Norquest

The Norquest family immigrated to their farm site in 1925 as part of a larger wave of Midwestern immigrants to the Lower Rio Grande Valley. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Valley also experienced an influx of Mexican migrants in search of opportunity and work. They joined their Mexican-American counterparts laboring as agricultural workers on the farms of Anglos and Texas-Mexicans. Some of these individuals found their way onto the Norquest farm site. This multidisciplinary report posits a nuanced way of looking at human-land interaction on a farmsite in South Texas, where racial and class conflict existed, but where, in certain pockets of exception, people from culturally different backgrounds came together to labor and laugh in order to make ends meet.