University of Iowa
Iowa Research Online
Theses and Dissertations
Spring 2013
Making Meatville: belonging and migration in a
Midwest meatpacking town
Cristina Lea Ortiz
University of Iowa
Copyright 2013 Cristina L. Ortiz
This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2599
Recommended Citation
Ortiz, Cristina Lea. "Making Meatville: belonging and migration in a Midwest meatpacking town." PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) thesis,
University of Iowa, 2013.
http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2599.
Follow this and additional works at: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd
Part of the Anthropology Commons
MAKING MEATVILLE: BELONGING AND MIGRATION IN A
MIDWEST MEATPACKING TOWN
by
Cristina Lea Ortiz
An Abstract
Of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in Anthropology
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
May 2013
Thesis Supervisor: Associate Professor Meena R. Khandelwal
1
ABSTRACT
This research focuses on a rural Iowa meatpacking community and the ways
diverse residents negotiate belonging in this context. People with various lengths of local
residence, racial/ethnic identities, social classes, language proficiencies, and education
levels all reside together in Meatville and many engage in face-to-face daily interactions
with one another. I argue that the combination of rurality and low-wage industrial
employment influences how residents manage belonging and social participation even as
they engage in activities that appear unrelated to meatpacking. Identities connected to
industrial work extend beyond the factory into the social relationships among community
members, including those who are not plant employees. Paradoxically, economic
development in the form of a meatpacking plant challenged residents’ ability to see
themselves as a “community” with shared experiences, values, and identities. The rural
context presents a unique sense of place as well as practical challenges and opportunities
for belonging. My fieldwork combines observations in the domains of school, families
and households, and public events to explore how interpersonal and institutional
mechanisms affect inclusion or exclusion.
Abstract Approved: ____________________________________
Thesis Supervisor
____________________________________
Title and Department
____________________________________
Date
MAKING MEATVILLE: BELONGING AND MIGRATION IN A MIDWEST
MEATPACKING TOWN
by
Cristina Lea Ortiz
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in Anthropology
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
May 2013
Thesis Supervisor: Associate Professor Meena R. Khandelwal
Copyright by
CRISTINA LEA ORTIZ
2013
All Rights Reserved
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
_______________________
PH.D. THESIS
_______________
This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of
Cristina Lea Ortiz
has been approved by the Examining Committee
for the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy
degree in Anthropology at the May 2013 graduation.
Thesis Committee: __________________________________
Meena R. Khandelwal, Thesis Supervisor
__________________________________
Virginia R. Dominguez
__________________________________
Michael Chibnik
__________________________________
Ellen Lewin
__________________________________
Santiago Vaquera-Vasquez
To my family
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are many people without whom this dissertation would not exist. I thank
all of the people who even in very small ways made it possible for me to graduate.
Among the people to whom I owe the biggest thanks are the people in Meatville. I will
be forever grateful for your willingness to share your thoughts and invite me into your
homes, social activities, and workplaces. Although I cannot name you individually, thank
you especially to all the community leaders, school personnel, city workers, and business
people who shared their thoughts, invited me to meetings, allowed themselves to be
interviewed, and helped keep me up-to-date with the goings on!
Thank you also to my committee who were perpetually encouraging throughout
the graduate school process. I couldn’t have asked for better people to stick up for me
when the moment called for it. I have truly valued your wisdom and expertise as
mentors. A special thanks to Meena Khandelwal for being so generous with your time,
encouragement, and valuable feedback. You read and re-read drafts, gave last-minute
feedback, attended presentations, answered questions, and have always been so
encouraging; thank you. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Virginia Dominguez for getting
the process started. You once gave a very convincing pep talk about staying in graduate
school and I will always remember how inspired it made me feel. Meena and Virginia,
you both have an uncanny ability to simultaneously scare me out of my wits and nudge
forward just the right amount; for this I will always be grateful!
A los dominicanos, un gran abrazo y el más profundo agradecimiento. Sobre
todo, gracias a Bienvo por introducirme a la familia y al Doctor Tavarez por hacerme
parte de tu familia. Les pido disculpas for todos los errores sociales y de interpretación
que cometí. Que dios les bendiga por haber asegurado que yo tenía qué comer, dónde
vivir, muchas risas, y suficiente bachata.
iii
Thank you also to Sara Sedlacek and Tracy Hatfield. It felt so good to be a part
of the campaign. I can’t thank you enough for reminding me how important activism is
and how important it is to embrace what I believe in rather than be afraid of what might
happen when I do. And, of course, thank you for giving me a great excuse to knock on
more doors in southeast Iowa than I ever imagined possible! Thank you to Natoshia
Askelson and Shelly Campo for giving me a wonderful place to work and being so
flexible and encouraging. It was a really valuable experience!
For their support, encouragement, friendship thanks to my fellow graduate
students, especially Susie Donaldson, Tony Pomales, Cerisa Reynolds, Jennifer Trivedi,
Lauren Anaya, and Angelique Dwyer. Your advice and knowledge has been worth more
than you can know. Special thanks to Lavanya Proctor and Hannah Marsh for leading the
way in supporting and encouraging cohorts of UI Anthropology students to learn and
socialize together across disciplinary and other boundaries; well done! Thank you also to
all the other members of the University of Iowa Department of Anthropology for all their
help over the years. A special thanks to Beverly Poduska and Shari Knight for going
above and beyond to help make the really important things happen and for how much
they truly care about the people in the department! Also, thank you to the University of
Iowa Department of Spanish and Portuguese for giving me the opportunity to teach and
helping me do it better. I am grateful that I came into graduate school with such a
supportive cohort of friends, colleagues, and mentors. In particular, I owe a great deal to
Mamadou Badiane. Thank you for caring about me, teaching me so much, encouraging
me to follow my academic bliss, and putting up with so much drama. You will always be
part of my chosen family.
Probably the biggest thanks is owed to my family. They shared not only love and
encouragement but also money, food, vehicles, clothes, and laughs usually at the precise
moments that I really needed them. Through heartbreak, disappointment, financial woes,
and stress I could always count on your support; thank you for believing in me. Thank
iv
you also for reminding me to have fun and enjoy a good laugh! Special thanks to my
parents, Oscar John and Kate Ortiz, for encouraging me to follow my bliss and doing
whatever they could to help me, including sending holiday care packages with parachute
bunnies and jumping frogs. Also a special thank you to my sister, AnaMarie, her
husband, Sean, and their son James. Even though you live far away, I knew you were
there for me and was inspired by the creative ways that you kept in touch. Thanks for
putting up with vacations where I had to work or was distracted and for showing me such
a good time whenever I came to visit!
This dissertation was completed with funding from the Marcus Bach Fellowship,
Ballard-Seashore Fellowship, Jane Weiss Memorial Scholarship, Rusty Barceló
Scholarship, and funding from the University of Iowa Department of Anthropology.
Portions of it have been presented at various venues including the Annual Meeting of the
American Anthropological Association, the Annual Meeting of the Central States
Anthropological Society, the Society for Applied Anthropology, the Society for
Economic Anthropology, and the University of Iowa Anthropology Graduate Student
Brown Bag Series. I thank the audiences at these presentations for their valuable
comments.
v
ABSTRACT
This research focuses on a rural Iowa meatpacking community and the ways
diverse residents negotiate belonging in this context. People with various lengths of local
residence, racial/ethnic identities, social classes, language proficiencies, and education
levels all reside together in Meatville and many engage in face-to-face daily interactions
with one another. I argue that the combination of rurality and low-wage industrial
employment influences how residents manage belonging and social participation even as
they engage in activities that appear unrelated to meatpacking. Identities connected to
industrial work extend beyond the factory into the social relationships among community
members, including those who are not plant employees. Paradoxically, economic
development in the form of a meatpacking plant challenged residents’ ability to see
themselves as a “community” with shared experiences, values, and identities. The rural
context presents a unique sense of place as well as practical challenges and opportunities
for belonging. My fieldwork combines observations in the domains of school, families
and households, and public events to explore how interpersonal and institutional
mechanisms affect inclusion or exclusion.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................... 1 Methods ............................................................................................................ 2 Choosing a Field Site: Meatville and Me ......................................................... 4 Meatville as Micropolitan Area ........................................................................ 7 Racial/Ethnic Terms ......................................................................................... 9 Diversity in Iowa: A Response to Bloom....................................................... 11 Community and Belonging ............................................................................ 14 The Issue of Scale: Face to face-ness ...................................................... 20 Difference, Power, and Control .............................................................. 22 Transnational Culture and Identity ................................................................. 26 Meatpacking and Identity: New Gateways, Industry, and Class .................... 32 CHAPTER 2 A SMALL TOWN WITH A TRANSNATIONAL COMMUNITY .......... 45 History of Meatville ....................................................................................... 45 Change and Industry....................................................................................... 53 Rurality ........................................................................................................... 56 Boosterism and Development Discourse ....................................................... 60 Boosterism Interconnected to Social Relationships ....................................... 65 Changes in Meatpacking & Survival of Rural communities .......................... 67 Changing Identity of the Town ...................................................................... 71 Postville as an Example.................................................................................. 73 Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 77 CHAPTER 3 INDUSTRIAL WORK IN THE RURAL CONTEXT ............................... 79 Factory Influences on Community ................................................................. 79 Industrial Meatpacking as Context Impacts Identities ................................... 80 Inside the Plant ........................................................................................ 80 Outside the Plant ..................................................................................... 81 Length of Residence & Belonging ................................................................. 89 Defining Difference Locally .......................................................................... 92 Perceptions of danger or discomfort .............................................................. 98 White, Latino and Asian spaces ................................................................... 110 Exclusionary Incorporation: Making Do, Informal economy ...................... 115 CHAPTER 4 INTERPERSONAL FORMS OF VISIBILITY AT SCHOOL................. 120 Local Education in a Globalized, Transnational Rural Community ............ 121 Meatville Community Public School: School Defines Community ............ 125 Seeing as Knowing ....................................................................................... 130 Seeing Things Differently: The School's Mission Statement,
Colorblindness, and A Bunch of White People............................................ 136 Recognizing Difference and Connecting to Students’ Lives ....................... 140 "They just don't know how important it is": Differing View of Parents'
Roles ............................................................................................................. 149 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 156 CHAPTER 5 INSTITUTIONAL FORMS OF VISIBILITY AT SCHOOL................... 158 Bureaucracy and the Business Model of Education ..................................... 159 SIOP (Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol) ..................................... 162 Mixed Messages: The implicit lessons of "policy" ...................................... 171 vii
Pay No Attention to "the Man" Behind the Curtain: School Registration
Processes ...................................................................................................... 175 School as Culture-Neutral ............................................................................ 179 Public High School Social and Community Involvement............................ 183 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 191 CHAPTER 6 INDUSTRIAL WORK AT HOME........................................................... 193 Return to "Lo Familiar" ............................................................................... 193 Return to Agriculture and the Accessibility of Natural Resources .............. 197 Housing in Meatville .................................................................................... 200 Neighborhoods and Types of Residences ............................................. 200 A Fire .................................................................................................... 204 Everyday Dynamics of Housing Instability .......................................... 208 Knowing and Face-to-Face Communication ................................................ 213 Knowing about School .......................................................................... 213 Kin and "Knowing" People ................................................................... 217 Gender and Responsibility: Perceived Stability, Alcoholism, and
Domestic Abuse ........................................................................................... 219 Creating Stability, Making Family ........................................................ 219 Trauma, Violence, and Alcohol as Barriers to Stability ....................... 222 Intimate Relationships and Parenting ........................................................... 227 Husbands and Wives ............................................................................. 227 Parents and Children ............................................................................. 231 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 234 CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSION ......................................................................................... 236 Theoretical Contributions ............................................................................. 238 Policy Recommendations ............................................................................. 243 Future Research ............................................................................................ 246 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................ 247 viii
1
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
This research focuses on a rural Iowa meatpacking town and the ways ethnically
diverse residents negotiate belonging in this context. I will explore the way notions of
community are contested by both scholars and local residents. I argue that the
combination of rurality and low-wage industrial employment influences how local
residents manage belonging and social participation even as they engage in activities that
appear unrelated to meatpacking. Identities connected to industrial work extend beyond
the factory into the social relationships among community members, including those who
are not plant employees. And the rural context presents a unique sense of place as well as
practical challenges and opportunities for forging community. My fieldwork reveals
much about how interpersonal and institutional mechanisms affect inclusion or exclusion
in the domains of school, family, household and public events.
While much is known about the economics of industries like meatpacking, this
project explores how a variety of people negotiate definitions of community and
belonging in a rural meatpacking town. I identify a central paradox: Meatville depends
on the meatpacking plant and the employees it attracts to maintain its vitality while the
social and economic context it creates makes it difficult for people to see the social
contributions of "others" (racial/ethnic, linguistic, religious, immigrant status) as
necessary.1 By examining who is (in)visible in which contexts, I challenge stereotypes of
the Midwest and move beyond binary distinctions (white vs. Latino, documented vs.
undocumented, newcomers vs. long-time residents) to focus on the complexities of daily
life and identities that shape community belonging in contexts of neoliberal economic
conditions.
1 The name of the town, nearby towns, organizations, and individual participants are
pseudonyms.
2
Although this research focuses on one rural Midwestern town, my findings about
community belonging--inclusion and exclusion--contribute to understanding of the
relationship between community and inequality in neoliberal economies2 more broadly.
The flexible and temporary nature of work in a neoliberal economy is particularly visible
in a small rural community because of the emphasis on face-to-face interactions. My
approach brings work on inequality, race, and immigrant experience into conversation
with research about community and rural belonging. These findings have particular
salience as places like Meatville have been propelled to the forefront of political battles
over education, economic development and immigration policies because of their very
visible status as new gateways for immigration. My study reveals that schools are a
privileged site of community in rural contexts. It renders visible some of the challenges
of making home and enacting family in a transnational rural context. I offer an
intersectional analysis by considering how people experience life in Meatville from a
combination of subject positions including age, length of residence, language proficiency,
immigration experience, gender, and race.
Methods
This dissertation is based on fieldwork conducted from summer 2009 to summer
2011. I have lived in Meatville continuously from the summer of 2009 until the present.
During that time, I lived in three different homes in Meatville, sometimes with Spanishdominant housemates. I conducted more than fifty semi-structured interviews in English
and Spanish with people who lived, worked, attended school, or socialized in Meatville.
2 According to Larner, neoliberalism “denotes new forms of political-economic
governance premised on the extension of market relationships” (5: 2000). It includes a
preference for a minimalist state, markets that promote choice and competition, privatization, and
de-regulation (5: 2000). Larner also argues that neoliberalism is “both a political discourse about
the nature of rule and a set of practices that facilitate the governing of individuals from a
distance” (5: 2000).
3
The interviews ranged from half an hour to more than two and a half hours and took
place in people's homes, restaurants, workplaces, the local high school, and the public
library. With participants' permission, I recorded interviews on a digital voice recorder
and transcribed them using ExpressScribe and a foot pedal. I interviewed teenage public
school students, parents, elderly people, those recently arrived, and long-time residents.
Most of the interviews were with individuals but several involved more than one person
at a time. I purposefully chose not to work from a randomized sample of Meatville
residents and instead made a concerted effort to conduct interviews with the broadest
range of people possible. I succeeded in interviewing nearly an equal portion of men and
women as well as people with varying levels of formal education, various occupations,
diverse social networks in the community, and various types of household arrangements
(both in terms of the people in a household and the actual physical type of residence).
The relatively small size of the community allowed me to encounter residents in a variety
of different social contexts and as they enacted a variety of roles (worker, parent, church
member, elected official, etc.).
During my time in Meatville I also took part in a variety of activities as a
participant-observer including church services, sporting events, school functions,
informal gatherings, parties, and meetings (city council, school board, academic booster
club, etc.). I have maintained a subscription to the weekly English-language Meatville
newspaper since 2008. I volunteered as a Spanish-English interpreter for parent-teacher
conferences and other events at the public school. Additionally, I interpreted and
translated in other contexts: for people who wanted to make a police report; for courtmandated evaluations and substance abuse treatment; for clients whose lawyers didn't
speak Spanish; for patients whose doctors didn't speak Spanish; for people whose
banking institution didn't provide customer services in Spanish; for people who wanted
help buying things from English-speaking merchants. I read people's mail to them,
4
helped them buy things online, and made phone calls. Through a nearby community
college I taught or helped teach English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) and GED (high
school equivalency) classes for adult students. The ESL classes included native speakers
of Spanish and a variety of Chin dialects. Students may take GED tests in Spanish or
English, so the class was conducted bilingually. The GED class was unique for rural
community college programs in that few, if any, of the regularly attending students spoke
English as their first language; Chin students were studying to take the GED in English,
and Spanish-speaking students were studying to take it in Spanish. I continued to live in
Meatville through the 2012-2013 school year and actively participated in a variety of
community events.
Choosing a Field Site: Meatville and Me
I chose to do fieldwork in Meatville for a combination of reasons. First, it is
typical of meatpacking towns in terms of its economy and demographic composition. It
has attracted younger, mostly non-white, minimally-educated, non-English-proficient
people who work relatively low-wage and dangerous jobs. These workers help prop up
slowing local economies with their wages and contribute to changing the demographic
shift of an aging white population. Second, the town had begun to settle into its identity
as largely Latino: historical tensions had begun to die down, service providers had
generally acquired the necessary linguistic and cultural skills to serve Spanish-dominant
clients, and the town seemed "integrated" if not cohesive. Third, the town was small
enough in population and geography to be able to track, follow, or recognize particular
individuals as they moved in different arenas of the community (school, church, work).
And fourth, Meatville is equidistant from several nearby larger towns or cities and all of
these are at least 30 miles away. In contrast to some meatpacking towns that tend to end
up serving as bedroom communities or suburbs to larger towns and have many residents
5
who commute to work, Meatville did not gravitate socially or economically toward a
single one of these nearby places.
I grew up in a rural Iowa town with a similar size population to Meatville. My
mother is white and my father is Mexican American. I attributed this combination to the
way I experienced my identity growing up as someone who has light skin, dark hair, and
is very short (under 5 feet). My parents taught in public schools in several rural Iowa
communities and grew up in working class families in Iowa; both facts are key elements
in my nuclear family's story of who we are. My parents speak limited Spanish and I did
not grow up in a bilingual household or as part of a Latino social circle; in fact most of
the Latinos I knew before I went to college were part of my kin group. Today, I identify
both as Latina and as white, and I am often read as a white American by others. Although
I am not a native speaker of Spanish, I am literate and fluent in both Spanish and English.
Spanish fluency and time spent socializing with Spanish-dominant people have allowed
me to become familiar with some Latino cultures. As a graduate student, my financial
situation was very similar to many of the working class residents in Meatville.
Nevertheless, from my grandparents’ generation to mine, my family has been steadily
upwardly mobile and I grew up in a mostly middle class milieu. Thus, my experience of
poverty is much more likely to be temporary than it is for the people with whom I
experienced it in Meatville. As a new arrival to town, I was an outsider but these
experiences helped position me as an insider in English-dominant and Spanish-dominant
segments of Meatville. They also facilitated my participation with residents across the
socio-economic spectrum.
Despite this access to some kinds of insider status, I found I was also an outsider
for reasons I hadn't anticipated. I was not married, had no children, and turned 30 while
in the field. This combination was rare in Meatville as most women that age had either
been married or had a child, or both. I had expected that this might make me an oddity
6
among Latinos but I was surprised at the number of English-dominant community
members who questioned me about these issues. My negative responses were so
anomalous as to leave some interlocutors literally lost as to how to continue a
conversation with me! It wasn't that they didn't like me. They just couldn't figure out
how to place me socially. This outsider-ness made it important for me to place myself
locally by leveraging the resources I did have (free time, bilingualism, teaching
experience, computer literacy, wireless internet connection, and a reliable car) to begin
participating in local activities, often through volunteering.
One of the activities that most contributed to my integration was teaching ESL
and GED classes through a nearby community college. In accordance with the accepted
practice of both communities, Chin- and Spanish-speaking students called me "teacher"
or "maestra." Being positioned as a teacher helped combat assumptions that I was a
journalist or social worker. As a kind of caring work, teaching also conformed with
gendered assumptions about appropriately feminine social roles in white American,
Latino, and Chin frameworks. Soon, people all over town were referring to me as "the
teacher" and seeking me out for information. This brought a whole new level of
community involvement. People asked me questions I was unqualified to answer: how to
check the sex offender registry; how to get divorced; what a landlord's responsibilities
are; whether an employer would accept transcripts from another country; how to get a
breath check machine installed in a car to comply with temporary license restrictions
after a DUI conviction; whether an undocumented woman should leave her abusive
citizen husband and file for legal status if she thought she might still love him. These
questions indicated that people not only trusted my knowledge on a particular subject,
but, more importantly, that they trusted me to keep their secrets.
The everyday experiences of moving back and forth between my field site and my
academic and social lives on a college campus highlighted the fluidity of my insider and
7
outsider status. I agree with Nancy Naples when she argues that the dichotomy of
"insider vs outsider" obfuscates the interactive process of constructing each category.
These positions are not fixed or static but rather “ever-shifting and permeable social
locations that are differentially experienced and expressed by community members”
(Naples 1996: 84). In the classical anthropological model, anthropologists go to far
away, exotic communities and their separation both physical and metaphorical from "real
life" is very clear. Even for people who study U.S. communities, their "field" is not
usually where they live their regular lives. It's on the other side of the city; it's in another
state; it's with people they mostly wouldn't run into while not doing research. And when
I first went to the field, I thought it would be simple enough to apply this model and
envisioned my field experience as a kind of hiatus from my "regular" life. I tried to make
clear boundaries telling my mother, "I bet Margaret Mead's mom didn't call her all the
time in Samoa to ask if she was coming to family functions." And as I became implicated
in participants' lives, it became clear that Naples was right, "we are never fully outside or
inside the 'community'; our relationship to the community is constantly being negotiated
and renegotiated in particular, everyday interactions; and these interactions are
themselves located in shifting relationships among community residents" (1996: 84).
Perhaps more importantly, this fluidity served as a constant reminder that not only was
my subject position messy, but "the community" as an entity to be related to was also
ever-shifting. Meatville as Micropolitan Area
Throughout this dissertation I refer to Meatville as a micropolitan area. The
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) uses the terms “metropolitan” and
“micropolitan” to describe counties when publishing federal statistics. "Metropolitan
Statistical Areas have at least one urbanized area of 50,000 or more population, plus
adjacent territory that has a high degree of social and economic integration with the core
8
as measured by commuting ties. Micropolitan Statistical Areas have at least one urban
cluster of at least 10,000 but less than 50,000 population, plus adjacent territory that has a
high degree of social and economic integration with the core as measured by commuting
ties" (Office of Management and Budget 2013: 2). I borrow the term micropolitan and
apply it on a much smaller scale to describe the cluster of towns or villages near
Meatville that are tied to it in ways that go beyond commuting. While the official
boundaries of Meatville proper are clearly drawn, as a community Meatville incorporates
several other smaller towns. For example, the public school creates a sense of unity
because children in the Meatville Micropolitan Area attend a school located in Meatville.
There is also a high degree of cooperation and interdependence in civic governments for
economic and logistical reasons. The smaller villages near Meatville proper are
frequently lumped together and included in references to Meatville. This grouping helps
these small places be more visible because they get "counted" or represented indirectly by
being included with Meatville, but being folded into Meatville also diminishes the
potential individuality and presence of each town.
Meatville has one public school and there are no private or alternative schools. In
the absence of an array of social service agencies or a community center, local schools
come to serve as clearinghouses for services as well as one of the main physical spaces
for large gatherings or events. The school also has a key role in defining the physical
boundaries and identity of the community. The inclusion of other small towns near
Meatville in the school district subtly shapes how even non-students and non-school
employees view the boundaries of the community. In 2012-2013 public debate about
closing rural schools and post offices for economic reasons shows that community
members view these institutions as key to their identity and survival. Post offices and
public schools provide affirmation at a state and national level of the existence of a place.
Much work on the anthropology of education has focused on ethnically or racially
9
diverse urban schools, but the effects of divisions are amplified in a rural context because
so much community activity revolves around the practices and spaces of the school.
Racial/Ethnic Terms
People use a variety of terms to refer to racial or ethnic identities. Both locals and
academic researchers, particularly those who study or theorize about Latinos in the
United States, use the terms Anglo or white. Researchers who deal with other kinds of
racial diversity, particularly those who study transnational migration generally prefer the
term white and very rarely use Anglo. The U.S. Census, and many other bureaucratic
entities, distinguishes between ethnic identity as Hispanic/Latino or non-Hispanic/Latino
and race, which includes White, Black/African-American, Asian, Native American, and
other categories. Although they might identify as white on some forms, most Latinos
consider themselves people of color and have historically experienced racialized
discrimination in U.S. contexts. Latino locals (including people who were U.S. citizens)
in the Midwest in the 1990s and 2000s also use the term American to refer to white,
English-dominant Americans. This is a usage also noted by Lionel Cantú, "In referring
to Euro-Americans, the following terms were used interchangeably or in combination by
the respondents: white, Anglo, gringo, or American" (1995: 407). Because white is an
unmarked racial category in the United States, some interlocutors struggled to name the
category at all. In local usage and in keeping with U.S. racial hierarchies generally, the
term white excludes even light-skinned Latinos and others with non-European heritage.
To emphasize this distinction and the idea of a privileged European heritage, I use the
term Euro-American.
Terms to describe people with heritage in Spanish-speaking (and sometimes
including Portuguese-speaking) countries are contextual both in terms of region and in
terms of historical moment. In the 1970s and especially in the U.S. Southwest, the term
Chicano rose to popularity. In other places such as Arizona and Colorado, some people
10
continue to insist on the term Spanish, emphasizing the European nature of their ethnic
identity, sometimes in order to explicitly downplay their connection to Mexico. In the
1980s and 1990s in the Midwest, Hispanic was the preferred term. Rejected by some for
its imposition by the federal government, Hispanic has now been replaced by Latino/a.
This term allows for greater gender specificity by using the linguistic mechanism from
Spanish where "o" is masculine and "a" is feminine to indicate gender. Like Chicano,
Latino/a is politicized and particularly promoted by those who are politically active and
involved in education. Recent immigrants and working class or poor people tend to not
be invested in these types of terms or not be aware of their connotations. Many people
prefer to refer to themselves according to a national origin: Mexican, Salvadoran,
Dominican.
While white and Latino people constituted the majority of Meatville's population,
other ethnic/racial groups were represented. Among these was a small group of Filipinos
who had mostly moved away by the time I began this research. There were also African
Americans, most of whom came to Meatville from urban centers like St. Louis, Detroit,
and Chicago; both they and others in the community used the terms African American or
black to refer to their racial identity. Immigrants from several countries in Africa
including Liberia and Mali also spent time in Meatville, primarily as employees of Meat
Corporation, but most chose to commute to Meatville from larger nearby cities.
During the course of this research, refugees from Burma who had been resettled
in cities around the United States moved to Meatville. Most of these refugees were
Christian Baptists from the Chin region. Partly as a result of the bureaucratic process of
being a refugee, Chin people readily understood and accepted their categorization under
the umbrella term Asian even though I never heard them use this term to describe
themselves. Chin State is a region in Burma and people from this region refer to their
ethnicity, language, and political region with the name Chin in English (Chin State, Chin
11
people, Chin language). This terminology partly emerges from a longstanding struggle
for autonomy and self-determination in relation to the government of Burma and
Burmese ethnic, linguistic, and religious (Buddhist) domination. There are a variety of
dialects of Chin with Hakha being the lingua franca dialect. In Chin language, the
language and people are referred to as Lai. In Meatville when Chin people spoke
English, they always referred to themselves as Chin, but English-dominant residents
(mostly unaware of the political and cultural implications) frequently referred to them as
Burmese. Spanish-speakers mostly referred to Chin people as chinos (Chinese) and
assumed that they were speaking Chinese. Even after learning that they were not
Chinese, the name continued to be used and is commonly used in Spanish-speaking
communities to refer to Asians.
Diversity in Iowa: A Response to Bloom
While Iowa is not ethnically diverse—more than 90% white according to the
Census Bureau (2013)—Stephen Bloom’s controversial assertion that this makes it
lacking in "culture" supports the implicit assumption that white people, as the unmarked
category, have no culture. Iowa is well known for some historical points when it led the
way in racial and other kinds of equality, particularly through the legal system.
Nevertheless, assuming the state's ethnic homogeneity is natural elides its historical
moments of inequality and racial discrimination like those pointed out by Loewen (2005)
and Jaspin (2007). There are difficult truths about racism (and other -isms) that many
people in mostly white small towns see as unnecessary to address. This may be
connected to the non-confrontational aspect of "Iowa Nice" which sometimes makes it
difficult to combat racism and other -isms. If people think of discrimination as only
explicit and/or as a moral failing, it is difficult to see that in themselves or their own
community (Millard & Chapa 2004).
12
If "culture" refers to artistic expression and not ethnicity, saying that Iowa is
lacking is elitist and dismisses the many talents and artistic performances in "off the
beaten path" places. My experience traveling in Europe and visiting New York taught
me that sometimes urban dwellers take the accessibility of arts communities for granted.
Seeing ballets, museums, Broadway performances, symphonies, and operas in the rural
Midwest were that much more special because they were not ordinary or easy. Rurality
can also contribute to making experiences with the arts more inclusive. At a large school
or in a big city, a person must often be among the best to be cast for a theatrical
production, host a radio show, or be a featured musician at a concert. Having fewer
people in rural settings mean that students and community members can experiment with
a wider variety of activities and nurture budding talents, even later in life.
Representing a perspective shared by many middle and upper class white Englishdominant city dwellers, Bloom's view of Iowa fails to acknowledge the breadth of
experiences that constitute what it means to be "Iowan" for many residents of the state.
He rejects the existence of diversity with the quip, "if you could find any" (Bloom 2011).
Even if meant sarcastically or ironically, such a comment erases the very real fact that
many people in Iowa today have experiences that do not conform to a vision of Iowa as
ethnically, religiously, or otherwise homogeneous. I will not list all the varying kinds of
diversity that I have seen or experienced in Iowa as both a native Iowan and an
anthropologist. But there are an increasing number of people for whom being Iowan or
experiencing Iowa includes things like making pupusas or tamales with friends and
family, marching in a parade to honor the Virgen de Guadalupe in December, eating
Ukrainian-made pelmeni on a cold fall day, competing in a dance group at the University
of Iowa's Nachte Raho, recognizing Chin National Day in February, eating dates at Iftar
dinners during Ramadan, painting a green line down Main Street to mark St. Patrick's
Day, and celebrating the lunar new year at Tet celebrations. I have attended rural
13
farmers’ markets where I can buy Amish zucchini bread next to a stand where I can buy
fresh tamales or Mexican-style corn on the cob (with cheese and chili). I wrote part of
my dissertation while sitting in a rural Iowa coffee shop listening to a small group of
Mennonites speak a dialect of German. And I helped a Dominican family butcher a pig,
including using a garden hose to help the hostess clean intestines that we then consumed
in a tasty stew. This is the very essence of "buying local." While these types of
experiences are becoming more visible and frequent around the state, as a whole they are
not "new" practices here and many native Iowans have grown up experiencing these
activities. This list is not meant in the same way that people accused of racism claim to
have a black friend; rather my intent is to highlight some Iowa experiences that might be
invisible to people who are not expressly seeking them out or who do not believe that
they exist.
Non-white ethnic identities are influencing and being influenced by white EuroAmerican versions and visions of the Midwest. And this presents some tensions and
difficulties for all parties. Those who are coming to Iowa from elsewhere have
expectations and experiences of Iowa that sometimes confirm their prejudices about the
rural Midwest. Those who are long-time Iowans can be puzzled by the ways "others" see
them as rustic, backward, un-modern, agricultural folk. An anthropological voice can
help illuminate the "middle land" as Schwieder calls it (1996). It reveals how Iowa Nice
can be detrimental to fighting -isms at the same time that it can be an example of the
continuing existence of social kindnesses in an era of mean girls. Iowa is neither a
"throwback to yesteryear" nor a "cautionary tale of what lies around the corner" (Bloom
2011). It is both scuzzy and idyllic. It is both visible and invisible. It is both powerful
and exploited. It is both politically left and politically right. There is crime and kindness.
There are bullies and defenders. There are racists and anti-racists. There are gay
marriage supporters and detractors. There are hunters and vegetarians. Rather than
14
judging about Iowa's contradictions, quirks, and shortcomings an anthropological
perspective can show how these come into existence, operate, and coexist in the "real"
Iowa, which includes both mine and Bloom's.
Community and Belonging Classic community studies (Goldschmidt 1947; Lynd and Lynd 1956, 1965;
Vidich and Bensman 1958) paint a picture of agricultural and ethnically diverse U.S.
communities in the mid 20 century. In the 21 century, technology and global economic
th
st
factors combine to create a very different U.S. experience. Rural communities in the
Midwest and South have become new gateways for immigration. These locations have
distinct immigration histories, smaller populations, rural geography, and frequently lack
institutional infrastructures capable of serving immigrant populations (Waters and
Jiménez 2005: 117-118). A variety of authors address the connections between
meatpacking employment and notions of belonging for undocumented, racialized,
gendered, and non-English proficient workers in the rural Midwest (Baker 2004; Bjerklie
1996; Chavez 1994, 1998; Stull, Broadway, and Griffith 1995; and Cantú 1995). Several
books offer an in-depth picture: Deborah Fink's work on meatpacking in Perry, Iowa
(1998); Grey, Devlin, and Goldsmith's treatment of Postville (2009); and Millard and
Chapa's description of life in the rural Midwest for Latino newcomers (2004).
Nevertheless, none of these works adequately addresses quotidian senses of belonging
created from hegemonic naturalization of privilege, marginalization of some types of
difference, and resistance to these constructions. The convergence of these forces shapes
rural social experience.
