The Rich History of Mexicans in Omaha
A recent report from the University of Nebraska Omaha’s Office for Latino and Latin American Studies (OLLAS) examined the local history of Omaha’s fastest-growing demographic group. With a slowing growth rate of 49% since 2000, approximately 140,000 Mexican-origin consumers live in Nebraska — making up 80% of the total Latino population.
The report details the data and how this immigrant group survived early adversity, overcoming levels of discrimination rarely seen by other ethnicities. Today most Mexican origin immigrants aren’t coming from Mexico.
Like many immigrant groups, Mexicans first came to Omaha to work for the railroad and to Nebraska to work in agriculture, many fleeing the fighting in the Mexican Revolution. Formed as a parish in 1919 to serve Omaha’s growing Mexican immigrant population, much like the other parishes and churches serving newly arrived Eastern European immigrants around Omaha’s stockyards, unlike these churches building Our Lady of Guadalupe took 25 years.
“During the years of the Great Depression (1929-1939), the Mexican-origin population and particularly the number of Mexi- can immigrants shrank considerably in Nebraska,” the report states. “Removal from relief rolls, discrimination in hiring practices, and forced repatriations are the main factors that contributed to the sudden decline of the Mexican-origin and immigrant populations in the Midwest. Nationally, more than 400,000 persons in the United States were forcefully repatriated to Mexico from 1929 to 1937.”
Between 1940 and 1980, the Mexican population quadrupled, almost entirely from the generations born to those early immigrants, representing the 4th and 5th generation Mexican-Americans in Omaha. Starting in 1980, but hitting its peak in 1990 t0 2000, when the Mexican origin population almost doubled to from 29,665 to 70,525 — immigration was the main driver, representing 56% of that increase.
Immigration, however, is no longer the factor it once was. Since 2000, the net migration rate of Mexicans from Mexico has declined significantly, from “83 per 10,000 in 2000 to 4 per 10,000 for the period of 2008-2012.” Roughly 4 out of 5 Mexican-origin adults comes from other states in the U.S., particularly California, Iowa, Texan, Colorado and Arizona.
As of 2012, two-thirds of the Mexican-origin population in the state is U.S.-born. Of the one-third that is foreign-born, a little less than one-third are naturalized citizens, leaving a little over 1/4 of this community not U.S. citizens, but possibly eligible.
We’ll talk more in next week’s posts about the future for the group, now the largest ethnicity in Omaha Public Schools and how “an important share of the Mexican- origin population is composed of immigrant families raising children born in the United States.”
