“We’ve become a destination,” says the mayor of a small Indiana town transformed by migration.
Seymour, IndianaOn a balmy day last September, hundreds of people gathered for a raucous, all-day basketball tournament in Gaiser Park, one of the sprawling, well-kept green spaces in this small midwestern town. All the players and participants were members of the local Chuj community, Indigenous Maya immigrants from a remote region of Guatemala in the country’s mountainous north, nearly 4,000 miles away.
Chuj people began migrating to Seymour some 20 years ago from the town of San Sebastián Coatán, in the province of Huehuetenango. Word about employment and the quality of life in Seymour soon spread to small villages nearby, and now Seymour has more than 2,000 Chuj residents, comprising over 10 percent of the town’s population. Thousands have moved to other