It's time for Positively Kansas.

Coming up, immigration continues to be a hot button issue across America and that calls for some perspective.

Does mean a melting pot of different cultures from the very beginning.

We'll examine one neighborhood that continues to be shaped by its cultural influences and how, in turn, it helped shape the rest of the city.

We'll also dove into the secret life of bobcats.

They're out there in the Kansas countryside, but you very rarely see them.

And sunflower season is a special time of year in these parts.

Well, explore exactly why that is.

Im Sierra Scott, a half hour of information and inspiration is queued up and ready to roll on this edition of Positively Kansas.

Positively Kansas is brought to you in part by before investing your hard earned money, make sure your financial advisor understand your objectives.

Mark Douglass CFP Serving our community for over 25 years, providing customized financial solutions that focus on the individual.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas serves more than 900,000 Kansans in various programs.

Independent member owned Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas, an independent licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, proudly supports PBS Kansas.

Program support provided by the F Price Cossman Memorial Trust and Trust Bank Trustee.

Bringing you the Kansas Wild Edge segments on Positively Kansas.

Wichita has long been a destination for hardworking people looking for better lives.

Mexican immigrants have had a presence from the very beginning.

A new book sheds light on the contribution and influence of this industrious bunch who continue to shape life on the city's north end.

Chris Frank reports.

Nothing says the north end like the aroma of street tacos.

This place is known for our street tacos.

El pollo Dorado has filled the neighborhood around 21st in Wellington with its media Roma for ten years.

Especially the smoke.

A lot of our customers just passing by.

They will come back because the smoke and the smell.

Every time Cinnamon Rojas opens the grill.

A fresh batch of smoke is released with drivers on 21st Street suddenly struck with hunger pains.

This little corner especially is been very significant to a lot of our customers.

We had customers coming in even outside of the city.

And those customers get a taste and experience of this North End neighborhood that has seen many changes over Wichita's history.

The North End is our military and multicultural neighborhood.

But historically, it has been the place where where Mexican Americans have settled down.

The North End has traditionally been one of those areas.

That was a really important part of our story as a city and something that was worth exploring and also a part of our city that let's face it, needed a little more love.

That helps tell the history of the Mexican-Americans in the North End, because it hasn't been told.

That history is being told.

In this recently released book titled Mexican-Americans of Wichita's North End, Mendoza, Navarro and Price, coauthor the book.

It is a photo based history.

Most of the writings are a photo captions.

Wichita's North End is loosely defined as 15 Street on the south, where the midtown neighborhood begins.

The I1 35 interstate on the east, either the Little or Kansas River or Amidon on the west and 29th Street on the North.

I would say that the heart of it is 21st Street.

No mar, an acronym for North Market is also a key part of the neighborhood.

The authors acknowledge Latinos lived throughout Wichita in many different neighborhoods, but say there is a mexican American concentration in the north end.

Now, anyone driving through the north in neighborhood can't help to pick up visual cues.

You could see the murals along 21st Street.

That's a sign that it's, you know, a Hispanic neighborhood.

The North End has numerous colorful murals.

The murals portray messages often relating to diversity, immigration usually stated in Spanish.

And I think it's just symbol of of our culture and the pride we have in our culture.

There are visual cues with the signs on neighborhood businesses, and there are visual cues in the bright, colorful houses.

The colorful stucco houses, which represent a piece of Mexico, bringing that over and making the neighborhood your own.

The North End wasn't always a Mexican-American neighborhood.

Working the railroads was a lot of German immigrants, Irish immigrants.

I mean, no one was at that time.

Even born in Wichita.

The north end is linked to railroads.

Anyone who's worked in the North End as I have, gets used to the sound of trains coming and going.

The history of Mexican-Americans in Wichita is tied to the coming of the railroads.

If you think, for example, about how how Mexican Mexican Mexican-Americans came to, which is that it was because of the railroad tracks and the railroad tracks are nearby, what is now the north end.

