By JON TEVLIN
Star Tribune
August 8, 2009
It was one of the more surreal moments in my reporting career. I had been in town for only a couple of hours, but I had already been warned not to go into a bar on Main Street because I might be stabbed.
A distraught woman, standing in a long food-shelf line, told me she'd been fired from her job after asking for medications to help with her mental illness. Across the street, women in colorful Guatemalan dresses walked around with court-ordered ankle bracelets.
Then a woman named Josephina Ortiz, a native of California, approached me. "Please God, somebody help us," she said. "There's something bad in this town. I don't know how this can happen in the United States of America."
Ortiz, who had come to Postville, Iowa, for a job in the wake of the massive immigration raid in May 2008, was living out of her car. She said she'd been lied to about the pay at the Agriprocessors meat plant by recruiters and, after paying rent to an unscrupulous landlord, found the apartment unlivable.
The police and city services were overburdened. There was no homeless shelter. With every Greyhound bus came more workers to replace the 300 immigrants who had been arrested. Some new workers were criminals, some were just desperate people looking for a better-paying job.
It has been 15 months since that raid, and Postville continues to evolve. The owners of the kosher plant now face hundreds of criminal charges. The plant has new owners, and is trying to recover. Several groups of workers have come and gone, unable to tolerate the difficult work.
In a couple of weeks, three people who have been close to the scene will publish a book, "Postville, U.S.A.," which takes a nuanced, sobering look at the town that became a national petri dish for issues that make people's neck veins bulge: immigration, workers' rights, animal rights and diversity.
