Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Immigrants Discover the Ties That Bind
In the middle of the chaos and ugliness emanating from Washington, D.C., as the new Trump Administration issued its mass deportation threats and Elon Musk took a chainsaw to federal agencies, I traveled with a group of dairy farmers and their friends to rural Mexico to visit the families of some of the immigrant workers who do 70 percent of the labor on dairy farms in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
The trip was organized by the nonprofit Puentes/Bridges, founded by Shaun Duvall, a high school Spanish teacher from Alma, Wisconsin, who worked as a translator for Mexican workers and farmers on dairies in her area and decided that taking the farmers on an annual trip to Mexico would help build cultural understanding.
For the past twenty-four years, different groups of Midwestern farmers have gone with Puentes to visit the families of workers on their farms, and to see the homes and businesses people laboring in the United States have been able to build with the money they send home to Mexico.
In 2023, Mexico received $63.3 billion in remittances from its citizens who labor in the United States—about 4.5 percent of Mexico’s total gross domestic product—according to a recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The country ranks second only to India in the size of the contribution made by people working abroad to their home country’s economy.
The difference that money makes was visible to the farmers on the Puentes trip as they bounced over rutted roads among tiny villages in the mountains of rural Veracruz. Wooden shacks with tin roofs and dirt floors stood next to two-story brick-and-tile houses with indoor plumbing and attached garages, their owners still working in the United States and sending money home to pay for construction, as well as to send their kids to college, start businesses, and propel their families out of poverty and into the middle class.
On the U.S. side, undocumented workers—including almost all immigrant dairy workers, since there is no such thing as a U.S. visa for year-round, low-skilled work like milking cows—pay almost $97 billion a year in total taxes, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. About $26 billion of that goes to fund Social Security, and $6 billion to Medicare—programs from which those workers are excluded.
“We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking immigrants are taking money out of the pot,” says David Kallick, director of the Immigration Research Initiative in New York. His group has done a lot of research over the years “to show how immigration is a big contributor to the overall economic success of this country.”
But the most striking thing about the Puentes trip was not witnessing the incredible economic feat that immigrant workers perform in the United States, although the effects of that are profound, especially for industries like dairy, which are massively reliant on the undocumented workforce. The most striking thing about the trip was learning the personal stories of families in rural Mexico, and seeing how their lives and the lives of people in the rural United States are deeply intertwined.
Julio Hernández, a twenty-one-year-old construction worker, came along on the trip this year. It was the first time he could remember flying on an airplane and a rare foray outside the area around Menomonie, Wisconsin, where he lives in a mobile home with his mother.
Julio’s father, Federico, met and married his mother, Fawn, while working on a dairy farm in Pepin, Wisconsin. When Julio was just a baby, Federico drowned. Federico’s employer, Stan Linder, was the one who knocked on the door to tell Fawn that her husband was gone. Now, decades later, Linder took Julio to meet his father’s family in the tiny village of Tepanzacualco. Linder had visited many times over the years, and a procession of Hernández relatives have come north to work on Linder’s farm.
Julio was nervous to meet his family for the first time. After a long flight and a rugged overland journey by truck, he and Linder walked the last half-mile to the Hernández family home in the mountains.
Julio’s grandmother, Paula Montalvo Cervantes Hernández, came out to embrace her grandson. “Mi hijo, mi hijo,” (My son, my son) she said, taking Julio’s face in her hands to gaze at him and then hugging him over and over. One of his aunts said he looked just like his father.
Inside the house, a group of aunts and cousins were preparing a big meal, patting out handmade tortillas and cooking them on a wood-burning stove, alongside breaded fried chicken, green salsa, and Spanish rice. Julio sat at the table next to his grandmother and put his head on her shoulder. “My son, thank you for remembering us,” she said in Spanish.
One of Julio’s aunts, Aurelia, commented approvingly: “His hair is very black. He doesn’t look like a gringo.”
Julio began to cry. “Why is he sad?” his grandmother asked.
“I feel like I’m home. I’m with my family,” Julio said through tears.
Everyone listened to the translation, then responded in a chorus: “Awwww!”
When Julio asked if the family had anything of his father’s, one of the cousins went to another room and fetched an enormous suitcase Federico had used when he traveled to the United States. Julio and each of the family members took turns posing for pictures with the suitcase.
Arnulfo, Julio’s eighty-six-year-old grandfather, who, when Julio arrived, came up to the house after working in the fields, said, “Tell him I’ll give him some land to build his house, just choose where.”
“You can send money and they’ll build it for you,” Linder told Julio. That’s what many family members have done, saving up from their U.S. jobs and sending money home to build houses on the family property.
For Julio, who works during the summers in Wisconsin at his construction job, the idea of building a house to spend at least part of the year in the place where his father grew up, though surprising, didn’t sound that far-fetched. He turned it over in his head for the rest of the trip.
In Tlaquilpa, another mountain village in the clouds, the Puentes group stopped at a small restaurant. The owners, Maximino Sánchez and Gabina Cuaquehua, have two sons in Minnesota who’ve been away from home for more than twenty years. Duvall got to know their sons when she was working as a translator on dairy farms in western Wisconsin and Minnesota. Later, she and her husband, Jamie, a retired judge, became godparents to their U.S.-born children.
Sánchez and Cuaquehua greeted the Duvalls in their living area downstairs from the restaurant and performed a ceremony, lighting incense and hanging flower garland necklaces around their necks while reciting prayers.
“We thank you because you are like second parents for my grandchildren,” Cuaquehua said. “You help them and accompany them on the path of life.”
“I ask that over there you take care of our children as if you were their parents,” Sánchez added. “You’re there in person, not like a video call or a cellphone call, which isn’t the same.”
Duvall and her husband were surprised and moved, still wearing the flower garlands and wiping tears from their eyes when they met up with the rest of the group outside the restaurant.
Duvall described the experience as an honor. By becoming a godparent to the family’s children, she said, she hoped to honor them, too, for “all the things they go through, the struggles and sacrifices and also the joy, because there is real joy.”
That spirit of warmth on Duvall’s part, and on the part of Mexican families who’ve put their trust in her and in the Midwestern dairy farmers who employ their loved ones, shines like a beacon in our current political moment, when the ostentatious cruelty of the Trump Administration threatens to stomp out the quiet virtues of compassion and human connection.
As we struggle to find our way out of the darkness that has fallen over our country, these connections among people point the way to a better world.
This column is based on a four-part series, “Midwest-Mexico Connections,” that Conniff wrote for the Wisconsin Examiner, reporting on her trip to Mexico with the Puentes/Bridges group. Read the entire series for free online at the Wisconsin Examiner.