Crete residents work to recognize their similarities

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By CARA PESEK/Lincoln Journal Star

CRETE — Jorge Paredes didn’t move to Crete until his junior year of high school, but the community quickly became home.

Paredes was born in Mexico, and immigrated to the United States with his family when he was a boy. He lived in Madison before he moved to Crete, where he graduated from the high school and took a job with Sack Lumber.

Now 25, Paredes owns a home in this Saline County community of about 6,300, where he’s also a soccer coach, volunteer translator and Lions Club member.

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Doane College Spanish Instructor Christy Hargesheimer, left, talks with Rebecca Gonzales of Nebraska Appleseed Monday morning at KH's Sports Shop in Crete. Nebraska Appleseed is sponsoring a campaign in the community to raise awareness and acceptance of the large Hispanic Immigrant population in Saline County. (JOSH WOLFE/Lincoln Journal Star)

Doane College Spanish Instructor Christy Hargesheimer, left, talks with Rebecca Gonzales of Nebraska Appleseed Monday morning at KH's Sports Shop in Crete. Nebraska Appleseed is sponsoring a campaign in the community to raise awareness and acceptance of the large Hispanic Immigrant population in Saline County. (JOSH WOLFE/Lincoln Journal Star)

And in the decade he’s lived here, Paredes said he has noticed a change.

There’s less tension between whites and Latinos, he said. There’s less separation.

Even three years ago, he said, the white kids and Latino kids on the school soccer team he coaches didn’t mix much. They warmed up separately. The Latino kids spoke Spanish. The white kids spoke English. A few Bosnian kids kept to themselves, too.

Now, he said, everyone warms up together, and everyone speaks the same language.

Monday, Paredes sat at wooden table at a coffee shop downtown with a guidance counselor from Crete High School, a retired couple from his church, a Spanish professor from Doane College and other community members.

They gathered to talk about what longtime Crete residents and newcomers have in common.

And they talked about things they could do to make sure more people — inside and outside of Crete — recognize those similarities.

Monday, the group began to raise awareness of the similarities through a poster campaign funded by Nebraska Appleseed, a non-profit group that seeks to provide equal opportunity for all Nebraskans.

The posters show photos of a Latino father and son donning Huskers jerseys, of a multi-racial family picnicking in a park, as well as other positive images of diversity.

It’s been well over a decade since the first wave of Hispanic immigrants arrived in Crete, drawn by work at the Farmland Foods and Nestle Purina plants.

Jim Crouse, a retired Crete resident, said he wasn’t sure how to treat the new immigrants at first.

There were growing pains, he said. There was a resistance to the way the community was changing.

That’s changed.

He said he has realized that Latino, Chinese and other recent immigrants who have settled in Crete want the same things as the European immigrants who settled there years before: a chance to work, education for their children.

“My grandparents probably faced a lot of the same issues,” said Crouse’s wife, Sharon Crouse, who teaches an adult ESL class.

She gestured outside to Crete’s Main Street, where nearly every storefront is occupied and perhaps half of the signs are in Spanish.

It’s because of those business owners, she said, that Crete has been able to avoid the economic problems that have affected some small communities.

This year, Jim Crouse said, Crete High School students elected a black homecoming king and a Latina homecoming queen.

“Race doesn’t mean anything to them,” he said.

But there’s always room for improvement.

So the Crouses and Paredes and others who attended Monday’s gathering divided up the stacks of posters and set to hanging them around town. The group, which has no name, would like to eventually raise enough money for a billboard.

Things are better than they used to be, Jim Crouse said.

“But you have to work at it.”

Reach Cara Pesek at (402) 473-7361 or cpesek@journalstar.com.