The author and family in Da Kao Restaurant.
In factory towns like Sioux City, Iowa, home to a massive Tyson Foods plant, restaurants form a delicious support network for immigrant meatpackers and their families
For 23 years, my grandma’s routine was the same. From the time she moved to Sioux City, Iowa, until the day she retired, she would wake up, put in her dentures, eat a small breakfast of instant coffee and rice porridge, and say a prayer for my family to our Buddhist altar. Then, at noon, she’d head to her job at the Tyson Foods meat processing plant across the state line in Dakota City, Nebraska, where she separated chunks of pork and beef fat as they came off a conveyor belt. Like all meat processing, it was hard work.
On the weekends, she could usually be found next door to her apartment at my family’s restaurant, Da Kao Chinese and Vietnamese Restaurant, gossiping with employees and drinking Vietnamese iced coffee. My parents had also moved to Sioux City to work at the plant — then owned by Iowa Beef Processors before Arkansas-based Tyson acquired it in 2001 — but they knew there wasn’t much opportunity for them there. They opened Da Kao in 1994 to have more control over our future.
Set in a large, century-old, red-brick building, Da Kao is adorned with simple hand-me-down decorations: a broken crucifix, a clock in the shape of Vietnam, and mirrors to make the space seem bigger. My family lived upstairs for nearly a decade and, when we were little kids, my cousins, brother, and I would run around the restaurant. We eventually worked there ourselves, bussing tables, making deliveries, and acting as our parents’ little homegrown front-of-house staff.
Da Kao was like an extension of home for me, and the customers were like extended family. Sitting at tables strewn throughout the dining room, on chairs my dad bought at auctions or estate sales, they’d dig into foods my family brought when they left Vietnam in the 1970s and ’80s: steaming, hearty bowls of our signature pho; banh mi on French bread from the local Hy-Vee, topped with barbecue pork, cilantro, pickled carrots and daikon, pate, and generous helpings of butter; and fragrant plates of banh xeo, yellow crepes wrapped in fresh lettuce and drenched in tangy fish sauce.
The clientele included some of the thousands of employees who worked at the plant, who would meet at the restaurant between shifts, as well as tech workers from the Gateway headquarters, back in the halcyon days of the dot-com era. Family friends would also come in, including my grandma’s coworkers, sometimes sharing cuts of meat or other food from work.
My family’s story is a common one in Iowa, where the meatpacking industry has drawn immigrant families from Latin America, Southeast Asia, and East Africa. In similar towns in the South, where the poultry industry reigns, and in the Midwest, where hogs and cattle dominate the landscape, immigrant workers make up a disproportionate share in animal slaughtering and meat processing.
Low-paid immigrant labor has not only ballooned the coffers of meat corporation execs. It has also expanded the foodways of middle America. Before the 1960s, when U.S. immigration quotas were repealed, there was no way in hell you’d get a bowl of pho in the heartland. Today, alongside Da Kao, the Siouxland area is home to Asian restaurants like Pete’s Thai and King Sea; East African eateries like Ayshah’s Restaurant, Nile Restaurant, and Elilly’s Ethiopian Food; and Mexican spots like Tacos El Guero and Panaderia and Pasteleria San Miguel.
In other factory towns where the majority of people are white, it’s not uncommon to see ethnic enclaves sprout up like so much corn and soybean. These communities are interwoven around restaurants, grocery stores, bakeries, bars, and other businesses — an entire world where factory workers can celebrate the joys of life while escaping, however briefly, jobs that can be brutal.
Pork is king in Iowa, where farmers raise a third of the nation’s hogs. One of a handful of gargantuan meatpacking corporations in the world, Tyson controls many of the work opportunities in the area. Of the company’s 120,000 workers, 42,000 are immigrants. Many meat processing jobs don’t require proficiency in English, allowing new arrivals to quickly build a life for themselves while sending remittances to family in their home countries, as my grandma did.
“I have family in Mexico, and when they need my help, I send money to them,” says Cristina Bautista, owner and founder of La Juanita, a Mexican restaurant in Sioux City. “We get more pay here than over there.”