Despite the romance of rural idyll, rural places are in reality embedded in larger
places and processes. Gans (1962) contests romanticization of the urban slum and its
"urban villagers" saying, "The West End was not a charming neighborhood of 'noble
peasants' living in an exotic fashion, resisting the mass-produced homogeneity of
15
American culture and overflowing with a cohesive sense of community. It was a rundown area of people struggling with the problems of low income, poor education, and
related difficulties. Even so, it was by and large a good place to live" (1962: 16). I could
say the same things of Meatville's "rural villagers." Naples also critiques such
romanticization of rural dwellers: "Contrary to popular belief, residents of rural
communities frequently experience the sense of alienation and fragmentation often
attributed to urban life. The growth in industrial capitalism revealed a variety of political
perspectives, social statuses, and perceived 'outsiderness' within the supposedly
'egalitarian' rural communities" (Naples 1996: 91). Caccamo explains how the Lynds’
classic studies of Muncie present the city as a threatened idyll of authentic American
democracy.
The small city represented the place where the traditional 'good'
values of the American pioneers (the white, Anglo-Saxon,
Protestant spirit) were crushed by industrialization and the
resulting class divisions (working class and business class). In
addition, the 'American dream' of upward mobility, typical of the
American colonial pioneering spirit, was disappearing. As Alexis
de Tocqueville had feared many years earlier, the frontier spirit
had become a mere appropriation that, deprived of the spirit of
community, no longer offered any guarantee of 'democracy'
(Caccamo 2000: xix-xx).
I argue that rural life is complex and question visions of the rural Midwest as a
yardstick for the United States, one that represents the "down-home"-iness or essence of
"real Americans” as well as visions that romanticize its poverty or an idealized notion of
disappearing rural community. In part I agree that, "Rural life, then, can be seen as one
area in which the dynamics of modern urban mass society are worked out" (Vidich &
Bensman 1958: 105). Places like Meatville are in some ways microcosms, while in other
ways they are unique places with unique people who have dialectical relationships with
other places, peoples, and processes.
Even for the people who live there, small, rural towns are often thought of as
unchanging, whether evaluated positively as quaint or negatively as backwards. Yet,
16
these places are actually sites of profound change and, as face-to-face social domains, are
key arenas for observing some of the quotidian effects of globalization in rural life.
Economic changes at the global and national level have led to a local shift from an
agricultural base to a more industrialized, large-scale model of farming and with most of
the local economy driven by a single meat-processing plant. Paradoxically, economic
development has led to more instability: low-wages mean more people living in
precarious economic situations; companies' local commitments are tenuous (many
companies shift operations when their tax breaks or economic incentives end); the supply
of animals to process can vary with weather and economic conditions; physical demands
on workers' bodies make it hard to keep a job; the constantly shifting pools of available
workers can be used to intimidate people into working more, for less money, and not
asserting their rights. In other words the boosterism that drew the plant to Meatville saved
it from extinction but jeopardized its ability to sustain "community."
Place is an important identifier, whether people embrace the qualities of a
particular place or define themselves in opposition to it (I'm not really a "small-town"
person). In either case, knowing the history of a place can become an in-group marker
for long-term residents. For example, long-time English-dominant residents refer to
places that no longer exist in discussing city improvement projects. Similarly, long-time
English-dominant residents like those at a high school Alumni Banquet in order to
ascertain where I was living inquired about my current landlord and, not recognizing the
name, the previous homeowner. But today, even rural places are complex. Discussing
Cohen's work, Amit writes that, "Community was not simply locale; [...] it had become
the nexus of an inextricable convergence between culture, place, intricate social relations
and collective identity" (2002: 5). Meatville provides an interesting entry point for
exploring how identities converge, change, and are negotiated in the context of rural life.
17
According to Amit, early anthropologists like E.E. Evans-Pritchard and Margaret
Mead used terms such as society, culture or peoples more often than community, which
"appears to have obtained greater analytical prominence when anthropologists began to
shift their research to cities, where the populations they studied were incorporated into
state systems and when they began to interrogate more self-consciously the limits of their
field of inquiry” (Amit 2002: 2). Thus they adopted the term community when referring
to complex societies that up to that time had largely been left to the field of sociology. In
this construction, community was the "antithesis of primitive societies" embedded in
context and linked to modernity (Amit 2002: 2). Nevertheless, she traces the history of
questions about community as a way to explore the relationship between social change
and social cohesion from scholars like Tonnies, Durkheim, and Weber to the Chicago
School, through Oscar Lewis to Anthony P. Cohen, Benedict Anderson, and Gupta and
Ferguson (Amit 2002: 1-2).
Certainly, ideas of modernity, urban life, and cosmopolitanism are central to local
white perceptions of changes in Meatville. They saw the town as becoming more like
"big cities" and dealing with "urban problems" like ESL delivery, communicating with
parents at a variety of educational levels, dealing with poverty. As an agrarian
community, Meatville prided itself on being home to self-sufficient, can-do people and
being a place where the gap between the haves and have-nots was not highly visible.
Locals felt particularly proud that they made their homes in a place with a level playing
field with equal access to success regardless of class, race, language or level of formal
education. Newcomers, particularly non-white and non-English proficient arrivals, who
came to Meatville presented a challenge to this identity as hardy survivors not only
because they challenged the idea of a level playing field but also because they were seen
by long-time residents as too “needy.”
18
There is also a racialized element of this challenge to rural identity from urban
encroachment. As Agyeman and Spooner argue for rural Britains, "In the white
imagination people of colour are confined to towns and cities, representing an urban,
'alien' environment, and the white landscape of rurality is aligned with 'nativeness' and
the absence of evil or danger" (1997: 199). Likewise, Erel notes the ambivalence
surrounding migrants in an English city where "appreciation of pleasurable aspects of
ethnic difference through consumption was in tension with a desire for a stable,
unchanging community; often the same person held both views" and the migrants'
presence is "valued as a sign of the city's desirability and economic success, signalling
that the city is becoming multicultural and a part of the modern world. At the same time
however, the presence of migrants also signals a loss of neighbourliness" (2011: 2056,
2058). Chavez's findings in a rural California community support this as he argues that
efforts to develop a sense of community, particularly those that mobilized around (nonwhite) ethnic pride, "were often dismissed because community continues to be anchored
in agrarian ideals-namely, the privileging of family farm life in which social relations
among townspeople were defined by longevity, homogeneity, and proximity" (2005:
332). Celebrating non-white ethnicity then presents not only a challenge to established
community identity but also to the perception of safety and neighborliness of rural social
interactions.
Such changes, challenges, and tensions highlight the sense of loss or instability
felt by many long-time Meatville residents. Defining community is a process of setting
boundaries of exclusion and inclusion. Referring to this as "the essential contingency of
community," Amit notes that, "participants' sense that it is fragile, changing, partial and
only one of a number of competing attachments or alternative possibilities for affiliation
means that it can never be all-enveloping or entirely blinkering" (2002: 18). Authors like
Signe Howell (2002) and Karen Fog Olwig (2002) illustrate how complex movements of
19
people over time also complicate identity because moving between locations (both
metaphoric and literal) multiplies and calls into question feelings about places and groups
of people. Augé points out how movement and complexity can cause consternation not
only for the people who experience them but also for anthropologists who study them,
"The ideal, for an ethnologist wishing to characterize singular particularities, would be
for each ethnic group to have its own island, possibly linked to others but different from
any other; and for each islander to be an exact replica of his neighbors" (2008: 41). He
argues that "supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which are not
themselves anthropological places" and rather are liminal, marginal, fluid, and complex
(Augé 2008: 63). Indeed, it is this liminality or contingency that unsettles longtime
residents of Meatville and makes hyphenated, transnational or cross-cultural identities
possible for other Meatville residents.
While the concept of community continues to be contested both by people who
define themselves as part of a community and in academic arenas, I agree with Creed
(2006) that it is not necessary to settle on one specific definition for the term to be useful.
An important component of community that Creed highlights is that issues of boundaries
are not just about drawing lines for inclusion or exclusion but are important precisely
because something is at stake when they are drawn. He says, “argument about inclusion
and exclusion can be appreciated as more than just issues of prejudice and culture clash.
They are contests over power and the resources such power affords” (Creed 2006:10).
With this in mind, I use the concept of community as it appears in the opening sentence
of this dissertation to refer to the people who live together in both the physical and social
spaces of Meatville. In Spanish, I often used the verb convivir (to live together or with
one another) to describe what I was studying. While not a noun like “community,” the
word convivir implicitly contains the idea that people do it to varying degrees and with
20
varying degrees of success. Thus, I think of the Meatville community as an intersection
of people who are managing lives in the relation to the same place.
The Issue of Scale: Face to face-ness
The issue of scale is crucial to notions of belonging and community. Tonnies’
(1957) concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gessellschaft illustrate one attempt to deal with
differences in scale and the affect or interest associated with these. Anderson's (1991)
concept of an imagined community is also an attempt to theorize belonging on a large
scale where members of a nation have no face-to-face contact and in an increasingly
mobile context. While Gemeinschaft gets at the differences between small and large
scales of belonging, such neatly arranged social attachments, especially in a
contemporary context of complexity and mobility, were probably never so
straightforward (Amit 2002: 17). Amit argues that the sentiment or "capacity for
empathy and affinity," emerge from "actual and limited social relations and practices"
(2002:17). In other words, small-scale daily interactions are necessary for community to
exist in that, "People care because they associate the idea of community with people they
know, with whom they have shared experiences, activities, place and/or histories. In
turn, they use these interpersonal relations to interpret their relationship to more extended
social categories" (Amit 2002: 18). The everyday shared experiences that contribute to
feelings of care that sustain community are particularly visible in rural towns like
Meatville where people emphasize seeing and recognizing one another in public as a way
of knowing each other. As Chavez argues, "Rural towns have been ideal places to study
the formation of community because in these areas interaction and locality plays such an
integral role in sustaining social relations across generations" (2005: 316). ReedDanahay argues that, although immigrants may also envision themselves as part of an
imagined national community, they come to feel a sense of belonging and citizenship
through these smaller-scale "face-to-face, tangible units of sociality" which she names
21
"communities of practice" (2008: 79). Indeed, Meatville residents placed a premium on
quotidian interpersonal contact as an indication of belonging.
Creed (2006) also recognizes the importance of scale in defining community. He
argues that the concept of “nested hierarchy” or “segmentary integration” allows for the
simultaneous consideration of different scales of community. By seeing smaller-scale
community entities like a local town or ethnic group as nested within larger communities
like the state or nation, it is possible to have “multiple and overlapping community
memberships” (Creed 2006:19). I find this imagery useful in conceptualizing the
intersection of power and multiplicity within different scales of community. However,
Creed also notes that some communities defy the nesting concept and “interfere with
fidelity to larger communities” (Creed 2006: 20). These kinds of communities disrupt the
hierarchical power associated with the nesting imagery and call into question the positive
associations of community (Creed 2006: 20).
Although belonging often has positive connotations, it is important to keep in
mind that more direct or intimate interactions can also have negative aspects. They can
be imbued with power and enacted as a kind of surveillance and control. Social closeness
of some rural communities, while inclusive of those who "belong" also excludes those
who are defined as "other," as Agyeman and Spooner note in the case of England, "Rural
areas are often considered as having distinct, close-knit cultures which are generally
regarded as intolerant of difference" (1997: 204). The knowledge that people in rural
communities have access to about each other, knowledge about education, possessions,
family heritage, and local leadership positions, provides possibilities for exclusion as well
as inclusion. In short, face-to-face interactions as compared to large-scale notions of
belonging are not simpler but rather equally fraught. And in the face-to-face context of
rural life, concepts like globalization and transnationalism are not only abstractions but
also keenly felt experiences of the relationships in a community.
22
In Chapter 2, I discuss how some aspects of Meatville’s history as a
predominantly white, Christian, and agricultural community have changed while others
have remained. Although Christianity continues to be the predmoninant belief system,
the public school has replaced churches as a primary site for social activities. Industrial
employment has overtaken farming as the primary source of income. These changes
have resulted in newly visible kinds of difference that challenged some residents’
concepts of community and neighborliness.
Difference, Power, and Control The works in Gupta and Ferguson's Culture, Power, and Place (1997) remind us
that power is also implicated in shifting relationships between identity and place. YuvalDavis supports this, saying that belonging "is not just about social locations and
constructions of individual and collective identities and attachments but also about the
ways these are valued and judged" (2006: 203). Large scale, highly visible transnational
flows of people, goods, and ideas through the local spaces of Meatville were largely
spurred by the recruitment and hiring practices of a meatpacking plant. Stigmatization,
established patterns of interacting, and the (sometimes unconscious) assumptions that
people make about each other are key to the ways people experience belonging. I agree
with Yuval-Davis that "The politics of belonging has come to occupy the heart of the
political agenda almost everywhere on the globe, even when reified assumptions about
the 'clash of civilizations' are not necessarily applied" (2006: 213). In my analysis of
Meatville residents' community-making, I examine how (in)visibility related to issues of
racial colorblindness, acknowledging difference, and differing views of social roles
naturalize or make invisible privilege, inequality, and misunderstanding that result in
(dis)enfranchisement or exclusion of some community members.
An incomplete understanding of how change, privilege, marginalization, and
difference are experienced in rural contexts has serious implications for both formal and
23
informal policies and practices in communities like Meatville. For example, urbaninitiated school reform proposals that recommend replacing large numbers of
administrators or staff, when standardized test scores are low, do not account for a rural
context in which the local school might be the largest or second largest employer and it
would be nearly impossible to hire enough new qualified staff to replace them. Research
about educational achievement gaps for poor students and students of color (Massey and
Denton 1992; Ogbu 1990; Lareau 2003) tells us a great deal about how these students
experience the institution of school differently and how white, middle class practices are
normalized. However, this research focuses primarily on urban and suburban schools. I
argue that such research must also consider place, particularly rural place(s). Similarly,
explorations of how gendered employment and/or religion influence immigrant
experiences in the U.S. are primarily recounted from an urban perspective (Ecklund
2005; Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000; George 2005). As residents of places like Meatville
struggle to cope with change and forge a path for the future of their rural community in
an increasingly transnational context, anthropological analysis must follow. Race and class become key factors in an analysis of rural belonging and concepts
of neighborliness as residents subtly and sometimes unconsciously wield power to
maintain control either literally or figuratively over community. As the economy has
changed, so have rural communities and their ability to enact certain kinds of
neighborliness. I agree with Chavez that it is not the existence of neighborliness that is
changing, it is the way it is defined and enacted. Like the Californians in Chavez's
research, long-time Meatville residents made attempts to control some of the changes in
their community. He notes that, "Long-term white residents frequently complained that
Mexicans were not actively involved in promoting a sense of community which they
believed undermined the close social relations which once marked this agrarian town.
However, Mexicans were not absent in creating community; their participation simply
24
did not conform to the dominant view of how community ought to be accomplished"
(Chavez 2005: 321) and that Mexicans were therefore perceived as "disengaged citizens"
(Chavez 2005: 323).
Certain types of participation are naturalized and imposed as criteria for
belonging. Erel found that rural English residents expected migrants to conform to their
culturally constructed ideas of good neighboring which they saw as normative criteria for
belonging (2011: 2059). "The repeated association of migrants with overcrowding, the
failure to maintain private-public distinctions, and with excessive rubbish—in particular
migrants' failure to maintain the proper boundaries between dirt and cleanliness—builds
on racist tropes" (Erel 2011: 2059). Like Meatville residents, long-time residents in a
rural English town claimed that new arrivals kept too many cars, did not dispose of trash
correctly, did not understand their neighbor's language, played loud music, and came and
went from residences at irregular hours. Yuval-Davis explains how these claims function
as a way to exert control, "Belonging tends to be naturalized, and becomes articulated
and politicized only when it is threatened in some way. The politics of belonging
comprises specific political projects aimed at constructing belonging in particular ways to
particular collectivities that are, at the same time, themselves being constructed by these
projects in very particular ways" (2006: 197). Claims to proper types of belonging are an
example of how residents, by prescribing appropriate actions, also marginalize deviance
from them and maintain control by exerting their ability to define belonging and
exclusion.
Both Naples and Cantú argue that manipulation of citizenship regulations and
other processes, particularly those related to institutionalized control and surveillance
contribute to keeping migrants in a permanently marginal and dispensable position
(Cantú 1995, Naples 1996). Similarly, Reed-Danahay describes how temporary
25
residence can function to make some kinds of difference acceptable precisely because its
impermanence counteracts a racialized threat to unified identity:
Students who were labeled "international" by the university,
perhaps precisely because they are international students, who are
not staying in the United States permanently, but will return home,
and, therefore pose little threat to U.S. identity, are freely
embraced by the university. They are celebrated through the
international festival and were, until the events of this protest,
honored with the display of their national flags during a parade of
nations. This is not so as to incorporate them within the United
States polity, but, rather, to foreground their foreign status and to
acknowledge the global consciousness they confer to the homegrown students with whom they come into contact (Reed-Danahay
2008: 91).
While for some people "flexibility, migration, and relocations, instead of being
coerced or resisted, have become practices to strive for," the ambivalence around
belonging described by Reed-Danahay and evident in contexts like Meatville
demonstrates that this is not universal (Ong 1999: 19). As Cantú argues, "One's sense of
welcome depends upon one's social location" (1995: 404). Yúdice takes this even
further by pointing out that for some people the flexibility of culture in a globalized
world has resulted in the commodification of culture. He writes, "culture is increasingly
wielded as a resource for both sociopolitical and economic amelioration" (Yúdice 2003:
9). The development of this argument includes the idea that cultural production and
distribution (he uses the specific example of Afro-reggae music in the favelas of Brazil)
is treated as a source of "empowerment" by NGOs and social workers who see it as:
A means by which urban youth can become a recognizable part of
the city and partake in some modest way of its assets in a context
in which government social services have dwindled and never
really worked well in any case, especially for the racialized poor.
They thus become performers of individual or collective selves
that are at least partly scripted to provide the life and spice, indeed,
the salve of the city (Yúdice 2003: 156).
Malkki supports this idea writing that, "In sum, the spatial incarceration of the
native is conceived as a highly valued rooting of 'peoples' and 'cultures'—a rooting that is
simultaneously moral and literally botanical, or ecological" (1992: 31). While the
26
rhetoric is about "culture as a resource" or "culture as empowerment," the reality is about
dominant cultures and institutions placing and utilizing the "other" in a way that benefits
or perpetuates the dominant status quo. Dominguez (1994) applies the term
“hyperprivileging” to describe a pattern in which racializing practices of institutions like
universities are disguised only enough to keep them from being challenged. She asserts
that, “Excellent intentions reproduce more than counter the very system of differentiation
and categorical inequality that the rhetoric and their accompanying institutional acts seek
to supplant” (Dominguez 1994: 336). Culture or diversity as a resource to be consumed is
also evident in Erel's finding that, "Appreciation of pleasurable aspects of ethnic
difference through consumption was in tension with a desire for a stable, unchanging
community" (2011: 2056) and Reed-Danahay's description of international students
whose ethnic identities were welcomed by the university in their temporary and nonthreatening form as public performance (2008: 91). Referring to Fanon, Bhabha also
notes the control implicated in surveillance in both its positive and negative forms: "To
be amongst those whose very presence is both 'overlooked'—in the double sense of social
surveillance and psychic disavowal- and, at the same time, overdetermined—psychically
projected, made stereotypical and symptomatic" (2008: 339). It is this double-sense that I
find particularly useful in exploring how othered people in Meatville were
simultaneously visible and invisible in the most disadvantageous ways.
Transnational Culture and Identity
While the presence of multiplicity, diversity, liminality, and change might
threaten some constructions of belonging and community, it also creates new possibilities
for how to belong or enact community. The creative choices that people make about their
lives are a testament to a diasporic, borderlands, or transnational existence. The residents
of Meatville often live their everyday lives in ways that refuse easy categorization as
either Hispanic, white, rural or urban and instead define themselves, their families, and
27
their communities in creative ways that honor their ancestry, the reality of their current
situation, and their hopes for the future in concert.
The concept of diasporic identity is useful in the Midwestern context because it
moves the concept of a "border identity" from its literal interpretation to one that more
closely resembles the kind of "borderlands" theorized by Anzaldúa (1987) . People are
not just moving back and forth between two nations (usually Mexico and the United
States in the specific case of Iowa), but also are dealing with complicated issues of
identification on many levels, regardless of whether their physical or geographical
residence has ever included more than one political-geographic location. The use of the
term "Hispanic" and the construction of a monolithic, "ethnic" Other obscures these
issues. And it is this that Anzaldúa attempts to illustrate when she writes that the
"psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands are not
particular to the Southwest. In fact, the Borderlands are physically present wherever two
or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same
territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between
two individuals shrinks with intimacy" (Anzaldúa 1987: preface). According to
Katherine Pratt Ewing, "the salience of the border emerges from a confrontation between
anthropology's old idea of bounded cultures with a recent focus on the flow of people,
ideas, and goods across national borders" (1998: 262). I find the metaphorical extension
of borderlands useful for theorizing about the experiences of rural Midwest communities.
Not only are the borderlands physically present, but also psychologically and
conceptually. With Gupta and Ferguson (1996), I would argue that a borderland exists
not only where two or more cultures "edge each other" but also where multiple
experiences of "culture" inhabit an intimate space, such as the conceptual and physical
space of the local public school. Yúdice's critique of some uses of the concept of "border
culture" supports this stance and he endorses Vila's (2000) argument that, rather than a
28
single border identity, there exists a more complex and multidimensional identification in
which "several competing and often coincident narrativizations of identity are deployed
to negotiate the status, value, or devaluation to which people are subject" (Yúdice 2003:
253).
Belonging, community, movement, power, and control come together in
discussions of transnationalism and its connection to citizenship. Foner argues that
anthropology as a discipline is moving toward including more U.S. contexts in the scope
of analysis and has key things to add to research on immigration.
A major task for social scientists is to chart and explain the
experiences of the newcomers as they create new lives for
themselves in this country while also, in many cases, continuing to
participate in institutions, projects, and relations across national
borders. Just as the move to the United States irrevocably alters
immigrants' lives, so, too, the millions who have arrived in recent
decades are reshaping American in profound ways and also
transforming their homelands (Foner 2003: 41-42).
Basch, Glick-Schiller, and Szanton-Blanc, define transnationalism as "the
processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link
together their societies of origin and settlement. We call these processes transnationalism
to emphasize that many immigrants today build social fields that cross geographic,
cultural, and political borders" (1994: 7). They use the term transmigrants to refer to
people who "take actions, make decisions, and develop subjectivities and identities
embedded in networks of relationships that connect them simultaneously to two or more
nation-states" (Basch, Glick-Schiller, and Szanton-Blanc 1994: 7). This definition
emphasizes the "'lived' and fluid experiences of individuals who act in ways that
challenge our previous conflation of geographic space and social identity" (Basch, GlickSchiller, and Szanton-Blanc 1994: 8).
To get at these lived experiences, Flores uses the term "cultural citizenship" to
refer to "a broad range of activities of everyday life through which Latinos and other
groups claim space in society, define their communities, and claim rights. It involves the
29
right to retain difference, while also attaining membership in society. It also involves
self-definition, affirmation, and empowerment" (1997: 262). The concept makes use of
both physical and metaphoric space noting that, "when Latinos claim space they do so not
for the purpose of being different, but rather simply to create a place where they can feel
a sense of belonging, comfortable, and at home. Typically, claimed space is not
perceived by Latinos as a place of difference, although it is often perceived as 'foreign' or
'exotic' to outsiders" (1997: 262). I found this idea particularly useful for thinking about
the ways people in Meatville constructed their lives and identities in creative ways that
called into question easy categorizations. "Latinos are not only entering society, they are
reshaping it, remolding it in their own image. The world that they are seeking to create is
neither a replication of the old countries nor an assimilation into the host society; rather,
it is a renegotiation of what it means to be a citizen with a distinct Latino infusion into the
defining fabric of the United States" (Flores1997: 277). Flores theorizes identities and
experiences that confound notions of assimilation or cultural preservation, precisely the
kind created by people in Meatville.
A variety of authors acknowledge the macro-level context as they consider
transnational practices at a more personal level. Although Flores' (1997) concept of
cultural citizenship includes the idea of claiming rights, they do not deal very thoroughly
with the political and economic macro-systems of citizenship. Zavella's (2011) concept
of "peripheral vision" goes farther to include these considerations describing it as:
Frequent reminders that one's situation is unstable in comparison to
those on the other side. Those who are poor or are members of the
working class and whose daily lives are influenced by
globalization are more likely to experience peripheral vision. They
recognize, often in graphic terms, that life fluctuates and is
contingent upon the vagaries of the linked economies and shifting,
polarized politics related to immigration in the United States and
emigration in Mexico (Zavella 2011: 8).
Crowley (1999) supports this, noting that, "notions of belonging not only relate to
whether migrants are recognized as a legitimate part of the locality, but also includes
30
their ability to realize their social rights." In her research on Muslims in Germany,
Katherine Pratt Ewing also suggests the utility of considering everyday subjectivities: "I
pose the alternative of tracing out the micropolitics of everyday life, foregrounding the
multiple positionings and identities occupied by immigrants and their families and the
diverse contradictions and inconsistencies they negotiate, without singling out their
situations as uniquely contradictory" (2008: 204). Zavella connects these macro systems
to lived experience by arguing that, "as a form of transnational subjectivity, peripheral
vision reflects the experience of feeling at home in more than one geographic location
where identity construction takes place in the context of shifting ethno-racial boundaries
and gendered transitions in a global society" (2011: 8). Others have further theorized the macro-level contexts of politics and economy
that constrain transnational subjectivities and the way people create boundaries of
belonging. According to Inda and Rosaldo, "The fundamental point here is that the
various flows which criss-cross the globe are not entirely footloose and the chains linking
different parts of the world to each other far from uniform" (2008: 35). They go on to
explain that "globalization is not about unrestrained mobility and limitless connectivity.
The world is not a seamless whole without boundaries. Rather, it is a space of structured
circulations, of mobility and immobility. It is a space of dense interconnections and
black holes" (2008: 35). Similarly, Ong's explanation of "flexible citizenship" as
referring to "the cultural logics of capitalist accumulation, travel, and displacement that
induce subjects to respond fluidly and opportunistically to changing political-economic
conditions" emphasizes economic and political constraints within which people construct
their lives (1999: 6). Taking another tack, Bump argues that immigrant communities who
successfully navigate these conditions become valuable themselves. He writes that, "a
newcomer community becomes a valuable resource as it mobilizes the collective
resources of its members to become a political and economic force capable of
31
representing itself and asserting its rights" (Bump 2005: 168). I follow these theorists.
While I focus on the experiences of people in Meatville, I also recognize the macro-level
political and economic forces that influence and sometimes constrain their lives and
possibilities. There is a considerable body of literature debating how much attention should be
paid to macro-level systems. Ong argues, for example, that the authors of Nations
Unbound (1994) have not paid enough attention to the effects of transnational political
economic contexts on majority populations, pointing out that they do not "sufficiently
deal with the ways in which the subjectivities of majority populations are also being
reworked by neoliberalism in the United States" (1999: 9). Levitt takes a different tack,
arguing that too much attention in this arena has obfuscated ordinary people and their
local, everyday activities like those of her participants who moved back and forth
between the Dominican Republic and Boston. "Much of the research on global cultural
flows focuses on how macro-level institutions and regimes spread throughout the world's
economic and political system" (Levitt 2001: 55) and emphasizes supply and demand or
push and pull factors. Levitt asserts that more focus should be on other ways global
culture is promulgated. "Ordinary people, at the local level, are also cultural creators and
carriers. Migrants send or bring back the values and practices they have been exposed to
and add these social remittances to the repertoire, both expanding and transforming it.
Later migrants bring this enhanced tool kit with them, thereby stimulating ongoing
iterative rounds of local-level global culture creation" (Levitt 2001: 55). Between Ong
and Levitt's argument lies a middle ground where the analyses presented in this
dissertation make an intervention. A rural, face-to-face community like Meatville
provides an ideal location from which to consider how everyday rural experiences can
also be transnational. National and international debates about what constitutes
citizenship or belonging are being worked through in quotidian activities in Meatville.
32
Meatpacking and Identity: New Gateways, Industry, and
Class
Changes in industrial structures (like the reorganization of the meatpacking
industry from urban centers to mostly rural locations in the 1980s and 90s) and changes
in the global economy have brought issues of belonging and inequalities (gender,
immigrant, ethnic, linguistic, economic) to the forefront of public discourse. More than a
quarter of the U.S. population lives in rural areas (Flora and Flora 2008), and small towns
with packing plants like Postville, Marshalltown, Milan, and Garden City play an
increasingly important role in national and transnational economic and social flows. This
dissertation is an ethnographic study of one rural Iowa meatpacking community that has
experienced radical change: the population is almost equally divided between Latinos and
Euro-Americans with some 400 recently arrived Chin Burmese refugees and a sprinkling
of African Americans. I focus on local experiences of inclusion and exclusion to analyze
how rurality and transnationalism converge and how local residents dealt with newly
visible kinds of difference (ethnic/racial, linguistic, class) as they imagined a changing
sense of belonging in the community.
Existing research focuses on the impact that a meatpacking plant or similar
industrial employment has on migration strategies and local economies (Alvarez 2005;
Amato 1996; Smith and Bakker 2008; Striffler 2005). Many studies have framed the
effects of industrial recruitment on local communities in terms of how they "respond" to
newcomers (Fink 1998; Millard and Chapa 2004; Zuñiga and Hernández-León 2005).
This approach makes sense in many "new gateway" destinations like the rural Midwest,
southern states, and the northeast. In this research I extend these foundational works
toward an intersectional ethnography that takes into account the interconnected and
contextual nature of a variety of identity factors. By both bringing together and teasing
apart identity components such as length of residence, race, class, and gender, I
33
demonstrate that local belonging in Meatville is negotiated in various and shifting ways.
Therefore, I argue against the view that social divisions in Meatville are primarily
between long-time residents and newcomers; such a view goes too far in privileging
length of residence and not far enough in recognizing that most newcomers are working
class people of color. The same would be true of an approach that focused primarily on
race without accounting for the considerable influence of length of residence. Research on rural communities has frequently focused on a particular industry or
type of work such as farming or meatpacking. Taking work as an entry point is key to
seeing and understanding how people in rural communities are able to live there and what
they spend much of their time doing. Focusing on work has been a classic way to
understand how social class is constructed by looking at how the work one is associated
with impacts possibilities in other areas of life. The connection between identity and
work is particularly salient in small communities like Meatville where, rather than being
restricted to "reading" someone's class in their public presentation of self (the way they
talk, the clothes they wear, etc.), people also frequently know things about each other
such as where they went to school, what kinds of possessions they have, to whom they
are related, and what local leadership positions they have held.
A variety of scholars have focused on issues of meatpacking by focusing at least
in part on the work itself and working conditions for employees of packing plants (Fink
1998; Striffler 2005; Grey 1999; Broadway and Stull 2008). These authors have
correctly pointed out the need for more attention to the human cost of corporate practices
like increasing the speed of production lines and reducing the amount of focus on training
workers in skills like sharpening knives. Some authors have made the connection
between worker health and issues of health care access in meatpacking communities
more generally (Midwest Coalition for Human Rights 2012; Blankenau and Boye
Beaman 2000). In this dissertation I do not directly take up issues of the practices and
34
policies within Meatville's plant. One reason for this is that, in the post 9/11 era, the
safety of the food supply is framed as a matter of national security. The hostility of the
meatpacking industry to surveillance or oversight was also demonstrated when, during
the course of this research, they successfully lobbied for a so-called "ag gag" bill in the
Iowa legislature that attempts to prevent activist whistleblowers from exposing animal
abuse in agricultural production facilities. In such a climate it is very difficult to get the
kind of access necessary to do such research effectively.
Also outside the scope of this dissertation are issues of healthcare access for
residents or industrial workers specifically. In some ways, healthcare is relatively
accessible for Meatville residents, particularly those employed at Meat Corporation,
because they have health insurance provided through their employer. There is a local
pharmacy and health clinic that provides services and Meatville's geographic location
puts residents within 60 miles of at least five other health providers (clinics or hospitals).
Although these options provide choices for people seeking healthcare, people's
movement among providers can complicate continuity of care. Additionally, the
financial cost of using a non-local healthcare provider (including the transportation itself,
unpaid time off work, co-pays for clinic visits, food, potential follow-up visits, and the
cost of any treatment or prescription) can pose a significant barrier to access. Healthcare
access is particularly important in rural meatpacking communities because the work is
dangerous and the intense physical labor makes workers particularly susceptible to workrelated ailments such as carpal tunnel syndrome and other repetitive motion injuries.
Healthcare access is also a key issue in communities like Meatville because the
population is unevenly distributed; the majority of residents are either elderly or very
young, including many new babies. Additionally, rural access to healthcare is a broad
concern across the United States but especially important in places like Meatville where
35
transnational migration flows present a particular need for access to culturally appropriate
medical care and especially mental healthcare.
In Chapter 3, I argue that rural industrial meatpacking influences the way
residents manage belonging and social participation even as they engage in activities that
appear unrelated to meatpacking. The temporary nature of the meatpacking economy
contributes to a social context in which people attracted to the community have identities
that are privileged neither in the corporate structure nor in certain kinds of community
participation. Conflicting interpretations of racial visibility, for example, led many white
business leaders to affirm that "everyone gets along" while students in my adult English
class confirmed that people of color felt targeted for increased police surveillance. The
social stratification of a racialized economy in which low-wage workers were primarily
people of color and immigrants or migrants while long-time residents were mostly white
and middle-class create an environment in which the contributions or potential
contributions of some are made invisible. In other words, a macro-level process like
racialized global flows of people toward and away from Meatville resulted in a particular
combination of politicized differences that constrained the kinds of relationships
Meatville residents were able to imagine and enact.
In Meatville, class is very much at the forefront of how residents see each other. I
was frequently told that local issues were not "about race" but rather "about class" or
"about poverty." Working class Spanish-speakers often referred to themselves as pobres
(poor) or trabajadores (workers). I was told that a local representative to state
government at one point publicly declared to fellow state congress members that the
problem with his district was not that there were a lot of Latinos but that there was a lot
of poverty. And a variety of people either used the phrase "culture of poverty" or
described how ignorance of financial management or unwillingness to "appropriately"
manage personal finances results in continued economic struggle.
