“I thought, 'This is the University of Iowa. This is going to be a breeze. I went to high school with majority white students. This is going to be OK.’ But that was not the case,” Campos said. “I had to find my own communities to be involved with and my own support system. Especially because many places, I wasn't welcome.”

She said the experience of learning about the lives of Latinas who made a place for themselves in Iowa was empowering.

“I think it is really important to know (Iowa's Latino history),” Campos said. “We've been here for a very long time. Even before the 1900s. There are records of a few people coming in that spoke Spanish in the 1700s.

“I think especially in the climate that we are in right now of always assuming that any person that looks brown or has certain physical features are probably here undocumented or here recently—that's just not always the case,” Campos said.

Campos and others from the university presented this history at Muscatine Community College on Saturday. Campos explained that Latino peoples began appearing in Muscatine around the turn of the century. And though many of their stories find a root in Davenport’s Cook’s Point barrio, Muscatine – an area of industry — is a locale with a still growing population.