Bautista’s family first moved from her home in Lagos de Moreno, Mexico, to the LA area, where they owned and operated a food truck in the early 1990s. After several run-ins with the LAPD, they were invited to the Midwest by Bautista’s brother, who had moved to Sioux City to work at the meatpacking plant and saw the potential for a food truck to provide meals to plant workers.
According to Bautista, this sort of word of mouth migration is common in the area. “[People] come, and then bring other people, who bring other people,” she says. “Because of all the factories.”
The first few years were hard. “The most difficult thing was the weather. We weren’t used to the snow or temperatures below zero,” Bautista says. But the meatpacking workers were no different from her customers in LA, which helped Bautista adjust to their new Midwestern environment. They worked and saved money diligently, eventually applying for a loan to open La Juanita.
Today, the restaurant is a scene of controlled chaos. An employee stands sentinel at the cash register, rapidly scribbling orders on a seemingly endless supply of notepads while screaming into the open kitchen. The menu is comfortingly familiar from so many other taquerias throughout America: tacos and burritos made with carne asada, al pastor, lengua, or pescado, along with tortas, sopes, and nachos. What elevates La Juanita to near mythical status in Sioux City, though, is the tangy, spicy, crunchy pickled carrots that come with every order.
“When I moved to Iowa, there weren’t a lot of Hispanic people or restaurants around,” Bautista says. “I thought maybe I’ll move back to California after one or two years.” But, as time went on, she watched the Latinx population of Sioux City explode, and the restaurant became a home away from home for meatpacking workers. “I’m here. I’m still here,” she says.
Before she hopped in her carpool to the plant, my grandma always made sure to put on a thick winter coat — even during Iowa’s blistering summers.
“It’s cold in there,” she’d tell me, describing the Tyson factory floor. “It feels like winter. If I didn’t wear a coat, I’d freeze to death.”
Cold temperatures are just one of many challenges workers face in an industry infamous for its harsh conditions since 1905, when Upton Sinclair first started publishing The Jungle.
“The work on the line is incredibly fast,” says Angela Stuesse, a cultural anthropologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and author of Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South, which focuses on Mississippi’s poultry industry. “It’s often in either very cold or very hot conditions. People will do the same repetitive motions tens of thousands of times every shift. It’s an industry with one of the highest rates of injuries, amputations, slips, and falls.”
Sinclair’s book focused on Chicago, but in the 1960s, meatpackers began moving to rural areas. As unions crumbled, companies pushed workers harder and wages stagnated. These trends have only continued in recent years. In 2019, the Trump administration raised speed limits on processing lines (though the rule change has met challenges), and this year, Tyson agreed to pay out a settlement of $55 million to workers alleging the company conspired to fix wages. (Tyson has denied any wrongdoing.)
Tyson has also come under scrutiny for workplace safety. In 2020, a lawsuit alleged that a pork plant in Waterloo, Iowa, flouted COVID-19 protocols; an investigation by ProPublica tied an outbreak at the plant to 1,500 workers contracting the virus and eight deaths. It was later revealed that a group of managers had taken bets on how many workers would become infected. (The company fired the managers and issued a statement that their behavior didn’t reflect “the Tyson core values.”) In 2023, the Department of Labor opened an investigation into Tyson and Perdue after the New York Times reported that they found minors working at slaughterhouses and processing plants. (The companies issued statements that they “have no tolerance for child labor and were taking steps to eliminate violations at plants nationwide,” according to the Times.)
Meat processors have historically enlisted immigrants for this kind of hard work. In the 1990s, for instance, chicken plants in the South turned to immigrants, first documented workers and then undocumented, to circumvent union organizing among Black workers. Tyson has actively recruited immigrant workers too, partnering with organizations like Tent Partnership for Refugees to hire immigrant workers and investing millions to support organizations including Immigrant Connection, which provides legal and citizenship counseling to immigrants. The company has refuted claims that it hires people in the U.S. illegally.
“Workers feel like employers like Tyson and others in the industry are giving them an opportunity,” Stuesse says. But, she adds, “Immigrant workers are in a precarious position in our society in a lot of ways, whether they’re newcomers, or don’t know how to speak the local language well, or they’re undocumented or refugees.”
Sinclair’s best-selling work provoked an outcry, leading to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 and the Pure Food and Drug Act. While labor conditions did improve as a result of the regulations, those laws focused on food safety, not worker safety. Even a century later, meatpackers haven’t been able to count on the public to protect them. Though some ink was spilled for frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. largely failed to protect essential workers in places like meatpacking plants.
