For 50 long years, life in Hamilton, a town of 63,000 people a half-hour north of Cincinnati, was in decline.

Factories closed and thousands of residents moved away to Cincinnati, Columbus and beyond. The scourge of the opioid epidemic during the early 2000s sucked the life out of Butler county’s seat of government.

But then, slowly, immigrants came to town. And things began to get better.

Inside Mary’s Comida Casera, an unadorned Mexican restaurant serving Guanajuato food on Hamilton’s southside, a telenovela plays on a pair of televisions while two elementary-age kids watch cartoons on a tablet in the corner.

The restaurant, formerly a 136-year-old residential property, along with dozens of Latin American