36
In popular discourse, locals sometimes acknowledged the importance of
intersectionality, as when school personnel argued that the district's performance on
standardized testing was "not really or not just about race but also about class." However,
even amidst these occasional recognitions, local interlocutors most frequently spoke (as is
common for a lot of people in the United States) from their individual and necessarily
constrained understanding of their own and others' racialized, classed, gendered, and
other positions. They frequently noticed and articulated cross-cultural and crossgenerational differences such as their perception that Chin people as a group were more
interested in acquiring English language fluency than Spanish-speaking immigrants.
Nevertheless, despite noticing a difference in actual use of English (mostly in public
places), the same interlocutors were not aware of or able to articulate other factors that
might influence rates of language acquisition or use such as previous experience with
formal education, native language literacy, the local possibilities for conducting daily
activities in a language other than English, intimidation and ideas about respect when
speaking with someone official, and commitment to native language maintenance.
In his classic analyses of class and identity, Bourdieu (1986) argued for moving
away from a narrow focus on economic theory to a broader focus on a variety of types of
capital. By taking a broad view of "capital," he wanted to elucidate the "the immanent
structure of the social world, i.e., the set of constraints, inscribed in the very reality of
that world, which govern its functioning in a durable way, determining the changes of
success for practices" (Bourdieu 1986: 242). He elaborates on these structures or sets of
constraints as when he explains the relationship between "taste" and the power of social
ranking:
Objectively and subjectively aesthetic stance adopted in matters
like cosmetics, clothing or home decoration are opportunities to
experience or assert one's position in social space, as a rank to be
upheld or a distance to be kept. It goes without saying that the
social classes are not equally inclined and prepared to enter this
game of refusal and counter-refusal (Bourdieu 1984: 57).
37
He argues that the strategies that elevate the choices of the privileged emerge
from their power to assert that their choices are more valuable (Bourdieu 1984: 57).
Particularly relevant to this dissertation is Bourdieu's recognition of the role that formal
education plays in creating and perpetuating these privileges. Throughout this
dissertation I illustrate how some of the kinds of constraints Bourdieu notes are enacted
and naturalized in everyday life in Meatville.
A variety of researchers from Oscar Lewis (1998) to William Julius Wilson
(1978) have since considered the connections between work, race, and upward economic
mobility. This work has often emphasized quantifiable outcomes such as graduation
rates, housing segregation, and the accumulation of financial capital across generations of
family members. Others have built on Bourdieu's concepts to explore connections
between nation building, identity, and work. Research in the Caribbean has been
particularly influential in this respect. Many of these authors followed Bourdieu by using
definitions of class that consider factors beyond the purely economic. For example,
Yelvington (1995) draws on Bourdieu's concept of forms of capital to provide an
example of how relations between factory owners and workers are based on power that
results from different possibilities of accessing kinds of capital. He explains,
Given the workers' experiences of class, which includes such
'cultural' variables as ethnicity, gender, comportment, and
command of cultural resources, it is clear that a concept of class
such as that of classical Marxism, which identifies one's class
position simply as one's 'relation to the means of production,' is
inadequate for empirical or theoretical explanation. Moreover, it
does not do justice to the ways in which Trinidadians themselves
construct the categories of class (Yelvington 1995: 28).
Yelvington's work provides a particularly good example of how quantifiable
aspects of class articulate with subjective identity positions, "So, for example, a woman
is hired to work in the EUL factory at low wages because she is black and a woman
(different forms of embodied social capital), because she has not completed secondary
school (cultural capital), because she has no alternative but to sell her labor (economic
38
capital), and because she is not connected to any trade union or workers' organization
(generalized social capital)" (Yelvington 1995: 39). All of these attributes make the
female worker relatively disempowered in relationship to factory owners.
Although building from a similar perspective about how culture endures across
generations, Oscar Lewis' culture of poverty concept emphasized that the constraints
within which poor people made their lives came to be perpetuated on purpose by the poor
themselves rather than simply as a reaction to domination. Taken up as popular
explanation and reinforced with work like that of Ruby Payne (1996), it has become part
of a broader multicultural institutional and corporate business rhetoric that uses "culture
of" to talk about everything from the "culture of middle school" to the "culture of
accountability." I agree with critics who find that these approaches incorrectly blame the
poor for their own poverty. As Zavella explains, an updated version uses the term
"underclass" and "blames the victims and pays insufficient attention to structural
inequalities as well as to adaptation by and creativity of the poor" (2011: 1).
Nevertheless, the idea that a culture of poverty in which young people grow up inculcated
with a skewed or counterproductive view of how to manage their finances and thus,
through their own ignorance or unwillingness to change, perpetuates their limited
economic possibilities remains popular in local discourse.
In his historical analysis of Fijian plantation production, Kelly also argues for
looking beyond work or plantation labor itself to examine the role of race in recruitment
of indentured labor and the lasting effects such recruitment had on the island (Kelly
1991). Analyses of meatpacking in the U.S. rural Midwest have likewise illustrated the
importance of looking at the communities and social aspects of life outside the plant. The
context of labor and industry are key to exploring class and belonging. Yelvington notes
that, "As the factory ethnography shows, power and identity are forged in the crucible of
the labor process under capitalism" and that, "in the process of exploitation under
39
capitalism, identities are invented" (1995: 39-40). So-called "new gateways" for
immigration in the United States are particularly well-positioned to contribute to
continuing dialogues about identity, work, immigration, diaspora, and class that have
been prevalent in scholarship in the Caribbean context.
In Chapters 4 and 5, I focus on interpersonal and institutional forms of visibility
to explore the paradox of community belonging and participation that is challenged by
privileging some identities through negative or positive affirmations of visibility in
neoliberal economies. Economic development in the form of the meatpacking industry
saved Meatville but such "progress" challenged the ability of residents to see themselves
as a stable "community" with shared experiences, values, and identities. This project
explores some of the tensions and challenges that became particularly visible in the faceto-face, daily experiences of Meatville residents.
Key to the idea of class in a place like Meatville is the presence and economic
dominance of a meatpacking plant. Industrial endeavors like meatpacking plants and
factories did not accidentally or haphazardly arrive at the locations where they conduct
business. Nor is their location only a result of boosterism. Particular market and social
forces made it prudent for companies to conduct business in particular ways and in
particular places. As Basch, Glick-Schiller, and Szanton-Blanc argue, "The development
of transnationalism within the past several decades is part of a long-term process of
global capitalist penetration. The development of an international division of labor and
the integration of the world by transnational corporations that develop worldwide systems
of production, distribution, and marketing affect both the flow of immigrants and the
manner in which they come to understand who they are and what they are doing" (1994:
12). I argue that these developments affect not only immigrants but also non-immigrants
whose livelihoods and social activities are affected by the immigrants’ labor and
economic impact and by their social presence in towns like Meatville. Broad definitions
40
of class allow us to examine not only labor and social relationships inside the factory,
processing plant or plantation, but also the everyday impact on individuals, families,
households, schools, social organizations, and communities outside these workplaces and
among those who are not involved in the industry as owners or employees. Neoliberalism plays a key role in the connection between work and identity.
Neoliberal rhetoric has become the language of expectation as a
generation has been taught that it is natural and legitimate to think
of people and jobs as disposable and that people need to be flexible
to meet the demands of markets, while loyalties of class, family,
kinship, region, and other groups are at best passé and at worst an
unrealistic and illicit betrayal of self-interest in a neoliberal market
system. When everything is a market commodity, there are no
collective interests, only individual ones (Durrenberger 2012: 4).
By privileging market forces, neoliberalism emphasizes individual responsibility,
individual choices, and minimal government regulation. Thus, when immigrant workers
move from their place of origin to work in places like Meatville, it is seen as an
individual choice rather than consequence of systems of inequality and privilege. In
short, neoliberalism contributes to naturalizing privilege and placing responsibility for
poverty and other kinds of inequality on those with fewest resources to deal with them.
Thinking about work, class, and identity from these perspectives allows for an
understanding of meatpacking as a context for daily life in places like Meatville. As I
demonstrate in Chapter 6, the meatpacking economy is a context for intimate and
household relationships. For example, "housing" has locally been a source of concern in
terms of civic policies as well as the safety of residents. There is also tension between
daily life and culturally dominant ideas about masculinity, femininity, and family. The
fissures become visible in areas such as household divisions of labor, incidents of
domestic violence, and the formation of multiple households and intimate relationships.
Differences across cultures and social classes also become visible in the case of
parenting. While having children can act as a marker of adulthood, stability, and even
41
cultural citizenship, I also witnessed some negotiation over appropriate expectations for
child behavior and parental control of children, particularly in public.
It is also important to recognize that privilege and poverty are naturalized through
the assertion that poor or otherwise underprivileged people are in that position because
they make illogical choices or decisions. William Julius Wilson (1996), Paul Willis
(1977), Sudhir Venkatesh (2006; 2008), Carol Stack (1975), and Philippe Bourgois
(2003), among others, all refute the idea that poor people's economic strategies are
nonsensical. For some, poverty has become not only an objective status but also a
pathologized identity.
Also in the second half of the twentieth century, scholars
discovered poverty, defined it as a topic of inquiry, and described
the cultural characteristics of the poor as pathologies relative to the
life-models of the managerial middle class to which such scholars
belong. These works contrasted affluent workers with
pathological, racialized ghetto dwellers. Poverty—rather than their
structural position in the political economy as unemployed—was a
characteristic of the poor: a status, an identity" (Durrenberger
2012: 8).
Instead, the authors mentioned above provide models of how to elucidate social
structures and constraints that underlie everyday decisions and actions. They
demonstrate that what might seem illogical or counterproductive to those whose
privileges give them an outsider's view actually emerges from logical reactions or
interactions of their context and interpretation of their possibilities. All have illustrated
that inequalities are not the result of lower intelligence, lack of effort, or a moral
deficiency. They point out that within the constraints of their lives and systemic or
institutional inequalities, people's choices make sense. Bonilla-Silva adds to this by
pointing out that both the privileged and less-privileged are implicated in subtle ways as
we accept or adopt messages we get about privilege, class, and identity through the
media.
42
The concept of intersectionality as developed by feminist scholars addresses the
ways that different facets of identity and social experience are interconnected. In laying
out intersectionality as a theoretical framework, Crenshaw wrote that, "In mapping the
intersections of race and gender, the concept does engage dominant assumptions that race
and gender are essentially separate categories. By tracing the categories to their
intersections, I hope to suggest a methodology that will ultimately disrupt the tendencies
to see race and gender as exclusive or separable" (1991:1244). She also calls for an
extension of the concept to include class, sexual orientation, age, and color (Crenshaw
1991: 1245). Such an approach takes into account that identity is intimately connected to
power and inequalities. Using intersectionality as a framework creates a way to examine
participants' assertions that local issues were about race or about class as statements that
index their own experiences of power and identity. Thus, rather than focusing on a
particular dichotomy such as long-time resident vs. newcomer, the various divisions or
groupings among Meatville residents must be analyzed as interconnected, fluid, and
contextualized such that a particular aspect of identity may be highlighted in a particular
context.
Throughout my time in Meatville I interacted with a broad range of residents and
I came to think of the divisions they described as basically about relative visibility and
agency. I employ Bourdieu's concept of social capital and concepts of belonging and
class to think of people in terms of their location on a context-dependent spectrum of
"enfranchisement." I choose the terms "privileged" or "enfranchised" (and its opposite
"disenfranchised") to describe the interconnected factors that construct residents' relative
visibility or empowerment. A Latino who speaks English fluently is relatively more
privileged or enfranchised than one who does not but their position relative to each other
may be reversed in a context where the fluent English-speaker is not able to vote in
school board elections because he is a permanent resident (rather than a citizen) while the
43
less English-proficient who has legal citizenship can both vote and decide to run for
election. These terms allow for a variety of intersecting identity markers that are
highlighted or hidden in particular contexts. Additionally, they incorporate the idea that
while objectively people might possess the same assets like homeownership or a
particular income level, other aspects of their subjective experience might constrain their
belief in their ability to leverage those resources in particular ways. In public health
research this is referred to as "self-efficacy" and I find it to be a useful concept to add to
ideas of privilege or enfranchisement. In subsequent chapters I illustrate ways that those
who tended to be most disenfranchised also tended to be more visible and invisible in the
most disadvantageous ways.
Those people who tended to be more enfranchised were primarily White but also
included Latinos who were upwardly mobile, largely due to their proficiency in English,
which allowed them more job flexibility and access to resources such as home loans.
Enfranchised Latinos were also largely, if not exclusively, documented and this too
contributed to their ability to be upwardly mobile and advocate for themselves effectively
when interfacing with institutions (such as the police, judicial system, school,
government, and healthcare). Those who were more disenfranchised tended to be both
more "invisible" and "visible" in the most disadvantageous ways. In local politics and
policy, their voices tended to be unheard both by choice and circumstance while
elsewhere they tended to be hyper-visible as racialized others, recipients of social
services, and the source of a variety of deficits that affected the community. So, while a
person could experience relative enfranchisement in a particular context such as voting,
they could also experience relative disenfranchisement as they interact with teachers in
the public school. Grey, Devlin and Goldsmith describe Postville as "a sum of its many
parts. We see it as a living, breathing, dynamic community" (Grey, Devlin, and
Goldsmith 2009: 99). In Meatville as well, one’s visibility and enfranchisement are
44
dependent on context and make it possible to imagine Meatville as “nested” in the
manner described by Creed (2006).
45
CHAPTER 2 A SMALL TOWN WITH A TRANSNATIONAL
COMMUNITY
This chapter addresses some of the changes that globalized industry has brought
to Meatville. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, some aspects of the community's history as
predominantly white/Euro-American, Christian, and agricultural have changed while
others have been reinforced. Some longtime residents have begun to imagine their
community as more economically "needy" and less insulated from "big city problems"
like violence, drugs, and alcohol abuse. The public school has become one of the
primary organizing institutions in the local community. And religious affiliation has
become a less important identifier than in the early settlement of the town when
schoolteachers were contractually obligated to regularly attend church services.
Economic changes have meant that fewer residents rely primarily on farming for their
income and that more residents rely on industrial jobs such as those at the meatpacking
plant for their income. In combination, these changes challenge local residents to adjust
to newly visible kinds of difference and the invisible inequalities that can be associated
with these differences. Adjusting to newly visible difference gives rise to a broader
definition of what it means to be "Iowan" including recognition that many people's
linguistic, ethnic, religious and other identities may challenge Iowans' typical "niceness"
or welcoming attitude. What Stephen Bloom has referred to as the "schizophrenic" nature
of the state, I explore as a paradox of neoliberal economic development in the rural
context: The boosterism that drew meatpacking to Meatville saved it from extinction but
compromised some residents' sense of belonging or community
History of Meatville
Meatville, like many rural Midwestern towns, particularly those west of the
Mississippi, was colonized by businessmen around the end of the 19 century. They saw
th
46
opportunities for commerce on the waterways and for agriculture in the fertile soil. They
took full advantage of land settlement policies to buy land, build houses and businesses,
and develop transportation routes. These policies would later serve as the template for
land rushes in western states like Oklahoma (Zielinski 1974). The most widely available
historical accounts of the settlement of Meatville mention that Native Americans lived in
the area and considered some of the land to be sacred. Although land was set aside for a
reservation, this was almost immediately disregarded as colonists began staking claims
and settling on the land. Within four years of the treaty, the land had all been ceded to
the U.S. (Zielinski 1974). Although these accounts mention that for a time some Native
Americans returned annually to the sacred places, they do not indicate when or why they
eventually stopped or what happened to the Native Americans who had lived in the area
before colonization.
Historic accounts of Meatville emphasize the contributions of a small number of
white businessmen to the economic development and prosperity of the community. Well
into the 21st century the surnames of some of these businessmen are still visible sprinkled
on the names of streets, geographic formations, and buildings. Although not all have
stayed in town, descendants of these men abound in the local area and their surnames
appear frequently in area newspapers. Their legacy of boosterism remains strong even
though Meatville's economic survival today hinges on meat processing much more than
agricultural crops or the railroad.
Longtime residents of Meatville recount an idyllic small town atmosphere that
most remember fondly and with nostalgia. One historical account of the town describes
the school's early start as a one room school house in the era when teaching contracts
specified that the female teacher's employment was contingent on her remaining
unmarried and regularly attending church. In the town's early days, businesses thrived
because farms thrived. Longtime residents remember flourishing main street businesses
47
that at different points included a soda fountain, creamery, button factory, and dry goods
store. Farmers and their families had a habit of coming into town once a week or so,
something that according to some of the people I interviewed lasted until the 1970s or
80s. Longtime residents remember business hours that were generally 9-5 and open late
on Wednesday and Saturday nights to accommodate the rhythms of rural life at the time.
Throughout most of Meatville's history, the dominant language has been English.
Migrants from the East Coast looking for entrepreneurial opportunities settled the town
and most of them were English speaking. By most accounts, these founders were all
white men looking to capitalize on the business opportunities provided by Meatville's
proximity to waterways and rail transportation. Today English and Spanish coexist in
the daily lives and business dealings of many Meatville residents, although English, of
course, is the dominant language of all official institutions (legal, religious, civic,
educational, health) and thus is accorded higher status and priority. During the time of
this research in 2010-2013 around 300-500 mostly Chin Burmese refugees settled in
Meatville, contributing further to the linguistic landscape with their lingua franca of
Hakha Chin and a number of other dialects.
Although many residents viewed linguistic diversity as a change from a
predominantly English monolingual past, Peter Cooper, a man in his early 60s, recalled
the local importance of Welsh in his family and childhood. Although his family believes
his grandmother understood English, she spoke only Welsh. He also remembered
hearing his grandfather conduct business in Welsh with local farmers, "I went down and
listened to my grandpa at the, at the shop in Hilldale, he was a blacksmith and my dad
was too, worked with him and uh, whenever all these old farmers would come in and all
the language, all the, it was all spoken, it was all Welsh. Until 1954, church services
were in Welsh in Hilldale." This man's experience with English acquisition in his family
made him more empathetic toward Spanish-speaking community members. Saying that
48
it's natural that people would frequent places where their native language dominated
when possible such as church services and imagining what it might be like if the situation
were reversed he noted, "I would be afraid, I would be intimidated too. I'm pretty sure I
wouldn't be able to pass a Spanish language test in two years like we expect kids to pass
one [in English] here. I don't, I'm pretty sure that wouldn't happen." Cooper's
recollection of the prevalence of a language other than English into the 1950s also points
to a less prevalent narrative of the area's history, one that highlights a multilingual
continuity with the past.
Throughout much of the town's history, church life was a cornerstone not only of
religious activity but also social interaction. Christian churches and associated Christian
charitable organizations provided much of the logistical as well as economic
infrastructure for social activities and gatherings. Today, in contrast, the public school
has largely replaced churches as a key social space for community. In the early 1900s the
Chautauqua circuit movement provided a popular form of entertainment in many rural
communities and was closely associated with Christian ministers of a variety of
denominations. Chautauquas were outdoor summer gatherings lasting from several days
to more than a week. Ministers, lecturers, reformers, musicians, and performers would
provide education and entertainment for a spectating public who frequently camped in
tents on the Chautauqua grounds (University of Iowa Libraries). Meatville hosted an
annual gathering on the Chatauqua circuit in the early 1900s and today the grounds of
that gathering are a public park that still bears the name "Chautauqua" although I believe
many residents are unaware of this history. Today, Meatville is home to churches for a
number of Christian denominations. Among the churches in the Meatville micropolitan
area are two Methodist churches, a Presbyterian church, Hope Bible Church, an
Evangelical Christian Center, and a Catholic Church. Although the ministers at each of
these congregations undoubtedly care deeply for the local people with whom they work,
49
it has been a challenge for many rural churches including those in Meatville to attract and
retain locally residing clergy. Through a variety of circumstances two of the most
publicly visible or active congregations (the Catholic Church and the Methodist Church)
were being led by ministers who commuted to Meatville during the time I lived there.
Over time Meatville has supported numerous groups with a variety of interests
including a chapter of the Lions Club,3 a Knights of Columbus group,4 a PEO
(Philanthropic Educational Organization) sorority chapter,5 various veterans’ and
auxiliary groups, and a master gardeners’ group. Some of the women's associations
were conceived as a way for farmers' wives to socialize and stave off the isolation of
rural farm life. Today most of the women who participate in these organizations are
neither farmer's wives nor residentially and socially isolated. The needs of farmers and
farming families have changed in important ways since many of these groups were
founded in the early 20th century. Nevertheless some of these organizations still exist
today and their announcements and meetings are published in the weekly paper. Many of
these groups offer scholarships for activities like youth summer camps or to help local
students attend college. Writing about voluntary social organizations, Salamon points out
that, "The ability to constructively mobilize local energies indicates whether the residents
share an identity and care to act as a group to perpetuate the community" (1992: 64).
Elsewhere she argues that service clubs support the community cohesion that boosterism
requires,
To undertake activities that promote the middle-class ideals that
are believed to be for a town's benefit. By making their town grow
bigger, wealthier, or grander, boosters aim to achieve superiority
3 A community service organization.
4 A Catholic fraternal organization.
5 An organization to support the advancement and education of women, PEO was
founded by a group of women in 1869 at Iowa Wesleyan College in southeast Iowa (PEO 2013).
50
over nearby towns, an all-American cultural goal. Since the early
settlement of the midwest, booster activities have mobilized
competition among towns to win the power and resources
considered necessary for economic progress" (Salamon 2003: 33).
Boosterism has played an important role throughout Meatville's history of
Chautauqua activity and voluntary or religious organizations. The town's enduring
identification with agricultural production is at least in part a result of boosterism
activities that won Meatville the privilege of hosting the county fair as a consolation prize
for losing the competition to be the county seat.
Although voluntary organizations are still active in Meatville and continue to
engage in activities and services that support wellbeing and cohesion in the community,
there have been some significant changes in the context within which they undertake
these activities. Membership in these organizations reflects the majority population of the
state both in terms of race and age. As a result, membership appears to be dwindling and
the influence of the groups gradually waning. Today, many farmers and their spouses
take other jobs. Mechanization on farms along with other industrialized practices (such
as genetically modified seeds and fertilizers) coupled with government subsidies and crop
insurance allowed more flexibility in terms of farm labor and lowered the stress of
uncertainty associated with investing in farm operations. Additionally, small family farms
are less prevalent today in the wake of larger, industrial farming operations. For those
that persist, greater access to dependable transportation, mainly cars (especially among
middle-class white women) and more paved roads has lessened the isolation experienced
by some rural farming families, particularly wives. Most of the people I interviewed did
not mention activities of these organizations among their primary social commitments.
Aspects of public infrastructure that they may have helped create are now under
municipal or other auspices: the public pool is run by the school, the public library is run
by a board of directors and funded through the town hall, and the Community Club
coordinates parades. The Community Club in Meatville functions as a kind of chamber of
51
commerce and many long-time residents participate in both Community Club and boards
of directors for the volunteer fire and ambulance services.
According to local historians the first Latinos to live in Meatville were members
of the Lopez family; they arrived in 1848 after a local farmer, lawyer, and politician hired
Mr. Lopez to help run his farm. Throughout much of the first half of the 20 century,
th
other Latinos periodically resided in or near Meatville as seasonal agricultural laborers.
Although a handful of these migrant workers "settled out" (began to reside year round) in
Meatville earlier, the reopening of the meatpacking plant in the early 1990s resulted in a
dramatic growth in the local Latino population. The very visible shift led many people,
including some longtime Latino residents, to characterize this as a key moment in the
town's history, an issue that I will return to below. Today, there are still Latino migrant
laborers who work on crops such as corn and melons, but changes in the economy,
immigration policy and enforcement practices, and farming technology have transformed
the system of seasonal labor. Some seasonal workers are recruited from Mexico and
work on temporary visas, others are U.S. citizens whose families have participated in
migrant labor circuits for generations and who have settled in places like South Texas,
and still others are unemployed refugees from cities like Des Moines who have been
directed to seasonal labor jobs by refugee services agencies.
In 2010 a handful of Chin refugees from Burma came to Meatville to work at the
meatpacking plant. They were prompted to flee the Chin Hills region of Burma to escape
persecution as both ethnic minorities and as Christians (mostly Baptist). Chronic food
shortages added to the strain and many Chin people began to look outside Burma for
survival. Some went to neighboring India but a large number went to Malaysia where
they spent months or years (up to more than a decade) waiting for papers that would
allow them to live in places like Australia, Sweden, Canada, and the United States. In the
United States, Chin people were sent to cities like Atlanta, Dallas, Seattle, Chicago,
52
Minneapolis, and Indianapolis but slowly began making their way to secondary locations
in the rural Midwest. Although the largest communities of Chin people in the United
States at the time of this research were in Indianapolis and Atlanta, their presence in
small meatpacking communities like Marshalltown, Iowa, also began to emerge.
Finding that they could get jobs in meatpacking, the first handful of Chin men in
Meatville turned into several hundred. Some Chin people I spoke with estimated that
including families with children, the number of Chin people in the Meatville area reached
nearly 500 by 2012. Having fled religious persecution, one of the first orders of business
was to establish a place to hold worship services. The Methodist Church let the Chin
Christian Fellowship hold Chin-language worship services on Sunday afternoons until
such time as they would be able to establish their own church facilities. The Meatville
Chin Christian Fellowship was operated under the auspices of the Chin Baptist Church6
but welcomed and served all Christian Chin-speaking people and even sometimes nonChin-speaking guests including this researcher. In 2012 the Chin pastor told a gathering
of community leaders that there were some 250 families associated with the Meatville
Chin Christian Fellowship. Some Chin-speaking people had also begun regularly
attending the Catholic Church, which celebrated the first Chin Catholic wedding
ceremony in Meatville in the summer of 2012. Although still welcoming all Chinspeaking Christians, the Baptist evangelical stance of the Chin Christian Fellowship has
become more noticeable over time. The national Chin Baptist organization had sent them
a full-time minister who had attended divinity school in India and was a UN-certified
Chin-English translator/interpreter. In addition, the local group of Chin Christians
interacted with other groups in the American Chin Baptist community. They attended
events and gatherings such as soccer tournaments, presentations by guest speakers, which
6 A national-level organizing body for Chin Baptist Churches in the United States that
also cooperates internationally with other Chin Baptist organizations.
53
had the tone and effect of revivals, and Chin Youth Organization (CYO) events around
the Midwest including Des Moines, Muscatine, the Quad Cities, and Indianapolis. They
also participated in the larger organizing structure of the Chin Baptist Church, for
example, by sponsoring missionaries to work among Buddhist Chin people in Burma and
by requesting a community liaison to help with things like translation and allow the
minister to focus on ministerial duties in the growing Meatville Chin congregation.
Change and Industry
While Meatville's overall population has remained steady at around 2000
inhabitants for many years, there have been significant demographic changes over the last
thirty years. Thirty years ago the local economy was driven by family farm operations
and Meatville residents were primarily "white" Euro-American workers whose links to
the area went back several generations. A changing economy, including the 1980s farm
crisis and the decentralization of the meatpacking industry, has contributed to changing
ways of life in many rural Midwestern communities. Today more than forty percent of
the adult population of Meatville is Latino, the local economy is driven by a non-union
meat processing plant, and there continues to be a high rate of migration in and out of the
town. Discussing the economic changes wrought by the reorganized and de-unionized
meatpacking industry in towns like Meatville, historian Osha Gray Davidson called the
process of middle class outmigration the "ghettoization" of the rural Midwest and
explained that it helps keep wages low and make it attractive to immigrants (1996: 133).
He points to a growing realization in the 1990s that "development is more than jobs" and
that "the very factor on which the inhabitants of rural ghettos have pinned their hopes—a
new industry moving into their area—often ends up entrenching and institutionalizing
poverty and its attendant ills. Considering all the damage done in its name, rural
development, as it is commonly practiced, might well be considered the second wave of
the farm crisis" (Davidson 1996: 133).
54
The meatpacking industry made globalization visible in rural Iowa. Although
Hispanic migrant workers had been coming to the area since the early 1900s to do
seasonal agricultural work and some of them eventually settled permanently, long-time
local residents (Latino and non-Latino alike) today recall the early 1990s as a time when
"the Hispanics first started coming in." In a town with such a small population, even
small changes are quite visible. At first, workers attracted to the town by jobs at the plant
were economic "others" of a variety of races and ethnicities (Davidson 1996). By the
time I undertook fieldwork in Meatville most people talked about the change as being
from a homogeneous white community to a "diverse" one, by which they generally meant
less homogeneously Euro-American. In the period between Peter Cooper's Welsh
grandparents and the early twenty-first century, the dominant narrative of the town was
that it was a basically homogeneous, white, and agricultural. This narrative was
interrupted by the very visible arrival of hundreds of migrants, most of whom were
people of color, mostly Mexicans and Mexican Americans but also African Americans,
Africans, and Asians. Over time, it became clear to long-time residents and newcomers
alike that Meatville would literally never "look" the same again.
The dependence of rural towns on industrial meatpacking over the last couple of
decades has brought issues of migration, immigration, consumption, ethnicity, and gender
to the forefront of public discourse. As I mentioned earlier, more than a quarter of the
U.S. population lives in rural areas (Flora and Flora 2008), and small towns with packing
plants play an increasingly important role in national and transnational economies. Much
of the nation's food supply is produced in small towns like Meatville and the economic
profits generated by many kinds of industrial production depend on companies' access to
the cheapest labor possible. New gateways have become the new frontlines in political
battles over education, economic development, and immigration policies. That is why it
is so important to understand deeply not only the experiences of a particular group or
55
stakeholder (Latinos, long-time residents, the company) but also to look at these
experiences as they impact each other and are negotiated.
With the desperately needed jobs the plant provided, Meatville became a so-called
"new gateway" for immigrant settlement. New gateways are unique in their distinct
immigration histories, their small size and rural geography, and a lack of institutional
infrastructures capable of adequately serving immigrant populations (Waters and Jiménez
2005: 117-118). As Gozdziak notes, "The policies widely adopted by traditional gateway
communities with long-standing immigrant populations and resources are not always
transferable to new settlement areas" (2005: 5). While immigration and even migration is
not, in itself, a new phenomenon, the unique qualities of new gateways contributed to
making many in Meatville, especially health and education service providers, feel as if
they were being expected to cope in extraordinary circumstances with little or no support.
Trends across Midwestern meatpacking communities indicate that there will
continue to be shifts in the racial, ethnic, and cultural landscapes of rural towns whose
economies rely on meatpacking (Grey 2000; Grey, Devlin, and Goldsmith 2009). I
witnessed some of these changes first hand as I spent time in Meatville. Sometime
between 2008 and 2010, there were about 30 African Americans living in town; an
unknown number of other African Americans and black Caribbean or African immigrants
lived in larger surrounding towns and commuted to work at the meatpacking plant. They
had been recruited from the urban Midwest (Chicago and St. Louis primarily) to work at
Meat Corp. By 2011, there were only a handful of African Americans who still lived in
town (I would say about 5) and an entirely new group of about 250 Burmese refugees
(ethnic Chin) were living in and around Meatville. A local company official said that
Chin workers arrived to "check out the situation" of their own volition without having
been recruited by company officials, found it appealing, and passed the word onto others
in their community. While this is quite possibly what actually happened, I also heard a
56
rumor from a community organizer based in Chicago that Meat Corporation had sent
informal recruiters7 to the Burmese refugee community in Indianapolis to tell them about
job opportunities in rural Midwestern communities. Shifts in the national origins of
newcomers to Meatville illustrate the unstable nature of industrial meatpacking work,
which I will address below. Visibly marked differences in race/ethnicity and language of
the newcomers also support the idea that Meatville is a diverse community. This is a
designation that I found misleading because, at least until the arrival of Burmese people,
"diversity" was used to index "Latino" or "Spanish-speaking" and the three terms were
frequently used interchangeably. Although Meatville has been less racially homogeneous
since the 1980s or 90s, there were still only basically two (and more recently three) ethnic
groups represented. In any case, these ethnic/racial and linguistically marked Others
decrease the imagined distance of rural Meatville from "the outside world."
Rurality
There are a variety of factors that make rural towns both very much like and at the
same time very much unlike their urban and suburban counterparts. One major
distinction is the scale. While 300 new migrants in Chicago don't really change anything,
300 new people in Meatville are both noticeable and can trigger real needs for public
health and safety officials, educators, and providers of other services (cable installers, for
example). This is especially the case when new arrivals are poor, English learners,
traumatized by war/refugee/immigration experiences, and/or cultural "others." In
7. At some points during the 1990s and early 2000s, Meat Corporation sent recruiters to
Texas, California, and Chicago to recruit workers. They sometimes covered transportation costs
to places like Marshalltown and Perry, Iowa. The company also offered recruitment bonuses up
to $1000 or more to workers who brought in other workers. Unlike these efforts, the rumored
informal recruiters simply spread the word that there might be jobs available. Because refugees
have legal permission to work in the US, they represent a desirable pool of workers for industrial
employers recovering from high profile workplace immigration raids across the country under the
George W. Bush administration.
57
particular with less-commonly-spoken languages or regional dialects, issues of basic
communication can be more challenging than in a city because there isn't such a pool of
potential helpers to draw from. In a city, there is more likely to be a range of migration
experiences and "generations" among a particular linguistic or cultural community that
can help smooth the way for newer entrants, while these kinds of resources are much
harder for smaller communities to plug into. Statistically-speaking small changes can
produce significant changes in local social fabric. The issue of scale also contributes to
rural communities being invisible to government agencies, social service organizations,
and media outlets. Policies, particularly those debated and imposed at a state or national
level, often focus on information from urban spaces and assume that whatever decisions
are arrived at can easily be scaled down and applied to smaller communities. Rural
communities are also invisible or conceived as marginally important because they have
statistically insignificant populations and thus do not warrant the deep engagement that
urban populations necessitate.
