FINNEY COUNTY, Kansas (CNN) -- U.S. communities are changing complexion as ethnic diversity grows in the American heartland.
Going to church is a popular activity on Sundays in racially diverse Garden City, Kansas.
Though not new in California, Arizona, Texas or Florida, the change of demographics is a bit more surprising in southwest Kansas.
Finney County, Kansas, is one of six counties across the nation that became majority-minority between 2007 and 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau recently announced. The agency defines majority-minority as a county where more than half the population is made up of a group that is not single-race, non-Hispanic white.
Nearly 10 percent (309) of the nation's 3,142 counties were majority-minority as of July 1, 2008.
"Why there?" people ask Tim Cruz, former mayor of Garden City, Kansas, the largest town in Finney County. And then, "How do you all get along?"
"It's just another melting pot you know," Cruz says. "It makes it nice to have those different cultures. And sure they're different -- we have to understand what they celebrate and why they do it."
In the last couple of decades, massive meatpacking plants in Garden City have drawn workers from Southeast Asia and Somalia.
You can smell the major industry of Garden City before you actually reach it and the stockyards that feed the meatpacking plants have their own unmistakable odor.
After high school, Cruz worked one year in the meatpacking plant and that one year was enough for him. But he says Somalis, and many southeast Asians come to the area for the steady work, and a steady paycheck -- even if the work is tough.
"Very dangerous, long hours," he says. "I am grateful that they do that work. Now, I know why my dad said stay in school, you know."
At the Alta Brown Elementary School, the native language of about half of the 409 students is something other than English.
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