THE FIRST TIME ROSA SAW SNOWFLAKES falling, she thought they were pieces of cotton. “I thought I was going to choke,” she told me.
Rosa, who is from Honduras, had never seen snow before, but it’s become a familiar sight now that she’s living in Bozeman, Montana. The city, population about 56,000, is ringed by four mountain ranges in the Northern Rockies. It took her a while, but Rosa has learned to deal with the weather. “Now I think it’s very pretty,” she said in Spanish. “Our kids love to play in the snow.”
Rosa, who has a round, serious face and long black hair, is one of the hundreds of thousands of Hondurans who have been displaced in recent years by a variety of problems: political corruption, gang violence, economic stagnation and environmental catastrophe. In 2020, when gang members threatened to kill her, she abruptly fled the country with her youngest daughter.
Rosa’s husband, Luis, had already gone to the U.S. with their older girl and found his way to Bozeman, drawn by the promise of available jobs. “I had a friend here, and he told me that this place was good for finding work,” he said. (Rosa and Luis, who are both undocumented, requested that their names be withheld for their safety. The names of all the immigrants quoted in this story have been changed.)
Twenty, even 10, years ago, Bozeman — far from the U.S.-Mexico border and overwhelmingly white — would not have been an obvious destination for a Central American family. One Mexican construction worker who moved here from Colorado in the mid-2000s told me that he used to walk the aisles of the local Walmart and hear only English. That is no longer the case, he said.
Southwestern Montana is in the middle of a massive multi-year economic explosion, propelled by a surge of wealthy people, a multibillion-dollar tech industry, and, especially, a luxury real-estate market that continues to soar to new heights. In February, the median price for a house in Bozeman surpassed $1 million. The resulting demand for construction workers drew people like Luis to Bozeman. Luis, a poker-faced man with a small patch of beard, has as much work as he can handle these days: framing houses, putting up siding and roofing — the most dangerous job and his least favorite.
Tina Visscher, a longtime Bozeman resident, became aware of Bozeman’s growing immigrant population in 2019 at a Quaker meeting. Someone mentioned that the Bozeman public schools were dealing with an increasing number