People in Meatville experience both transnational processes and the isolation of
rural geopolitical location simultaneously. This can sometimes result in striking
similarities with developing countries. In rural towns, technology and geography
converge in paradoxical ways. For example, lack of public transportation means that
Meatville is only accessible by car, but geographically isolated residents can watch
television stations from around the world by satellite and chat with far away friends and
family over a high-speed wireless Internet connection. The relative lack of public-use
infrastructure also disproportionately affects the poor, who are overrepresented in the
populations of meatpacking towns, as responsibility for "staying connected" in the
neoliberal state is shifted from the state to the individual.
The term "flyover state" illustrates the place of Iowa in the national imaginary,
and yet factory jobs attract people from thousands of miles away to this town that is a
58
speck on the map. As if to highlight the off-the-beaten-path location of my field site, for
technological reasons unknown to me the Craigslist website loaded the page for Goa,
India, every time I opened it on my laptop from my home wireless connection in
Meatville. And, as some local officials and school teachers have discovered, it is not
entirely uncommon that some people who come to the town are not quite sure exactly
where they are in the sense of its geographical relation to other places or in the sense that
they could find it on a map. And yet, people have made their way from a variety of
places around the country and the world to these very small towns looking for what was
so frequently described to me as "a better life." And while not all the people who came to
Meatville may have known quite where they were, it took quite a bit of effort or at least a
conscious decision to make the journey to this town.
This is also a distinction from some urban migration stories. One of the reasons
that new destinations are "new" is that they are not major first points of entry into the
country. One does not get off a plane from another country or even a large city like New
York and suddenly find oneself in Meatville and decide to stay. Rather, almost every
immigrant in Meatville is what would be called "secondary." Particularly in the case of
refugees, but also in the case of immigrants generally, they did not come first to
Meatville and most never even set out with Meatville in mind as a destination (like one
might think about New York or Chicago). For the most part Meatville is not really a
place where one ends up by accident. Almost all the people I met told me that they came
because someone told them that there were jobs here. Often, that person was a family
member who helped arrange their arrival and "get them settled." Some people came for a
short vacation and/or to see if they liked it and ended up staying because they got hired at
the plant. These experiences of transnationalism and isolation underscore the inadequacy
of research that focuses only on urban areas.
59
Within the concept of flyover state is also a class division. While most of the
adults I spoke to had flown somewhere in the world in their lifetime, the reasons and
destinations of travel were quite distinct. Most of the working-class people I talked to
flew to places where they had family connections or to a place they considered a "second
home" in the sense that they maintained deep social or kinship connections there. The
Burmese refugees would travel to metropolitan areas where many of their ethnic or clan
groups had settled such as Indianapolis, Atlanta, St. Louis, Dallas, or Chicago. Many
Latinos traveled to hometowns in their native countries. And, as other researchers have
shown, this travel represents not only a significant investment of time, money, and effort
but also an investment in continued social and kinship relationships with those people
being visited. While the same might be said for many of the middle-class people I met
who flew to various destinations, more of these trips tended to be in the "getaway
vacation" genre. While they might have been flying to Australia to visit a family friend
finishing up a year of study abroad or to Hawaii to visit a friend from high school, these
trips were more about entertainment, escape, and consumption in pursuit of middle-class
luxuries than the pursuit of a community, ethnic or kinship identity.
Political attention for having the first caucus race in the nation raises Iowa's
visibility on the national stage. But periodic blitzes of national media attention do not
provide a very thorough or nuanced picture of daily life in rural Iowa. They often draw
on tropes that construct Iowans as patriotic in ways that call to mind the white
colonization of "frontier" land and as ideal Americans by referring to the individualism
and self-sufficiency in a romanticized vision of pastoral life. They highlight Christian,
racialized, and gendered visions of an ideal nuclear family by pointing to feminine wives
as homemakers and masculine husbands as hardworking farmers or entrepreneurs. As
Goldschmidt's description of the farm home correctly illustrates, the mythical
construction of country life in our national imaginary is decidedly classed and gendered.
60
He writes, "The farm home, with sons helping father, with mother in the kitchen and the
hired man a part of the family; with Sunday night suppers and social decisions reached
around the cracker barrel- this picture is 'as American as apple pie.'" (Goldschmidt 1947:
241). Politicians tour the state and make speeches like President Obama's 2011 speech
staged in front of green John Deere tractors, Senator Tom Harkin's Steak Fry in 2007 set
among hay bales on gently rolling hills in Indianola, and Sarah Palin's 2011 visit to the
prizewinning sows in the Swine Barn at the Iowa State Fair. The media attention
increases the visibility of rural Iowa's agricultural heritage but packages it in a way that
emphasizes the Midwest as a "traditional," homogeneous, and idealized place that
embodies and preserves the positive qualities of authentic U.S. citizenship.
Boosterism and Development Discourse
The necessity to develop local rural economies has a particular history in the rural
U.S. where it has been termed "boosterism." One historian brings together several
definitions to describe boosterism as "a uniquely American tradition for touting a small
town. It expresses a historical midwestern dedication on the part of towns to achieve
'progress' through commercial development and population growth (Atherton 1954;
Charles 1993; Curti 1959)" (Salamon 2003: 23). Salamon further explains that, "By
making their town grow bigger, wealthier, or grander, boosters aim to achieve superiority
over nearby towns, an all-American cultural goal" (2003: 33). Salamon points out that
boosterism supports efforts "to maintain local pride and middle-class esteem," both of
which are qualities underlying the establishment of many Meatville organizations and
clubs (Salamon 2003: 23). Meatville's participation in boosterism activities is evident in
historical accounts that highlight the town's unsuccessful bid to be the county seat.
Anecdotes about how Hampton, one of the micro-towns that make up the Meatville
micropolitan area, was once considered as a potential location for the state capital
61
because of its equidistance from two larger key cities also demonstrate the enduring spirit
of boosterism.
One contemporary instance of boosterism is the head of the local school district
trying to gain community support for a revenue purpose statement that would allow the
school to borrow against money it receives from a one-cent sales tax in order to fund
facilities expansions that include a sports complex and land acquisition. While voters
approved the spending, nearly 60 people attended a special school board meeting at
which the superintendent acknowledged the attendees' opposition to the land acquisition.
His argument in favor of the "development" spending was that eventually the county may
be forced to consolidate their various school districts into one and these projects would
contribute to convincing county and state officials that they should locate that single
public school in Meatville rather than at any of the other existing county schools: "As we
dwindle in population, [Rivers] County is going to be forced to say 'where is the county
school going to go?'" (Rudisill 2011). Another example in which it appears that
boosterism has not been as effectively mobilized is the closing of post offices in locations
throughout the U.S. in 2011. These struggles over the location and consolidation of
schools and amenities like post offices hearken back to county seat wars during the
settlement of frontier land west of the Mississippi (Salamon 2003: 32). Additionally,
these issues demonstrate a local concern with their precariousness as small towns.
Because growth is associated with progress, a town that employs booster activities
as a tool for economic development theoretically welcomes newcomers but, as Salamon
says, "it is assumed that recruited newcomers can easily be incorporated because they
will be similar to the white, middle-class boosters" (Salamon 2003: 33). In the case of
many rural meatpacking towns, however, this has not been the case. The loss of
unionized factory employment and concordant cut in wages meant that the people who
would end up taking the factory jobs were not only newcomers but also more likely to be
62
immigrants, working class, non-white, and less English-proficient than the white, middleclass, English-proficient boosters had anticipated. Dynamics between boosters and
newcomers, who are not as easily or quickly incorporated, have largely replaced the
historic tensions between "farmers in the countryside and boosters who were owners of
main-street businesses" (Salamon 2003: 34). Today farmers and business owners are
both boosters and the categories are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes business owners
also own or operate farms (or vice versa, farmers own storefront businesses or office
space). Additionally, the distinction between business owner and farmer is muddled
because modern farming operations that follow an industrial model are regarded as
businesses. The emergence of the term agribusiness to describe the application of
industrial production and business principles to agriculture is evidence of the way
agricultural production has scaled-up far beyond the typical family farm. Farming has
become big business, meat processing has become rural, and boosters have begun to
confront some of the unexpected consequences of these changes in both the economic as
well as the social context of rural Midwestern life in the 21st century.
Boosterism is seen by those who engage in it as a key factor in the survival of
some rural communities. As Schweider notes, "the disappearance of small towns will, no
doubt, be selective, as those close to larger communities will have continued economic
vitality" (Schwieder 1996: 322). Although geographic location can also be an important
factor in small-town survival, those that can prove they have "economic vitality" have the
upper hand and a meatpacking company providing a source of employment is one way to
prove it. The potential disappearance of their hometown is a serious concern for many
longtime rural residents and the loss of a post office, public school, or major employer is
seen by many as a serious threat to the vitality of a rural community.
The interdependence of the meatpacking industry and rural communities is
evident as Fink describes the near-closure of a plant in 1994: "Citing failure of workers to
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ratify the 1993 union contract, the attempt of the town of Perry to annex the plant, and
meanness on the part of U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) meat inspectors, IBP
claimed that it had never made a profit in Perry. In response, the town dropped its
annexation plans, the USDA transferred out all of its meat inspectors, and workers
ratified the contract at the eleventh hour. And IBP stayed" (Fink 1998: 70). The
company cited three hostile elements that made it difficult for them to be successful: the
reticence of the workers to sign the union contract (presumably one favored by
management), the uncooperative nature of the USDA meat inspectors, and the attempt of
the town to annex the plant. The company signaled its benevolence for staying in the
community by claiming to have stayed despite never having profited. At the same time,
this assertion implicitly invoked the threat of its absence if the company decided to
relocate elsewhere in order to increase profits. The company used the threat of relocation
to get union members to agree to the contract it offered rather than prolonging the
negotiations. In this case the threat of losing the plant entirely appears to have weakened
any bargaining leverage the union might have had. It also helped convince city
government to give up plans to annex the land on which the plant stood, which likely
would have resulted in higher tax revenues for the town. Threatening relocation also
appears to have successfully decreased the enforcement of federal meat inspection
regulations. Thus, it is clear that corporations have leverage at a variety of levels, which
makes communities fear their loss despite the drawbacks of industrial meatpacking or
other industrial development such as pollution, low wages, and high turnover.
However, boosterism is not only about economics. A major element of
boosterism is community cohesion, "orchestrated by service clubs, to undertake activities
that promote the middle-class ideals that are believed to be for a town's benefit" (Salamon
2003: 33). Such activities may include holiday parades or improving public use facilities
such as parks. And while service clubs traditionally formed the basis of support for
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community integration by sponsoring such activities, "it took a broad spectrum of
civically engaged citizens to bring off these activities" (Salamon 2003: 33). In a rural
community in California, Chavez also found that "White residents' involvement in
mainstream organizations was officially recognized as the means by which to become a
responsible and respected citizen. While many of the organizations were no longer active
or their presence had drastically declined by the time I had conducted the study,
volunteerism continued to be necessary for the maintenance of social relations and local
resources" (2005: 324). Following Salamon (2003), Chavez notes that "families whose
lives revolve around the agrarian ideology support the idea of gemeinschaft, or close knit
collectives of people who depend on each other for social, political, and economic
livelihood" which make a community more cohesive and productive because frequent
interaction nourishes social relations that increase social capital (2005: 317).
Meatville does have a history of service clubs, annual celebrations, and civic
improvement endeavors. It seems to be a truism that, "In Iowa, as in much of rural
America, a town's personality is reflected in its annual community fair"(Grey, Devlin,
and Goldsmith 2009: 45). However, in the case of Meatville, community cohesion and
civic incorporation is threatened by the "differences" of many relative newcomers. This
creates a situation where, "when key people step down, move away, or otherwise end
their involvement, there is no one else to pick up their projects and keep them going.
Small, rural communities typically don't have the critical mass of trained, passionate
replacements to cover for key community organizers who might leave"(Grey, Devlin, and
Goldsmith 2009: 45). Although these authors are referring to "community organizing" in
a more formal sense, the statement remains true more generally in many small towns with
aging and "newcomer" populations. The importance of these activities is highlighted by
findings in other rural communities that particularly for white long-time residents
"volunteerism and participation were important obligations that long-term white residents
65
saw as key to the reproduction of social relations and developing a sense of community"
(Chavez 2005: 320). As newcomers form their own social relationships, organizations,
and local traditions, some continuity with past practices is lost. The apprenticeship-type
relationships in which younger generations involved in clubs, social activities, and even
civic government became familiar with "how things are done" are less common. The
result is that the burden of continuing some activities falls on an increasingly small
number of boosters and is less successful in incorporating newcomers.
Boosterism Interconnected to Social Relationships
Boosterism is one example that illustrates the interconnected relationship between
the meatpacking or other industrial employment and social identities in local
communities. Through boosterism, local residents become implicated in industrial
production even before an industry begins operating. As influential community members
discuss and take action to attract or retain business, for example by holding meetings with
company officials or by offering tax abatements as incentives, their support becomes an
effective endorsement of the company. Although powerful locally, in terms of overall
visibility and capital representatives of rural communities are at a distinct disadvantage
relative to national and multinational corporations. The imbalance of power places
boosters in a role similar to that of corporate employees, particularly in rural contexts,
because even indirectly their livelihoods as bankers, restaurant owners, landlords, and
other local economic endeavors depend on a proportion of residents having and spending
money in the local economy. Not only do local businesses depend on the presence of
industrial employees as workers who spend money locally but also on the presence of at
least some workers and their families who contribute as social participants in the life of
the community by doing things such as buying food that the school band sells as a
fundraiser for a trip, entering a float in a parade, or participating in a book club at the
local public library. For a struggling rural community, the presence of a single large
66
employer like a meatpacking plant can mean the difference in having enough interested
students to field a team for organized sports like football.
Boosters work hard to convince industries or companies to do business in their
communities because the local community is economically and socially dependent on its
presence for their survival. But a business, especially a large corporation, is focused on
increasing profit margins and not with the survival of a particular local community.
Having chosen a local community in which to do business, the company can continue to
wield the threat of relocating to another community in order to tamp down any potential
criticism or as a bargaining chip in negotiating union contracts, as in the example already
discussed of a plant in Perry. While a local plant manager or company president might be
very interested in whether his alma mater high school can field a football team, as a
company these local issues are likely to be a very low priority. As Grey argues, "One of
the hallmarks of the growth in secondary jobs in rural Iowa is that increasing amounts of
the monetary and social costs of maintaining a labor force have been transferred from the
industry to the workers and host communities" (1997: 158). Perhaps in part recognizing
this, many of the major meatpacking companies in the United States (Swift, Tyson,
Conagra, Smithfield, and Farmland among them) prominently display statements about
corporate responsibility or sustainability on their websites. These statements outline the
companies' commitments to local communities and include examples of investments the
company has made such as charitable giving to food banks or the United Way.
In his discussion of education in rural meatpacking communities, Grey (1997)
argues that lower worker turnover is intertwined with school success as greater stability
allows students more pedagogical continuity and positive school experiences might
encourage more long-term settlement of newcomer workers. "Corporations,” he argues
“cannot actively promote too much academic success because it would result in students
becoming overqualified for the jobs the corporations provide. This may threaten their
67
long-term ability to maintain secondary jobs as such. As workers' children succeed in
school today, it may mean a more stable workforce, but it may not mean that workers'
children will be available to take these jobs when they become adults" (Grey 1997: 163).
Although this statement focuses on the impact of increased academic success for
industrial meatpacking, the dilemma he notes also affects rural towns as communities.
While meatpacking provides a solution to economic extinction, it could require a shift in
focus by boosters to address a rural brain-drain phenomena that may have been
exacerbated by a dual labor market.
Changes in Meatpacking & Survival of Rural communities
Changes in the meatpacking industry have had a profound impact on many rural
Midwestern communities both in terms of economy and social organization. Industrial
changes occurred at a historical moment when rural communities were in need of local
investment as they tried to rebound from the farm crisis of the 1980s. Similar to the
recent real estate bubble, Midwestern farmers of the 1980s were confronted with a
downturn in what had been a post-World War II trend toward expansion. The
intersection of international agricultural policies, economic changes, and new
technologies (both mechanical and scientific) meant that farms had been borrowing more
money to expand their size and production. When the bubble burst, Midwestern farmers,
families, and communities were left to deal with devastating losses. These included bank
foreclosures on farms, some of which led to violent confrontations between farmers and
law enforcement officials. At the same time, industry owners in meatpacking were
looking for ways to bring meat processing operations closer to farm sources and, in some
cases, to move operations away from urban hubs in an attempt to bust unions. Boosters
in a variety of rural Midwestern locations encouraged meatpacking companies to relocate
and take advantage of business opportunities there, including lower transportation costs
of live animals because plants would be closer to the sources, and tax abatements or other
68
incentives designed to attract industrial development. Writing in the 1990s one historian
recounted,
Although agriculture remains Iowa's single most important
industry, that activity has undergone significant change in the past
forty years. Given the trend toward increased farm size and greater
specialization, and the agricultural distress of the eighties, the
number of farms has greatly declined; during the 1980s alone more
than 140,000 people moved off Iowa farms. By 1992, according to
the latest farm census, the number of Iowa farms had dropped to
96,543. Moreover, Iowa's farmers are aging: The 1992 farm
census showed that the average age of an Iowa farmer was fifty,
while the number of farmers younger than 34 years had declined
by more than 20 percent between 1987 and 1992. For men and
women who remained on the farm, there was yet another trend:
More of them needed to work off the farm in order to keep the
farm going (Schwieder 1996: 322).
Thus, the reorganization of the meatpacking industry was a turn of events that
"saved" many rural towns from economic devastation after the 1980s farm crisis. For
many residents new meatpacking plants brought a welcome infusion of money into the
local economy through both the direct spending of the company and the indirect spending
of employees who live, shop, and pay taxes in the local area. It also signaled an infusion
of younger residents into an aging community. The strenuous nature of factory work
meant that younger, healthy workers were recruited and employed. They in turn, thanks
to the stable employment and income of the factory, started families and encouraged kin
to move to the area. The interdependence of rural towns and packing plants is captured
in this description of Postville. According to Grey, Devlin, and Goldsmith, "In some
ways, Postville is also a typical meatpacking town, dependent on the local packinghouse
for its economic survival. Meatpacking plants, in turn, have developed a tremendous
dependence on immigrant and refugee workers who are qualified for packing jobs
precisely because they are unqualified for other employment" (2009: 13).
69
The competitive and entrepreneurial aspects of boosterism combined with nearly
70 years of legislative support for "right to work" laws.8 Changes in industrial meat
processing happened in the context of agricultural strife and a state government that
encouraged economic development by strengthening the position of industry and
management. These shifts, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, wrought deeply felt and
long-lasting adjustments in rural communities. Increased border enforcement in the U.S.
Southwest after the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) in 1986 and an
economic recession in California helped push Mexican immigration to other destinations
(Durand, Massey, and Capoferro 2005: 16). One modification in industrial processing
was greater factory specialization: "The industry of meat-packing has undergone major
change in the past thirty-some years. In 1960 the Iowa Beef Packers (today known as
IBP) opened its first plant in Denison and greatly altered the industry there through
specializing in one type of meat production" (Schwieder 1996: 323). Striffler provides an
account of how Tyson, already a leading producer of poultry in the country, came to
control over a quarter of the national chicken supply through an Arkansas-based hostile
merger (2005: 66).
Fink (1998) outlines the history of meatpacking in a particular location: Perry,
Iowa. She describes how in the 1980s and 90s, IBP (Tyson Fresh Meats since 2001)9
was able to decrease the power of unions, lower wages, increase production, and
consolidate control of a large portion of industrial meat processing. The authors of a
book about Postville also describe the changes of the 1980s on the meatpacking
8. "Right to work" legislation does not guarantee jobs for those seeking employment but
rather regulates agreements between employers and labor unions. It prevents unions from
excluding non-union-member workers and from requiring employees to pay fees to unions that
have negotiated the contracts under which they are employed.
9 A name that reflects its expansion beyond poultry into both beef and pork production.
70
operations there, pointing out similar trends toward lower wages, higher production, and
weaker unions. They claim, "Plants lost interest in hiring locals. Instead, the industry
became deeply dependent on immigrants and other workers who were unfamiliar with the
old expectations for working conditions and wages, and who were willing- often out of
desperation- to migrate to jobs in remote rural American towns" (Grey, Devlin, and
Goldsmith 2009: 16). The processing plant, by offering a very large number of lowwage, unskilled jobs with limited prospects for advancement, given the relatively small
number of higher-paying managerial and administrative positions, solidified and
exacerbated the gulf between white middle-class, English-proficient residents and nonwhite, non-English-proficient poor workers. Using the concept of a dual labor market,
Grey explains that "although meatpacking has always been unpleasant work, meatpackers
in rural Iowa used to enjoy many of the benefits of primary sector employment.
However, beginning in the early 1980s, meatpacking jobs decidedly became secondary
jobs. Wages were slashed. Real hourly compensation peaked in 1980 at about $19 per
hour. Between 1981 and 1984, compensation fell by 25%. By 1995, it was roughly $12
per hour, lower than in 1960" (Grey 1997: 153).
While policymakers may see these changes as primarily industrial and having
little impact beyond executives and shareholders, meatpacking plants (as well as other
industrial production facilities) have and continue to exert influence on the local
communities in which they operate and the social relations of the people who live there.
Changes such as income inequality, differences in access to appropriate social services,
racialization of workers, and consolidation of economic power over rural economies not
only produce direct effects on the employees of a factory or processing plant but also
impact other domains including families, schools, churches, social networks,
interpersonal relationships, and the reputation of a community.
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These changes in the meatpacking industry are part of a broader trend toward
embracing industrial investment as the logical path towards economic development.
Thus, changes in agriculture and industrial processing that brought meatpacking plants to
the rural Midwest are viewed as a next step in a linear movement of progress and a
change that moves a "backward" rural place into the modern globalized economy. The
tendency to view development in this way has also been noted in Third World economic
development discourse,
Development has become the grand strategy through which the
transformation of the not-yet-too-rational Latin American/Third
World subjectivity is to be achieved. In this way, long-standing
cultural practices and meanings as well as the social relations in
which they are embedded, are altered. The consequences of this are
enormous, to the extent that the very basis of community
aspirations and desires is modified. Thus the effect of the
introduction of development has to be seen not only in terms of its
social and economic impact, but also, and perhaps more
importantly, in relation to the cultural meanings and practices they
upset or modify (Escobar 1988: 438).
This is just one of a variety of ways in which images and economic strategies of
the rural Midwest resonate with those in developing countries.
Changing Identity of the Town
The impact of changes in international, national, state-level, and local political
and economic contexts converge in small towns like Meatville, and become visible not
only in politics and economy but also in people's social lives. Having secured the
promise of steady jobs and incomes from the meatpacking plant, many Meatville boosters
saw a vibrant and promising future begin to soothe fears of potential economic and social
collapse. But they also had begun to imagine some of the changes and challenges that
would come. Like the residents of Marshalltown, Iowa, described by Grey and Woodrick
in an article titled "'Latinos Have Revitalized Our Community'" (2005), the residents of
Meatville expressed some ambivalence about their status as a 'new gateway' and the
newly visible transnational ties in their community. In the twenty-first century Meatville
72
is less economically diverse and has new kinds of ethnic, linguistic, and cultural
diversity. Meatville is also now home to more transnationally-oriented residents because
increased global mobility and technology allows them to maintain close, even daily,
connections to other "homes" across the world.
At the same time that it is one small example of an urban to rural movement of
people, boosters and long-time residents have had to confront the notion that a much
larger number of its residents are not steeped in the agrarian, family-farm traditions that
have shaped Meatville's history. Naples notes three significant shifts in a rural
Midwestern meatpacking community in the 1990s: women's work moved from on-farm
to factory and from part-time nonfarm to full-time nonfarm labor; there was a growing
disparity between the few wealthy farmers and business owners and those living on the
economic margin of the rural economy; and there was increased racial-ethnic diversity
(1996: 91-92). Although the local economy of Meatville is still centered around
agricultural production, most local residents are involved in the food chain at the level of
industrial production at the meatpacking plant rather than working for or owning farms
that provide grain or livestock. In short, longtime residents are slowly coming to grips
with a community that has shifted from a largely agrarian, farm-centered identity to a
more industrial one. As I discuss in Chapter 6, although many children and young adults
are directly involved with activities like raising, showing, and selling livestock as part of
their participation in 4H or FFA (Future Farmers of America), these activities are
somewhat different in the 21st century. As one local teacher put it, "We're a rural
community but these are not rural kids. .... They're kind of—they're urban rural kids."
For many 4H and FFA participants or students in agricultural classes, livestock is not part
of their family economy and does not imply the young person's intentions to live and
work on a farm as an adult. For those who do not themselves live "in the country" on
fully functional farms (many people live on smaller pieces of land or keep their animals
73
on borrowed or rented property), activities like showing sheep or raising a bottle-fed calf
have become one more concerted cultivation activity (Lareau 2003) rather than a method
of family survival.
In the context of global migrations affecting Meatville, this shift from agrarian to
industrial production brings about some interesting convergences of urban and rural
experience. For instance, some young immigrants from Latin America might have
learned in a family context how to butcher a pig, but, having grown up in the urban
phases of their family's immigration trajectory (rural Mexico to urban Mexico to urban
U.S. to rural U.S.), not know how to raise a pig. Both long-time U.S. residents but also
some immigrant parents who may have grown up on "ranchos" or in rural places in
Mexico and Latin America (and perhaps Burma) sometimes impart knowledge about
rural practices to their children but the children's experience of "rurality" tends to be very
different from that of their parents. For the younger generation of Meatville, even those
who see their future in agricultural production or natural resource conservation, theirs is
not a classically agrarian rural experience but rather one infused with technologies and
much more mobility between rural and (relatively) urban experience. Changing
experiences of rurality and life in Meatville mean that today's residents are constructing
new understandings not only of their individual lives and identities but also of Meatville's
past, present, and future. This is a complex and challenging process, particularly for
some longtime residents as new or different ways of being, communicating, and doing
business may sometimes seem threatening to ways of life that they know well, are
comfortable with, and/or which they desire to preserve or recuperate.
Postville as an Example
The case of Postville, Iowa, is one example of the impact of globalization on rural
people and the need to better understand what is happening in their communities. It also
illustrates how some of the unique qualities of rural experience make it impossible to
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simply overlay or scale down findings from urban research. Large-scale immigration
raids in Iowa in 2006 and 2008 highlight the effects meatpacking can have on symbolic
boundaries in a community. In the first decade of the 2000s Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE)10 raids on manufacturing and packing plants across the United States
(in Bedford, Massachusetts; Laurel, Mississippi; Greeley, Colorado; Marshalltown and
Postville in Iowa) detained unprecedented numbers of people. Although the stated goal
of such federal actions was to increase security, they succeeded primarily in creating
turmoil in the affected communities, most of which were rural. In the particular case of
the December 12, 2008, raid on a kosher meat processing plant in Postville, raids gained
national media coverage and spawned a national-level public discourse about federal
immigration enforcement strategies and immigrant rights. The ICE raids revealed the
connections between local communities, the nation-state, and the transnational to both
local residents and the national media.
Postville, Iowa is a town of about 2000 in the northeast corner of Iowa. In the
1980s a small beef packing company called Hygrade ceased operations and by the late
1980s a group of Hasidic Jews from New York bought the plant and reopened it as
Agriprocessors, a kosher slaughterhouse. The company grew and by 2007 was producing
60 percent of the nation's kosher meat and 40 percent of its kosher poultry (Grey, Devlin,
and Goldsmith 2009: 20). The town was the subject of a book by Stephen Bloom in 2000
titled Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America (Bloom 2000). The book
chronicled his experiences as a big-city (New York and San Francisco) Jew migrating to
Iowa and discovering what he describes as a "clash of cultures" in Postville. He describes
tension in the small town between relative newcomer Hasidic Jews and long-time non-
10. This department is under the broader umbrella of the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) and was created in 2003 as a merger between Customs Service and the former
Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS). (http://www.ice.gov/about/overview/)
75
Jewish residents. Bloom ends the 2001 edition with an afterword that acknowledges the
negative reactions to his book by both the Orthodox Jews and the long-time residents of
Postville. He argues that, "Because of the Hasidim, Postville has finally joined modern
America" and is therefore no longer "insulated or singular" (Bloom 2000). It is ironic
that Bloom positions Hasidic Jews in Postville as modernizing Others in opposition to
long-time residents, given that many Hasidic traditions and practices are specifically
intended to recall ancient religious customs and beliefs.
Postville once again made national news in May 2008 when ICE conducted an
immigration raid on the plant. The raid resulted in the arrest and detention of 389 people.
Most of these people were Guatemalan but there were also others including Israelis and
Ukrainians. Dr. Erik Camayd-Freixas, a professor and court interpreter involved in the
legal aftermath of the raids, and the authors of a post-raid book about Postville outline the
novel prosecution to which the detainees were subjected (Camayd-Freixas 2008; Grey,
Devlin, and Goldsmith 2009). ICE worked with the federal court before the raids to
arrange two possible guilty pleas to present to detainees, each of which was subject to
minimum sentencing requirements. The choices were: plead guilty to a felony charge
carrying a 5-month jail sentence followed by deportation or plead guilty to a much more
serious (and up to this point novel) charge of aggravated identity theft carrying a
mandatory minimum sentence of two years in jail, of course, also followed by
deportation. These prearranged plea bargains gave the judges no decision-making power.
It also allowed ICE to depart from its past policies of simply charging workers with
administrative immigration violations and deporting the detainees. The federal and courtappointed public defenders who were summoned by a federal court judge in Cedar
Rapids the day of the raid found out only the next day that they would be expected to
defend detainees 10 at a time and without being allowed time to interview them (Grey,
Devlin, and Goldsmith 2009: 65-66). Those involved also pointed out that many of the
76
detained Guatemalans were non-literate and spoke indigenous languages. They were not
fluent in Spanish, the language spoken by the interpreters summoned to Postville by the
authorities. I agree with other vocal activists and critics that the collaboration between
ICE and the justice system prior to the raid seems to indicate an assumption of guilt
rather than an assumption of innocence, a proclaimed basis of U.S. law.
The events in Postville also made visible a gendered division in the treatment of
undocumented11 workers as many women were released with ankle monitors while more
men languished in immigration detention centers and/or served time in jail before being
deported. A movie about the raid highlights the voices of women and concerns about
children affected by the Postville raid (Argueta 2009) including the fact Agriprocessors
had been employing underage workers. Additionally, a key component of the outcry
against such raids by activists included not only the militarized nature of the action (guns,
handcuffs, helicopters, etc.) but also the detrimental effects of splitting up families by
detaining and/or deporting the parents of U.S. citizen children.
In the immediate aftermath of the raid in Postville, the local Catholic Church
became a literal place of refuge for those afraid that ICE agents might conduct door-todoor style checks on individual homes or citizens. It also became a site for social
activism and community organizing in response to the raids. In the long term, the church
became a resource for those affected by the raids. The church provided what they could
for unemployed workers (due to the closure of the plant in the wake of the raid) and for
people released from detention with ankle monitors. People with ankle monitors were
released from detention but not granted work permits or permission to leave the town,
11. Although the term "undocumented" would seem to mean that workers have no
documentation, in Postville most of the workers actually had improper documents for which they
faced prosecution under identity theft laws. I use "undocumented" here because it has gained
currency as an alternative to "illegal" and because it mirrors the frequently used expression sin
papeles in Spanish.
77
and they awaited their possible roles as testifying witnesses at the trials of plant owners
and managers. Recognizing that under these conditions, she would not be able to provide
for her family, one woman unsuccessfully pleaded with a judge to deport her. When a
new owner bought the plant and returned it to operation, the town experienced further
changes as recruiters tried to maintain a supply of appropriately documented workers.
For example, Somali and Palauan workers came to Postville after the raid, recruited
because they are refugees (in the case of Somalis) or have permission to work in the
United States (in the case of the Palauans).12 While the town has begun to recover from
such a significant drop in population following the raid, it continues to experience the
flux and fluidity of the meatpacking industry. While they use very different strategies to
do so, the two books about diversity in Postville illustrate the extent to which industrial
meat processing affects how a small town community defines itself and grapples with
changes. Postville is one example of how a whole local rural economy and social
environment depends on and is impacted by meatpacking. And the events of the
immigration raid illustrate how the economic and social relations created by such
dependence implicate even those individuals who do not work at the factory.
Conclusion
I have explained in this chapter how the efforts of boosterism and corporate
strategies have led to the emergence of industrial labor in small towns. This has saved
some rural communities from extinction and has also shifted social dynamics in the
community in unforeseen ways. Even as community members engage in activities that
appear unrelated to meatpacking, they are operating within a particular socioeconomic,
geographic, and historical context that influences how they manage belonging and social
12. Palau is a group of islands in the Pacific Ocean. Like Micronesia and the Marshall
Islands, Palau sought a Compact of Free Association with the US. This means that Palauans can
live and work in the U.S. with a specific type of resident alien status.
78
participation. In a rural community where the local economy depends on the
meatpacking industry (and in many cases, one single plant), the effects of low-wage
industrial employment extend beyond the factory into the social relationships among
community members.
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CHAPTER 3 INDUSTRIAL WORK IN THE RURAL CONTEXT
Factory Influences on Community
I turn now to how industrial meatpacking influences how community members
manage belonging and social participation even as they engage in activities that appear
unrelated to meatpacking. In a rural community where the local economy depends on the
meatpacking industry (and in many cases, one single plant), the effects of low-wage
industrial employment and the identities connected to this work extend beyond the
factory into the social relationships among community members, including those who are
not plant employees. In this chapter I elucidate some ways that local residents, by
defining and privileging difference in a variety of ways, were actively negotiating both
the kinds of difference that were visible as well as the values associated with them.
In this chapter I show how local constructions of belonging in the community are
intertwined with the local meatpacking plant and industrial meatpacking as a globalized
industry. The plant not only determines the local economy but also creates a context of
widening socioeconomic stratification and a greater number of low-income wage earners.
