Discover & Discuss Nights at the Museum A Spanish Page in Cowboy Country

A Spanish Page in Cowboy Country: Mexican Labor and Belonging in 1920s Wyoming

In the 1920s, hundreds of Mexican and Mexican American families traveled to Wyoming’s beet fields, recruited by the Great Western Sugar Company to do the difficult hand labor that powered one of the state’s most important agricultural industries. Known as Betabeleros, these workers thinned, weeded, irrigated, and harvested sugar beets across the Big Horn Basin and other parts of Wyoming. Yet despite their importance to the state’s economy and rural communities, their stories have often remained at the margins of Wyoming history.

This lecture brings those stories back into view through La Página en Español, a Spanish-language page published in the Powell Tribune for one season in 1927. At first glance, the page looks like a warm community bulletin: it reported births, weddings, illnesses, baseball games, dances, recipes, agricultural news, and celebrations of Mexican Independence Day. But it also carried messages about productivity, respectability, obedience, and assimilation. In other words, it welcomed Spanish-speaking workers into Wyoming public life, but only under certain conditions.

By reading this remarkable newspaper page alongside the history of Mexican labor in Wyoming’s sugar beet industry, this talk explores a more multilingual and multiethnic version of Wyoming’s past. It asks: Who gets remembered in local history? Who is left out? And what can a single forgotten newspaper page teach us about labor, belonging, family, and community in the American West?