St. James is a diverse city, where Latinos account for approximately 45% of the population. The big draw is employment, found most often in manufacturing jobs for metal fabrication and agricultural machinery. Smithfield also has a meat packing plant in St. James. 

“There’s a lot of people who travel to St. James to work,” Trapero said, mentioning the size of one factory’s workforce. “One shift has 500 or so workers.”

Factory workers started the community organization known as La Convivencia Hispana, where Trapero serves as a coordinator. What began as a tamale sale years ago to raise money for educational scholarships has grown into a community support system that promotes cultural integration and relationship building, offers educational workshops, and celebrates diversity. 

“When you have a little group of Latinos in a community, they needed that leadership,” Trapero said. “So, more things came to them.”

Many of the homes in St. James are older, built around the 1940s and in desperate need of upgrades. A full home weatherization project can cost anywhere from a couple thousand dollars to over $10,000. Paying for those upgrades would force many households in St. James to choose between a more efficient furnace or putting food on the table that week. Faced with that difficult choice, necessary upgrades were put off. 

La Convivencia Hispana recently became an integral collaborator on a project to help reduce energy costs for nearly 10% of the homes in the St. James community. The organization partnered with the Region Nine Development Commission (RNDC), a Minnesota-based economic development organization, to secure a grant from the Department of Energy that would fund residential weatherization upgrades.

Outreach for the project focused on members of the city’s Latino community, who historically have not been able to access programs that offer weatherization support due to language, cultural and logistical barriers. To address those disparities, RNDC trained La Convivencia Hispana volunteers as “energy navigators” and those individuals went out into the community to arrange energy audits for 170 homes in St. James. Based on the outcome of the audit, a home could receive grant-funded upgrades for improved insulation, new water heaters, or energy-efficient  furnaces.

The upgrades make the home more comfortable, efficient, and safer for the people living in them. The new weatherization equipment also allows residents to save money on energy bills every month. 

“We were eager to do this kind of work,” Trapero said. “Our families, they live paycheck to paycheck. It’s hard to do those kinds of things. We were the key to enter a lot of the community in St. James. They needed to trust somebody and we were the trusted key members in our community to do this kind of job. A lot of the navigators are also working in the manufacturing sector, so they know a lot of the people in St. James.”

Introducing the program to the Latino community in St. James would require a trusted source. Explaining it and implementing it would, too, because homeowners would have to open their homes to an energy auditor and a local contractor to complete any upgrades that were needed. Once the outreach began, though, La Convivencia Hispana beat its anticipated timeline. 

“We put a six month target on it, but by the next month, we had identified all the homes we were going to visit,” Trapero said. “It was such a great opportunity to have Region Nine help us and go along with us to do this adventure and this whole program. We didn’t have the capacity. We’re really small.”

The momentum of the program slowed as Minnesota experienced a surge in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in late 2025. The Latino community in St. James became wary of leaving their homes or opening their doors, which disrupted audits for several homes. Despite these challenges, Trapero said the team is trying to find a way forward to finish the work in a way that respects the fear being felt across the community. 

“Our neighbors are really afraid. We need to find a different way to connect with our neighbors, and for auditors to come back and finish the ones we’re missing. It’s hard for them to open the door for anyone right now,” she said. “We want them to have this grace. We have to do this with the trust from our community.”

Trapero said she hopes people understand that many rural communities are just like hers. The Center for Rural Innovation reports the Latino population in rural communities grew by nearly 1 million people between 2010 and 2020, even as rural populations in general have seen a decline. 

Rural Latinos, Trapero said, make a big economic impact on their communities and in the end they want the same things for their families as everyone else. 

“We are a big solid community and a lot of the Latinos live in rural communities,” she said. “We mean well for our community. The work is being done and we know all our neighbors want their community to thrive. We all work to make St. James a better place.”