It Takes a Tough Woman to Work a Tough Town  

Hereford, Texas – May 2026

Look at Casa del Llano’s brochure and the image of their building on its cover;

it’s a study in modesty, humility, and maybe even discretion, as in we don’t want ICE knocking at our door. There’s barely a sign marking the building or anything resembling a parking lot. But if there was a small logo of what this place stood for in this predominantly Latino community it would probably be a small replica, no bigger than a lawn flamingo, of the Statue of Liberty. Because over the course of the last 25 years, that unassuming door has been the gateway to U.S. citizenship for about 2,000 people. For thousands of other newcomers, and not-so-newcomers who have faced a less than welcoming country, Casa del Llano has helped them navigate their way to the American dream. This non-profit organization is the proverbial lantern under a bushel basket, a lantern that is Lady Liberty’s torch.

I made the trek from Santa Fe across the badlands of eastern New Mexico into west Texas to interview Lydia Villaneuva, a former colleague from our days together at the now defunct Community Food Security Coalition. I knew of her work founding and running Casa del Llano, and I had heard many unsavory (smelly) tales of Hereford, but for some reason I had never made the five-hour journey. I felt the time had come.

But as you cross from New Mexico into Texas you soon become aware of why this is not one of America’s preferred travel destinations. Later, I googled jokes about West Texas, one of which said it’s so flat that it’s the only place where you can look farther and see less than anywhere else on earth. This assessment was more or less confirmed by my GPS directions which told me to “go right at the light, then go straight for about 100 miles.”

Hola!

Amidst many holas!  and gracias, Lydia introduced me to several staff members and took me on a tour of the office/house (stay tuned for its origin story!). There is a sweet air of informality that pervades CASA’s operations, including a casual application of the English language. One official-looking sign in the office where payments for services are taken, including US citizenship applications, reads: “We only except cash or check only.” What the heck, I thought, it’s still better than my Spanish.

Even though an appropriate degree of professional decorum greets the visitor as they enter the reception area, a visitor’s desperation and the staff’s desire to help may soon turn procedure and confidentiality into an afterthought. Within ten minutes of my arrival, Lydia, one of her staff, and me are listening to Joey Gonzalez share his frustrations about a failed job search. “No one wants to hire me because of my record. I got out of prison eight years ago, but I’ve been clean ever since!”

Speaking only Spanish, an agitated older woman is looking for help for her two children to become citizens. Lydia provides some on the spot guidance and arranges an appointment with the woman for a later consultation.

Just off the lobby, inside a spacious, well-lit room, 21-year-old Melissa, a student at nearby Western Texas University, is instructing four women – all of whom are old enough to be her mother – in the fundamentals of English. The chatter was lively and Melissa, born in the US and a native English speaker had clearly stirred up the enthusiasm of her older students. With much good cheer and enthusiasm, each woman was filling in a large poster as if it was a resume they were preparing for a job application. With Melissa’s guidance, they were writing in English and using little hand-drawn charts and pictures to illustrate their stories.

In the next room over, every Thursday, you would find the High Plains Food Bank, whose headquarters are in Amarillo, Texas. A representative of the food bank aids people applying for SNAP.

The Neighborhood

“Let’s go see the ‘neighborhood’,” suggests Lydia, and we jump into her car to see an area that actually encompasses the better part of two counties. Our first stop is a 486-acre community where Lydia got her start as an organizer. Known as Coronado Acres, it’s divided into several dozen five-acre lots whose property lines are defined by roads that are either washboard dirt or a rough macadam surface made of recycled tarmac. They made the car bounce so hard that my tailbone hurt, and I couldn’t write notes to save my life. The staccato vibration captured on my recorder sounded, later, like we were escaping machine-gun fire. Lydia tells me that one of her first organizing projects was to convince the county commissioners to pave these roads. “I ruined my first car driving here!” she noted, “but what’s worse is that the roads had become impassable during the summer monsoons. School buses would get stuck in the mud and people couldn’t get to their doctor appointments.”

A distinguishing feature of Coronado Acres is neglect. Homes and trailers are in a state of disrepair or teetering on the brink of outright collapse. An attempt to bring small-scale agriculture into a community that was hungry for fresh food, or anything other than the nearby commodity agriculture products (farming, farming everywhere, not a bite to eat) was thwarted by dropping water pressure. In this thirsty neck of the world, no water, no food.

The Ogallala Aquifer, the vast underground reservoir upon which portions of eight states including West Texas depend on for their water, is declining at the rate of one foot a year. This is thanks in no small part to the gargantuan draw down required to sustain factory farming operations and their massive pivot irrigation systems. While not officially a colonias because it’s too far from the Mexican border to qualify, the outward appearance of Coronado Acres with broken appliances and rusting autos strewn about and used tires stacked up to fence off properties, gives it and similar areas around Hereford the undeniable look of third-world poverty.

