Resettling the West

Segment: Cody rejects temporary workers

Narrator: Cody residents learned recently that a company was about to recruit large numbers of Mexicans to work in local motels and restaurants. Angry callers jammed a popular local radio talk show.

Speak Your Piece

"I have been listening to this and reading about it. We were in Jackson last summer and a lot of them were very nice. A lot couldn't speak one word of English and they are working in the stores. A lot of them were super clean and decent, a couple of them that I encountered in downtown boutiques, I wanted to wash my hands."

"Are these people when they come to town, are they paying taxes?"

"Supposedly, I guess they are going to have to pay taxes."

"Does that mean twenty years from now they're going to come back here and get my social security?"

"They need to pay them decent wages and they need to treat them decent and get all the help they want. There are a lot of women in this town that go to work for them and they just do that. Also in the motels, they had nobody that could speak English; any request that you said, 'Could I please have a towel' was 'Por Favor? No speak English.' I was asked a couple of times, 'Do you speak espanol?'"

"I'd like to paint this perceived problem of the foreign workers coming to Cody this summer in a little bit different color. I would wonder if some of these people would see a problem if the workers coming in were fair-skinned, blue-eyed and came up here from Utah or were inner-city youth, from Illinois or even came from Canada or Britain or Australia. I'm wondering if this really would be a problem if they weren't brown-hair, brown-eyed and brown-skinned."

"I doubt if it would be as big a problem, let's put it that way."

Narrator: Letters flooded the local newspaper predicting dire consequences for the community, should Mexican workers come to town.

Arnoldo Flores: The information given to us was that, this year, there were 20 original workers from Mexico. There are two different employers that these workers are working for currently, one is the Super 8 Motel and the second one is Granny's Restaurant.

Narrator: As a result of the backlash, only a small number of Mexicans workers actually came to Cody.