On a weekday morning before the sun has fully cleared the Atlantic, men gather at a low building off Military Trail with coffee in paper cups, waiting for the day’s work to find them. Many of them, or their fathers, were born in a highland town in Guatemala called Jacaltenango, more than two thousand miles away. The story of the Guatemalans in Jupiter, Florida is the story of two towns bound together by war, work, and family, and of a place that chose, after years of friction, to build something rather than simply push its newcomers away.
The Place
Jupiter sits at the northern edge of Palm Beach County, where the Loxahatchee River meets the Atlantic beneath a brick-red lighthouse first lit in 1860. It is a prosperous coastal town of golf courses, marinas, and gated subdivisions, the kind of place where retirees and second-home owners outnumber farmhands.
For most of the twentieth century it was a quiet resort community. Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, the same construction and landscaping boom that made Jupiter affluent created a demand for labour that local supply could not meet.
That demand, and the violence unfolding in Central America at the same moment, brought a Maya town to the shores of South Florida.
How It Became Guatemalan
A war in the highlands
The roots of the community lie not in Florida but in the western Guatemalan department of Huehuetenango, home to the Jakaltek Maya. Beginning in the late 1970s and peaking in the early 1980s, the Guatemalan civil war turned genocidal against the country’s indigenous population.
Whole villages in the highlands were burned, and hundreds of thousands of Maya fled, first into the refugee camps of Chiapas in southern Mexico, then north. As the anthropologist Allan F. Burns documented in his study Maya in Exile, the first organised arrivals reached Florida in late 1982, when a crew leader brought Kanjobal Maya to the farming town of Indiantown to pick citrus and vegetables.
From the fields to the coast
Indiantown, an inland agricultural community, became the first Maya foothold in Florida. The Roman Catholic priest Frank O’Loughlin, serving there in the early 1980s, became one of the earliest advocates for the new arrivals, and the organisation CORN-Maya grew out of those years to help refugees navigate asylum and survival.
From Indiantown, the migration spread east toward the coast. As agricultural work grew seasonal and unreliable, men looked toward the construction sites, nurseries, and lawns of the wealthier towns near the ocean. Jupiter, with its building boom and its proximity, drew them in.
The pattern that followed is one demographers call chain migration. One man from Jacaltenango found work and a place to sleep, then sent word home. A brother followed, then a cousin, then a neighbour. Over two decades the highland town of Jacaltenango effectively extended a branch of itself into a Florida resort town.
The corner on Center Street
By the early 2000s the consequences of that growth had become visible on a single Jupiter street. Each morning, hundreds of day labourers, most of them Maya from Guatemala and southern Mexico, gathered along Center Street in an open-air hiring market, waiting for contractors to pull up and pick crews for the day.
The arrangement worked after a fashion, but it was precarious for everyone. Labourers faced wage theft, unsafe job sites, and exploitation, with little recourse. Neighbours complained about traffic, crowds, and a perceived effect on property values.
Tensions rose. Some residents pushed for crackdowns and ordinances aimed at the labourers and those who hired them. The town faced a choice that many American communities have faced and few have answered well.
Choosing to build
What happened next is the reason scholars still write about Jupiter. Rather than legislate the workers out of sight, a coalition formed: longtime residents, immigrants, faith congregations, and academics from the nearby campus of Florida Atlantic University, several of them connected to the political scientist Timothy J. Steigenga, who had co-founded Corn Maya Inc. in 2002.
In 2006 that coalition opened El Sol, Jupiter’s Neighborhood Resource Center, at 106 Military Trail. It replaced the informal corner with an organised, sheltered hiring hall where wages could be recorded, workers screened, and abuses reported.
El Sol grew quickly beyond labour into a full neighbourhood centre, adding English classes, a food pantry, legal and health workshops, and youth programmes. Steigenga and Sandra Lazo de la Vega later told the full story in their book Against the Tide: Immigrants, Day Laborers, and Community in Jupiter, Florida, published by the University of Wisconsin Press.
The model drew national attention. It became, for a time, a case study in how a town could turn conflict over immigration into an institution that served everyone, employer and labourer alike. The contrast with the more punitive paths taken elsewhere in Florida, and the deeper hardships faced by Guatemalan communities like the Maya of Indiantown a few miles inland, is part of what makes the Jupiter story distinct.
The Landmarks
El Sol, Jupiter’s Neighborhood Resource Center, 106 Military Trail. The institutional heart of the community. Opened in 2006 out of the conflict on Center Street, it is the place where work, English lessons, food assistance, and legal help converge. For many Maya families it has been the first door that opened in Jupiter.
Center Street. The unofficial monument to where it all began. For years this was the open-air labour market where men gathered each dawn to be hired, the friction point that ultimately produced El Sol. To walk it now is to read the community’s recent history in the pavement.
La Esquina Guatemalteca, 200 Hibiscus St. A Guatemalan restaurant in the heart of Jupiter, its name meaning “the Guatemalan corner.” Here the chicken caldos, tamales, and other dishes of the highlands are served to a town that did not know them a generation ago.
Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse, 500 Captain Armours Way. The 1860 brick tower that anchors the town’s identity and waterfront. It stands as the symbol of the affluent coastal Jupiter that drew labourers seeking construction and landscaping work, the older Jupiter the newcomers arrived into.