What marks Hereford’s identity and catalyzes Lydia’s own brand of practical activism is the rampant presence of industrial agriculture – cattle feedlots, livestock slaughter and processing plants, “value-added” processing plants that turn discarded livestock parts into pet food (wet and dry), factory dairy farms, and two ethanol plants. While their products may feed the world – as well as Fluffy, Buddy, and Milo – the well-being of their workers is what feeds Lydia’s concerns. Merrick Natural PetWorks and its two Hereford facilities employ 400 people, almost all of whom are Hispanic. As soon as Trump began his vicious crack down on immigrants, 30 of Merrick’s employees, some of whom had been there 20 years, were forced to disappear or be arrested.

But driving through another nearby “colonias” that Lydia called El Homiguero, we encountered a defining moment of environmental injustice. One of the community’s boundaries abut a large cattle feedlot and its crop production fields. As we approached the property line and prepared to turn around, we spotted a dark-brown cloud hovering just above the ground and moving slowly in our direction. I asked Lydia to pull over so we could take a better look. I hopped out of the car and looked over the fence. What I saw was a tractor pulling a manure spreader that was shooting the feedlots daily waste material in a spiraling motion about 15 feet upward. I found myself downwind of the tractor with a strong westerly breeze propelling tiny particles of wood shavings and manure into my face. I quickly retreated to the car and noticed the same material was hitting Lydia’s windshield. Of greater concern was the gusting winds that were sending the same material into the residential properties directly adjoining the homes. God only knows what besides cow shit resided inside that ghastly cloud! “Those houses aren’t well-insulated,” Lydia told me. “And that smell of manure everywhere? We used to call it ‘Cattle Pen No. 5’.”

Later that night as I was resting at my Best Western Hotel in downtown, a powerful scent of cow manure came wafting through the room. I went outside, but there was no escaping it. By my estimation, I was at least two miles from the nearest feedlot. Over the years, I’ve heard more than one farmer tell me that’s “the smell of success.”

Lydia summed up the local political problem pretty well, “Nobody wants to take responsibility for this community! Hereford is Trump country. I hate to say it, but it’s a MAGA world – even the Hispanics!” The numbers not only confirmed Lydia’s assessment but actually make the picture worse. In spite of the fact that 79 percent of Hereford’s 15,000 people identify as Latino, 75 percent of Deaf Smith County, which is mostly Hereford, voted for Trump in 2024.

If a place’s food or agricultural identity is any reflection of its politics, then as you might expect, deeply liberal areas like Washington, DC are known informally as the hummus capital of America. By contrast, Hereford, which is known as the “Beef Capital of the World,” would be very conservative. In fact, according to a 2015 report by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Hereford is not only Texas’s most conservative city, it’s also America’s.

Tortilleria Chihuahua

Lydia and I are sitting in the Tortilleria Chihuahua restaurant on West First Street.

She’s simultaneously translating and rating items from the all-Spanish menu for me. Once I settle on the Chili Verde and a cold cerveza importada (Mexico), she explains to our non-English speaking waitress what her non-Spanish speaking friend wants. Our table faces the street, and a large picture window gives us a panoramic view of the traffic moving down this main thoroughfare. It’s a non-stop convoy of agriculture vehicles hauling silage, milk, and cows. Regardless, we’re settling into a good meal not only because the tour of Hereford and Casa del Llano made me hungry, but because I was eager to hear more of Lydia’s origin story. And if you’re Latino standing on Texas soil, that story often begins with a river crossing.

Lydia: I was born in Plainview, Texas which, if you’ll excuse the pun, doesn’t mean everyone saw me being born. But it’s my parents’ and grandparents’ story that explains my history and why helping immigrants is the most important thing I do. My father was carried across the Rio Grande on my grandfather’s shoulders. He was also carrying the family’s metate [a stone grinder used to process corn for tortillas]. At one point in the river, he fell into a deep hole and was submerged under water with my dad and the metate. My grandmother, who was a strong woman, reached down and pulled them up. Everyone made it safely to the Texas shore.

Me: It sounds like meeting adversity head-on and persisting in the face of tough odds shaped who you are.

Lydia: That’s who we are as a family. My father worked for a construction company doing road work with a shovel. By the time he retired, he held stock in the company! My mother was an entrepreneur but developed breast cancer. Since I was the oldest of six children, I was my mother’s voice for four years including going to every doctor’s appointment and translating for her since she only spoke Spanish. As I was trying to find written information to help her battle, I discovered that the American Cancer Society didn’t have anything in Spanish. This was 1988! “God dang it,” I said to myself, “that’s not right!”

I also had a brother who was mentally challenged. People would always look at him funny, which would piss me off. He’s the reason I don’t like injustice. He’s my core! That’s where I draw my strength from. But I also learned to keep my anger under control because if I fell into a rage, I couldn’t do anything about the injustice.

M: You experienced deeply personal challenges and benefitted from really good parental role models, but at what point did you decide to address the injustices in your own community?

