On a June evening in Jackson, 30 people attended a gathering sponsored by the Center for the Arts — a community conversation titled “Who is your neighbor?” The event drew from the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan — a story about a cultural outsider who helps someone in need while religious leaders “pass by on the other side.”
A dozen Hispanic participants, students in the center’s English language classes, sat together at one table. Not one white attendee joined them for pizza from Pizza Ranch, a rural Minnesota institution. The facilitator lectured from prepared notes in a binder, projecting slides in English only about the parable’s characters. She never checked whether Spanish speakers understood. Table discussions seemed engaged and animated, but no one shared insights with the full group.
Even an event designed to overcome polarization reproduced the division it aimed to address.
“Little kids take passports to school, scared that they’re going to be taken away from their parents,” one attendee said. Another participant added: “In Worthington, there are people who don’t go to church because they’re afraid. This ICE enforcement thing bothers me; people are living in fear.”
Yet these same families gather at soccer fields where their children form the community bonds that federal enforcement seeks to fracture.
Avoidance vs. response
The Good Samaritan parable begins with religious leaders who see suffering and choose institutional protection over human response. Federal policies create this same choice for communities: legal compliance or neighborly cooperation. Immigration enforcement affects rural economic relationships while immigration control supporters cite community safety as justification.
“Our kids are integrated pretty much,” one conversation participant from Jackson noted, describing schools where students navigate multiple languages and cultures daily. Yet federal immigration enforcement creates fear that keeps families from fully participating, while state law guarantees universal education regardless of status. The contradiction puts educators in difficult positions — children arrive carrying passports in fear of family separation, while teachers cannot protect them from the enforcement climate.
Business owners face similar binds between economic survival and federal compliance. Schools balance universal education mandates with citizenship documentation requirements. Churches navigate religious sanctuary traditions against immigration enforcement cooperation demands.
Tools for navigating differences
Pastor Lucio Barumen and his wife Vaneta of Worthington teach practical strategies for cross-cultural relationship building in communities under federal pressure to abandon such efforts. Their Mexico-Minnesota communication workshops address what Jackson conversation participants identified as the need for “cross-cultural, intergenerational” safe spaces for difficult conversations.
“The 80/20 rule reminds people that cultures aren’t monolithic,” Vaneta explains. “You can’t assume someone’s behavior based on their background.”
The couple met while doing missions — Lucio from Mexico, Vaneta from Minnesota. Their workshops contrast relationship-centered “warm cultures” of Latin America with task-oriented, reserved “cold cultures” like Minnesota’s. While national politics exploits these cultural differences for polarization, rural communities develop sophisticated tools for navigating them constructively.
The Barumens’ work illustrates what becomes possible when communities choose engagement over avoidance. Translation services for city council meetings aren’t multicultural gestures — they’re civic infrastructure enabling democratic participation across language lines. Cross-cultural communication training isn’t diversity programming — it’s practical preparation for the daily navigation required when federal enforcement pressures meet economic interdependence.
Where integration actually works
Three months after the divided church basement conversation, the same Center for the Arts hosted its Heritage Fiesta. Eighteen food booths represented cultures from Norway to Mexico to Somalia. Some of the same people who didn’t dialogue over pizza in June confidently served their traditional foods to community members in September.
A woman in an embroidered white dress moved with practiced precision, serving golden chicharrones to children and adults. Behind her, men in traditional guayaberas chatted easily with neighbors in polo shirts, conversations weaving between Spanish and English as naturally as the colorful papel picado fluttering overhead.
An elderly woman in a purple shirt and baseball cap moved slowly through the crowd, sampling offerings from cultures that weren’t represented in Jackson when she was young. Her presence, alongside families speaking multiple languages, created integration that national political debates suggest shouldn’t happen.
Children learned hospitality lessons extending beyond recipe cards. Young soccer players who competed fiercely on Sunday afternoons served food together on a September evening, teaching younger siblings the same skills. The same families who sat separately in the church basement three months earlier now shared food, stories, and space.
