Guymon's workforce drew people from far and wide, bringing new foods, languages, and traditions that some locals love and others find jarring. Is the cultural shift enriching the community, or do old-timers have a right to feel like the town they grew up in has changed beyond recognition?
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Add your commentI'm originally from Chihuahua and came here with my husband when he got work in 2004. We raised our kids here. My daughter just graduated from OPSU. This is her hometown. When people say they want the 'old Guymon back' I always want to ask them — back to what year exactly? And who gets to matter in that version?
Here's my thing — I actually used to live in Liberal, Kansas before moving to Guymon, so I've seen this exact same conversation happen in two different panhandle towns. The people who complain loudest about cultural change are almost never the ones who actually lost any concrete thing. They just lost a feeling of demographic familiarity. Those are not the same loss and we should stop treating them like they are. Challenge any commenter here to name one actual tangible thing — not a vibe, a THING — that got worse.
Honestly the criticism I have is less about the workers themselves and more about how the companies handled all of it. Seaboard and the other operations brought in thousands of people and basically left the city infrastructure to figure it out on their own dime. Schools, roads, water, emergency services — all strained. The workers aren't the problem. The corporations that profited enormously while the town absorbed all the social costs — THAT is the actual conversation we should be having instead of pointing fingers at neighbors.
Born and raised here, third generation. My grandad ran cattle on the same land his dad broke sod on. I'm not going to pretend the town feels the same because it doesn't. The grocery store has a whole aisle I can't read, the school my kids go to has announcements in two languages, and half the restaurants downtown are places I've never set foot in. Is that bad? I honestly don't know anymore. But don't tell me I don't have a right to feel something about it.
People act like Guymon was some perfect little Norman Rockwell painting before the packing plants expanded. It wasn't. It was a dying panhandle town hemorrhaging young people every single year. I moved here from Tulsa for work in 2011 and stayed. This place has more life in it now than half the towns surrounding it that stayed 'pure' and are basically ghost towns. Think about that.
Lived here 40 years. The culture shift argument cuts both ways and people forget that. Yes we have new traditions and foods and that's genuinely wonderful. But we also lost some things. The Fourth of July parade used to be something the whole town organized together. Now there's like three separate community events and they don't overlap much. That fragmentation is real and it matters whether you want to admit it or not.
I'll tell you what changed that nobody talks about: the Catholic church here has three Masses now and two of them are standing room only every Sunday. You want to tell me that's bad for a community? My Protestant grandmother would've had opinions about Catholics but she'd at least have admitted a full church is a full church.
The housing situation got worse, I'll name that. Rents went up. Working class families who were here before — and that includes some long-time Hispanic families by the way, people forget they were already here — got priced in certain areas. That's a real tangible thing. It's not about culture, it's about economics squeezing people out and we conflate the two constantly.
ok genuine question for the old timers complaining — what exactly was so great before? because i looked it up and guymon's population was actually shrinking in the 80s and 90s. the jobs brought people. people bring culture. thats just how towns work and always have worked
fun fact that most people here probably dont know: seaboard foods actually started the big expansion wave back in the mid 90s and guymon went from like 8,000 people to over 11,000 in basically a decade. that is an ENORMOUS percentage jump for a small town. like imagine any major city growing 35% in ten years, people would be losing their minds. so honestly the adjustment has been pretty smooth all things considered lol
My aunt works at the school district and she says the ESL program there is actually one of the best-funded in the whole state now because of the student population growth. More students = more state money = better programs for everyone's kids. People sleeping on this fact.
My buddy told me Guymon has the highest per capita income in the whole Oklahoma panhandle now because of the meatpacking wages. Not sure if that's exactly right but I do know the economy here is way more stable than Boise City or Hooker. The jobs did that. Can't separate the economics from the people who came to do the work.
Nope. Hard disagree that anything was lost. Progress isn't comfortable and that's the whole point.
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