L: I went to my family’s church, San Jose Catholic Church at first just to help prepare meals. But the church’s pastor, Father Darryl Birkenfeld picked me to work on the finance committee. Even I think I can sometimes be dopey, he saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. Later, he targeted me to work on the Rural Life Ministry which took me into sustainable agriculture and a paid job working for the Church. This took me into something we called The Promised Land Network which eventually morphed into the Ogallala Commons [this is a non-profit network whose work focuses on education about the aquifer that is the lifeblood for the region that includes West Texas] that Darryl would later become the coordinator of after he left the Church. But after one hard day of seeing bad conditions in the community, I vented my frustrations to Father Darryl. He responded with, “So, what are you going to do about it?” That’s when I became a community organizer. I never went to college; I learned on the job and from experience, from Darryl and many others, including national networks I worked with. I’ve worked with farmers, business people, immigrants, and neighborhood residents. I was trained by the Industrial Areas Foundation, the same group that Barack Obama learned from.

M: When you and I first met at the Community Food Security Coalition conferences in the late 1990s and early 2000s, you were still in your early stages of organizing work in Hereford, new to the game, so to speak. But I remember how confident you seemed and how willing you were to jump into leadership roles in spite of your lack of experience.

L: My career was never a straight path. I got married when I was 17 and had my first child when I was 18. My husband had a good job, and I was fortunate to be able devote many years to raising my two children. When I was ready to jump into community work, I felt no guilt about not being a good mother. But suddenly I felt self-conscious of being around very smart people. I was often embarrassed and insecure about being on the board of the CFS Coalition – there were people there with Ph.Ds., decades of experience, belonging to national organizations. But I said to myself that you can’t be any more real or Latina than me! I had a conversation with God, and I decided that my work speaks for itself. As I look back on my time with CFSC, and later with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, I realize that they became my colleges!

M: It seems like Providence has been on your side ever since. The story of how you got your office building is fascinating. Please tell me about it again.

L: The building where CASA is located, which is basically a six-room house, used to be a dentist’s office. I met the dentist one day at a meeting, and he told me he was retiring from his practice. I told him about the work I was doing in the community and how I wanted to serve people in Hereford. This was 1999, and we had just organized CASA del Llano a few years earlier. Before I knew what happened, he gave us the house outright! We’ve owned it – mortgage and rent free – for 26 years now.

M: Being an ambitious and justice-seeking Latina in a gritty place like Hereford where money and men rule, can’t be easy. Give me an example of how you’ve brought that fuerte personality of yours to bear.

L: I like to think that I don’t need no outside validation. But I’m only human, and I was pissed off when the local Chamber of Commerce took years to recognize CASA’s value to the community. Joining a local Chamber may not be something a lot of community organizations around the country want to do, but for us, it’s where the action, power, and yes, recognition is. I finally got fed up and did something I didn’t want to do: I took a white business owner to a Chamber meeting to plead my case because they wouldn’t listen to me! He told them CASA was responsible for making 700 employees available to local businesses. And you know what? They said, “Yo, you are all okay!” I wish I didn’t have to do that, but I reminded myself it’s not about me or my pride; it’s about how I best serve the community.

M: As we drove around today and I witnessed living conditions that can only be described as “third world,” – in a state as rich as Texas, in a country richer than any other, a place that from my perspective seems to exist as a colony of the industrial agriculture complex – have you ever thought about taking on “the Man”? In other words, have you ever thought about using a more confrontational style of organizing?

L: I could stir up a lot of crap here, but I don’t want to jeopardize the chance to serve the people we are serving. Over 2,000 people who crossed “the river” became U.S. citizens because of CASA; thousands more received legal assistance, learned English, got green cards, signed up for SNAP, and found a shoulder to cry on when they needed it from CASA. The community knows we help the people that everybody else in this town wants to ignore. Anybody who walks through that door is someone we’re ready to serve. I have five grandchildren. I want to leave the world in a better way for them. I don’t want to sound like an old lady, but I want them to learn by what I do, not what I say.

M: I’ve run non-profit community organizations for most of my life. I know very well the kind of choices and compromises you have to make. But as you look to the future of this community and the role of CASA del Llano, what do you see?

L: To be honest, it might take another generation before we get to a place of real social change here. I’m only two generations removed from my grandparents crossing the river. My children are three generations removed. Today, we have young families here who just crossed the river for the dream, but they will need the services we provide. My hope and goal for the future are that the next generation won’t need the services we now provide.

Concluding Thoughts

There should be more Casa del Llanos and more Lydia Villaneuva’s. If there were, there would be fewer places like Hereford that depend on the exploitation of people and the environment to produce our food. Just as importantly, Lady Liberty’s words – “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses…I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” – should be placed at every mile post along America’s borders rather than the Trump Wall. Until that day, we find ourselves stuck with the dueling ironies of pride in an America that is still the land of hope and dreams, and of shame in an America that treats the dreamers with brutality, abuse, and neglect. It is within that ironic tangle that people like Lydia intervene to uphold the humanity and dignity of those who struggle in a place like Hereford.