The new face...  

Of the Plains. Hint: it doesn't look like me.

For generations, the story of the small rural town of the Great Plains, including the dusty tabletop landscape of western Kansas, has been one of exodus — of businesses closing, classrooms shrinking and, year after year, communities withering as fewer people arrive than leave and as fewer are born than are buried. That flight continues, but another demographic trend has breathed new life into the region.

Hispanics are arriving in numbers large enough to offset or even exceed the decline in the white population in many places. In the process, these new residents are reopening shuttered storefronts with Mexican groceries, filling the schools with children whose first language is Spanish and, for now at least, extending the lives of communities that seemed to be staggering toward the grave.

That demographic shift, seen in the findings of the 2010 census, has not been uniformly welcomed in places where steadiness and tradition are seen as central charms of rural life. Some longtime residents of Ulysses, where the population of 6,161 is now about half Hispanic, grumble over the cultural differences and say they feel like strangers in their hometown. But the alternative, community leaders warn, is unacceptable. [More]

As we have become expectant of instantaneous, radical changes in our world, we often miss the merely rapid social changes happening around us. My grandchildren will live in a different rural America, it seems. Nor do I think this demographic trend will stop at the Mississippi, although the economic structure variations will certainly revise its pattern. But it is hard to ignore the consequences of a shift like this:

[Click to enlarge][Same source]