• The New York Times, Monday, November 14, 2011 9:43 AM

While the Great Plains has seen plummeting populations with consequent businesses closings and communities evaporating, another demographic trend has breathed new life into the region. Hispanics are arriving in numbers large enough to offset or even exceed the decline in the white population in many places.

In the process, these new residents are reopening shuttered storefronts with Mexican groceries, filling the schools with children whose first language is Spanish and, for now at least, extending the lives of communities that seemed to be staggering toward the grave. In places like Ulysses, Kan., the population of 6,161 is now about half Hispanic.

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