Combined with the racialization of workers, these are changes of both the local economy
and social identity. Thus it is important to view rural meatpacking communities as
dynamic wholes composed of many interdependent components that operate at a variety
of scales (from local to international). Focusing only on quantifiable phenomena such as
employment, ethnicity, linguistic ability, length of residence or income level of people
who live in places like Meatville is insufficient for understanding how rural people are
connected to and influenced by the international corporate meat processing industry.
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Industrial Meatpacking as Context Impacts Identities
Inside the Plant
Industrial (and other) workers enter the workplace with complex and multifaceted identities. They experience life as workers, as racialized, gendered, and classed
people, as participants in linguistic groups, among other kinds of identities. And these
aspects of identity can intersect with each other, meaning that, for example, being a black
female worker can be a very different experience from being a white male worker.
Although these aspects of identity are not necessarily produced by a particular workplace,
they can and often do take on different or intensified meanings in the context of industrial
meatpacking. Someone's identity as a "hard worker" for example, can be strengthened by
the work they do in meatpacking and their classification as a hard worker may reinforce
stereotypes of what kind of racialized or gendered worker is especially suited to that kind
of job. Yelvington argues that, "When identities such as ethnicity and gender are
symbolized in such a way as to make one set of workers different from another, then the
owners reap the benefits because the likelihood is reduced that workers will identify with
each other and collaborate against the owners" (1995: 39). I doubt whether local
workers, even high-level managers, would say that their hiring or employment practices
have anything to do with intentionally creating or emphasizing difference as a way to
disenfranchise workers. I never heard anyone even imply such a thing, and some
employees I spoke with explicitly denied such practices. Nevertheless, relatively high
levels of turnover and continuous changes in available pools of workers resulted in a
work force with significant differences (in gender, language, religion, and race) from
each other and who sometimes were grouped together in particular jobs or ranks.
Although the company implemented multilingual signage and hired interpreters for
workers, language and cultural differences created differences in power, in ability to
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access some kinds of information, and also made it more difficult for workers to get to
know each other and mobilize for common interests.
Outside the Plant
Workers' identities permeate the space of the meatpacking plant, meaning that
they enter the social and physical workspace with already constructed identities or senses
of who they are as well as carrying aspects of their identity with them when they emerge
from the workplace. Workers experience the facets of their identity, including those
impacted by industrial labor outside the workplace as well as inside. For example, a man
or woman who works on the line at a packing plant is seen not only as a parent and
provider when he or she goes to the bank or attends parent-teacher conferences but also
as an industrial worker. Even when facets of one's identity are noted by others without
negativity, they are still important identifiers and often are associated with implicit or
explicit hierarchical social placement. This is what I mean when I argue that the
processing plant is a context for the community. The meatpacking plant not only has
economic impacts but also affects other aspects of local life in a variety of ways.
While boosterism certainly contributed to the existence of the current packing
plant, those people who credited it with saving the community seemed to feel far less
empowered to "come together" in other areas. When I asked why they thought there
were so few Latinos on the city council, for example, I was told by a variety of
community leaders that it was due to a lack of interest in running by Latino citizens. One
city official had a much more nuanced view and pointed to the fact that work hours often
prevent local industrial workers from being involved in activities. When I asked why he
thought there were no non-whites on the city council or school board he responded, "It's
not for lack of trying! Because you know what? We've tried to recruit and it's a matter of
recruiting. People don't just step forward for these positions." He also pointed to other
constraints such as general familiarity with the workings of local government and lack of
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citizenship status. He recalled trying to recruit a Latino business owner to run for city
council. The city official had thought the business owner would be a good candidate
because he was involved in other community activities and spoke English well. However
the recruitment attempt failed because the man is a permanent resident and thus ineligible
(as a non-citizen) for a position in civic government. Others, often the most enfranchised
community members, spoke of attempts that they or others had made to include Latinos
and sometimes described feeling disappointed and frustrated when these overtures did not
produce the desired results.
That some of the people in positions of power at the plant also have powerful
positions in the community outside the plant is predictable. High-level management
workers have held seats on the city council and the school board, and sometimes both.
They have access to forms of capital that others do not: time, local name recognition,
personal and family reputation, money, education. The white male-dominated city
council is constituted not only of those most enfranchised in terms of having experienced
formal education in the United States, but also those who mostly have jobs that allow
enough time and energy outside of work to participate in regular meetings, and are
familiar with the "local politics" of the town. While the connection is a logical one in
that these people are the most enfranchised and empowered to hold civic leadership
positions, it results in solidifying outside of the plant the racialized power positions
established within the plant. It also leads to an increasing exclusion of non-white,
working-class, and lower English-proficient community members from positions of
officially recognized power. The mayor's critical reflections on what prevents people
from participating in civic government were forged through years of trying to recruit
community members and ensure the vitality of the local government. Efforts such as his
to consider the constraints of community members need to be more prominent and should
spur action that seeks to reduce those barriers.
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The interplay of race/ethnicity, gender, and economic class come into focus more
clearly when considering the actions of the local police. Emilia, an upwardly mobile,
English-proficient, single-mother Latina and long-time local resident recounted how one
time when she got drunk at a local bar patronized primarily by white English speakers,
the policeman stopped her as she walked home and offered her a ride to her parents'
house nearby where she planned to spend the night. She had known the police officer
since she was in high school. In contrast, several working-class, non-English-proficient
male Latinos related that they or their friends had not only been stopped by the police
while walking home drunk from another local bar, one patronized primarily by Spanishspeaking Latinos, but they had also been ticketed for public intoxication. On one
occasion, one of these men called me to come pick him up after the police stopped him
outside the bar. He handed his phone to the policeman who declared that if I didn't come
pick him up immediately, he would be arrested and spend the night in jail. All of these
men had come to the community as adults and were not involved with school activities
through their children. Although Emilia and these men shared roughly similar incomes,
education levels, and ethnic identities, the defining elements of these different
interactions were gender, English proficiency, length of residence in the community, and
socialization in the public school system. Research on a similar rural Iowa meatpacking
community in the 1990s also found that, "Even many white European American residents
reported that the police targeted Mexican and Mexican Americans to a greater extent than
the white youth who were often the cause of certain problems. Some reported that
Mexicans and Mexican Americans were arrested for drinking when white residents
would be escorted home or ignored" (Naples 1996: 97). This was a position echoed in
Cantú's findings also, "Latino residents have been charged and arrested for 'legitimate'
reasons-such as public intoxication, driving without a driver's license, and disorderly
conduct-while even whites in Midtown report that Anglo residents are not pursued when
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guilty of the same crime" (1995: 408). The people I describe above had different
experiences with law enforcement and, more importantly, interpreted these experiences
differently.
On another occasion I witnessed a local parade in which Spanish-speaking
working-class onlookers booed and shouted "fuera" [get out] at a relatively new, white
police officer as he passed in his patrol car. They were responding to what they viewed
as discriminatory policing by this particular officer (they didn't yell at any of the other
officers in the parade who had lived for much longer in the community). They took his
response to their yelling as confirmation of an antagonistic relationship: he rolled up the
windows of his patrol car! These incidents demonstrate the complicated interplay of
race, gender, class, length of local residence, English proficiency, and familiarity with
school social spaces in constructing local belonging.
There were also several instances in which white community leaders named a
specific "successful" Latino and argue that despite "being Latino" or having spoken
English as a second language, or having come from humble economic roots he had
learned to speak English fluently, had graduated from high school and gone on to college,
had become a homeowner, and/or had gone on to hold non-menial jobs. Later in
fieldwork I found that I had learned the system so well that I could predict who would be
deemed successful even though their parents immigrated, worked at the meatpacking
plant, were on welfare, didn't speak English very well or had little formal education. The
superintendent pointed to Julio, a particularly bright and socially active bilingual senior
to demonstrate how it was possible to grow up speaking Spanish at home and attend a
renowned four-year university. And several people drew my attention to a Latino brother
and sister, Mario and Esther, who attended state universities and were concerned about
the consequences of standardized test scores on the future of their alma mater. A
Meatville public school teacher pointed to Sofia, another socially active bilingual senior
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student to illustrate to me how a student could be Latino and still be familiar with Iowa
popular culture (such as the Iowa Hawkeyes and RAGBRAI). Several influential civic
leaders pointed to Alegra and her family as an example of how even people with "rough"
backgrounds can be upwardly mobile by learning English, being involved in church and
community activities, and sending their children to college. And a local banker pointed
to a Latino businessman to show how immigrants can participate in local boosterism
activities.
These references to "successful" Latinos were often also accompanied by stories
of how the speaker had contributed to or helped that Latino person achieve their success.
A white female former teacher named Georgia Knott told me about being accused of
racism by students. Although the events had transpired nearly a decade before, she still
wept as she told me the story which concluded with her saying,
I thought "How could you take somebody like me who was, you
know, not only giving Hispanic people gifts, you know my
[relative] worked to start the cultural festival and all this stuff, and
you've let this young man say I'm racist?" And I'm gonna tell ya, I
really feel a lot of that is going on. These kids still say that "You
don't like brown people," and I really feel the Hispanic people are
shootin' themselves in the feet or foot as the old saying goes. I
think they're ruining their own lives here, some of em. [choking
up]. For this woman, as for many white Americans, racism is conceived of as a moral
deficit and incompatible with positive intentions. In Georgia's eyes, her benevolence
toward minorities foreclosed any possible bias. It was clear that she did not recognize the
paternalistic element of what she describes as cross-cultural generosity. She also does
not realize the essentialization present in her example of the cultural festival. Although it
was likely meant to celebrate Latinidad, as Shankar (2008) explains, a cultural festival
can also create boundaries that make difference or ethnic identity acceptable only within
that sphere and in performance rather than in everyday ways. Even if the accusations of
racism were unfounded, her description of the events seems to indicate that it was simply
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unthinkable for her to consider even the possibility that her accusers' perceptions of bias
could hold some validity.
On the one hand, the cross-generational benevolence described here is evidence of
the incorporation of at least some Latinos into the social networks of non-Latinos.
Particularly in small towns, it has been common for more influential and wealthy
members of the community to help give a "leg up" to promising youngsters. This can take
the form of mentoring or hiring them to work at local businesses while the young people
are in high school or college. Additionally, many clubs and benevolent associations have
supporting youth as one of their explicit missions as a group. It is encouraging that this
practice in Meatville seems to be extended across racial boundaries. And the supportive
relationships established through these interactions undoubtedly contribute to
constructing a feeling of belonging and inclusion that encourage young people to remain
in or return to the community as adults.
On the other hand, people like Julio, Alegra, Mario, and Esther all pointed out that
their success was due not only to their individual achievement but also to circumstances
that facilitated their success. Mario and Julio both pointed out that their parents had more
experience with formal education in their countries and languages of origin than their
peers' parents. Alegra's family had also benefited from the fact that her mother was not
Latina and was fluent in English. They also pointed to support from their predominantly
white, English-dominant evangelical church as a key factor in their ability to have a
stable home life despite the difficulties of physically draining, low-paying jobs and past
struggles with substance abuse. In light of this more nuanced view of the path to success
in the voices of the very people who have experienced it, the stories of white community
leaders about these "success stories" can also be seen as an example of "benevolent
racism" (Villenas 2001).
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In Meatville social class was treated as fairly obvious and common-knowledge.
Those who worked (or had worked) on the line at the local processing plant, in other
factories within commuting distance, or in the agricultural fields often knew each other at
least enough to recognize those they had worked with, even if (as was often the case),
they didn't know each other's names. But even those who didn't work at the plant could
"read" such information in the tell-tale signs on the workers' bodies. The line where a
hairnet digs into one’s forehead at work temporarily leaving a mark and calloused hands
combine with more obvious signals to make one's occupation and associated social
position more visible. Workers often carry a smell of meat and machinery that permeates
skin and clothing, sometimes even after bathing and laundering. Several workers I knew
expressed being self-conscious about appearing smelly or dirty at adult education classes
or parent-teacher conferences. Other times I noticed people absent-mindedly or painfully
rubbing and flexing sore shoulders, arms, and hands. One student's hands were so
damaged from the work he did that he could not operate a computer mouse because he
could no longer sustain the fine motor control necessary to do so. Protective gear such as
arm shields can leave marks including bruises where the edges rub the skin, even skin
covered by a layer of clothing or soft protective gear. One acquaintance who worked at
the plant seemed to have nearly permanent bruise-like marks just below his elbow on the
insides of his forearms. All of these kinds of physical indicators contributed to locals'
ability to read one another's social class.
While many people could read these signs to know something about another
person, they often did not tell the whole story. For example, many middle class EuroAmericans were unaware that among the line workers at Meat Corporation were a
woman who had a degree in mechanical engineering from a Mexican university and
others with post-secondary educations. As an observer, these physical marks also came
to represent in some respect the powerlessness of workers to preserve their health. I
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heard one person say that they would "just like to come out [of work, whether meaning at
the end of the day or upon quitting/retiring was unclear in the context] in the same
condition I went in. Not better, not worse." When I read a newspaper article about a
potential reform of immigration processes that proposed thousands of dollars in penalties
as part of a "path to legalization" for undocumented workers, I exclaimed to a friend "But
they're already paying, literally, with their bodies!" And many of the workers I knew
were glad to do so because it meant feeding their families, educating their children, and
housing their relatives. They were proud to work hard and sacrifice one of the limited
resources they possessed—their bodies.
Particularly because it was a small town, it was easy to connect at least faces (if
not names) to visible possessions like homes or businesses. Despite having grown up in a
small town I was notoriously bad at the "whose car is that" game, and yet even I learned
to recognize the cars and associated residences of a variety of people in Meatville. I
frequently heard people commenting on the visible possessions of others around town,
regardless of how well they knew them personally and making associations to other
information they knew about that person. People would say things like, "There goes soand-so with another new car. I don't know how he can afford it, he owes lots of child
support for two kids with his baby mama", "Did you see that Burmese guy drive by with
a dent in his car door? Isn't that the second car he's crashed this year?", "You know that
guy with the big house up by the school? I saw he had a new RV in the driveway
yesterday. He must be retiring. I saw his daughter-in-law was running the office when I
went in to get my taxes done," or "I don't know why that Hispanic mom comes in to get
free school supplies when she drives up in an Escalade and her kid sits there in line
playing a PSP!" These examples illustrate not only the way that class is visible but the
way that race is articulated with it, noting especially that the well-to-do businessman's
whiteness is usually unmarked as the default racial categorization. Elsewhere I take up
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the issue of "seeing as knowing" but here I have shown some ways in which relationships
and relative social positions are constructed, known, and negotiated both within and
outside the plant.
Length of Residence & Belonging
The length of time people had already spent in Meatville or the local area played
an important role in local constructions of belonging. Most adult white community
members had made conscious decisions to reside in the community, largely because they
felt an emotional attachment to the place where they grew up and/or because they had
kinship ties in the area. As I discuss in more detail in Chapter 6, for many people it was a
return to family, heritage, or rurality that drew or kept them in Meatville. For others,
including Latinos and Chin people, the perception of their residence as temporary or
long-term had to do both with sentimental connections to the area as well as employment
stability. I discovered this when, as a researcher, people expressed surprised satisfaction
that I had chosen to live in Meatville and planned to stay for at least a year (it turned out
to be four years). It is also important to note, as Kingsolver does in her study of rural
Kentucky tobacco growing towns, that "Because many small-town residents can be
'placed' as either insiders or outsiders, or both, in specific contexts, it is not possible to
figure out either insider or outsider status by place of birth" (2011: 115). Similarly, ideas
of belonging or being an insider in Meatville were complex, having to do not only with
place of birth, but also legal citizenship, language fluency, homeownership,
understandings of what Kingsolver calls the "phantom landscape connecting topography
to memory," and "knowing the codes" (2011: 114), among other things. Thus in certain
contexts, a non-citizen Latino who is fluent in English and uses local terminology for
informally named unmarked places might experience a greater sense of belonging than a
Spanish-dominant U.S. citizen who has not picked up such local terms.
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More enfranchised Latino residents (fluent English-speakers, homeowners, white
collar workers or upwardly mobile economically) frequently echoed the sentiments of
wanting to live in a small, rural community and be close to other family members who
live in or near the community. Having listened to Maritza Leyva Torres talk longingly
about the East Coast, I asked her if she had considered moving back there.
Maritza: My son said, 'If you leave, fine, we're staying.'
[James (her son-in-law)] is definitely no. He ain't
going anywhere, so my daughter's not going
anywhere.
Cristina: He's from [Meatville]?
Maritza: Mhm. Yeah. So I'm like, uh, my kids, my family
is the most important thing to me, so I'm like, I
want to be around my family you know. I love
New York but I love my family more. So we'll
see what happens, I don't know.
Another woman I know, Conchita, owned several rental properties in the area and
had just bought a house in a larger nearby town when I met her. She mentioned that her
hope was that her son (at the time a high school student) would get married and take up
residence in one of her rental properties as he started a family. Apparently, part of the
reason she had invested in local real estate was to create something of a legacy to pass on
to him. A popular perception by Anglos about meatpacking communities that have
experienced a large increase in the number of Latino residents over the last 20-30 years is
that many of the Latino workers are both newly arrived and only here temporarily. To
the contrary, some Iowa Latinos, even those who have precarious economic situations
and may use migration (whether locally or further afield) as a coping strategy, do not see
themselves either as recent arrivals or temporary inhabitants. Some of these Iowa Latinos
today have well-established kinship connections and family histories in Iowa or the upper
Midwest. Although some longtime residents may interpret their bilingualism,
transnationalism, and mobility across cultural frameworks as evidence of their transience
or lack of loyalty, these Latino Iowans draw on a broad range of experiences to construct
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new and flexible identities which recognize and validate knowledge that emerges from
and combines their diverse experiences. Rather than divided loyalties, their experiences
represent the emergence of a more complex concept of what it means to be Iowan.
In the context of local Meatville life the complex nature of transnational
economies, kinship commitments, and local interests comes into sharper focus. For
example, calculations of family budgets sometimes included how much money could or
needed to be sent to kin in other states or countries. In other cases, some Meatville
grandparents, both Latino and Anglo, had physical, legal, or de facto custody of one or
more of their grandchildren. Others, particularly immigrants, sent remittances and made
real estate, business, or other investments in other countries or home places. Particularly
given overall wealth disparities, it makes sense that many immigrants would prioritize
investment in both people and places that they know and, perhaps more importantly, that
they perceive as more in need. I saw one man I know crying inconsolably because, he
told me, relatives from the Caribbean had called asking for money to buy groceries (they
had had to spend the monthly amount he usually sent on a medical emergency) and he
didn't have any more money to send them. And a Chin man I knew put off enrolling fulltime in college for a couple of years because he was sending several hundred dollars a
month to his brother at a Bible college in the Philippines. When deciding how to allocate
their limited household incomes, it is understandable that literally feeding, clothing, and
housing kin (whether they are nearby or a world away) might take precedence over
donating to a school fundraiser in Meatville, for example. In this situation, demonstrating
belonging through economic investment can be complicated by economic necessity,
limited resources, and a desire to belong in more than one place at a time. In other
words, it can be difficult to see US communities like Meatville as investment priorities,
either emotionally (in the sense of creating and maintaining relationships with new
people) or economically, especially for people who have other pressing commitments.
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In addition to actual experiences of long-term residence, the perception of one's
commitment to the local community was closely connected to an intention to remain
local. Unlike residents with ties to the area, less enfranchised people and especially those
who work in manual labor or meatpacking jobs, tended to emphasize employment as their
primary reason for living in Meatville. They typically saw themselves as temporary
residents who will live where there is a good job available. Although many of these
kinds of residents had come to appreciate other aspects of life in Meatville, their
connections to the community were more utilitarian; while any place would have positive
and negative aspects, they would go where they could make the best living possible. The
precarious nature of industrial employment and the intertwined issue of uncertain
physical health caused by such intense labor also contributes to some people seeing
themselves as temporary rather than long-term residents, although efforts in the industry
and at individual plants to reduce turnover also may contribute to more stable conditions
that foster greater economic and emotional investment by workers in a local community.
Defining Difference Locally
Elements of social identity in Meatville, as elsewhere, are intersecting and
interdependent, like a thread in a sweater pulling on one string wrinkles others. In any
specific context one particular element such as social class, English proficiency, gender,
or race/ethnicity might be more obvious or salient but the others are still operational.
While length of residence or even the perception of a future commitment to long-term
residence was a key factor in how belonging was evaluated, other kinds of difference also
played important roles in the ways Meatville residents placed each other. Differences
were alternately and sometimes interchangeably described as cultural, racial, or
linguistic. Latinos and non-Latinos alike tended to frame Meatville's recent history as
pivoting around a time before there were significant numbers of Latinos, or before and
after diversity.
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Despite the multiple interconnected components of identity, many people
characterized local divisions or problems as being either about race or about class. And
most of the Euro-American people I spoke with were completely unaware that people
from other parts of the world might construct race (or class) in ways that differ from the
established hierarchies in the United States. They did not recognize that "far from
describing biological entities, American racial categories are merely one of numerous,
very culture-specific schemes for reducing uncertainty about how people should respond
to other people" (Fish 1995: 251). And while it might be simpler to describe the local
community as being divided into racial or economic binaries (if it could be described as
divided at all, which some people assured me it could not), it became clear as people
explained local challenges that a combination of interconnected factors worked to define
people in nuanced ways.
For many Meatville residents "diversity" was used as a gloss for "Latino."
The
increased presence of Latinos in Meatville since the 1980s has been a significant change
in the dominant story of the town's history as racially homogeneous. Nevertheless,
Meatville's diversity is relative. Compared to some even more racially homogeneous
rural Iowa towns, Meatville is very diverse. In comparison to Postville, it is not so
diverse. There are basically three or four racialized groups of which two (Anglo and
Latino) are far and away numerically dominant. Until recently there were basically only
two languages represented in public spaces: English and Spanish. Except for one Jew
and one animist, all the people I met in Meatville were Christian, although many
considered themselves not to be practicing or not affiliated with a particular church or
religion.
In her discussion about the familiarity of living in a rural community, Kingsolver
addressed what she calls "the problem of exceptionalism" where a person might be
known as an individual rather than according to a stereotype without the stereotype itself
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being abandoned (2011:140). So, for instance, this would explain the kind of situation
where someone says, "I think they should deport all the Mexicans, but not my neighbor
Jose. He helps me shovel snow in the winter and brought me Mexican-style chicken soup
when I was sick." Some of the white English-dominant Meatville residents I spoke with
used similar discursive techniques to talk about Latinos. By mentioning positive qualities
such as being hardworking, polite, or smart, interlocutors directed attention to qualities
that contradicted stereotypes of Latinos as lazy and uneducated. Such descriptions also
implicitly reinforced the message that the speaker was not racist or close-minded because
in the popular conception a racist would not be able to identify such positive qualities or
recognize non-whites who possessed them. According to Kingsolver, the problem of
exceptionalism "begs the question of how major changes in majority/minority numbers
and relations might challenge the welcoming reputation of Carlisle and other small towns
with similar demographics" (2011:140). And my research shows how people in
Meatville have answered that question.
Change has come with tension, uncertainty, and a number of adjustments in
practice and policy. New and different people have challenged long held familiarity
among people as well as established ways of doing things. Unspoken, sometimes
unconscious ways of living in a small town such as personal networks serving in lieu of
formal communication about policy; "phantom landscapes of topography and memory";
and flexibility in the application of the law presented unforeseen challenges when many
of the "new people" in Meatville experienced life from the perspective of racial and/or
linguistic minority status and a historical context of inequality and injustice (Kingsolver
2011: 114, 135). The challenge of change was exacerbated in some respects by the
changing circumstances of the meatpacking economy in which white English-proficient
workers did not want the newly de-unionized (and therefore lower-paying) factory jobs,
which then drew non-white, less English-proficient workers to the community. This
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created the perception for many people that Latinos brought not only positively valued
"culture" or "diversity" with them to Meatville and other meatpacking towns but also
poverty and crime. That race and power played key roles in this perception is evidenced
at least in part by the fact that very few people ever voiced accusations that Meat
Corporation might be responsible for bringing more poverty and crime to Meatville.
Some longtime residents defended the rights of "those people" to be here (in
Meatville) or made statements that started with phrases like "We don't mind them..."
which functioned to refute anticipated allegations of racism. These speakers tended to be
in direct opposition to other speakers who with bumper stickers, letters to editors and
other means made claims such as "illegals should be deported back to Mexico" and
"You're in America, speak English!" Nevertheless, explicit confrontation on the subjects
of race or immigration almost never occurred, at least not in public. Some people I spoke
with carefully distinguished between not liking new people or Latinos personally and
disliking particular behaviors like leaving cars on their lawn, not using trash bags in their
trash cans, or being too noisy. As I explain further in the next section, this type of
discourse avoids direct references to race while continuing to affirm notions of fear,
danger, impurity, or other rationales for exclusivity and separation. Still other white
Meatville residents and some long-time Latino residents assured me that it has just taken
some time for Latinos (or will in the future take some time for the Burmese) to learn
"how we do things." And indeed, the arrival of the Burmese provided not only another
cultural and linguistic element for the social fabric of Meatville but also a tool for
comparison among minority arrivals. This resulted in some discussions about whether
and how the Burmese might be like or unlike the Latinos in their involvement with the
public school and one administrator mentioned elsewhere hoped the Burmese would be
more actively involved than Latinos. In another case, the expressed concern was the pace
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of English acquisition and a civic leader said he thought the Burmese appeared to be
picking up English much faster than Spanish-speakers.
Colorblindness can both produce and reinforce the idea that everyone gets along.
Several times I heard conversations between young adults and older community members
about how Meatville students were more prepared to go out into the world and
particularly to college because they aren't surprised or threatened by the racial diversity
they find there. Colorblindness creates a way to avoid the potential discord created by
recognizing that some kinds of difference such as race are valued in a hierarchical
system. The rhetoric of colorblindness also supports ideas about "niceness" elaborated in
the next section by presenting a way to avoid confrontation. According to this logic,
everyone gets along because "we're so used to the diversity, we don't even see race." As
one college-educated Latino talked about students at the local school he noted, "They're
used to it, so it's no big deal. It's just everyday life." He contrasted his classmates'
education in Meatville among Latinos with other rural Midwest college students like his
white rural-Iowa-educated college roommate who didn't have very much direct exposure
to people with "difference." In his view, his Meatville classmates were at an advantage
because they were not as surprised or conflicted when confronted with difference at
college. The everyone-gets-along rhetoric serves a variety of purposes. In one sense, it
builds community. By asserting harmony and grouping all local residents under the
umbrella term of "everyone," the speaker promotes a vision of a united, conglomerate of
individuals, "community." Although a variety of people (including some Englishproficient Latinos) claimed that they didn't "see race" or did not believe that there was
much racial discrimination occurring, all participants alluded to some kinds of
hierarchical difference even if they did so in an effort to refute the power of such
hierarchies. While in theory it strives for fairness by asserting equality regardless of
difference, the negative side of colorblindness is that it is unable to allow for or account
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for situations in which it might feel different (or others might treat you differently) to be a
Meatville student of color or who is Spanish-dominant than it feels to be a Meatville
student who is white or English-dominant.
A related discourse is that of multiculturalism. In one instance, a white senior
gave a speech at commencement lauding the multicultural education with which he and
his Meatville classmates would enter the post-high school world. Conversations about
how young people benefited from Meatville's diversity cast the very presence of "others"
as a benefit. Like in the example of the college student above, difference was not only
disconcerting to those less exposed or educated, but on the flip side was a benefit to
Meatville students by its mere presence. Many young people grow up hearing that
"other" (read: minority) cultures are valuable for their food, music, clothing or crafts.
This message is conveyed through events like cultural festivals in which these particular
and essentialized elements of culture are highlighted. As Shankar explains in the context
of Desi high school youth in California, a critique of this kind of multiculturalism
"acknowledges that multiculturalism focuses on how immigrants, people of color, and
other minorities add diversity to American society without actually addressing the power
relations that contribute to inequality between and within these groups" (2008: 121). By
focusing on essentialized elements of culture like food or music, more subtle differences
or quotidian ways of being are not recognized or validated. In the schools she observed,
Shankar noted that "multicultural programs stand alone as the designated space where
racial difference within the student body receives public attention" and are equated with
entertainment (2008: 122-123).
Like the protective mechanisms discussed in the next section, multicultural events
such as those described by Shankar serve to place and contain ethnic or cultural
expression within a particular controlled and bounded space and place thereby
minimizing the perception of danger or loss of control. As Shankar describes, "even
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though White students are a numerical minority at Mercer and Greene [high schools],
events such as homecoming, rallies, school dances, and prom that Desi teens regard as
White dominate the public space of school and rarely take into consideration the music or
aesthetic choices of non-white groups" (2008: 123). Although what Shankar describes
takes place in a school, the same holds true in other contexts, such as when a town puts
on a Cinco de Mayo celebration. Thus it becomes clear how the concept of
multiculturalism can be deployed in a way that elides differences in everyday ways of
doing things, conflates race with culture, and reinforces the concept of whiteness as the
unmarked racial category devoid of cultural expression. Given the prevalence of
colorblind and multicultural discourses, many people in Meatville did not find it difficult
to notice culturally-constructed differences and their associated value but did find it
difficult to vocalize these tensions and recognize the structural, interpersonal inequalities
that constrain enfranchisement for some people.
Perceptions of danger or discomfort
One of the things that drew me to Meatville was how "nice" people seemed when
I was there. I grew up in a small Midwestern town very much like Meatville and, having
lived elsewhere for various periods, had come to appreciate practices like chatting with
people in the grocery store and the "one-finger-off-the-steering-wheel" wave. While
Midwesterners are known for their "niceness," this quality is claimed even more heartily
by rural Midwesterners. It is sometimes framed by state as "Iowa Nice" or "Hoosier
Hospitality" in Indiana (Levinson, Everitt, and Johnson 2007). And in a book about rural
tobacco towns in Kentucky, Kingsolver (2011) discusses the concept of "neighboring"
that seems to be very similar to Midwest Nice. I have heard stories about young
Midwesterners getting jobs on the East Coast in major urban hubs at least in part because
they were from the Midwest and therefore perceived as "nice" and hardworking. And a
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friend told me that one Midwestern senator in Washington, D.C. shifted some of his
hiring to include more staff from the Midwest (including his district) in part because they
had more even-keeled attitudes, or as she put it "there was less drama." The kind of
"niceness" that these expressions refer to are generally meant to indicate an avoidance of
confrontation or direct criticism, an assumption of rural familiarity (such that people feel
comfortable striking up conversations with strangers in public), the expectation that other
people have at least benign intentions (rather than sinister ones) when interacting, and the
belief that others will reciprocate kindness if approached kindly. In the case of Meatville,
“niceness” was likely behind the response "everyone gets along" when I asked explicitly
about racial tensions or changes in the community.
These positive characterizations of "niceness," however, also have a negative side.
Iowa Nice sometimes makes it difficult to combat racism and other -isms because it
encourages people to avoid conflict. Iowa Nice and other brands of benevolence elide
difficult truths about as yet unrecognized histories of inequality and racial discrimination
pointed out by writers like Loewen (2005) and Jaspin (2007). And many people still see
it as unnecessary to address these difficult historical truths, their contemporary legacies,
or emerging tensions in changing communities. As Kingsolver (2011) explains,
"neighboring" can mask or even serve as an informal mechanism to police certain kinds
of exclusion such as rural homelessness, racism, and LGBTQ sexualities. Iowa Nice
contributes to the popular belief mentioned in the book Apple Pie and Enchiladas
(Millard and Chapa 2004) that racism is intentional, explicit, individual, and indicative of
moral deficiency. Many people believe that if an act or utterance wasn't meant
pejoratively, it couldn't constitute racism and therefore should not be interpreted as
offensive to anyone. Conversely, being accused of racism represents a serious affront to
one's moral character and honorable intentions. Unfortunately, such a view does not
acknowledge institutional or unintentional racism. The combination of these components
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(avoiding confrontation and beliefs about racism) makes it particularly difficult to discuss
issues of inequality and discrimination of a variety of types.
The context of rurality contributes another dimension to the issue. Although
homogeneous communities and rural isolation can make it more challenging to establish
and maintain cross-boundary social interactions, people do not participate in offensive,
racist, or discriminatory activities because they do not know any people they see as
racially different (or with other differences). Rather, many people simply do not
understand discrimination in a meaningful and historically contextualized way because it
has not only not been part of their life experience but also because no one who
understood it that way has successfully explained it to them. On a surface level, it is easy
to look at rural Midwesterners and assume that we are racist or discriminatory because
we are ignorant or uneducated hicks. Likewise, attributing racism to the fact that many
of us come from and were educated in communities and contexts that are still largely
white and standard English-dominant supports the idea that diversity is a good in itself. It
is important to recognize the implicit stereotypes about class, rurality, and race (in this
case whiteness) that are present in these assumptions. Growing up in an allegedly diverse
community is not a necessary requirement for having access to a worldview that allows
for more subtle types of discrimination and an understanding of systemic and historically
constructed inequalities.
Given the context of Iowa Nice, what does it mean to say "everyone gets along"
in Meatville? One measure people often referenced was violence. Since the first time I
heard someone assert that a lack of interracial tension was evidenced by the absence of
physical violence, it struck me as a pretty low threshold for claiming communal harmony.
Both in the context of the local public school and in the community generally, people
often refuted the perception that the town was a hotbed of violence or violent crime. In
discussions about schools in rural Iowa meatpacking communities I heard several people
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refer to misconceptions about their school saying something like, "People think there are
fights here every day but we don't really have very many." For the most part, most of the
people I met experienced Meatville as a safe place to live, work, and socialize. Asked
why she preferred to live in Meatville rather than a city, Lisa Adams responded, "[in a
city] you don't know your neighbors. We just, we have, it's just the friend, it's the
atmosphere, it's the you know, probably the little more safety of it too." Like in many
small towns, there were some locals who expressed confidence in the trustworthiness of
their fellow community members by routinely leaving the doors of their house unlocked
when they weren't home or leaving their keys in their car while inside a store. Some of
the Mexican immigrants I spoke with indicated that living in a place like Meatville was a
welcome change from home places in Mexico torn apart by the violence of drug cartels,
and indeed, the tragedies perpetrated by cartels in Mexican communities was a frequent
topic of conversation in the adult education classes I taught. I also met several Latinos
(of Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Dominican descent) who had lived in New York City
before coming to Meatville. They all said that one attraction of Meatville was its
comparative safety. Nearly all of them mentioned the stress of potential or actual danger
in their daily lives in New York; experiencing or being prepared to experience events like
mugging, verbal threats, or physical assault played a prominent role in their narratives
about city life which they contrasted with life in Meatville. For newcomers who came to
live in Meatville without knowing many people, the kinds of public rural familiarity
demonstrated by waving to people or engaging in small talk make Meatville feel
welcoming and safe, particularly in contrast to the anonymity of city life.