So my mom's family, they came up and they worked the railroads.

The authors say it was common for Mexicans to come to the United States to help construct railroads.

Now, initially, families arrive here with the railroad and some are going to be housed in makeshift quarters.

There are photos of families along the tracks living in converted boxcars.

And so the housing was cheap and meant to be temporary.

The immigrants that came from Mexico lived in tents along the tracks.

And it says that in the 1910 census.

Most of those immigrants, she says, returned to Mexico, but not all.

You know, they began having families and they stayed.

Mendoza says in the 1930s, the Our Lady of Perpetual Hope Church was built on North Market Street to minister to the growing Mexican-American population in the North End.

Those staying found work in other north end industries.

And the railroad brought a lot of a lot of them up through Texas to work, but also the packing houses.

Mendoza, a realtor by profession, is a North End community activist working to preserve North End history.

My grandfather came in 1907, but he started working at the packing house at 16 at cutting hay packing house on Broadway at 16.

But this is my grandfather.

She points to her grandfather, Julio Mendoza, pictured with other workers at the Cudahy plant.

Mendoza says her grandfather worked there for more than 50 years.

They had several packing houses.

Some which attorneys made forget.

There used to be several meatpacking plants in the North End industrial area.

Then, several decades ago, some of those plants started moving west to places like Dodge City, Garden City and Liverpool.

The former Cudahy plant site remains to this day at 2300 North Broadway, the property is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Construction on this facility started in 1889.

In 19, cut hay, purchased the plant and operated it for more than 70 years.

Wichita became known as a cow town and a railhead for Texas cattle drives.

Once a rail line arrived here in 1872 and the North End was where the former Wichita Livestock Exchange and where the stockyards were located.

Grain elevators and milling also make up part of the north end industry.

Besides railroad construction through Kansas prices, meatpacking companies and grain mills in the North End attracted Mexican immigrants.

The packing houses were a tough job, but they pay wages that allowed a standard of living.

That was certainly an improvement over where families had come from in Mexico.

And those packing houses were within walking distance to affordable housing in the North End.

There was an emphasis on having residential areas near where the employment was.

The former North End, shown in the book, had just about everything a nearby resident would need.

And within walking distance, you.

Have to go to the bank is going to be at walking distance and you have to buy groceries that are going to be in in your neighborhood.

You are not going to be you are not going to be commuting.

You are not going to need a a car.

Those days are gone and so are many of the retailers and other services which once cater to the north and populous.

The old photos from the 1940s, fifties and sixties show how busy the neighborhood, streets and sidewalks were with local shopping.

Compare that to the present.

There's plenty of traffic on the streets, but for the most part that traffic isn't stopping to shop.

There are many empty storefronts which once housed businesses along Broadway, 21st Market and other North End streets.

Consider also that Broadway Street was U.S. Highway 81, the north south route through Wichita, bringing a lot of local traffic through the north end.

Most of that traffic is now on i 135.

Earlier we talked about the culinary aroma coming from the street taco stand.

But the north end has been known for less desirable odors in its history.

I don't know if you ever remember there was a smell of the stockyards.

Long time Wichita, it's no doubt.

Can't forget that odor.

And the oil refinery also was along 21st Street, so it had that smell.

Now, many will recall the Darby refinery later called the coastal refinery.

It used to occupy this 21st Street property west of the I1 35 canal route.

The Darby refinery, built around 1920, was closed in 2005.

It was removed a few years later, and the property was an EPA Superfund cleanup site.

Now new business is coming in on the former refinery site with large warehouses and manufacturing, bringing hope of more employment in the North End.

The North End went through an outmigration of families after the stockyards, packing houses and refinery closed.

You see an out migration of workers, especially white workers, but also the businesses that support them are going to close and so a lot of those families are going to be moving out as well.

And new families and immigrants come in.

So known Rojos immigrated from Mexico to Wichita, a couple of years ago.

