Mexican migrant workers have picked the crops around this farming community in the southern tip of the state for decades, and Jerry Jimenez, true to his roots, was stooping over a long row of pepper plants last week.
But contrary to the stereotypes, Jimenez owns his tidy farm here and hasn’t picked vegetables for a living in decades. As he sipped coffee on the porch of his comfortable farmhouse, the 63-year-old entrepreneur outlined an ambitious plan for expanding his hot-pepper-jelly business over the Internet.
“We want to see how far we can take it,” he said.
Times have changed in Cobden. Its population of 1,102 includes dozens of former migrants who have settled here permanently, boosting an otherwise dwindling community and launching some of the few new businesses around.
Across the Corn Belt, as the children of longstanding residents have moved out of rural hamlets in search of better job opportunities, Mexican workers and their families have moved in.
The Hispanic population of Illinois shot up 19.4 percent between 2000 and 2005, according to U.S. Census data. Even as the overall population declined here in rural Union County, the number of Hispanic residents expanded.
“Hispanics have fueled all the growth,” said Kenneth Johnson, rural demographer at Loyola University Chicago. Still, no one’s marching down the streets of Cobden for immigration rights or holing up in its churches seeking asylum. In fact, the Mexican population blends in more seamlessly than its swelling numbers might suggest.
Unlike Downstate flashpoints such as Beardstown, where Mexican workers pouring in for factory jobs faced open hostility in the 1990s, the problems in Cobden tend to be as small as the town.
“The gradual growth may make it easier for the local community to accept the newcomers,” Johnson said.
That’s how it went for Jacob Clutts, a senior at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, 15 miles to the north, who recalled feeling uncomfortable around the Mexican kids at his Cobden schools years ago.
New arrivals scraping together a living through seasonal farm work were viewed harshly as “trying to milk off us,” he said, and their conversations in Spanish made him feel they were talking behind his back.
There was no hiding those differences at a school where the mascot remains a freckle-faced white guy in overalls known as an “Appleknocker,” and folks still speak reverently about the all-white basketball team that made it to the state championship in 1964.
Now a part-time youth minister at a Cobden church, the 21-year-old Clutts said his feelings changed as he visited Mexico, got to know his new neighbors and developed friendships. He learned enough Spanish to recognize no one was talking about him, either, he said.
Mike Basler also recalls feeling “nervous” when Spanish-speaking customers first started shopping at the feed store his family ran for generations along the town’s main drag, Appleknocker Drive. The tension faded as his wife picked up some phrases, and the customers started bringing along their children to translate, he said.
The 70-year-old Basler retired four years ago, but he still opens his empty feed store every morning to shoot the breeze with his buddies, reminiscing about the days when Cobden had a movie house, a couple of small hotels and as many as five grocery stores.
Today, Cobden has two groceries, both Mexican, and locals of all ethnic backgrounds line up for lunch at the downtown taqueria.
Basler says he always appreciated that by providing labor for the region’s apple and peach orchards, Mexican workers “saved” the town’s farm economy. Now, Hispanic businesses help keep the downtown alive, too, though the migrant population is coming under pressure.
The Bartolo family launched the town’s taqueria two years ago, after decades spent working seasonally in the orchards around Cobden. Business is slow during the week but busier on the weekends, said Fidel Bartolo, a 57-year-old former farm worker who also helps manage the migrant housing camp on the outskirts of town.
The Bartolos bought their home here in the early 1990s and plan to stay, he said. “It’s a good place. Quiet. There’s a lot more families settling down over here.”
At St. Joseph Catholic Church just a block from downtown, Rev. Federico Higuera recalls that when he arrived in Cobden 20 years ago, conducting masses in Spanish and English, Mexican workers were valued for cheap labor but isolated from the community.
As more migrants settled in the area permanently, “We’re in a very interesting transition,” he said. “Very much improved.”
Friction still arises over “silly” things, he said, such as different standards for front-lawn neatness or celebrations that attract attention. Higuera said drinking brings tensions to the surface, and scuffles erupted at a Mexican Independence Day bash a couple of years back.
Some Mexican parents have rebelled against the freedom accorded American teens, and Higuera said one of his parishioners stormed back to Mexico after concluding he could never raise children in such a permissive environment.
A centerpiece of downtown Cobden is a well-equipped technology center, operated by the Illinois Migrant Council. It’s open to all comers, and non-Hispanics routinely drop in to use the free computers alongside their Hispanic neighbors.
The town is “much more integrated than before,” noted Jeri Kinser, the center’s director. Asked if discrimination persists, Kinser and fellow council employee Brenda Pessin exchanged a nervous smile before agreeing that relations have improved, although slowly.
Jimenez wasn’t worried when he established his Rancho Bella Vista in May 2003 on a street just off Appleknocker Drive. He knew about Cobden from his career at the Illinois Division of Rehabilitation Services, where he oversaw the southern half of the state and pressed his government colleagues to serve migrants with disabilities in out-of-the-way places like this.
Jimenez knew firsthand that help was needed, having grown up with agricultural labor. Born in Taft, Texas, near Corpus Christi, Jimenez worked in the fields with his parents and the eight other children in his family picking cucumbers, carrots and cotton.
Even after he made it into college with the help of the Presbyterian Church, he found summer work driving trucks and shoveling peas for Green Giant. Once he graduated, he said goodbye to farm work, launching a career in Illinois state government after a U.S. Army stint.
When he and his wife, Carol, a foreign-language teacher, decided to retire, they returned to the countryside, choosing a 17-acre spread with a panoramic view that hadn’t been farmed in recent memory.
Bored after less than a year, Jimenez used his rototiller to turn over two acres of level ground, anxious to see if the land would support some of the chili peppers he remembered from his childhood in South Texas. After a few months, he had more chile de arbol, guajillo, habaneros, pequin and tepin than he could possibly sell.
The following year, he and his wife got serious, introducing processed pepper products such as jalapeno lemon jelly, chipotle salsa and dried peppers of all varieties, prepared in the commercial kitchen and retail store they built behind their house.
With profit margins far greater than fresh peppers, the processed products have real moneymaking potential. In their third year, the Jimenez family produced new labels, new marketing and an updated Web site, DarnHotPeppers.com.
With $50,000 invested out of pocket, “It’s not a hobby,” Carol Jimenez said, emphatically. “We talk peppers every day.”
This year, the company is part of an agri-tourism circuit sponsored by the University of Illinois, which is trying to build a joint marketing program for vegetable and fruit growers. A similar campaign has helped the area’s dozen or so wineries attract visitors to this sparsely populated part of the state.
“We’ve got a big dream,” Jimenez said. “I hope we can do something large that would help the southern Illinois community and help Cobden. This is our community and we want to see it grow.”
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gburns@tribune.com