I had the chance to see what some of my Chin Burmese students thought when I
used a worksheet in English class with a short text titled "Crime around Town." We read
the text aloud together and then discussed some of the vocabulary. The worksheet then
had a few true-false questions to check basic comprehension and then several open-ended
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answer questions or discussion prompts about the students' opinions. One of the
discussion questions asked whether they felt their own town or neighborhood had a lot of
crime. In response to the students’ questions I had glossed "crime" as breaking the law.
The students, all males and in their thirties, began the discussion by answering in the
affirmative and saying that they felt there was a lot of crime. I followed up by asking
what kinds of crime. One man said, "drinking" as he acted it out. This prompted another
student to demonstrate that he had already learned the Spanish vocabulary associated
with alcohol consumption by saying the Spanish word for drunk (borracho). Encouraged
by this, another student contributed "cerveza" (beer) to the conversation. The direction of
this conversation demonstrated that Spanish-speaking and Chin-speaking community
members had been talking to each other and that consuming alcohol was apparently a
common topic of conversation. When I asked the students if they drank, most said no. I
have no reason to disbelieve them but it's also possible that they just did not want to
admit to drinking given that a couple of the students had leadership roles in the local Chin
Baptist Church. I returned to the issue of crime and asked whether they felt someone
might hurt them physically or steal something from them, and most said no. In the sense
of physical safety and the safety of their property (like cars or homes), most of the Chin
students in my English class that night seemed to feel that Meatville posed few dangers.
The students made comparisons to big cities like Kuala Lumpur, where many had lived
as undocumented immigrants while waiting for refugee placement by the UNHCR, to
argue that Meatville was relatively safe.
Like other rural Iowa communities with meatpacking plants, by the 2000s
Meatville had arrived at a sort of critical mass of Spanish-speakers. This made it
relatively easy to accomplish many daily tasks in Spanish, something that is not very
common for many other rural Midwestern towns. As Chin Burmese people arrived in
Meatville in 2010 and 2011, there was soon not only a strong church organization but
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also a grocery store and a restaurant that specialized in Chin Burmese food and other
products. In addition to selling products, both of these commercial establishments also
provided a site for social encounters with other Chin-speakers. For both Spanishspeaking and now Chin-speaking (im)migrants, being able to speak one's native language
with others and find at least some kinds of familiar food and products locally contributes
to making Meatville a more attractive and comfortable place to live and work.
In contrast, white longtime residents sometimes spoke about feeling
uncomfortable for many of these same reasons. At least once a month, people talked to
me about how the main street didn't look the same as it had years ago and several
prominent community members told me stories about elderly community members who
had been upset when the owner of a Latino bakery painted his historic storefront bright
yellow. Apparently, some community members felt the color was gaudy or too bright
and incongruous with the other stores on Main Street. Mrs. Knott explained, "An
example would be some Caucasian people or Anglo people were very upset when the
bakery downtown painted itself lime green and yellow. You know, I looked at it, I
thought it looked a little out of place but quite frankly I found it cheery. But there were a
lot of people that didn't like that." Several English-dominant community boosters
mentioned throughout my fieldwork that the signage in the windows of the ethnic
groceries and restaurants appeared to be "messy" or disorganized. "But,” Mrs. Knott
continued, “there are some things some of the Hispanic stores do [that] I don't like. And
one of them is they plaster the windows with ads or signs and it looks very trashy."
Many of the signs or posters that Mrs. Knott and other interlocutors referred to were
handwritten in Spanish or Chin and some of the Spanish-language ones contained
spelling or grammatical errors. Some of the signs were old, faded, torn, or waterlogged
from window condensation, and others advertised events that had long since occurred.
Like the dwellers of gated neighborhoods that Low (2009) discusses or the suburbs that
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Baumgartner (1988) describes, signs, furniture, lawns, and their cleanliness or orderliness
"indicate the 'type of people' who live in a place and establish a norm of middle-class
civility, masking the imposition of whiteness" (Low 2009:87). Similarly, Mrs. Knott's
observations illustrate how taste in the form of a "nice" or orderly appearance of a
storefront functioned as a "coded way to talk about and voice resistance to racial
difference and a loss of white privilege" (Low 2009: 88).13
Some people told me that "it must be a cultural thing." Participants' recognition
that different aesthetic principles connected to culture were behind the window displays
implicitly suggested that confronting the owners or attempting to force a change might
make them seem insensitive. Others were less resigned and a notice in a local newsletter
reminded business owners in a series about spring cleaning that one of the beautification
projects they might undertake would be taking down out-of-date or marred postings in
their windows. While changing the color of a store facade or untidy signage might seem
trivial, it contributed to a sense for some long-time residents that everything was
changing. In a place with which they had been intimately familiar, visible changes on the
main commercial street indicated to some long-time English-dominant residents that
perhaps they no longer belonged.
Other longtime non-Latino community members told me that inside the stores
just didn't feel the same anymore to them either. The stores weren't as organized or
brightly lit as many U.S. residents have come to expect stores to be. These stores are not
like U.S. chain grocery stores with their shiny counters, misted vegetables, bright lights,
and bar-coded packaging. These stores were darker, sometimes products weren't labeled
or priced, and items tended to be haphazardly shelved rather than meticulously displayed.
13. These same tropes of danger, fear, and purity are also seen in discourses about
immigration and (southern) border control in the US. For further reading see Leo Chavez (1991,
1998).
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When I first shopped at one of the tiendas I wasn't sure whether the vegetables stored in
enclosed refrigerated cases were for sale to the public or whether they were simply being
stored for the taquería in the back of the store. Many monolingual English residents were
also unfamiliar with some of the foods or brands available at the tiendas. Much of the
labeling and signage in these stores was also not in English but rather in Spanish, Chin,
Burmese, or Thai. Mrs. Knott verbalized the shift in consumption practices of many
long-time English-dominant Meatville residents.
We love the food. I go to the bakery some. I go to the
restaurants, not a lot because I don't eat out a lot but you know, I
love to go into La Cantina and eat. And Geraldo and Gisela that
ran La Mexicana [restaurant] for years were great friends of ours
and we went there a lot. But now there's just, there's a different
feel. There are so many Hispanic businesses downtown that on
Main Street, I'm gonna tell you, I hardly stop. You know, I'll go
downtown to the grocery store, I'll go to the Dollar Store out on the
highway, but to go in these stores, they, you know, they don't quite
display things um, the same way in like the Bodega New York
store, I'm gonna tell you, there's a feel that it's very cluttery. It's
hard to see things. So, you know, I don't go into those stores and
it's not because I don't want to buy their stuff, it's because
sometimes the store owner doesn't speak [English] or like I say, I
can't find anything, so yeah, that is, and then, obviously it has
created some white flight in our school and in our downtown.
That the storefronts looked different, the kinds of products and name brands were
different, the signage was in Spanish (or Chin), and the physical organization of products
was different contributed to monolingual English-speakers' discomfort in these spaces
and avoidance of them in daily life.
Some people enjoyed the variety and sense of adventure in shopping at these
stores. A few community leaders mentioned that it made them feel like they lived in a
dynamic, cosmopolitan community. The food and products at these stores served to
create points of connection between Meatville and other places14 that would otherwise be
14. While some of the products were imported from other countries, many arrived in
Meatville through Chicago. Both restaurant and grocery owners in Meatville would periodically
drive to Chicago for both pre-packaged products and fresh produce. They argued that the
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accessible only by traveling outside of Meatville. Many of these people were also
boosters and saw shopping locally as part of a commitment to support the local economy.
The weekly English-language Meatville newspaper even had a winter series in 2011 and
2012 that featured local businesses and described the goods and services each provided as
a way to encourage local shopping for the holiday season. Nevertheless, on the whole,
ethnic-identified Meatville stores (including two small clothing shops) simply didn't sell
products that middle-class white Americans needed or wanted. Encountering differences
and being in unfamiliar spaces was an uncomfortable experience that many long-time
white residents were not willing to endure, particularly not as part of everyday life in a
place where they expected to be familiar with everything. And in a very small but
visceral way, the prominence of ethnic stores on Meatville's main commercial block in
some ways represented a loss of power. The diminished ability to exercise control over
actual space in addition to the ability to define appropriate uses of space created a feeling
among some long-time Euro-American English-dominant residents that they no longer
belonged.
The small-scale local groceries were also "old school" or perhaps typically rural
in that they did not accept debit cards or credit cards as payment. Stores pay fees for
machines and processing when they accept credit/debit payments electronically so
Meatville tiendas did not install or use that technology, although they were able to accept
food stamps. Several times this cash-only system caused minor inconveniences for
friends and colleagues who came to visit. It also placed tiendas in direct competition
with local restaurants (including those that specialized in Mexican food) that embraced
electronic payment technology. The lack of electronic payment instruments at local
ethnic groceries also proved problematic for FEMA coordinators who, in the wake of a
products they brought from Chicago were of better quality and cheaper than if they relied on
closer suppliers.
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disastrous flood in 2008, distributed aid money on debit cards as part of their standard
protocol saying, "You can spend it at any local store just like a regular debit card."
Unfortunately, the primary places to use debit cards locally were a chain gas station and
grocery store that had both already been destroyed in the flood. This forced residents to
travel twenty miles or more to other towns to spend their FEMA money, which also
resulted in lost business for the tiendas that could have sold at least some items. The
prevalence and acceptance of cash transactions reinforces a local preference for face-toface personal interactions over those mediated by institutions or technology. For others,
like out-of-town guests and FEMA personnel, however, it can be interpreted generously
as a quaint aspect of rural life or, less generously, as an indication of ignorance,
backwardness, or traditionalism.
Changes in the appearance of the stores were accompanied by changes in actual
physical bodies of the community. Some English-dominant white residents talked about
being uncomfortable with groups of young non-white (mostly Spanish-dominant Latino)
men hanging around in public spaces. Mr. Johnson referred to groups of Latinos
gathering publicly in his mention of different uses of public space in Latin America,
particularly in the form of gathering at plazas. As I elaborate in Chapter 4, Mr. Johnson
addresses some rhetorical questions to his students, "Also what I've noticed too in the last
couple of years, you'll see a lot more Hispanic people downtown [in Meatville] talking,
hanging around. Is Hispanic culture more centered around the community than Anglo
culture? [Gives example of towns in Mexico set up with squares or a big common area in
the middle.] People hang out there in the square. Do the Germans do that? No, German
culture is way different." When I interviewed a group of senior students who had not
been in Mr. Johnson's class the day he made the comments quoted above, in response to a
question about whether they ever experienced discrimination or racism in Meatville, they
offered the following comments:
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Rita: This teacher tells us a story about how in the
downtown, um, in the afternoons there's a lot of
Hispanic guys that hang out and that white girls are
afraid to cross, even if they're in their car.
Talia: Yeah.
Cristina: What did you say?
Julio: It makes me laugh.
Rita: Yeah, because I mean, they're not there to, they're not
gonna do anything to you. Sometimes [I would say],
"They don't do anything to you" and they're like
"yeah, but they're Mexican, you know them, you're
Mexican too, they won't do anything to you because
you're Mexican." Like it doesn't matter what race you
are, they're just standing.
Julio: It makes me laugh because like you know who they
are and then they like are all gangster [Rita and Talia
giggle]. It's just so funny, I don't know, like are you
really scared of him?
From the perspective of these students, it is the race of the people hanging around
that provoked the second-hand story of unease from the teacher (who the students did not
initially name) rather than any actual indication of threatening behavior. Perhaps because
the prompting question was about discrimination, the students' discussion did not include
reference to gender, but it is clear from Rita's initial statement above that masculine
Latinidad is constructed in opposition to (and threatening to) white femininity. Much
like William Foote Whyte's (1943) urban Italian street corner boys, the physical presence
of males' classed, gendered, and racialized bodies in public space was interpreted by
outsiders as threatening and a marker of social disorganization. Co-ethnics, on the other
hand, viewed the same acts as either part of normal daily life or perhaps the performance
of a not entirely authentic display of intimidating masculinity as indicated by Julio's
saying that they're "like all gangster" and the subsequent giggles by Rita and Talia.
Thus, although Meatville was not devoid of violence, many people, and perhaps
especially some minority immigrants, experienced the town as a generally safe place. As
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I have demonstrated above, however, the broad narrative that "everyone gets along" is
belied not by physical strife between racialized groups (as popular images of ethnicallyidentified gangs might indicate) but rather by more subtle mechanisms of boundarymaking. Feeling safe in Meatville can be distinguished from feelings of belonging. I
have shown here how some aspects of belonging are asserted and contested in the public
and commercial spaces of downtown Meatville. The tension over contested public space
in part arises out of the fact that people from each of the ethnic and linguistic groups are
not effectively crossing into each others' social spheres very readily or deeply although
they may have some level of familiarity from seeing each other in public spaces. As Rita
and Julio suggested, if the white girls who were afraid to cross the street actually knew
the Latino men hanging around downtown as they themselves did, they would likely not
be intimidated by their presence or their "gangster" displays. But although people from
different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds might all get gas at the local Casey's, see each
other at church, or have children who married across ethnic boundaries, the deepest social
engagements in Meatville took place primarily between people who shared a dominant
language or ethnic identification. While in many urban contexts, the threat or discomfort
of ethnic, linguistic, and/or religious difference has resulted in residential segregation and
the creation of ethnic neighborhoods, in rural towns like Meatville the space where
difference has been much more visible is in discussions about downtown commercial
spaces (usually a Main Street). Issues of ethnic or linguistic difference are compounded
in some rural meatpacking communities by nostalgia among long-time residents for
community and commercial spaces as they used to be: both more prosperous
economically and more recognizable culturally, like the English-dominant dry goods
store and soda fountain instead of tiendas in Meatville. In contrast, many more recently
arrived Latinos and Chin Burmese have welcomed the opportunity to feel a bit more "at
home" in Meatville by shopping in culturally and linguistically recognizable spaces and
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by being able to see and interact not only with English-dominant whites but also with
others who look and speak like themselves in public spaces.
White, Latino and Asian spaces
Mary Wright, a political candidate, was discussing where to hold a fundraiser.
She mentioned that an acquaintance had connections to a local restaurant that might serve
her purposes. Knowing that she was making a particular effort to include Latinos in the
campaign, my first thought was "But that's a 'white people' place, I don't think many
Latinos will feel comfortable there." As I processed my reaction, I realized that during
my time in Meatville I had unwittingly come to understand some social spaces as
ethnically marked. Although the boundaries were fluid, there were clear patterns of
gathering and using space which indicated that some people would feel more comfortable
or as if they belonged in that space while others might experience less acceptance or be
more uncomfortable. In addition to race (as evident primarily through phenotypic
markers), class and language proficiency played key roles in marking particular spaces
and creating implicit parameters of belonging. In the previous section, I provided some
examples of the ways this operated with regard to the small grocery stores in Meatville.
Here I observe how some other spaces were similarly marked.
Among the places that drew the greatest cross-section of residents in terms of
ethnicity, language-proficiency, and social class were two Mexican restaurants, Meat
Corporation, and the public school. As institutions, both Meat Corporation and the public
school conducted official business primarily in English and had leadership positions
filled primarily with white, monolingual English workers. Nevertheless, these were also
the two key places where non-white, non-English proficient Meatville residents spent
their time on a daily basis. So, both institutions had made adjustments to account for this.
Meat Corporation and other meatpacking companies had signage and interpreters for a
variety of languages. These sometimes shifted according to changes in the population of
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workers at a particular plant but over the last decade have included languages like
Vietnamese, Laotian, and Spanish. In Meatville the dominant languages among workers
at Meat Corporation when I worked there were English and Chin. The public school also
conducted most official business in English and most of the teachers and administrative
staff were both white and monolingual in English. In contrast, more than 65% of the
student body identified as non-white and nearly 25% were reported as Limited English
Proficient.15 While I discuss the school in more detail elsewhere, suffice it to say here
that the school made a number of adjustments to account for their student population
including having two family liaison positions (one who was bilingual in Spanish and
English and another who was bilingual in Chin and English), using an outgoing
automated calling system with messages in several languages, and instituting programs
like SIOP (Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol) which I explain in Chapter 6. It is
my hope that this research will point the way for further analysis of rural meatpacking
communities that would address the potential ramifications of the most diverse quotidian
spaces also being highly regulated institutions.
When I first arrived in Meatville there was one main Mexican restaurant, Los
Portales, but as of this writing there is another called La Cana. Both were owned and
operated by bilingual or Spanish-dominant Latinos. Both were restaurants with bars and
attracted a broad cross-section of patrons. The fare at both establishments combined
Mexican foods like tacos de lengua or menudo with Mexican food more familiar to
Midwest Euro-American patrons such as burritos, enchiladas, and fajitas. Bilingual wait
staff and menus meant that both Spanish- and English-dominant patrons could be served
with ease and, indeed, patrons were as likely to hear one language as the other while
dining at either Los Portales or La Cana. The arrival of Chin people in the community
15 This figure does not include students who are bilingual.
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was also reflected in the clientele at Los Portales, which was more centrally located and
accessible to Chin residents who lived in the downtown area, although not in the same
proportion as Spanish and English speakers. This was likely due to a combination of
factors including a preference for eating at home, economic priorities, communication
challenges, and the opening of a Chin restaurant in 2012. The opportunity for racially
diverse local residents to see each other and interact at these restaurants was very
important in creating a sense of integration and belonging in Meatville. These restaurants
were frequently called on to cater for local events like meetings or conferences. And
interlocutors frequently listed Mexican restaurants or food as among the key attractions
for visitors.
In contrast, Midway Restaurant & Bar and Main Street Bar are examples of the
how race and class intersected to mark space as primarily for a particular group of people.
Located at the site of a biannual motorcycle charity rally, Midway was marked not only
as white space but also as a particular kind of white space because of the association with
American biker culture. Clothes like black leather jackets or chaps and events like wet tshirt contests at the rally marked Midway as working class as well as "American."
Additionally, English was the dominant language used by most patrons and in menus and
other signage. The food was primarily American with items such as prime rib, catfish, or
chicken wings. Similarly, Main Street Bar was a hangout for many longtime residents.
There had been a bar at the same location under a variety of names for at least two
generations of locals. It was not uncommon to see a variety of motorcycles parked in
front of Main Street Bar during good weather months and the patrons favored jeans, tshirts, and black leather vests or jackets. Unlike the jeans and shirts at Buena Vista Bar
(which I discuss below), these were not likely to have shiny embellishments like swirls
on a rear pants pocket. Because Main Street Bar had been a bar for so long, even years
after the state ordinance prohibiting smoking in public places, it smelled like stale
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cigarettes. Nevertheless, it was clean and reputable as a much-beloved watering hole for
English-dominant locals. Many, in fact, had probably consumed their first official
alcoholic beverage there! Although some Spanish-dominant people occasionally went
there, the primary language spoken by the bartenders and the programming displayed on
the televisions for patrons was English-dominant. Nearly every time I had occasion to be
inside Main Street Bar, there were car races playing, alternating with popular American
sports coverage.
In part to confirm my reading of Midway as "white space" I suggested to some
working class Spanish-dominant friends that we eat there sometime. They said, "No es de
nosotros" [That's not for us]" and "Es para americanos." [That's for Americans (meaning
white Americans)]. In this case racial and linguistic markers proved more salient than the
shared position of being working class or shared desire to eat and drink. A young woman
who identified as biracial (white and black) told me that she had worked at Midway but
when new managers took over she began to feel less comfortable because the other
workers were all part of a kin network to which she didn't belong. I also heard several
Spanish-dominant Latinos refer to Main Street Bar as the "American Bar." A couple of
Spanish-speaking acquaintances also told me they heard that white, English-speaking
Main Street Bar patrons had objected to Chin presence there supposedly on the grounds
that, as Vietnam War veterans, Chin people's Asian features disturbed them. When I
went to Main Street Bar with a white, English-monolingual, female friend we heard a
racial epithet uttered by a patron within moments of arrival making both of us
uncomfortable.
While Midway and Main Street Bars were marked as white, English-dominant
spaces, Buena Vista Club was marked as Latino and Spanish-dominant. Buena Vista was
a bar and dance club open primarily on the weekends, usually Saturdays. When the space
wasn't rented out for events like quinceañeras the owners had live bands playing
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Mexican music and charged a cover fee. Occasionally, other kinds of parties and events
were held at Buena Vista including a breakdance competition. Although events like
quinceañeras were technically private, anyone could come in and buy drinks at the bar.
Invited guests at such events were often given a ticket (or several) that entitled them to be
served a meal and receive free drinks at the bar. At most of these Saturday events, the
attire for women was high heels, tight pants or skirt, a blouse, makeup, and jewelry
including large earrings while men sported cowboy boots and cowboy hats with jeans and
a button up shirt. Men's clothes were primarily in the Mexican style with images of the
Virgen de Guadalupe or intricate swirl patterns on pants pockets and the backs of shirts.
The clothing and the music (mostly Mexican regional music) marked the space not only
as Latino but more specifically as Mexican and working class. At Buena Vista, in
addition to unwritten norms like the one I mentioned above about who has to pay for
drinks, both language and clothing served as primary markers of Latino space and
reinforced its exclusivity.
Shortly after the arrival of Chin Burmese people, Buena Vista also became a site
for negotiating belonging as several men told me that Buena Vista workers had ejected
and/or banned Chin customers because several had gotten drunk and unruly. Although it
is likely that there were safety issues at play and I had certainly heard of Spanishspeaking patrons being ejected on occasion from Buena Vista for similar reasons, the
effect of such news circulating in both Chin- and Spanish-dominant circles appeared to
be a reinforcement of the notion that Buena Vista was an exclusively Latino space.
Additionally, Chin community leaders did not object to their co-ethnics' exclusion,
whether real or perceived, from either Main Street Bar or Buena Vista Club because their
association with the Baptist Church prompted a rejection of drinking alcohol and a belief
that it was bad for the community both physically and spiritually. In November and
December of 2012, Chin people rented Buena Vista Club, though without the services of
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the bar, to host some events for which church gathering spaces were inadequate or
unavailable including a birthday party and a Christmas/New Year celebration.
Nevertheless, Buena Vista remained one of very few social venues in Meatville where
Spanish language and Latino cultural norms dominated.
Exclusionary Incorporation: Making Do, Informal economy
One aspect of practicing neighborliness is that it facilitates the trust and
interaction that allows an informal economy to flourish. Particularly when geographic
isolation makes it problematic to easily acquire certain goods or services, the informal
economy can be a vital channel for quickly and efficiently getting something. And in
order to continue to successfully operate in the informal economy, both vendor and
consumer have to avoid detection by official regulatory or enforcement officials and
agencies. As with other instances of rule-breaking or deception, the moral connotations
can vary according to the context. For example, for some people speeding is a much
more acceptable offense than overstaying a visa even though, legally, both qualify as
administrative infractions rather than criminal ones. What might for some people be
deemed entrepreneurial can for others be "illegal," dangerous, or construed as "taking
advantage" of others in the community. Moral judgments about economic transactions
build on a discourse in U.S. civic policy that privileges regulation and accountability,
frequently framing them in terms of protecting consumer safety and monitoring the
responsibility of vendors. Thus, although informal trade was a key strategy for continued
access to local goods and services locally, tolerance for informal trade in a variety of
goods varied widely. Among the things available under the radar in Meatville were food,
live music, videos (mostly porn), Viagra (or similar medications or herbal treatments),
other kinds of medications and drugs both prescription and banned varieties, childcare,
transportation, and housing. I also heard rumors about prostitution but was never able to
actually confirm instances of transactional sexual encounters. Except for the live music,
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all of these goods or services are highly regulated in the formal economy, thus adding to
their price and often diminishing accessibility to them, particularly among rural, nonEnglish proficient residents. In some cases, people who had engaged in informal
transactions in other countries or cities were unaware of the penalties for their actions or
that the rural context significantly increased their chances for detection and punishment.
In other cases, participants in the local informal economy were much more aware of the
legal connotations and intricacies involved in their activities than I was.
Selling or trading food was a key way to participate in the informal economy in
Meatville. One family I knew of regularly made food on the weekend with the express
purpose of selling it. Clients could either come to their home to eat it or pick it up for
later consumption. They also offered delivery service for anyone who couldn't retrieve
their own orders, effectively running a restaurant out of their home. In fact, someone told
me that these entrepreneurs had once been part of a deal to own a restaurant but the deal
fell through and they turned to the informal economy instead, in part as a way to lower
their investment risk. However, there were several formal, profit-making, safetycompliant ethnic restaurants in town. Running a legitimate business, although potentially
complicated for non-English proficient or undocumented residents was seen as relatively
achievable and something that several immigrants I knew aspired to. Most of the people
who talked to me about starting businesses felt they could be successful once they
managed to put together enough start-up money and the bilingual (in Spanish and
English) local development coordinator managed to help guide most local entrepreneurs
quite successfully. However, some people were reluctant to start businesses in Meatville
for a variety of reasons, including the too-high price to rent a space or the possibility that
some unforeseen event like the plant closing might make opening a business too risky.
There were other men and women who, on a much more irregular basis than the
family mentioned above, traded food or food preparation for other goods or services. In
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some instances, food sharing was simply a survival strategy: when money was tight at
one home, or long working hours meant the main person responsible for cooking was just
too tired, extended family members might stop by a cousin's or aunt's house for a meal.
Some Latino men I met would occasionally help butcher and prepare meat (usually pigs
or chickens) with the expectation of being fed from that meat when it was cooked. And
some women, especially those who were known for making a particular dish, would be
enlisted to contribute their specialty to potlucks, fundraisers or family celebrations like
birthday parties. These contributions tended to be either in exchange for money or as part
of long-term kin relationship obligations. Food also figured in other kinds of social
relationships between non-kin community members. Many of the Chin community or
church celebrations involved serving food to attendees and, in fact, I sampled my first
Chin food at an event celebrating Chin National Day in Meatville. I also saw video
evidence online of Chin community members sorting and packaging freshly butchered
meat, presumably for the family or friends that were gathered there. Factory workers also
traded or shared homemade dishes for lunch. Food sharing took place both within the
context of the factory lunchroom and outside the factory. It was sometimes linked to
romantic or sexual relationships; women provided food to men with whom they were
romantically or sexually involved. I knew a married woman who sometimes delivered
food to her lover, a divorced Latino man who was frequently unemployed or
underemployed, when she came to his house. Perhaps because of the existence of such
arrangements, women's sharing food with men was sometimes interpreted to indicate a
romantic or sexual relationship even when this was not the case. By the same token,
partners of women who did not make such gestures could be seen as "fair game" meaning
they were unattached or available romantically.
From a middle class, white, English-proficient point of view, informal trade in
food was a relatively benign offense while buying prescription medication or a
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certification of completion of court-mandated substance abuse counseling was seen as
much more serious. But many people I came to know saw little difference in the moral
implications or potential risk between buying food, buying a little blue pill and buying a
piece of paper. For many working class and poor people in Meatville, of all ethnic/racial
backgrounds, participation in the informal economy, rather than representing a
dangerous, morally questionable, or civically irresponsible act, instead was a survival
strategy that allowed them to get by with little money, little formal education, and few
other resources.
The belief of some participants in the informal economy that local law
enforcement disproportionately policed minorities, the rumors that local law enforcement
personnel participated in the informal economy or law-breaking activities themselves,
and the perception that law enforcement arbitrarily directed inordinate amounts of effort
to curb particular offenses like driving under the influence or public intoxication
contributed to some Meatville residents' willingness to participate in the informal
economy. In other words, because they viewed the legal system as arbitrary or biased,
they felt less compunction about breaking the law or ordinances. In her work on the
transnational strategies of migrants moving between the Dominican Republic and Boston,
Levitt addresses the informal economy explaining that, "they continued to see these
minor infractions as rule-bending, not rule-breaking, and as necessary for their daily
survival" (2001: 120). Under the same logic, those who broke the law and suffered
consequences such as jail sentences, fines, or probation were not necessarily seen as
morally deficient for having broken a social contract or betrayed a civic duty but rather
simply unlucky.
Participation in the informal economy both relied on and solidified face-to-face
interpersonal relationships and knowledge about people in the community. Although
some long-time residents viewed these activities as in some way eroding the established
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social fabric of Meatville, in fact it functioned not only as an economic survival strategy
for some people but also as a mechanism for initiating or solidifying social relationships.
While many of the interactions were intra-ethnic, I would also argue that the informal
economy was a key metaphorical social space for more inter-ethnic exchanges than any
other space in Meatville except for the school.
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CHAPTER 4 INTERPERSONAL FORMS OF VISIBILITY AT
SCHOOL
Large scale, highly visible transnational flows of people, goods, and ideas through
the local spaces of Meatville were largely spurred by the recruitment and hiring practices
of a meatpacking plant. In the resulting flux and change, the public school has emerged
as a key site for both social interactions and negotiations of community identity. This
chapter focuses on schooling to demonstrate how, even in a place where it would be easy
to assume that everyone knows everyone else, interpersonal relationships are fraught with
issues of visibility and invisibility. MacTavish and Salamon (2006) point out that rural
mobile home residents are stigmatized and argue that this limits youth's ability to become
integrated into small town resource networks. Although these networks "hinge on high
levels of trust and a sense that everyone knows everyone," small town social hierarchies
can often be "close-knit and rigid" (MacTavish and Salamon 2006: 164). They identify
static youth as those who “appeared headed toward socially reproducing the working
poor status of their parents (MacTavish 2006:171). While static youth successfully
navigated ties to the local small town, they simultaneously retained strong ties to the
trailer park. In contrast, flourishing youth focused only on social ties to town.
Qualitatively different resources derived from these distinct patterns of engagement that
distinguished a flourishing from a static pathway" (MacTavish and Salamon 2006: 172).
Stigmatization, established patterns of interacting, and the (sometimes unconscious)
assumptions that people make about each other are key to the ways people experience
belonging. And I examine how interpersonal forms of (in)visibility related to issues of
racial colorblindness, acknowledging difference, and differing views of social roles like
parenting naturalize or make invisible privilege, inequality, and misunderstanding that
result in (dis)enfranchisement or exclusion of some community members.
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Local Education in a Globalized, Transnational Rural
Community
In Meatville, a more immediate sense of the transnational was largely the result of
what Fink (1998) calls "new processors" in industrial meat production in the 1980s and
1990s. In this new model of meat processing, large corporations became larger and often
multinational, wages decreased, unions weakened, and the factory jobs drew people who
"were not qualified to do any thing else" (Grey, Devlin, and Goldsmith 2009). The
arrival of migrant, immigrant, non-white, less-literate, less-English proficient workers
combined with increased in- and out-migration generally created pressure on
communities to continually educate residents both in the classical sense of teaching
things like literacy but also in the sense of teaching about "how we do things here" and
the historical identity of the community.
Many small towns feel the pressure of their relatively low levels of infrastructure
as inadequate to serve these educational needs. Small towns like Meatville often have
social service and other civic infrastructure that is not locally based. Services provided
by entities such as Public Health clinics, Area Education Agencies (AEAs), and
Extension Offices are often located outside the town and provide services to a broad rural
area, sometimes defined by county boundaries or other larger designated area.16 This
diffuseness is a barrier to accessing services, particularly for people who value seeing
someone as a way to know them. When an organization or service provider's presence is
primarily in the form of a phone number, as when one calls to make an appointment in a
neighboring town or a clinic within commutable distance, rather than a person with an
office where people can go, it is much less likely to be trusted or used as a first resort.
16. The state is typically broken into five general areas: north, south, east, west, and
central. Often service providers will use these boundaries or combinations of them to define their
service area. For example, there might a South Central Iowa Mental Health organization or a
Northwest Education Agency.
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In the absence of an array of social service agencies, local schools come to serve
not only as institutions of public education in the traditional sense but also as
clearinghouses for other kinds of services needed by students and their families. I
witnessed or heard about teachers and school personnel helping families accomplish such
diverse tasks as arranging funerals, accessing medical care, getting advice about legal
issues, and dealing with interpersonal relationships among kin. While many teachers
readily recognized their lack of expertise in some of the areas they were asked to deal
with or forced to deal with, they also recognized that they were relatively more able to
access resources or information than community members with less education or literacy
ability. Additionally, teachers, because of their high levels of formal education are often
approached as if they know everything and have access to all kinds of information on a
whole variety of areas. They are often, although not always, treated as trusted authorities.
One way I learned about the Meatville community was by teaching adult
education (GED and ESL) courses affiliated with a nearby community college. People in
the community came to know me as a teacher both because of this and because I
frequently volunteered as an interpreter at the high school for events like parent-teacher
conferences. Spanish-speakers called me "la maestra" and Chin speakers literally
translated and used the honorary title of "teacher" to refer to me (as in "Teacher Nina, can
you help me with my computer?"). Sometimes even people who just knew I was a
teacher but weren't my students asked me for information or advice. I ended up
discussing such varied topics as parenting, cross-cultural dating practices, how to access
different types of government aid and determine one's eligibility, how to write resumes,
find a new place to live, buy a home, the history of the world, the sex offender registry,
human rights, immigration law, divorce lawyers, and labor law. Despite their impression
that I knew a lot, I was usually completely unprepared to answer the questions they asked
me. But I did realize that class privilege, including access to news outlets and electronic
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email lists heightened both my awareness and ability to find appropriate information or
sources of information.