He's seen changes in that short time in this neighborhood.

And yeah, we're seeing a lot of new people coming in from different places, moving from different states and people coming to the new people coming to the country.

We can see that Everyday.

Changes is expected with new property owners.

For example, there are new owners of the Noma theater who want to revitalize it.

The Nomar Theater opened in 1929, near 21st and Market.

It was highly acclaimed at the time in local newspapers, but it was also a time of segregation.

If you were Mexican or black, you had to sit in the balcony.

You couldn't sit down at the main floor with the Anglos.

Another strike against the North End in the 1970s is the completion of the canal route that diverted traffic around the north end.

So by the late seventies, you have the end of the meatpacking plants nearby.

You have the fading of the grain elevators and the refineries.

You have Broadway shifting to IE 135.

But there are a few businesses which have been able to survive and thrive here for generations.

One of those is Connie's Mexico Cafe, Wichita's oldest family run Mexican restaurant, according to the Kansas Historical Society.

Connie's Mexico Cafe has been a part of the North End since 1963.

Rafael and Concepcion Lopez immigrate here from Mexico and later opened the cafe near the busy meat packing plants in that day.

Carmen Garcia's mother operated Connie's for several decades until recently retiring.

So Carmen and her sister, a third generation, take the reins of the popular restaurant.

You know, we got the big shoes to fill in.

You know, knowing that this is third generation of powerful Latino women running this restaurant.

And that's great because we get it from my mom, my grandma.

So we'll be fine.

We cannot wait.

We're a legacy and a staple in the community, and we want to continue that.

So you can't replicate the North End.

The book tells the North End story through the faces of those who have lived here.

Northern residents shared family photos dating back several decades with the book's authors.

The photos help tell the stories of important family and neighborhood events of weddings, the festivals of U.S. military service graduations and much more.

It does keep evolving.

It's like any any neighborhood.

It changes and it grows and it always will.

And considering the changes to the North End that the book documents, we should assume that the North End will continue to evolve and could look much differently in the decades to come.

It was just such a wonderful time to grow up in that in that.

In that area.

This is Chris Frank reporting for Positively Kansas.

Mendoza sees this book as just the start of the North End story.

So we'll watch for more to come.

Among Kansas's most beautiful and mysterious creatures are bobcats.

In this week's Kansas Wild Edge report, Mike Blair shows us why.

When you think of animals that are hard to film, you have to consider a bobcat.

These beautiful predators marked with near-perfect camouflage and possessing a patience and self-assurance that they are somehow invisible if they hold still, are admittedly almost impossible to spot in natural cover.

At any given time, they may be in a territory of ten square miles or more.

They sleep a large percentage of these 24 hours, and they're mostly active in dusk and darkness.

So they're not a high odds photo subject for a person with a camera.

But modern trail cams placed on travel ways, can occasionally provide glimpses of these ghostlike creatures.

We're talking few and far between, and then almost always at night.

I don't play the lottery, but to me, such surprise clips surely sparked the same surge as a winning ticket.

I get maybe half a dozen such clips over a period of months.

That is until this past week when I've had spectacular luck on a wild mother, bobcat and her have grown kitten.

No bait was involved here.

These rare clips were the result of good habitat, right placement and pure luck during a period of snow.

I'm thrilled to see these remarkable moments as they happened in broad daylight.

I hope you enjoy them, too.

I'm Mike Blair, four Positively Kansas.

From Fauna to Flora and the story behind the iconic Kansas fire that attracts so much attention each summer and fall.

Jim Greenway has the story on Sunflower.

Good morning.

Should coming in like a sunny day, few flowers have more personality and purpose than the healing and the sadness commonly known as the sunflower.

This plant is as practical as it is beautiful and no doubt a lot of Kansans would agree that makes it the ideal symbol for their state.

They're the prettiest.

Flower, don't you think?

I love the color.

It's kind of hard to believe that when they take the seed and they make oil out of it or they make grain for.