Workers depend on each other for support, though they may avoid discussing their workplace challenges in public places like restaurants, instead finding private venues like union meetings or homes. Still, restaurants and other businesses can provide comfort after difficult shifts, like to those who arrive at La Juanita around 1 a.m. Some nights, Bautista keeps the restaurant open a little later just to make sure workers have a hot meal. She says they especially fawn over the pastor tacos and carne asada burritos.
“They tell me how authentic it is and how much it reminds them of home,” Bautista says. “That makes me feel so good. That makes me feel proud.”
While folks from Mexico like Bautista make up the majority of foreign-born workers in the U.S., the immigrant workforce in the middle of the country is diverse, including a small but growing community of East African immigrants.
Mulugeta Endayehu moved from his native Ethiopia roughly 25 years ago, following his wife, who had a job at the Smithfield Foods plant, a Virginia-based pork processor in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The town bears a striking resemblance to Sioux City an hour to the south, and not just in name. Swap Tyson for Smithfield, and you’ve got many of the same dynamics.
In 2003, the couple opened up Lalibela, which serves traditional Ethiopian food, such as crispy, golden sambusas stuffed with seasoned minced meat or a tender mix of spiced lentils; spicy yebeg wot stew filled with tender chunks of lamb, ginger, onion, berbere, and garlic; and smoky, red doro wot, packed with caramelized chicken, onions, and berbere spices.
Endayehu and his wife found a welcoming community in Sioux Falls, but the transition isn’t easy for everyone. Research suggests that Muslim immigrants from East Africa face particular barriers in rural communities, which tend to have large white evangelical populations. In many small towns, churches are the primary gathering spaces for community events and social programs, further isolating Muslim immigrants. Refugees fleeing war zones are also often separated from their families.
It’s typical to see East Africans finding a taste of home at Lalibela, but the restaurant also attracts people of all strata.
“My customers come from all over the place,” Endayehu says. Though some come from the Smithfield plant, others “do all different kinds of things,” he says, like woodworking, farming, and teaching. “I don’t ask the customers where they work.” Restaurants like Lalibela may start within meatpacking circles, yet they often grow beyond those communities. Lalibela became so popular it was even featured in Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.
La Juanita has also become something of a modern piazza in Sioux City. The long lines stretching out the door into the wee hours of the morning are filled not only with immigrants fresh off shifts at Tyson, but also wealthy Omaha bankers, gaggles of local teenagers, and everyone in between. Together they paint a more nuanced picture of the factory town.
“A lot of people move here because they start working at Tyson, but now there are many factories around and different work,” Bautista says. “Before it was only Tyson, the big factory, but now we have a lot more.”
Tyson made my family’s life in Sioux City possible. Without the plant, we wouldn’t have come to Iowa, opened Da Kao, or had money to put my brother, cousins, and me through college. I wouldn’t have become a journalist, and you wouldn’t be reading this story. Sioux City wouldn’t have had a successful Vietnamese restaurant for a very long time — if ever — or a hell of a taco joint, or any of the other wonderful restaurants I grew up visiting.
But the people who have made the most direct impact in the region aren’t the corporate executives or plant managers. They’re the workers, former workers, and their families. They’re the ones who decided to leave their homes, stake their small claim to the heartland, give their neighbors a place to eat, and make the American dream possible for one another.
My grandma still comes by the restaurant from time to time. Occasionally, one of her former coworkers will pop in to chat over Vietnamese iced coffee, sharing the latest gossip about friends and goings-on down at the plant. Occasionally, they’ll try to bring her some meat, which she always politely declines. She spent decades dealing with beef and pork. She’s more of a seafood person nowadays.
Tony Ho Tran is a writer and editor whose work has been seen in Slate, the Daily Beast, Outside Magazine, Playboy, and more. He is currently the senior tech editor at Slate.
Fact checked by Kelsey Lannin
Copy edited by Laura Michelle Davis
Photo illustration credits: Da Kao images courtesy of Tony Tran; Tyson employees by Kansas City Star / Getty Images; River view by Matthew Howieson / Getty Images
