Montana

Montana is the fourth largest state by geographical size in the United States. It straddles two geographical regions, the Northern Rockies and the Great Plains, and borders Canada. Despite its size, Montana has a little over one million inhabitants. It is home to seven Native American reservations and twelve tribes. It also has a more than two-hundred-year history of Latino presence, with the first recorded Latino having arrived in 1807. Fur trading and trapping brought the first white explorers to Montana during the early 1800s. By the late 1840s, when fur trading waned, cattle driving, especially from Texas, became a major enterprise all over the south and northwest. Cattle drives brought the first vaqueros to Montana from Texas. One in three cowboys was Mexican and Anglo cattle herders learned techniques from the Mexican vaquero, from roping, to herding, to taming horses. Cattle were brought not only for ranching but also to feed the influx of miners to the territory during the 1860s. The placer mining boom in Virginia City in 1863 brought individuals from all over the world including Mexicans. The great majority of Latinos, however, arrived in the state throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as heavily recruited Mexican labor. Railroad giants, like Great Northern Railway, hired experienced Mexican traqueros, railroad track workers, from Mexico and the Southwest. By the turn of the twentieth century, Mexicans had lain at least 50 percent of the railroad tracks for Great Northern. After agriculture, the railroad industry was the major employer of Mexican labor until conglomerates like Anaconda Copper Mining and sugar companies, like Great Western Sugar, contracted Mexican labor to harvest sugar beets. Until recently, agriculture and agribusiness had been one of Montana’s largest industries and the base of the longest running Latino migration stream to the state. But the first two decades of the twenty-first century witnessed a newer influx of Latinos into Montana due to residential and tourism-based construction and rural gentrification. More recent Latino labor arrivals are connected to the influx of lifestyle migrants drawn to Montana’s blend of natural beauty and urban amenities, including proximity to Yellowstone National Park; hunting, fly fishing, and skiing; and cafes, wine bars, and quaint small-town life. Montana, like most states in the American Northwest and Plains region, has seen an increase and diversification of its Latino population. Census numbers show that the Latino population has grown from 18,081 in 2000, to 28,565 in 2010, to close to 46,000 in 2020, becoming the largest ethnic group in the state after Native Americans (67,612). According to July 2024 census data, Latinos make up 4.7 percent of the state population. To date, and despite the long history of Latinos in Montana, there is no comprehensive history of the community’s presence in the state.

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