered her family lodging at a hotel, but because her husband had to take their car to work and they could not cook at the hotel, they had to resort to Burger King for the first three weeks. She said that since she still did not know English very well back then, she would just point to the numbers on the menu. “That was our life for about 4 weeks, eating Burger King,” she said, “so we cannot see Burger King anymore.”
Marroquín’s story of her migration to the United States was also filled with tragedy because of the life-changing choice she had to make. When she first moved from El Salvador to California, she had to leave her oldest daughter behind. Her daughter’s father had placed a restriction order that would not allow Marroquín to take her out of the country. Because of this, she was not able to see her for 10 years, when her daughter arrived in the United States. Marroquín shared how difficult this decision was for her, and how it has impacted her family, but she also shared how grateful she was, because this experience allowed her daughter to become who she is today. “I went through the same situation with my mom . . . It was so hard to call my mom “Mom” after 20 years. So I had the same feeling that what happened was the same with me and my daughter, because I didn’t know her.” Hearing this story was a reminder that, behind the town’s celebrated diversity, for many, life-changing decisions and painful sacrifices guided many to the United States and to the City Beautiful.
Marroquín also shared that when she first came to Storm Lake, she felt a lot of support from the people. In one anecdote, she recalled one day when her family got stuck in the snow, and locals came with shovels to help them move their car. When asked what she though the biggest shift was in town, she said, “The many different cultures that we created. Because yeah, in a way, we created them.” She also mentioned how the biggest challenges she sees within the community are getting various peoples to blend and learn from each other, along with the housing and affordable childcare shortages. In one of her closing thoughts, Marroquín remarked that, “Like anybody else, Iowa or Storm Lake gave me this opportunity to become myself. I discovered who I was in Storm Lake. I never imagined myself doing any of the things I’m doing right now.”
“Like anybody else, Iowa or Storm Lake gave me this opportunity to become myself. I discovered who I was in Storm Lake. I never imagined myself doing any of the things I’m doing right now.”
— Emilia Marroquín
Alongside of all the SourceNotes, meetings, and interviews, on Wednesday, we dedicated thirty minutes to talking about the ending chapters of Any Way You Cut It and how some of the problems from meatpacking plants in the 1990s are still here today.
Chapter 9 deals with the meatpacking industry itself, the immigrant workers, and healthcare for these workers. It opens by discussing how the emergence of Midwestern meatpacking has created a “disposable labor force,” and how the meatpacking industry sustains the highest rates of industrial injury recorded in the United States. This also causes a “strain on housing, schools, social services, and law enforcement wherever it [meatpacking] appears.” This raises a recurrent question: Are meatpacking plants beneficial to communities, like Storm Lake, or do their cause more harm than good? Our class, and some of the residents we have talked with, give mixed responses to this question. On one hand, meatpacking has helped Storm Lake grow into the community it is now, and the industry has helped bring diversity to this town. On the other hand, many workers are exploited and the companies themselves have not really offered any help to the communities or to many of their workers.
Anna Rottenborn mentioned a troubling statistic from this chapter. In 1990, researchers found that 42 percent of women giving birth in Finney County, Kansas, received inadequate prenatal care. One SourceNote by Rachel Rinehart brings this larger issue into context with Storm Lake. She found a piece from 1992 that looked at the societal changes during the IBP era, and it mentioned that, at the time, 62.6% of the poverty population of Buena Vista County were women. After this, Dr. Offenburger mentioned another study with similar results the University of Iowa. It looked at the changes in birth outcomes among infants born to Latina mothers after a major immigration raid had taken place. As we have come to know, Storm Lake women in particular face many issues relating to gender inequality.
To close out our discussion on Any Way You Cut It, Joseph Puckett offered a statement about how depressing it is that the writers of the book offered an optimistic closing chapter on how things can change and get better for the meatpacking industry. “Unfortunately, this text is still as relevant in 2021 as it was in the 90’s,” he said. The final pages of this book bring up how there has also been a rise in places in Brazil, like Rio de Janeiro, accepting this emergence of the “marginal class” of workers, but the study ends on the hope that we can still choose whether to accept it or not.
When we reconnected with our BV collaborators, Dr. Frantz shared some good news. Yesterday, BVU had received 150 COVID vaccines. She had received her shot and had been “feeling better than I felt in a year.” The reason they had received the vaccines, though, was potentially concerning; they had been originally reserved for Tyson and Rembrandt Foods workers, and only 40% of them wanted to receive the shot.
We Miami students then separated into discussion rooms with our partners from BV and spent the rest of the class learning more about each other, and discussing some of the details about our interviews for the “Small Town, Big World” project. My partner for the project is Charisma Mendez. She is from Des Moines, Iowa, and does most of the graphic design work for people or clubs at BV. Together, we will interview María Ramos, who is a city council member, a SALUD! member, and an office manager at United Community Health Center. Our class has already spoken with her before, during our SALUD! interview, but the goal of this interview is to hear more of her story and ultimately make a profile piece on her to highlight her experiences.
This week laid the foundation for what is to come for our “Small Town, Big World” project, and it has shown us just how important this project truly is. Diversity can come at a high cost—and great personal sacrifice—especially for immigrants. This can be lost in daily life, and often goes unnoticed, unless you take the time to simply ask a neighbor her or his story.
Hunter Kolbus is a junior Political Science major with minors in History and Finance. He enjoys learning about American history and watching most any movie. After graduation, Hunter intends to go to law school, possibly specializing in corporate law.
