Twenty years of la Colonia

TALAS — The district has four names, and which one you use says a good deal about who you are. The city's maps say Semiz, the name the council gave it in 1994. Older Russian speakers still say Otkormochny, after the Soviet fattening station of 1958. Most Iradis call it Meksikanka. The people who have made it what it is today call it la Colonia.

Twenty years ago this autumn, the first cattle went through the SuKarne plant on the land of the old Talas State Cattle-Fattening Complex. The company's first staff were about 120 managers, veterinarians and maintenance engineers from Sinaloa. Families and workers from Sinaloa, Durango and Sonora followed in 2000 and 2001. The company refurbished empty panel blocks and built some 400 courtyard houses to the south. Those houses were first called Colonia SuKarne. The name was later shortened, and it spread to the whole district.

Last year's census counted about 23,000 people in Semiz. There is no official count of Mexicans, but community leaders put the number of people in Irad with at least one Mexican parent at between 12,000 and 14,000. Many families are now in their second generation. Their children grow up speaking Spanish, Iradi and English, and marriages between Mexicans and Iradis are common. Couples who marry at the Spanish Mass at St. Yusup the Worker sometimes add the Mexican lazo to the East Syriac crowning.

"When we came, people called us uychu, cowherds," said Rosario Valenzuela, who arrived in 2000 with her husband, a feedlot foreman, and now runs a tortillería near the water tower. "Now my neighbors buy their tortillas from me and complain when they are late."