However, there were also occasions in which school personnel expressed concern
and even resentment at being pushed into being responsible for issues outside what they
saw as their responsibilities to teach. The deferential attitude of students' families was
sometimes negatively interpreted as taking advantage or, as one woman told me, "they
want us to do everything for them." And a variety of white middle-class participants
brought up allegations by community members that the school was "catering" to the
Hispanic population, meaning that they viewed the allocation of resources for things like
ESL or a bilingual parent liaison as unfair. I viewed this stance as an example of
reluctance to acknowledge real change in the community. After all, why shouldn't a
school cater to the majority of its school population? As the balance of the population
shifted to be majority-minority at the local school, it became evident that at least a
portion of community members viewed this as a potential threat to the quantity and/or
quality of resources available to white, English-speaking students.
Meatville School District did, in fact, make some changes or adjustments in light
of their changing student population. Teachers, coaches, and administrators told me about
instituting culturally responsive measures. For example, one administrator told me that in
the past teachers had insisted that students who are being disciplined show they are
paying attention by making eye contact. However, they had learned at a teacher training
session that they should no longer do so because eye contact can be considered
disrespectful in some cultures and contexts. This is true in some Latino cultures when an
individual is being disciplined. Other teachers and coaches talked about paying for
supplies or equipment out of their own pockets so students could participate in activities,
and helping babysit younger siblings so students could attend after-school practices. The
school had a phone messaging system that allowed recorded messages to be sent to
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parents in their preferred language (chosen upon registering a student for school). This
way announcements such as reminders about parent-teacher conferences or snow day
cancellations would be delivered to parents in English or Spanish (and eventually Chin).
Many residents, including Latinos, discussed with me the qualities of culture that
made education or schooling difficult in Meatville. People referred to a culture of
poverty or Latino culture and sometimes used the word “culture” interchangeably with
“mentality.” But few people ever pointed to the culture of school or formal education
that created or exacerbated real or perceived barriers to greater integration and broad
community or parental involvement across cultures and social classes. One teacher who
worked closely with the administration explicitly pointed out that the culture of school is
white and middle class and framed this as one more thing that the school was teaching to
students. She told me that, "Many of our parents aren't educated to white middle class
[standards] and the job of the school is to teach white middle class American rules." She
saw white middle class cultural competence as one more skill or tool that students
(English language learners and poor students alike) needed to master in order to be
successful and one that was intertwined with language and social class. But although
some enfranchised people, like this administrator, were able to recognize Euro-American
cultural dominance, they were mostly not able to contest its dominance. In this way the
cultural dominance of the enfranchised remained invisibly ensconced as a natural way of
doing things.
The naturalization of white, middle class practices is a mechanism of power that
displaces the responsibility for inclusiveness and belonging to Others. For example, I
frequently heard discussions about what students lack when they come to school or how
their families aren't contributing either purposefully or due to inability to their academic
endeavors. Such descriptions of students and their families define qualities such as
Spanish-language literacy and "unskilled" labor as barriers to success. Thus, the barriers
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themselves are located among disenfranchised people and it is therefore their
responsibility to overcome them rather than a shared responsibility to break down
inequalities. Research on culturally responsive pedagogies suggests that it is productive
to approach difference as a continual and dialectic process involving learning, reflection,
and negotiation. And, employing Anzaldúa's (1987) concept of a borderlands, when "the
way we've always done things" bumps up against "what we need to do now," interstitial
spaces are created that offer sites for analysis of how public and educational policies can
be responsive to issues of race, class, and migration (among other factors).
While Meatville School has, out of necessity, made some significant adjustments,
it still struggles with questions. How should they react when parents take students out of
school to go to Mexico for two or three weeks or move away abruptly in the middle of a
school year? How can they get parents to attend school-related events? And some of this
struggle is exacerbated by the fact that while they feel they are doing a good job
educating their students, pressure is exerted by state and federal statistics that school
officials don't feel takes into account the particular circumstances they deal with in
Meatville. The constant challenge amidst the changes wrought by participation in the
perpetual flux of the global marketplace is to negotiate what and how much to change
locally given the quantity of different interests of stakeholders (at local, state, and federal
levels and in government, economics, politics, and other arenas).
Meatville Community Public School: School Defines
Community
Meatville Community School is a public school district that serves the town of
Meatville as well as four other smaller towns within 15-miles. The Meatville school
itself consists of two buildings on a single campus, one for elementary school and one
that houses both a Junior High and High School. The school's 80 teachers are joined by
approximately 80 ancillary staff including guidance counselors, paraeducators, secretarial
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staff, custodians, bus drivers, technology coordinators, and food service workers. While
many of the paraeducators, secretaries, and janitorial staff are Latino and bilingual in
Spanish and English, over 96% of all the classroom teachers are white. The school staff
serves a student population that is 30% White, and nearly 65% Latino. The other
categories listed on the report are Native American, Asian/Pacific Islander, and African
American. Together students in these categories make up around 3% of the student
population.
Today's Meatville Community School District includes several small towns that
used to have their own elementary schools, although they were still part of the Meatville
District. These schools were eventually consolidated and by the late1980s Meatville
Community School District included all four surrounding communities that today make
up the district. While rural school consolidation was not an extraordinary occurrence at
that time or today, it was important in redefining the boundaries and identity of this
particular community. A local historian wrote that, "The merger of the [Sand City]
school meant loss of identity and school spirit and pride that only those who have
attended small schools can understand.17 [Sand] always had to work to hold its own in
whatever competition it entered. Sometimes it was difficult to have enough players to
field a team" (Brown 1978: 76). As current public discourse about the struggles over
closing rural schools and post offices for economic reasons has shown, community
members view these institutions as key to their identity and survival. Post offices and
public schools provide affirmation at a state and national level of the existence of a place.
Recalling Fred Gailey's courtroom argument in Miracle on 34th Street that Mr. Kringle
must be Santa Claus if the U.S. post office delivered mail to him, many people view the
presence of a rural school or post office as validation of their existence as a community
17. Long-time residents often referred to "Sand City" by just the first part of its name as
in the above quote or when they talked about "Sand kids" coming to Meatville to go to school.
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and as a key connection of an otherwise invisible place in the state and nation. Visual
and symbolic confirmation of this connection is evident in the display of the flag outside
both these institutions. In Meatville the consolidation of the school led to a change in the way people
organized the boundaries of their community in some contexts. I interviewed a number
of adults who attended the now defunct Marion Elementary School. They all described
themselves as being from and/or going to the Marion Elementary School. Today's
students from Marion and the other towns in the district were more likely to say simply
that they were from Meatville and then clarify that they actually live in one of the other
towns. The shared experience of going to school helps create common points of
reference for students and makes them more likely to see the community of Meatville as
including people from the smaller surrounding towns. When issues of racial division
arose, many people talked to me about the unifying power of sports and the public school
sports teams more specifically. They argued that cheering on a team contributed to a
sense of unity that superseded other identifiers like race or socioeconomic status. At the
very least, school consolidation and the inclusion of other small towns in the Meatville
Public School system have solidified a definition of community that is more unified
around a consolidated school identity than it used to be. This is partly because Meatville Community School District is the only local
school. There are no parochial or other independent schools in Meatville or River
County. This singularity means that families looking for other school options must "open
enroll" in another public school district or commute a minimum of 45 miles to the nearest
parochial school.18 Parents of open-enrolled students are responsible for their
18 According to the Iowa Department of Education website (2011) open enrollment is
"the process by which parents/guardians residing in one Iowa school district may enroll their
children in another Iowa school district under the terms and conditions of Iowa Code section
282.18 and the administrative rules of the Iowa Department of Education, 281 Iowa
Administrative Code chapter 17." 128
transportation to a school bus pick-up point in the receiving district, although there are
provisions for families who qualify for economic assistance. In 2010-2011, the Meatville
district had a student population of 900, with about 300 of those being high schoolers. Of
those 900 students, there were 18 who open enrolled in and 79 who open enrolled out.
Reasons for open enrolling may be quite varied, but several white people I spoke to
(including a school employee, a politician, and a business owner) thought that, although
parents officially cited bullying as the reason for open enrolling their students, the real
reason was white flight. In any case, the singularity and dominance of the public school
in the social sphere of the community is evidenced by reference to it as "the school" as in,
"I talked to the school about Johnny's attendance issues" or "Jane called to ask the school
if there were any scheduling conflicts if we plan the event for next Friday."
The inclusion of the other small towns near Meatville in the school district also
shapes how even non-students and non-school employees view the boundaries of the
community. People often referred to the whole conglomeration of towns that make up
the school district as Meatville except when more specificity was required. For example,
when I met people outside the community, they would tell me they were from Meatville
and then clarify later in the conversation that they actually lived in Marion or Sand City.
Even community members who don't have the shared experience of attending the local
public school are influenced by the singularity of the public school and the unifying
power this has among the small towns it serves. Next to Meat Corporation, the public
school is the second largest employer in Meatville. And beyond that, residents who live
in the Meatville School District pay taxes that support the school economically, and their
contributions to school-related fundraisers benefit students from all the towns in the
district. Meatville is comparable to a city and its suburbs on a smaller scale, what I call a
micropolitan location (see Chapter 3).
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Much work on the anthropology of education has focused on ethnically or racially
diverse urban schools, but the potential impact of the public school as an institution is
amplified in a rural context because so much community activity revolves around the
practices and spaces of the school. In the absence of a community center (or other
family-friendly entertainment venues such as a bowling alley, arcade, or movie theater),
the school represents one of the few physical spaces with adequate infrastructure to
support a variety of gatherings. In addition to extracurricular school-sponsored activities
like sports, jazz band and show choir, the school hosts activities that have no connection
to education and are not sponsored by the school. One example was an ecumenical Chinlanguage Christian organization that used school facilities to host a regional soccer and
volleyball tournament. School grounds were also used to hold fundraisers like one
dedicated to raising funds for awareness and treatment of brain cancer after the disease
afflicted a young member of the community. One year, the gymnasium also hosted
Latino Catholic celebrations dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe. More than 300 people
filled the bleachers to attend a bilingual Mass followed by dancers and free food provided
by the Knights of Columbus and the celebration committee. The school is also the owner
and operator of the only local public swimming pool. So the school becomes a key social
space in rural communities like Meatville and is not only a place where people get to
know each other but is also where they come to be known by institutional representatives.
The most enfranchised community members come to think of the school in many ways as
a community space both in the sense that the goal of the school is to serve the
community's (mostly educational) needs but also in the sense that they see it as a
communal space.
In its makeup of students and personnel, the Meatville School is a microcosm of
the larger community. The school's singularity helps shape a concept of community
through the shared experience of attending the school as students. For parents, families,
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and community members that didn't experience the Meatville Public School system as
students, their imagined boundaries of the community also come to be shaped by the
inclusion of towns in the school district, which is a political entity. Students' participation
in school and school-related extracurricular activities such as sports also influence
community members. And the physical space of the school represents a primary physical
space for some non-school-related social activities. All of these things help residents see
the community as one that comprises all the residents of the towns that make up the
school district.
Seeing as Knowing
Meatville is a face-to-face community, meaning that trust and the concept of
knowing someone is intimately connected to seeing them both literally and as a particular
person who can be socially placed. While many of the people I met maintained
connections with friends and loved ones via technology like Facebook or cell phones, I
found that until people "knew me" they wouldn't return phone calls or answer the door.
Even a high-level local employee at Meat Corp. didn't answer an email asking if I could
tour the facility until I introduced myself in person at an unrelated meeting we both
happened to attend. In his work in a small town, Sizemore (2004) cites participant
reluctance due to fear, concerns about the portrayal of the town, and Latino gender
norms, but I would suggest that what he calls "getting along" also had something to do
with being "unknown" in a face-to-face sense even though people might have heard of
him or talked to him on the phone.
While seeing someone face to face is one way to "know" that person, it can also
prove deceptive. In his book about Oelwein, Iowa, Reding (2009) recounts the story of a
man who accompanied police on a meth lab raid in a "normal" neighborhood and a
"normal" house with a "normal" family. The man was surprised that he could have
known so little about meth and the people affected by it despite his familiarity with the
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town as mayor, longtime resident, husband of a school teacher, and father to young kids.
Especially in a community that has experienced such an increase in cultural diversity in
its recent history, what people think they know about each other or assume they have
learned about one another from face-to-face interactions might not be so. Many of the
public school teachers are longtime residents, so it is not uncommon for a student to be
taught by the same teachers as their parents. What teachers think they know about
students based on their history with a particular family might also be deceptive.
Also, more generally, what school personnel used to be able to assume about their
students' family and home lives may no longer be true. The commonalities or
assumptions based on shared local experiences and a white middle-class identity are no
longer so broadly common as there is more diversity in social experience. Today, while
nearly 100% of the teachers are white and middle class, 60% of the student population is
Latino and many if not most are working class with parents in meatpacking or other
manual labor jobs. Although the size and physical layout of the community means that
locals often "see" each other around town (at the grocery store, the post office, bank, etc.)
and may even live near each other, they may not socialize together or understand much
about each other's home lives. Teachers at the elementary school had much more
frequent contact with parents beginning in kindergarten when the teachers made home
visits. High school teachers, in contrast, generally do not have as much contact with
parents and most had never been to most of their students' homes.
Seeing doesn't always equate to knowing. Some teachers, who were also parents
in the community, took as a marker of good parenting that adults' social lives revolved
around their children's school and extracurricular activities. In their cultural
environment, they expected to spend much of their time as parents and teachers attending
sports events, concerts, theatrical productions, etc. One teacher and parent who was
active in extracurriculars with her children told me that, "to me it still goes back to that
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American value of education and everything with…when your kids are from
prekindergarten to senior…to 12 grade, you revolve around the school. Your life
th
revolves around the school. Your life revolves around that time and involvement [in their
activities]. I have a hard time seeing kids at activities without a parent or somebody there
to watch them." That other parents using other cultural frameworks might define good
parenting differently and/or define family priorities differently was not positively
acknowledged or validated. Another case is the assumption of middle class access to
material goods. For example, a middle school teacher assigned a science project to
create a model of the human heart using only edible items. Such an assignment held a
variety of implicit assumptions about students' home lives. It assumed that they had
enough to eat and would not be offended at wasting edible food on a school project, that
they had ready access to kinds of food that could be molded into durable objects, that
there was enough extra food to use for a project, and that students had access to it on
short notice. In fact, many local families did all their shopping on the weekend both
because they traveled to stores in nearby towns and bought enough food to last for the
week and because they budgeted their money according to this schedule. And two retired
women who volunteered as helpers at an adult English class were surprised to learn after
several weeks of involvement that one of the students had a degree from a Mexican
university in industrial engineering and that another had been a school teacher. All of
these situations demonstrate that personal interactions made people feel like they knew
each other; in these cases enfranchised people were making face-to-face connections with
less enfranchised people. Thus, despite the fact that actual individuals were made more
visible to each other through these interactions, some key aspects of privilege were
obscured at the same time.
The social divisions between parents and educators is evident in the way teachers
compared the "difficulty" of teaching in Meatville to other nearby schools that had much
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smaller non-white and working class student populations. They correctly pointed out
that poor students often have other priorities before school such as food, shelter, and
safety from physical violence. They also noted that traditional lecture-style teaching was
ineffective for most of their students and that teaching in creative ways was imperative.
As one teacher put it, "When people leave here [Meatville School] and go somewhere
else [to teach], many times, they write back and talk about how easy it is to teach in this
other district. Well, one of the reasons is that they're homogeneous. You can teach to the
middle and get most. And you can't do that here." These teachers were arguing that they
could not get away with mediocrity in teaching and expect that students would be able to
pick up the slack or compensate on their own with resources outside of school.
Teachers had different philosophies or approaches regarding attention (or not) to
students' lives outside of school. Many high school teachers saw their classroom and
content as potentially safe places or escapes from the poverty or other problems in
students' home lives. These teachers tended to see living in the community and forming
close social relationships with families of students as liabilities for their own emotional
health and ability to focus on teaching. One teacher explained to me how knowing too
much about students' personal lives was both emotionally difficult and practically
challenging. She said, "I used to do journals. It was way too upsetting and often times I
found my self in a position where I had to be a mandatory reporter. And, um, that's a
vicious circle, and um once in a while I'll see kids with bruises on their face you can see
where someone has pinched their face to get a hold of them, or their arm." Pointing out
that the foster care system was not an ideal solution to such problems, her approach was
to create a supportive, family-like atmosphere in her classes and to steer students towards
books that they could identify with and that have positive messages about overcoming
challenges. This approach was undoubtedly beneficial to at least some students, for
whom school became a haven from difficulties at home.
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It is understandable also that with the pressures and responsibilities involved with
their jobs, teachers would both need and want to get away. As the child of public school
teachers I can appreciate the desire not to have a trip to the grocery store turn into an
impromptu parent-teacher conference in the checkout aisle. Nevertheless, the possibility
of leaving town or ensconcing themselves in a middle-class, white milieu outside of their
work lives contributed to the difficulty some teachers may have experienced in
understanding the daily lives and struggles of students. The ability of teachers to escape
represented for some a missed opportunity to "see", know, or be reminded that at least
some of their students had no such possibility of escape even temporarily from daily
stresses like poverty and unstable living situations.
Some teachers saw close personal relationships with students and their families as
instrumental in helping students overcome home life challenges. These teachers focused
on creating "confianza" (trust) so that students and their families felt more comfortable
being involved with school. According to Rodriguez-Brown, "Confianza is attained
through the involvement of teachers and other school personnel in existing community
networks" (2010: 353). While these teachers often had first-hand, experiential knowledge
about their students gained through frequent informal and formal social interactions with
families, they often also expressed feeling overwhelmed and helpless to ameliorate many
of the daily challenges their students faced. One high school teacher conducted home
visits as part of the projects for a particular class she taught and felt that these were very
valuable in building close and useful relationships with parents. She felt it gave her an
opportunity to relate to students and she shared with them her own history of growing up
on a farm during the farm crisis and her family's experience with government aid. She
felt that her experience of poverty really helped her connect and empathize with students
and their families. Indeed, she had very good rapport with students and their families at
parent-teacher conferences.
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Seeing was also constructed as knowing in relation to participation in school
activities. Some community members, teachers, administrators, and school board
members who didn't "see" parents at school events often didn't "know" them. A variety
of community members expressed concern with low parental participation in school
activities from parent-teacher conferences to attendance at sporting events. Teachers,
parents, administrators all mentioned not "seeing" each other in attendance at various
school-sponsored events and interpreted this as evidence of a more general disinterest in
the local community or its young people. One parent, for example, described a downtown
business open-house event called family night where a parent organization had students
nominate their favorite teacher to win a prize. Saying, "We had over a 150 kids that
came in that night. That whole night long we only had two teachers. I saw two teachers
all night long." She argued that low teacher attendance was a missed opportunity to
communicate with parents and community members. While teachers may have seen (and
therefore gotten to "know") some students' families through activities like church or
through their personal social networks, this was most often not the case. Teachers' social
lives tended to revolve intensely around the school and their own families, leaving little
time or energy for other endeavors. Thus, parents who didn't take the initiative to meet
their children's teachers or did not attend school events often remained unseen and
unknown to teachers.
And parents often judged teachers and school administrators, especially those
who commuted from towns up to an hour or more away, according to whether or not they
attended events. Parents and community members who didn't see particular teachers or
administrators at the events they attended took this as a demonstration of their lack of
commitment or investment in the local community. At least some teachers recognized
this and some chafed against it. One teacher who commuted fifty miles each way to
school responded to this type of criticism saying, "My whole career I have had people
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slamming me about 'this is just a job to you', 'you aren't invested in the community' and I
said, 'you point out one other person that drove a 100 miles a day for 16 years and you
tell me I'm not committed to the district.'" And for their part some educators and school
board members also noted the presence or absence of parents at school events. They too
used attendance at school events as an indication of parental investment in education.
Teachers frequently mentioned that they had concluded that parents didn't think school or
education was important because they didn't come to school events. Especially when
talking about success in relation to the standardized tests upon which school funding is
based, teachers and administrators often explained to me that, "We just have to tell them
how important it is."
Seeing Things Differently: The School's Mission
Statement, Colorblindness, and A Bunch of White People
My research shows Meatville residents’ perception of the influence of race varied
widely. Whether they ascribe to a colorblind, post-racial philosophy or whether they
"see" race as a significant identifier, negotiating race has become an important issue in
the community. It is far too simplistic to talk about the community as divided primarily
or only along racial lines. As others have noted (Ladson-Billings 2005; Maharidge 2005;
Pollock 2004, 2008), race can arise as a key tension even while explicit discussion of the
topic is absent or silenced. In both interviews and participant observations, the issue of
race came up frequently in relation to resource distribution, the economy, schooling, and
socializing.
One of the things that most appealed to me about Meatville when I first moved
there was how welcoming it seemed. In particular, the school's mission statement struck
me as striving for understanding and inclusion in a dynamic and transnational
community. The school's mission is to "provide a quality education for all by considering
cultures, learning styles and individual abilities in a safe, nurturing environment" (CCSD
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2012). When it didn't come up naturally in talking about the school, I asked people I
interviewed what they thought about the mission statement and their ambivalence was
clear, especially for white middle-class stakeholders. For example, one mother, business
owner and school board member said, "I don't like it but you know...here's my thing, I
think it brings attention to the diversity and I don't think we need to bring attention to it."
When I asked why, she responded, "I think we're past that. I think that was a motto
maybe back in 1980 or whatever when Meat Corp. first came around and we had all that
and then the Hispanics started comin' in and I think we were trying to tell everybody
yeah, we're all gonna work together and all this but I think we're so far beyond that that I
don't think we need to bring attention to it anymore."
This woman subscribes to the idea that "paying attention to" or "seeing" race
increases racism and that by being "colorblind" she furthers the goals of equality both at
the school and in the community generally. Additionally, it is clear that she interprets
"diversity" as referring to race and specifically to Latinos rather than being more broadly
applicable. While this makes sense given the demographic history of Meatville, a view
towards its future indicates that the settlement of Latino factory workers over the last 30
years is only one part of a much larger global movement of corporations and workers
internationally. The arrival of between three and five hundred Burmese refugees over the
last year and a half is a primary indication that, like meatpacking towns such as Postville,
Meatville will continue to experience numerically small but significant changes in its
population. This woman's statement echoes the view I heard frequently expressed, that
the town had settled into a sort of happy status quo having adjusted to and moved past the
earlier stress and tension of Latino settlement.
Another white person, in response to a question about the mission statement said,
"I didn't like it when they first did it because I thought it singled out the Hispanics. I
don't like it now because I think it makes white people feel devalued. Because throwing
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that word 'culture' in there first and foremost gives people a bad feeling." This person too
was emphasizing the historical distance between Latino settlement in the past and current
times in which the primary concern is "white people" who feel aggrieved. This is
representative of sentiments among a variety of primarily white, middle-aged or older,
middle-class long-time residents. Teachers told me that these same people frequently
expressed the feeling that the school was "catering to the Hispanics" and by implication,
not paying enough attention to or spending enough money on (white) students. Like the
woman who interpreted "diversity" as referring to Latinos (which at the time, it no doubt
did), this person applies the same process to the concept of "culture" implicitly asserting
that non-white people have culture and white people do not, which is why valuing
"culture" makes white people feel bad. Similar to the "ethnic entitlements" that Sizemore
(2004) discusses, issues of fairness and special treatment cloaked in a language of care
tend toward ethnocentrism and paternalism while diverting attention from issues of
power.
A third person, a retired white former school employee returned to the theme of
colorblindness arguing both that there is no culture, ethnic or otherwise, represented by
the institution of the school. "Once those kids walk in that door there's only one culture
in that school. I worked there for 4 years and it's not a Hispanic culture and it's not a
white culture, and it's not a poverty culture; it's a culture of learning and everybody learns
the same. It may take one child longer than the next but in essence they all learn the
same." White and Latino middle-class community members I spoke to subscribed to the
concept of a level playing field and the rejection of not only ethnic influences but also
social class influences on academic success. Reference to a "culture of poverty" is likely
the result of recent teacher in-service programming that focused on issues of poverty and
included the study of Ruby Payne's work (1996, 2001).
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Two of the above participants pointed to children as evidence of harmony and
colorblind attitudes saying, "you can see that in the way the kids act in school and the
way they interact and they play. ...they're all playing together" and "My kids are way
different than I was. When I was, you knew oh, those are the Hispanics or those are the
black people or whatever and...my kids don't know skin color from their friends and that
makes me proud as a mom." These statements do a few things. First they shift
responsibility for maintaining harmony and asserting social justice to the younger
generation. Second, they make it seem as if racism (or any other -ism, for that matter) is
located within individuals rather than potentially being systemic or institutionalized. And
third, they implicitly create a concept of linear movement towards the future and regard
equality as an inevitable outcome of a modernizing or evolutionary process.
In contrast, the following story illustrates the complexity with which some nonwhite people DO see race. It was homecoming and my teeth chattered as I watched the
homecoming court being announced. I noticed that among the honorees were a
smattering of Latino students and wondered if my whole dissertation would need to be
reworked. My panic dissolved when I heard some voices behind me switching back and
forth between Spanish and English. A girl's voice said, "Who is that?" A male voice
directly behind me shot back, "I don't know, it's a bunch of white people" and then peels
of laughter from both.
The characterization of the homecoming court as "a bunch of white people" is
significant in several ways. First, it's such a small community that it's unlikely that the
speaker didn't actually know the students. This was born out when another girl jabbed
the boy with her elbow a few seconds later and said, "That's Julio and Elisa, stupid."
More importantly, that he referred to them as white even though they had Latino heritage
and were bilingual points to the complex matrix of elements including class and language
ability that can mark someone as "white." Also, this boy's description of the court as a
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non-descript, socially unidentifiable group, emphasized his social distance not only from
the individuals participating but also perhaps his inability to relate to or access the
football homecoming tradition. That the homecoming court is "not like him" is a
distinction explicitly disputed by middle-class residents who frame the school, and by
extension the community, as colorblind and post-racial.
This contrast illustrates a key division in the ways community residents view race
and culture. The colorblind stance is problematic because it represents a desire to
eliminate discrimination and treat students equally, but it also represents a refusal to
recognize difference and can make it more difficult to address inequalities (Pollock 2004,
2008). Works by both Sizemore (2004) and Arora-Johnson (2009) also address situations
in which the rhetoric of existing equality or fairness diverts attention from and makes it
difficult to address the realities of inequality. In Meatville, one arena where the contrast
between a post-racial stance and the visibility of race became particularly significant is
community interest in the district's poor performance on standardized tests. This interest
eventually took the form of an academic booster club organized by local white
businessmen, which I discuss elsewhere.
Recognizing Difference and Connecting to Students’ Lives
When I began thinking about the school's connections to the broader Meatville
community, I believed that it would be easier for teachers to make connections to their
students' daily lives because of the small size of the community and its emphasis on faceto-face interaction. This proved to be true in some classes that I observed. The fact that
students were very aware of racial differences became evident when in a written exercise
in English class students were asked to find synonyms for various phrases. One phrase
apparently referred to a "brown desert" and a Latina girl somewhat facetiously asked "For
brown can we put Mexican?" To which the teacher responded, "It's not a Mexican
desert." The girl smiled and went back to working on the assignment. Almost every
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teacher I talked to mentioned students' accusations of racism and most of them viewed
these accusations as a manifestation of high school angst or an attempt to deflect attention
from whatever other issue was being addressed at the moment (things like turning in
homework or other responsibilities). None of the teachers I talked to viewed themselves
as racist or participating in discriminatory practices and most were committed to
education as a tool of empowerment for all people. The teacher in the conversation with
the student above even recounted an incident in which she took an explicitly anti-racist
stand. She had noticed that her adult volleyball group was self-segregating
(unconsciously in her opinion) and pointed it out in an effort to prevent it from
continuing. Most of the teachers I interviewed pointed to the fact that race is
intersectional and tied to a variety of other aspects of identity such as social class, gender,
and language ability.
My observations of teachers, students and families in Meatville lead me to
conclude that the teachers who were most able to identify, empathize, and establish
positive relationships with students and their families were those who were able to
recognize both similarities and differences between themselves and students in
productive ways. Many teachers successfully draw on experiences that they shared with
students such as rural life or interests in pop culture or sports. And some teachers
actively cultivated interests or made efforts to include pop culture references that their
students could connect with such as mentioning soccer players and telenovelas (Spanish
language soap operas) in addition to Star Wars and football. Many local residents felt
that teachers' ability to connect in this way to students was intricately connected to their
familiarity with the local community, based on their current residence or having lived
there in the past. However, I argue that their ability to connect to students was much more
closely tied to their ability to make connections by fighting the culturally dominant
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approach of locating difference almost entirely among the students or families
themselves.
My observations of conversations between parents and teachers at parent-teacher
conferences supported this view. I observed that some local, long-time resident teachers
seemed to have friendly but more distant dealings with parents, while some out-of-town
teachers had more developed relationships with students' families. These relationships
were evident in the length and topic of conversations between parents and teachers.
Other teachers who focused on grades and had short conversations did not make use of
the face-to-face contact with parents to build rapport. They did not act upon cultural
expectations of rural residents and also Latinos by inquiring about other family members
or recent social events (baptisms, birthday parties, visits to other places, hunting trips,
and sports events). These teachers constructed the differences between themselves and
students or their families as "challenges" primarily located in "others." They held
newcomers responsible for assimilating or adapting to the U.S. school system and rural
culture and unproblematically accepted the dominance of their own culture as white U.S.
citizens and as teachers educated within a white, middle-class framework. These teachers
tended to emphasize the deficits that students and their families needed to (and
sometimes were able to) overcome such as language acquisition.
Teachers who established the best rapport with students and families had longer
conversations that included more small talk and more detailed explanations of students'
social behavior at school in addition to their grades. For Latino parents, an important
piece of information from teachers included references to whether the student
demonstrated "respeto" at school. Parents who had these conversations came away from
the interaction smiling and talking more. Even when the student wasn't doing
particularly well at school, the parents who had these longer and more personal
interactions with teachers seemed generally more hopeful about the situation and the
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potential impact of both their own and the teachers' actions as they left than those who
did not have these more involved discussions. I argue that the more "culturally
responsive" teachers were those who were able to locate differences and similarities in
the interstitial spaces between themselves and "others" rather than placing both difference
and the responsibility for it wholly with "others." By viewing the challenges as mutually
created in the spaces where two or more cultures came into contact, they located the
responsibility for action as belonging to all parties and, in doing so, some teachers were
able to draw productively on both differences and similarities to create deep and mostly
positive cross-cultural relationships.
The complicated process of understanding and the interconnected experiences of
race, rural experience, and students' 21 century technology-saturated cultural milieu
st
(which was also a point of "difference" from most teachers) does not always yield such
positive moments. One example of the practical difficulties in implementing real-life
connections between curriculum content and students' lives or previous knowledge (also
sometimes called "scaffolding") occurred in a world history class I attended. The teacher
attempted to draw parallels between the spread of Hellenistic culture in Greece and
multiculturalism in the United States. He likened Alexandria to New York City, where
"all these cultures mix together to form one." This was followed by examples to illustrate
the definition of the textbook vocabulary "Stoicism" and "Epicureanism." The instructor
employed a lecture style in which he asked a series of rhetorical questions some of which
were directed at students and some of which he addressed himself. Over two different
class periods he asked the students what it meant to be Stoic and then provided
definitions and examples. In the first class he said, "It's good to be Stoic I think. Don't
let your desires hurt your life" and in the second he defined stoic as "Not reacting to
things. The whole thing about Stoicism is to live a life of virtue, integrity. I try to do the
best I can, that sort of thing. You stop yourself from becoming too hedonistic. Meaning
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you're trying to live your life for pleasure like Spring Break or sex drive." In the second
class he used himself as an example, explaining how he had negatively overreacted to the
loss of a football game. In both classes he also pointed to the musical "Rent" to illustrate
how the existence of AIDS is an example of Epicureanism and that there are
consequences for just "doing whatever you want." In the first class he also used the
example of a semi-annual local motorcycle rally and in the second class he pointed to
Amish Rumspringa as an additional example.19 This was followed in both lectures by a
portion where he identified Anglo and Hispanic cultures with Stoicism and Epicureanism
respectively.
Teacher: Which [Hispanic or Anglo] would be more Stoic do you
think? I'm gonna say white culture. What do I mean by that? In
our culture, my, the traditional [Meatville] culture, what
celebrations do we have?
Student: Birthdays.
T: But they're not that big a deal, right? The Hispanic culture,
they're more vibrant, more Epicunuriasm.20 Did you have quinces?
Thanks Elena for inviting me. [Said in a somewhat facetious tone
in response to a student's indication that she had indeed had a
quinceañera that the instructor had not known about nor been
invited to.] And I wouldn't make fun of it, maybe a little bit. The
only time it causes conflict is when they leave [referencing
intoxication while doing a caricatured impression of quince
dancing]. Also what I've noticed too in the last couple of years,
you'll see a lot more Hispanic people downtown talking, hanging
around. Is Hispanic culture more centered around the community
than Anglo culture? [Gives example of Mexico towns set up with
squares or a big common area in the middle.] People hang out
there in the square. Do the Germans do that? No, German culture
is way different.
T: There's a big debate today and back then between Stoicism and
hedonism. Then there's Epi—a life devoted to pleasure. Is there a
battle between those two things today? You bet there is. Are there
19. Rumspringa is a time of exploration before professing faith and belonging to the
Amish community through baptism.
20. The instructor had difficulty pronouncing the word "Epicureanism" and instead used
a variation that this spelling approximates.
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ads for weight loss? Is that Stoicism? A little bit. Self-control,
not giving in to those desires or are you going to be an
Epicunuriasm. Is there a problem with doing anything you want?
With being an Epicunuriasm? Which Hispanic or Anglo would be
more Stoic? Is the Hispanic culture more celebratory, meaning are
there more parties and stuff?
S: Yes.
T: Why? Part of it has to do with Spanish ancestry—they're happy
people. Big common area in the middle of Mexican towns. That's
fine. Do we see that in our community?
S: No.
