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Hispanics Reviving Faded Towns on the Plains

November 14, 2011 (1 min read)

"In the sparsely populated western half of Kansas, every county but one experienced a decline in the non-Hispanic white population, two-thirds of them by more than 10 percent.  At the same time, a vast majority experienced double-digit growth in Hispanic population, more than offsetting the declines in seven counties and many smaller cities and towns. Those places with the highest percentage of Hispanic residents tend to have the lowest average ages, the highest birth rates and the most stable school populations.  'These towns, I don’t know what they would do without Mexicans,' said Oscar Rivera, a Honduran immigrant who lives in a community of a few hundred people and travels through rural parts of western Kansas selling prepaid phone cards used to call overseas. 'It would be like ghost towns.'" - New York Times, Nov. 14, 2011, front page.

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