Middle of Everywhere - Mary Bray Pipher [6]
Our obituary column shows who came here early in the 1900s. It is filled with Hrdvys, Andersens, Walenshenksys, and Muellers. But the births column, which reflects recent immigration patterns, has many Ali, Nguyen, and Martinez babies. By midcentury, less than half our population will be non-Latino white. We are becoming a brown state in a brown nation.
Lincoln has often been described by disgruntled locals and insensitive outsiders as the middle of nowhere, but now it can truthfully be called the middle of everywhere. We are a city of juxtapositions. Next to the old man in overalls selling sweet corn at the farmers' market, a Vietnamese couple sells long beans, bitter melons, and fresh lemongrass. A Yemeni girl wearing a veil stands next to a football fan in his Big Red jacket. Beside McDonald's is a Vietnamese karaoke bar. Wagey Drug has a sign in the window that says, TARJETAS EN ESPAÑOL SE VENDEN AQUI. On the Fourth of July, Asian lion dancers perform beside Nigerian drummers. Driving down Twenty-seventh Street, among the signs for the Good Neighbor Center, Long John Silver's, Fat Pat's Pizza, Snowflakes, and Jiffy Lube, I see signs for Mohammed's Barber Shop, Jai Jai's Hair Salon, Kim Ngo's jewelry, Pho's Vietnamese Cafe, and Nguyen's Tae-Kwon Do.
We celebrate many holidays—Tet, Cinco de Mayo, Rosh Hashanah, and Ramadan. At our jazz concerts, Vietnamese families share benches with Kurdish and Somali families. When my neighbor plays a pickup basketball game in the park, he plays with Bosnian, Iranian, Nigerian, and Latino players. I am reminded of the New Yorker cartoon which pictured a restaurant with a sign reading, RANCHO IL WOK DE PARIS, FEATURING TEX-MEX, ITALIAN, ASIAN, AND FRENCH CUISINES.
Women in veils exchange information with Mexican grandmothers in long black dresses. Laotian fathers smoke beside Romanian and Serbian dads. By now, every conceivable kind of grocery store exists in our city. And the ethnic shelves in our IGA grocery stores keep expanding. The produce sections carry jicama and cilantro. Shoppers can buy pitas, tortillas, egg rolls, wraps, and breads from all over the world. My most recent cab driver was a Nigerian school administrator who fled his country because he was in a pro-democracy group. S. J. Perelman's description of Bangkok—"It seemed to combine the Hannibal, Missouri, of Mark Twain's childhood with Beverly Hills, the Low Countries, and Chinatown"—could now apply to Lincoln.
Our city's experience is not unique. As writer Pico Iyer puts it, "More bodies are being thrown more widely across the planet than ever before." America keeps taking people in. By 2050, whites of European origin will no longer be the majority race in our country. We're becoming a richer curry of peoples. Before 1990 most of our refugees settled in six big states: California, Texas, New York, Florida, New Jersey, and Illinois. But during the 1990s refugees moved into the Midwest, including Nebraska. And what they found was a vast farm and ranch state defined by its most beautiful river.
Nebraska is from an Oto word, meaning "flat water," or the river we now call the Platte. That glorious brown river has been an east-west thoroughfare for thousands of years. It has provided a resting place for cranes and geese as they travel along the great American flyway.
Willa Cather wrote of our vast prairies where tall grasses undulated in a way that reminded her of a great red sea. However, especially in eastern Nebraska, there is almost no natural landscape left—only a few scraps of prairie, an occasional prairie dog town or burr oak forest. Instead, we have fields of wheat, corn, soybeans, and sorghum, little towns, and, increasingly, suburban sprawl.
Our state's