What changed? Not the participants. Not their willingness to engage. The event structure itself — food as universal language, service creating purpose, celebration replacing lecture. Many of the food hosts were members of the ESL class held in the Jackson Center for the Arts.
Rural communities are increasingly navigating demographic change through shared meals and civic participation.
Economic reality versus enforcement architecture
The Jackson conversation illustrated what gets lost in national immigration debates: the economic interdependence rural communities depend on daily.
Worthington’s JBS plant employs over 2,200 workers whose children compete in state soccer championships and whose families shop at locally-owned businesses. Federal enforcement targeting these families threatens the entire community’s economic foundation.
Rural Minnesota communities function as laboratories for democracy under pressure precisely because they can’t afford ideological purity. Roads need plowing regardless of the plow driver’s documentation status. Schools need funding that higher enrollment brings. Fire departments need volunteers regardless of country of origin.
This practical governance reveals democracy’s essential truth: It works best when people focus on shared problems rather than manufactured divisions.
Sunday soccer games between Worthington and Estherville — competitions between adult Spanish-speaking or bilingual men that started as pickup games and became an interstate league — operate on this principle. The games are spirited. Spectators in bleachers and lawn chairs share banana, berry, or cucumber popsicles and walking nachos. But cultural lines persist. Players compete; families watch from separate sides.
The soccer leagues create what political scientists call “cross-cutting affiliations” — relationships preventing political differences from becoming total social divisions. Children who learn teamwork across cultural lines can become adults who practice civic engagement across political divides. But only if federal policy stops working against them.
Democracy’s fragile progress
Communities navigating demographic change reveal both democracy’s potential and its fragility. The Heritage Fiesta showed genuine cross-cultural celebration. The church basement conversation demonstrated a small element of persistent segregation. Both realities exist simultaneously in the same small town, organized by the same institution, drawing from overlapping communities.
Local residents say they don’t go out walking at night anymore. Talk radio commentary centers one culture over all others, discussing “taking back the community,” suspecting most newcomers are illegal, claiming they take more than they contribute. Integration successes coexist with persistent division.
Cay Gjertson, who teaches English language classes at Jackson Center for the Arts and serves on its board, navigates these tensions weekly. Her classroom becomes a space where practical language learning enables civic participation — teaching vocabulary for city council meetings, health care appointments, school conferences. The same students who sat isolated at the church basement table gain tools for democratic engagement through structured learning that the conversation event failed to provide.
“Cross-cultural intergenerational safe spaces” aren’t abstract concepts. They’re church basements with pizza, art centers with food booths, soccer fields on Sunday afternoons. Some work better than others. All require intentional effort against forces pushing toward division. Design matters as much as intention.
The choice communities face
The Good Samaritan parable asks not “Who deserves my help?” but “To whom am I willing to be a neighbor?” In rural Minnesota, the answer emerges through shared action: to anyone willing to participate in the difficult, daily work of democratic community.
Children carrying passports to school while playing soccer together on weekends embody this choice. They can grow up in communities teaching democratic participation across difference, or in communities fractured by fear of difference.
Federal enforcement creates pressures working against cooperation. Communities can navigate demographic change, economic transition, and cultural difference when institutions support relationship building rather than fracturing it. But this requires federal policy that strengthens rather than undermines local democratic capacity.
The church basement stayed divided. But that dynamic was not a binary; the ESL teacher’s later pronouncement that the class was a very cohesive group illustrates another side of the interaction. The Heritage Fiesta brought people from all backgrounds together. Understanding why some integration efforts succeed while others fail requires examining the mechanisms — federal policies, institutional practices, economic pressures, cultural habits, event design — that either enable or prevent rural communities from choosing to be neighbors.
Fields of Belonging is a three-part series written by Amy H. Peterson, a freelance journalist based in Estherville, Iowa, about rural communities building integration while navigating federal immigration policy. The project received financial support from the Joyce Foundation.
Next: How federal visa restrictions prevent qualified teachers from earning income while employers pay students to learn from them — and what communities do to navigate the contradiction.
The post Integration remains a work in progress in rural Minnesota appeared first on MinnPost.
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