Florida Atlantic University, Jupiter campus, in Abacoa. The university’s northern campus put scholars within reach of the community on Center Street. Faculty and students here, through Corn Maya and the research that became Against the Tide, helped turn an immigration flashpoint into a national case study.
Abacoa. The planned town centre that has become the setting for the community’s public celebrations, including the annual Fiesta Maya, where Guatemalan food, coffee, and marimba music are shared with the wider town. It is where the highlands step out of the kitchens and job sites and into the open.
The Guatemalan-Maya Center, Lake Worth Beach. A short drive south, this long-running nonprofit has served Maya families across Palm Beach County for more than three decades, tracing its origins to Father Frank O’Loughlin’s work with refugees in the 1980s. It remains a wider anchor for the region’s Maya population that Jupiter’s families draw on.
Where They Came From
The defining origin of Jupiter’s Guatemalans is Jacaltenango, a town in the department of Huehuetenango in Guatemala’s western highlands, near the border with Chiapas, Mexico. Its people are the Jakaltek, also called Jacaltec, one of the many Maya groups of the region, with their own language and traditions.
Jupiter is widely described as the place where most Jacaltecos in the United States have settled. The bond is so close that the two communities became the subject of the documentary Brother Towns / Pueblos Hermanos, directed by Charles D. Thompson Jr., which follows the lives of Jacaltecos moving between the Guatemalan highlands and the Florida coast.
The pull factor was work: construction, landscaping, and service jobs in a fast-growing affluent town. The push factor, for the first generation, was survival. The genocide of the early 1980s and the poverty that followed the war left highland families with few options, and the path north, once opened by a handful of pioneers, became a well-worn road traced by family ties.
Smaller numbers came from other Maya towns of Huehuetenango and the surrounding highlands, and the wider Florida Maya story also runs through San Miguel Acatan and the Kanjobal communities that settled first in Indiantown. The diaspora reaches far beyond Florida, of course, with one of the largest concentrations in the country among the Guatemalans of Los Angeles. But in Jupiter, the name that recurs is Jacaltenango.
Jupiter Today
Jupiter remains, on its surface, the prosperous coastal town it has long been. Hispanic residents make up a meaningful minority of its roughly sixty thousand people, and the Guatemalan Maya are a distinct thread within that, concentrated in working-class pockets rather than spread evenly across the gated subdivisions.
The community is no longer only its first generation of day labourers. Children who learned English in El Sol’s classrooms have grown up, gone to local schools, and in some cases moved into trades, small businesses, and professions. The corner on Center Street that once defined the community in the eyes of its neighbours has given way to an institution that the town now points to with a measure of pride.
The community sits within the wider Latin American story of South and Central Florida, alongside threads such as the Venezuelans of Orlando and other newcomers who have reshaped the state in recent decades.
Yet the present is not without strain. Florida’s immigration climate has hardened in recent years, and the legal uncertainty that has shadowed the Maya since the 1980s asylum battles has never fully lifted. For a community built on labour that the wider economy depends on but does not always welcome, security can feel provisional. Even so, the marimba still plays at Fiesta Maya, the tamales are still steamed in Jupiter kitchens, and the road back to Jacaltenango stays open in both directions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Guatemalans in Jupiter, Florida?
The Guatemalans in Jupiter, Florida came largely as Maya refugees fleeing the genocide of the Guatemalan civil war in the early 1980s, first to farm towns like Indiantown and then to Jupiter’s booming construction and landscaping jobs. Chain migration from the highland town of Jacaltenango did the rest, with family members following one another north over two decades.
What part of Guatemala do Jupiter’s Maya come from?
Most trace their origins to Jacaltenango, a town in the department of Huehuetenango in Guatemala’s western highlands. Its people are the Jakaltek, or Jacaltec, Maya, and Jupiter is often described as the place where most Jacaltecos in the United States now live.
What is El Sol in Jupiter?
El Sol, Jupiter’s Neighborhood Resource Center, opened in 2006 at 106 Military Trail. It replaced the informal day-labour market on Center Street with an organised hiring hall and grew into a full community centre offering English classes, a food pantry, and legal and health services to the Guatemalans in Jupiter, Florida and their neighbours.
What was the conflict over day labourers on Center Street?
By the early 2000s hundreds of mostly Maya day labourers gathered each morning on Center Street to be hired, prompting complaints from neighbours about traffic and property values, while the workers themselves faced wage theft and unsafe jobs. Rather than only passing punitive ordinances, a coalition of residents, immigrants, churches, and Florida Atlantic University faculty created El Sol in 2006.
Is there Guatemalan food in Jupiter?
Yes. La Esquina Guatemalteca at 200 Hibiscus Street serves Guatemalan dishes, and the annual Fiesta Maya in Abacoa brings Guatemalan food, coffee, and marimba music to the wider town. These are among the most visible signs of the Guatemalans in Jupiter, Florida.
Has Jupiter’s Guatemalan community been written about?
Yes. The book Against the Tide: Immigrants, Day Laborers, and Community in Jupiter, Florida by Sandra Lazo de la Vega and Timothy J. Steigenga tells the story of El Sol, and the documentary Brother Towns / Pueblos Hermanos by Charles D. Thompson Jr. follows the link between Jacaltenango and Jupiter.
If your family’s story passed through Jupiter, or any of the places Guatemalans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the highlands of Jacaltenango and Huehuetenango, to a corner on Center Street and a hiring hall on Military Trail, to wherever you are now.