WaPo:

DODGE CITY, Kan. — For the past 13 years, Hector Almendarez has picked up his hard hat every workday and driven down Wyatt Earp Avenue — passing the Cowboy Capital Saloon & Grill and the Boot Hill Museum, where visitors drink sarsaparilla from the Long Branch Saloon – to work his shift at a nearby meatpacking plant.

He is one of thousands of Hispanic immigrants who have come to this city of 27,000 in Southwest Kansas over the past four decades to work in one of its plants. Known for its cowboy culture and as a symbol of the Western frontier, Dodge City, a quintessential emblem of an older, Whiter America, is now 65 percent Latino, according to U.S. Census data.

But despite its changing demographics, Dodge City’s city commission – the local body in charge of enacting policies that affect its residents most directly, including housing, transportation, and education – remains nearly all White. Almendarez, who makes rounds at his plant registering fellow Latino citizens to vote, believes the commission’s membership might better represent the city’s diversity if its five members were elected from local neighborhoods. Instead, every commissioner is elected city-wide rather than by just one district. Two Latino residents are suing over the practice.