Cattle, they just are happy.

They're a happy flower.

Each year, people flock to Dianna Burris's field near Augusta.

It's their fleeting chance to pose with the big bright state flower of Kansas, which blooms for just a short time at summer's end.

Once they start blooming there, there's about a 10 to 12 day time frame that you've got.

To be out here.

Because before long they start looking like this.

This was Pam Rogers Field, just west of Wichita.

As harvest time was approaching.

The sunflower is my favorite flower.

My favorite flower.

This was Rogers first ever attempted drawing them on her family farm.

And as soon as the flowers started blooming, visitors started showing up.

Well, people just like sunflowers.

It's the color of it.

It's happy.

It's makes you feel good.

Rogers only planted eight acres as an experiment.

It was something she discussed with her father, Lynn Burkey, shortly before he passed away in 2020.

Turns out he had raised them once before in 1979, and he didn't make much money on them.

But Rogers says she's not worried about that.

No, that's that's not the point here.

I just enjoy the color of it, the beauty of it, how it grows and it can grow just about anywhere.

And they just start popping up everywhere in August.

They're just beautiful sunflowers.

The smaller, wild varieties have thrived in what is now Kansas for thousands of years.

Here before there was a state, even people that were traveling the Santa Fe Trail back and forth between Kansas City and Albuquerque, Santa Fe noted the presence of the sunflowers, which makes sense because the ground that had been dug up by the traffic on the Santa Fe Trail would have been a perfect place for sunflowers to grow.

So you would have been a certain times of year you'd have been walking right through a gallery of sunflowers as you cross the prairie.

Native Americans were the first to grow and consume sunflowers.

Then European explorers exported the seeds around the world.

It was in Russia, where the high yield domestic hybrids were originally developed and farmers started cultivating the plants in large numbers.

But commercial production of the sunflower was still a new idea in the United States.

In 1903, when the Kansas legislature voted to make it the official state flower.

State Senator George Moorhouse introduced the bill, citing the sunflower for being striking to look at easy to draw paint and carve, and noting its association with the prairie trails that brought settlers to the region.

Thought this was a very eye catching emblem easy to produce, easily recognized is.

The editor of the Ellis Review headlight offered his endorsement, writing that the sunflower will do.

It isn't much of a smile or he wrote, but it is a great looker.

And these flowers make great photo subjects because they're almost always facing the sun.

Because the the the blossom on of a sunflower plant is there as a kind of a landing pad for insects, honeybees and other pollinating insects being cold blooded creatures.

What the sunflowers will do is they actually are capable of a limited range of motion where they will face the sun as it comes up in the morning.

And that provides a a nice warm spot, extra warm spot for the honeybees to come in and feed and increase their body temperature at the same time through the generations.

One part of the plant or another has been promoted for livestock feed.

Hair tonic, healing salve.

And even a preventative for malaria.

Nowadays, the number one commercial use for sunflowers is cooking oil, and that is the variety that is best suited for the climate in central Kansas.

The confectionery or snacking type grow well in western Kansas, where it's drier.

Rogers says her first harvest was a home run, and she says she'll plant more acres next year.

Meanwhile, Burris looks forward to many more sunflowers seasons as well, and many more visitors who share her passion for the Kansas State flower for Positively Kansas.

I'm Jim Garraway.

Well, that's a wrap for this week.

positivelykansas@kpts.org is our address if you want to write us.

I'm Sierra Scott.

Thanks for watching.

See you again soon.

Positively Kansas is brought to you in part by program support provided by the F price Kosman Memorial Trust and Trust Bank Trustee bringing you the Kansas Wild Ed segments on Positively Kansas.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas serves more than 900,000 Kansans in various programs.

Independent member owned Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas, an independent licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, proudly supports PBS Kansas.

Before investing your hard earned money, make sure your financial advisor understands your objectives.

Mark Douglass CFP Serving our community for over 25 years, providing customized financial solutions that focus on the individual.