T: How many white guys do you see hanging around? [Said in a
tone of voice that makes it clear that the correct answer should
have been "Yes, we do see people hanging around in our
community."] Because that's the whole culture of that. Different
from traditional Iowans like myself. So that's this whole argument
in ancient Greece. Do you want to do whatever you want, going
crazy? I went to Sofia's quinceañera. We don't really have these
things in Anglo culture. Epicunuriasm is the party guy. Are there
consequences to doing whatever you want? [...] Not thinking
about consequences is Epicunuriasm, not very Stoic. Think about
your family- is your family more Epicunuriasm than Stoic?
Divorce is a big problem in our society. Some of it might be that
there was Epicunuriasm going on. Do you want to be stoic and
kind of normal and live your life with restraint or do you want to
be a kind of Rumspringa lifestyle?"
As the above excerpts of dialogue show, the instructor made references to
contemporary events such as Rumpsringa, the Broadway musical "Rent," the biker rally,
Spring Break, football, quinceañeras, and casual public gatherings in an attempt to help
students make connections between the textbook concepts describing changes in ancient
Greece and their own lives. In both classes he made passing or direct references to the
quinceañera celebrations of a girl in the class and he explicitly noted that his personal
experience with quinceañeras was limited to this one experience. By mentioning these
celebrations and the spaces of the "downtown" in addition to the other events mentioned
above, the instructor was drawing on what he considered to be shared common
knowledge. In doing so, he was complying with instructions included in the SIOP
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training that encouraged teachers to use "scaffolding" to build on students' out-of-school
knowledge and experiences as an entry-point to new concepts and vocabulary.
Likely because the word "Epicureanism" proved difficult to pronounce, he
switched in the second class to the easier to pronounce "hedonism." He uses each of the
beginning examples of Epicureanism (Rumpsringa, AIDS, the biker rally, Spring Break,
negative reaction to a sports loss) to illustrate negative images or consequences of
Epicureanism. Some phrases like the rhetorical question, "Is there a problem with doing
anything you want?" or describing Epicureanism as "not thinking about consequences"
highlight a negative image of Epicureanism that distinguishes it from the opposite
concept of "Stoicism." The teacher seemed unaware that he was assigning mostly
positive characteristics to Stoicism and mostly negative characteristics to Epicureanism.
He made an effort to draw from a number of different cultural backgrounds for the
examples he gave and it is unlikely that he realized that all the examples that he drew
from white or European cultures were presented as aberrations from "normal" or
expected behavior.21 By making parallels between these negative, aberrant acts and
Hispanic culture, the implication is that Hispanic culture as a whole is similar to these
acts and also has primarily negative qualities. Anglo culture is then described using
primarily positive qualities and is constructed as the norm for expected, non-aberrant
behavior. This description of the vocabulary not only reinforced negative and positive
values or meanings with racial divisions but also strayed significantly from the
definitions provided in the students' textbooks. The book noted that for Stoics "human
desires are distraction" and Epicureanism sought to "achieve harmony of mind and body"
21. Rumspringa, AIDS, the biker rally, and Spring Break were all associated with
promiscuity and sexual irresponsibility through mentions of acts such as flashing and excessive
drinking. The negative reaction to the loss of a football game was also described as an
overreaction and, in mentioning his father's rebuke at the time, cast as irresponsible or at the very
least, unnecessary.
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(Beck et al. 2005: 148-149). It went on to say about Epicureanism that, "Today this
means being devoted to pursuing human pleasures, especially good food but in his life
Epicurus advocated moderation in all things" (Beck et al. 2005: 149). Given classroom
experiences such as these, it becomes clearer how some students singled out this
particular teacher as having a "racist" attitude without being able to articulate concrete
examples or instances of racism, discrimination, or unfair treatment.
This classroom observation also highlights the difficulties involved in monitoring
and helping established instructors accommodate the needs and incorporate the out-ofschool knowledge of diverse student populations. Once teachers have been granted a
teaching license, the continuing education requirements to maintain certification do not
mandate any kind of critical reflection about cultural difference between teachers and
students. In addition, teachers rarely have the time to observe each other's teaching
and/or reflect critically with each other on their practices in the way that is required in
most teacher preparation programs. Administrators also have little time to spend
observing teachers in-depth and providing them with constructive and sustained support
for improvement. The day I witnessed the class discussion detailed above, the school
principal also stood in the back of the room to observe the second class. He had a paper
on a clipboard, which I assumed to be the SIOP checklist I had learned about at the
teacher in-service before the beginning of the school year. I marked in my notes that the
principal was present for the beginning of the discussion about how Hellenistic culture is
a mixture just like Meatville and how the teacher's wife makes pico de gallo even though
she "has not a speck of Hispanic blood in her" before presumably finishing the checklist
and slipping quietly out of the room. The principal was not present for the part of the
lecture that constructed Anglo culture as positive and Hispanic culture as negative and it
is unclear what he could have or would have done had he been present.
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These experiences of local racial, linguistic, and social class changes represent the
people, daily lives, and complex relationships that are the practical and local realities of
national and state statistics showing educational achievement gaps for poor students and
minority students. Reports like the U.S. Department of Education Data Summary (2012)
demonstrate a wide disparity in the number of students of color who were removed from
classrooms as a punishment relative to their overall representation in classes. Looking at
more than 10,000 districts nationwide, they found that non-white students were
disproportionately removed from schools even while white students who committed
similar offenses were not. Information collected by a variety of state education agencies
across the country also shows disparities in discipline across racial lines but nearly all of
the focus is on urban schools. Iowa has not been exempt from this trend, as noted in
newspaper articles from across the state (Andino 2008; Losen 2011). While the
Meatville School District was not one of the schools included in the national data
summary, district data reported to the state for the 2009-2010 school year shows that
Meatville had among the largest number of suspensions recorded in the state, especially
for a school of its size. This can be attributed to district attendance policies that meted
out suspensions for the accumulation of a number of tardies. Whether the discipline was
proportionally representative of the student population in terms of race or gender is
unknown as the school, I was told, did not gather or record racial statistics related to
disciplinary action. The qualitative ethnographic research I present here elaborates
statistics about disparate racial treatment by demonstrating the variety of ways that
people know and think they know each other at a local level and the complex
construction of identities through daily interactions both inside and outside classrooms.
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"They just don't know how important it is": Differing View
of Parents' Roles
In interviews about their experiences in the Meatville community, residents often
resisted characterizing challenges or issues as being related to race. Many particularly
influential members of the community were involved either personally and/or
professionally in promoting social justice. However, U.S. ideals of meritocracy and
discourses of multiculturalism prevented them from being able to identify anything other
than intentional classist, racist, or sexist views as contributing to inequalities. When I
began living in Meatville I helped interpret for Spanish-speaking parents at school
registration and parent-teacher conferences. In my conversations with school personnel
at these events, one of the biggest concerns they related was about low parent
participation in such events, particularly Latino parents. Participants' responses to
interview questions about why they thought people, and Latinos in particular, didn't
attend such events or why they thought there were no Latino city council or school board
members demonstrated the prevalence of middle class white frameworks for both
parenting and civic participation. Some people offered nuanced explanations and pointed
to a variety of possible barriers to participation such as work hours, unfamiliarity with
processes of civic government, and low English language proficiency. These responses
often coexisted with the idea that socioeconomic background, ethnic background, or both
influenced the ways people participated or not. Discussing his experience at the school, a
Spanish teacher from South America explained that:
There are cultural differences, socioeconomic differences. We
here in this town, we have clear differences in between Hispanics
and Anglos. They go to some classes together but it's implicit you
know some stereotype you mentioned before and I think that
somehow we discriminate the Hispanics even if I am Hispanic
myself. Uh, but uh, they have issues with behavior and uh school
values, education values and social skills and uh stuff like that.
They are not, many of them are not college-bound.
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A female school board member questioned whether education was not important
to Latinos or whether some Latinos simply weren't aware of how to be involved with
school activities. Her comments were representative of many white, English-dominant
community leaders in Meatville who believed that many local challenges could be
attributed to either or both of these root sources in the Latino community. She went on to
name two Latino families with students who have been able to successfully navigate the
school system and each have sons who were college bound or had graduated from college
at the time of the interview.
I think it goes back too that a lot of times they work and then they
come home at night and they have other things to do. But it is
[hard to get them to come to stuff], I don't know if education is a
high-, I know family is a high priority but I'm not so sure where
education fits in. But I do know that most of them want much
better than what they have. But again maybe they don't know how
to be involved. I don't know. That's something that we have, we
have tossed around for, for years, how to get parents really actively
involved in their child's education. Now we have some parents
now like the [Palacios] family here, they are very, very involved
but their kids are, their kids are very, very intelligent kids. And but
they are involved. And um, [Sandra], we have the two families
here at church, Sandra Ordenez [sic] and Enrique went on to the
university and he's got a job in Kansas City.
While the speaker accurately notes that these children are quite intelligent and that
they are active in the church that she attends, what remains invisible in this statement is
that both of these families are exceptional. That they attend a Protestant denomination
church, which does not conduct services in Spanish, points to the fact that they are
English proficient and so are comfortable socializing and worshipping in English. Unlike
the local Catholic Church, which boasts hundreds of Latino attendees, this church has
only a handful of Latinos in their membership and overall the congregation is white,
middle class, and elderly. Additionally, the parents in each of the families this woman
mentioned have engaged in other acts or practices that demonstrate their upward mobility
and willingness to deviate from what co-ethnics might expect from them. Both had
become homeowners of residences that reflect the white middle class aesthetics that value
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a neatly trimmed lawn area, muted colors, and the absence of clutter (e.g., broken toys,
beverage containers, broken machines or cars). The mother in one family was college
educated and her son became an active member of Meatville school's Gay Straight
Alliance. The mother in the other family successfully represented herself in court
proceedings in which she sought a divorce and legal custody of her children on the
grounds that her husband was abusive and neglectful.
This notion that formal education is a cultural value accomplishes several goals.
First, it avoids reference to race and fits well with a multiculturalist discourse. While
race and racism are closely tied to issues of power and inequality, multiculturalism posits
cultures as different but equally valued. Second, it shifts the blame for non-participation
from individuals in the community to the more nebulously conceived realm of culture.
This way, it's not the fault of individuals themselves who are not participating but rather
their culture that prevents them from participating. Third, it obscures the existing cultural
framework of the meritocratic, middle-class, white status quo. In this framework, upward
socio-economic mobility is available to all and is primarily thought to be possible by
availing oneself of education, particularly at the post-secondary level. Enfranchised
parents believed that their children were upwardly mobile or would be successful in life
because they worked hard and valued education. Good parenting is then demonstrated
through parents who enact their role publicly by prioritizing the activities (scholarly and
otherwise) of their children over all other activities. Parents who make other choices are
seen as not caring about education or as not caring about the upward mobility of their
children. My interactions with some Latino parents demonstrate that some Latinos were
unaware of this framework while others consciously chose not to adopt it.
Administrators, teachers, and civic leaders believed that they simply needed to educate
disenfranchised parents about the importance of standardized tests, school attendance,
and extracurricular activities.
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A school administrator addressed a Burmese community leader at a meeting of
civic leaders about how to help Burmese immigrants adjust to life in Meatville: "I hope I
don't offend. I know that your community has come for economic reasons. I hope you
see our school and are impressed and are glad [you came here]. I know that work at
Tyson is hard and they're tired. I sometimes wonder if the Hispanic population trusts us
too much. [They think] 'we work, you take care of education.' That doesn't work well. It
must be a partnership. They have to know and care and value education. Our teachers
are willing to partner with them. Don't trust us too much." The exhortation not to "trust
us too much" and the idea that the relationship between parents and teachers must be one
of partnership defines parental roles as hinging on direct involvement with school
activities and leaders. What the administrator interpreted as overly trusting, many
Latinos viewed as deference to the professionalism of teachers and a division of space,
authority, and labor: parents rule at home and teachers at school. Privileging active
parental involvement with school thus assumes that parents feel comfortable interacting
with teachers as equal authorities over children. But given many parents' unfamiliarity
with the U.S. educational system, the English language, and the complex arena of
educational theory and policy, this assumption of equality on the part of parents is
unlikely.
The differences that the administrator referred to above were seen by the
enfranchised as cultural to the extent that ethnic differences prevented (or could
potentially prevent, in the case of the Burmese) parents' appropriate or expected
relationships with the school. These cultural differences are seen by people like this
administrator as a matter of assimilation. These parents or their more Americanized
children were expected to adopt interpersonal relationship norms between parents and
teachers in which parents directly interact and even question teachers and the school
system. And such acts are perceived as indicating not only good parenting but also good
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citizenship. As such, overcoming cultural differences was implied to be the work of
those who are "other" and therefore need to assimilate or accustom themselves to the
existing way of doing things. This reinforces the belief that a good parent or one who
cares about education attends school-related events and actively engages with school
personnel by doing things like inquiring about homework or discussing the details of
what students read or learn.
One white, middle class mother I interviewed enacts the expected relationship
between parents and the school, although in this case perhaps it was not particularly
welcome on the part of school authorities. Reacting to steps the school took to address
state-imposed consequences of having serially low standardized test scores, she
remarked,
Nobody took the time to call parents and tell us. Um, that's one of
the things that I know I've made some nonfriends over because I
finally said, okay, listen, I'm here, I brought my kids here because I
wanted them to have a good education. I'm gonna question you,
I'm gonna ask you why, and I'm gonna tell you if I don't think
something is right because these are my kids and this is their one
chance at a good education.
This woman's concern over the school's actions led her to form a parents' group.
She told the story of how, at an initial meeting, she had a conversation with a Latino
father in which they discussed their different perceptions of their ability as parents to
interact with teachers or administrators. In response to his argument that, having left
school in junior high, his own low level of education prevented him from questioning the
actions of school authorities, this woman told him, "That doesn't mean your child can't
get a good education now. And that doesn't mean you can't ask questions. 'But they
could tell me something, I'd believe them,' he'd say. And I'm like, well, that's fine if you
want to believe them but if you don't, ask more questions. [He said] 'Well, then they get
mad.' Well let them get mad, that's how I am. I don't care if they're mad at me, but I'm
going to make sure my kids are getting a good education." This woman saw herself as an
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advocate for her children and if that put her in a position to question or oppose school
authorities, then so be it. She clearly felt that her authority as a parent was sufficient to
allow her to question or oppose the actions of the school if she felt they were not in the
best interest of her children.
In many cases, the differences in perceptions about parental roles were cast as
cultural differences in that Latino parents and Anglo parents generally took different
approaches to interacting with the school. However, these differences were also inflected
with other important factors such as the parents' own levels of formal education and
social class. When I asked about the differences between Meatville Community School
and other school districts, one female teacher said,
We have a whole lot more parent nights, I think than other
districts, to try to get parents in for college planning, for college,
for FAFSA. We are way more accessible as a staff, uh because we
have families that work until 7, and so many, many, many of our
staff will stay-, if we know they're coming, we'll stay. Now,
because we have a high poverty district, about 35 percent of the
time they don't show up, so you stay until 7 and they have
forgotten because they don't run on calendars, they don't run on
planners, those are not poverty things. So that's quite an issue, and
then you feel like I've got my whole family at home that's eating
supper by themselves so that I can make this meeting and it doesn't
happen. We have a lot of parents who have never graduated from
high school. That impacts those children. When you have an
uneducated parent, those parents feel very inadequate to try and
help those kids get ready for school, get ready for, you know help
with homework, sometimes they even have really bad memories of
school so indirectly they put school down, they think it's stupid,
they you know, and the kids pick up on that, education is not
important.
Both the Latino father mentioned earlier and this school worker point out that
being self-conscious about one's own education can make it more difficult for parents to
see themselves as key contributors to their children's educations. And this can and does
extend beyond ethnic boundaries to include white working class parents in the Meatville
community. Another retired teacher noted the connection he saw between social class
and the ways some white families viewed education, "We are one of the poorest counties
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in the state of Iowa. The level of education is low. We've got a lot of people who are
native of [Meatville], who do not value education. And it's probably the single most
frustrating thing. When I, myself teaching there, you just had too many adults that didn't
see the value of education." This former teacher went on to note that "not that long ago"
he knew of one farm family where the father encouraged their children to drop out before
finishing high school so they could dedicate more time to working on the farm. This
participant viewed these kinds of attitudes about education as a continuation of past
practice. "We've always had that culture of uh, at least I think, of not valuing education
the way you should," as connected to social class, and as something that transcended
ethnic background. It is the complex interplay of race and social class that makes an
intersectional analysis important. It is important to tease apart popular notions of
academic achievement gaps’ cultural basis and make explicit the racialized, gendered,
and classed aspects that these popular notions build upon by blaming an ethnic culture or
a so-called culture of poverty.
Some Latino parents, for their part, also expressed frustration at being called upon
to deal with issues they interpreted as being the appropriate domain of the teacher. One
single mother mentioned to me repeatedly that teachers didn't know how to control or
discipline students at the school, and her daughter in particular. As evidence of this she
related how school personnel had called her at work (at a large meat processing factory)
to tell her that her daughter's cell phone had been confiscated because she had violated
the school's policy regarding cell phone usage. This mother was frustrated because it
seemed to her that school personnel could not distinguish between an ordinary discipline
problem and an emergency. In her perception, teachers or administrators should have
been able to deal with this rather minor issue without contacting her or calling her
workplace, which resulted in her having to leave the processing area to take a phone call
in the administrative offices of the plant. Another Latina single mother later told me a
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similar story about getting summoned to the school to deal with a disciplinary matter
regarding one of her children who was in an altercation. She viewed dealing with this
situation as the proper domain of the school authorities. Referring to educators, she
asked me, "No estudian la psicología?" [Don't they study psychology?] and when I
responded that they probably did, she felt vindicated in her opinion that they should know
how to deal with her children, perhaps even better than she would. Both of these mothers
viewed the school's insistence on parental involvement in disciplinary matters as
evidence that teachers were unwilling or unable to effectively do their jobs. And rather
than serving as a starting point for a strong mutual relationship between parents and
teachers, the incidents eroded the confidence of these two mothers that their children
were in capable hands while at school.
Conclusion
In the context of a transnational rural community like Meatville, the public school
has emerged as a key site for defining community identity as well as being a key place
for social interactions. Even in a place where it would be easy to believe that everyone
knows everyone else, interpersonal relationships are subject to issues of visibility and
invisibility. Being able to see differences in productive ways, taking responsibility for
inequalities, and taking actions that question unearned privilege are daily struggles and
urgent challenges not only in urban areas but also in rural communities like Meatville. In
the absence of other infrastructural supports, the Meatville public school assumes a
particularly important place in the social life of the community. And although people
live close together and see each other, this does not necessarily result in thoroughly
integrated participation across the spectrum of enfranchisement. This is at least partly
because people at different points on that spectrum view differences and the possibilities
they permit or prevent in very different ways, sometimes even as they try to be sensitive
and empathize across those differences. The discourses of colorblindness,
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multiculturalism, and the fact that white, middle class practices and beliefs are
naturalized in ways that make them invisible illustrate some of the quotidian challenges
to broader community participation and enfranchisement.
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CHAPTER 5 INSTITUTIONAL FORMS OF VISIBILITY AT SCHOOL
In this chapter I discuss how adult and high school students' experiences of
institutional education illustrate the ways neoliberal practices constrain the self-making
abilities of socially, politically, and economically disadvantaged rural populations in the
United States. Community members (students, instructors, and community volunteers)
involved with adult education and the activities of the local public high school experience
institutional and bureaucratic forms of (in)visibility as a part of their involvement.
Explicit messages from community institutions tend to be about welcoming newcomers
and embracing diversity while the implicit messages often convey the idea that it is the
responsibility of newcomers to make the adjustments necessary to belong or be
incorporated. I argue that these contradictory messages contribute to maintaining higher
levels of disenfranchisement for community members who are in some way "other" such
as in their social class, race, language, citizenship status, or length of residence. White
middle-class cultural constructions become normalized through institutional policies to
such an extent that the racialized and classed aspects are normalized.
This normalization makes the actual ethnocentric aspects of policies and the
institutions that employ them invisible. It also creates a sense of exclusion or at the very
least a barrier to inclusion for those who are not part of the white middle class cultural
milieu. Sharma and Gupta argue that the state is constituted through the "apparently
banal practices of bureaucracies" and that "What the state means to people [...] is
profoundly shaped through the routine and repetitive procedures of bureaucracies" (2006:
11). I highlight some of these everyday practices to show how the naturalization of their
ethnocentrism highlights aspects of "others" that make them more visible in a negative
way, often focusing on what they lack that impedes assimilation: their lack of English
language ability, their lack of Euro-American parenting strategies, their ethnic difference,
their lack of native language literacy skills, or their lack of formal schooling.
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Additionally, the normalization of ethnocentric policies places the bulk of the
responsibility for making adjustments toward inclusiveness on the people least able to do
so.
Bureaucracy and the Business Model of Education
In Meatville, a nearby community college offers non-credit adult education
courses for ESL (English-as-a-Second-Language) and the GED (General Equivalency
Diploma); the latter can be taken in Spanish or English. Meatville is one of several small
"satellite" locations where the college offers non-credit courses. The community college
and the local school district are both subject to state and federal policy decisions that
make funding contingent upon their compliance. This connection between reporting
certain kinds of information or statistics arises out of a trend in 21st century education to
address inequalities or achievement gaps between dominant and historically
disenfranchised populations by applying a business model.
The business model emphasizes concepts like accountability, outcomes, and
achievement in the belief that, as in the corporate world, education is a product that must
be managed and delivered to clients (students) efficiently for a maximum return on the
investment. This approach results in the implementation of policy and funding decisions
based on statistical data like enrollment numbers and standardized test scores. Federal
laws and programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top explicitly impose
neoliberal business practices regarding performance, profit, and competition on public
education institutions. In order to meet these administrative requirements to measure and
document the coincidence between student/school performance and government
expectations, schools must now employ the services of other businesses: ones that
specialize in testing and tracking. Education thus has become not only a national project
but also an industry.
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I observed some of the consequences of applying a business model of education
to local education providers in Meatville. Under the federal No Child Left Behind
legislation, states were asked to identify their persistently low-achieving public schools.22
Iowa (like most, if not all, states) created a system based almost entirely on standardized
test scores in reading and math to designate schools as "in need of assistance" and
subsequently, if they remained in need of assistance for several years, "persistently lowachieving" (hereafter PLA).23 The federal government presented four possible
intervention models that PLA schools would need to implement to keep getting federal
money. One of these, the turnaround model, would have schools replace the principal,
fire all the teachers and rehire no more than half of the same teachers, and implement
professional development and other instructional strategies. Another model, called school
closure, calls for closing the school and sending students to higher-achieving schools in
the district.
When viewed from the perspective of a local community like Meatville, these
mechanisms of measurement and intervention that appear to be objective are in fact based
on a variety of assumptions about normative communities and students. Standardized
tests assume that students speak English, share a particular cultural milieu,24 have
22. http://educateiowa.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1974&catid=497
23. As it was informally explained in parent and community meetings, only the scores of
3rd, 8th, and 11th graders (one grade each for elementary, junior high, and high school) are taken
into account for these state determinations. This means that a particularly high achieving or testtaking cohort of 8th graders can keep the whole middle school off of the list while the opposite
could be true the next year. It also means that one group of 8th graders is compared to the group
after them rather than examining how one cohort of 8th graders performed as 9th graders.
Additionally, the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) and Iowa Tests of Educational Development
(ITED) set proficiency at the forty-first percentile. Thus, by definition forty-one percent of all
the students who take the test will be designated "not proficient" every time it is administered
while NCLB requires that all schools demonstrate proficiency on standardized tests by a
particular date. Additionally, no exceptions are made for students with learning disabilities or
who are still learning English.
24. For example a young reader in a mild climate may not understand a text about the
texture of snow or a rural student might not grasp a text about the subway system.
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sufficient food and feel safe enough to focus on a test, and are able to move from a
question in the test booklet to the corresponding bubble on the answer sheet.25 The
federal intervention models also contain a variety of assumptions about communities that
will implement them. The turnaround model assumes that it would be possible to attract
and hire replacements for at least half of a teaching staff. The school closure model
assumes that there are other higher-performing schools in the district (or even near-by)
and that it would be more efficient to transport students to other nearby schools. Federal
education policy assumes an urban context and thus renders invisible rural schools.
Focusing on standardized test scores to measure academic achievement makes
communities with non-normative students highly visible. By attaching labels like PLA to
these schools, it translates non-normative into negative.
Adults seeking GED or English-language instruction through a nearby community
college were also subject to sometimes absurd institutional policies and practices.
Incoming GED students were supposed to have some kind of assessment on record early
in their participation so that after they attended a particular number of hours of class, they
could take the test again and their improvement could be documented. As the instructor
at the Meatville location where class was scheduled once a week, I was given a math test
to administer. I expressed concern that the GED class was explicitly conceived to
include students who would take their exams in Spanish but that the math assessment was
in English.26 I was told that this is what other locations in the community college system
did and that it should be fine, since math is not very reading intensive. I administered the
test assuming that I could translate the instructions and everyone could muddle through,
25. Students with certain kinds of learning disabilities tend to have a hard time mastering
this skill called tracking.
26. The company makes assessments in Spanish, but probably for budgetary reasons, we
only had access to English assessments.
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but it turned out to be almost impossible for some of the students; although it was a math
test, it was almost entirely composed of word problems. I was completely exasperated
because this meant the assessment was virtually useless in terms of measuring
improvement, I felt it was disrespectful to administer such an obviously inappropriate
assessment to students especially when they had such limited class time (two hours a
week), and the GED itself is set up so that success is defined as passing the five exam
areas thus making other measurements redundant. To her credit, my supervisor
sympathized with my frustration about testing policies. She encouraged me to see it as
just something that must be done for bureaucratic purposes and to focus my energy on the
students. And I did. But I also viewed these practices as an exercise of power and
surveillance that highlighted the (in this case) linguistic differences between my students
and the normatively English-proficient students presumed by a policy that was
implemented locally through the community college to satisfy both state and federal
demands.
SIOP (Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol)
Research, business, and teaching come together in the many methods, initiatives,
and programs designed to address an "achievement gap" for groups of students set apart
according to race, gender, immigrant status, geographical location, and/or socioeconomic
status (Massey and Denton 1992, 1993; Kluegel 1990; Kao and Thompson 2003; Ogbu
1990; Massey, Gross and Shibuya 1994; Tomaskovic-Devey 2006; Lareau 2003; Browne
1997). Although the term achievement gap usually refers to differences in test scores,
graduation rates or other quantitative measures of achievement between these students
and their peers, in popular usage it almost always refers to non-white students. Meatville
School District is one of thousands of public school systems around the country that have
used or experimented with a variety of commercially available programs designed to
address issues such as low English proficiency, low test scores, and high levels of
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poverty. One such program was adopted at the high school while I lived in Meatville and
I had the opportunity to attend one of the teacher in-service days where teachers were
trained to implement it.
The initiative was called Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) and
was "developed in a national research project sponsored by the Center for Research on
Education, Diversity & Excellence (CREDE), a national research center funded by the
U.S. Department of Education from 1996 through 2003 to assist the nation's population
of diverse students, including those at risk of educational failure, to achieve academic
excellence" (Center for Applied Linguistics 2012). Sheltered instruction means using
strategies that both make content (in math, science, language arts, social studies, or
health) comprehensible to students who are still learning English and that help them
develop English language skills. One strategy in sheltered instruction, for example, is to
use "supplementary materials" such as graphs, models or visuals rather than relying on
oral, lecture-style instruction. SIOP emphasizes professional development for teachers as
well with a strong component of planning and reflecting on teaching. Now out of the
research and development phase, SIOP is marketed and sold by Pearson, one of the
world's largest education services, testing, and scoring companies. "Pearson partners
with The College Board to administer the SAT and scores the National Assessment of
Educational Progress. The company makes $1.7 billion each year in worldwide
educational testing alone" (Carmody 2012). SIOP is just one example of the way big
business has taken an interest in the potential profits in education and has made serious
investments in an array of education related endeavors from education materials to
technology. SIOP is also an example of the way state and federal policies about
quantitative assessment have pushed schools to turn to private for-profit businesses to
address their needs in terms of providing the testing and data required by policy or law
and in terms of meeting the needs of students and instructors.
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Preparation for a SIOP lesson has three key components, all of which center
around language and content objectives. Content objectives, broadly speaking, are the
concepts or ideas that students learn about while language objectives focus more on the
vocabulary or grammatical abilities needed to communicate about the content. By
separating these areas, teachers are implicitly encouraged to recognize and address the
fact that while communication may be problematic (students may not be reading at gradelevel or may not be fluent in English), students have the ability to grasp and explore
ideas. The first step of separating content from language objectives may sound quite
simple, but it can be very difficult to do in practice. The issue caused some concern as I
discovered while observing a professional development workshop with Meatville high
school teachers. Language and content objectives had been the subject of a previous
professional development workshop and some teachers were frustrated that the way they
had been taught to implement language and content objectives seemed to change with
each workshop. They were particularly concerned that this made the criteria according to
which they would be evaluated unclear. The second step in SIOP requires that teachers
explicitly express and prominently display content and language objectives during the
lesson. Following the SIOP model, teachers should accomplish this by finishing the
sentence "Students will be able to...".27 A third step in planning a SIOP lesson is making
connections to the lives of students.
Teacher reactions to implementing SIOP varied. Some teachers expressed
frustration that although theoretically SIOP is applicable to any content area, they had
questions about what it should look like practically in particular classes such as choral
and instrumental music. Some worried that the emphasis on having the objectives posted
27. Examples of a content and language objective are: Students will be able to (SWBAT)
depict the life of Tom Sawyer in graphic and written form [content]. SWBAT use regular and
irregular past-tense verbs (e.g., born, lived, traveled, had, died) to describe the different phases of
Tom Sawyer's life that are represented on the timeline [language] (Vogt and Echevarria 2008).
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in the classroom would obscure or de-emphasize other important aspects of teaching at
the time of evaluation by their superiors. One teacher explained to me that they were
worried that when the principal came into classrooms for observations with his SIOPprovided checklist, that he would just look around the room, check off the boxes, and still
not have a good idea of whether or how SIOP (or other basic teaching practices) was
being implemented.
Some teachers were tired of new initiatives to which they were expected to adapt.
One teacher told me that in her 11 years in the district they'd implemented eight different
initiatives. Some civic leaders and school board members supported this view and
expressed concern that there had not been a concentrated approach to dealing with the
school's "problems" (meaning, low standardized test scores). In an interview at his home,
one particular board member put the problem this way, "we were still teaching lily white
middle income Iowans and that's not what's going to our school." Many people also
mentioned that the district had cycled through a number of programs in an effort to find a
"solution" to the problems but had not stuck with one approach long enough for it to
make a difference. Several teachers mentioned a sort of solutions-fatigue that they felt
resulted from both the programming changes and the pressures to perform well on
standardized tests. Mrs. Denton expressed her reaction to such pressures, saying "you
know, at this point in the trenches and I don't care what's really on the outside, it's what's
going on here that matters. And my energy is in here. Maybe later on I'll be more
instrumental in that but right now this is where the greatest need is, and I get to the point
where a lot of other older, experienced teachers, we just close our door. We just teach the
way we have to and let all the others go by." These sentiments resonated with other
experienced teachers with whom I spoke. A counselor at the school also told me that
students were expressing frustration at both the testing and the number of surveys they
were asked to complete. She said they complained that the surveys were asking the same
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questions, and her response was that they were for different agencies. The mother of
several children in the Meatville district also mentioned the changes she'd seen regarding
the proliferation of standardized testing and assessments. Speaking about her oldest
daughter she noted, "I never once made a big deal about ITBS tests. She always did well
but it's like, it's just another day, it's just another test. Don't worry about it. If you don't
do well, you don't do well. If you do, that's great, I'm proud of you. But now, I feel like
I've gotta make this huge deal out of ITBS tests and I don't know if that's right for my
child." It became clear to me that there was certainly widespread concern about
educational initiatives and the testing mechanisms used to assess their effectiveness.
Nevertheless, most teachers believed that SIOP was theoretically sound and
beneficial for many of their students. Steve Smithfield explained how SIOP was different
from other approaches the school had tried.
SIOP is a language-based initiative to help identify language
proficiencies from every student. It's a sheltered instructional
observational protocol, which demands that every student be
taught according to their abilities. So it's a language-based
initiative. It's an acknowledgment for the first time really in my ten
years here that if we want to significantly improve test scores, we
have to improve the students' language skills. And I'll step back on
that statement, we've tried other language initiatives but this is the
most intensely focused language initiative in my opinion.
Teachers like Steve were hopeful and pointed out that, although marketed in the
lingo of SIOP, the actual strategies being used were just basic teaching practices.
Another teacher, David O'Neil, explained how he used SIOP in his classroom:
I think it's just a lot of good teaching. It's probably a lot of
common sense kinds of things but I think it's [...] one of the
components is like for example, building background. Our kids
don't have a lot of background knowledge about certain subjects.
You get kids who have never left [Meatville], you know, and they
don't know--and that's one of the reasons why I try to talk about
what's going on in the world, you know, things like that. So yeah,
I'm trying to use it as much as I can, and I think SIOP is just a
formalized good teaching plan. You know, there's nothing
revolutionary or anything about it I don't think, it's just really good
teaching, and it's a formalized way of making us do that.
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And Mrs. Denton explained that she felt she was already doing elements of SIOP:
Really it's a program designed to make learning accessible to ESL
students. In a nutshell it's just better teaching practice and to be
honest it's just as applicable for English speakers as non-[English
speakers]. And it's really helpful for those students in poverty who
have short attention spans who need all the extra visual, mental
cues that they can get teaching. I do it in my classroom; I've
always done it in my classroom, it's just been renamed. It's fancy.
Um, graphic organizers are part of SIOP, building a background,
telling stories, linking of new information with prior information. I
mean in my opinion it's just good teaching.
For these kinds of teachers SIOP represented a formalized validation of practices
they were already using while encouraging them to more broadly implement these
strategies.
A key aspect of the SIOP program is that it incorporates the idea of
responsiveness to students' socio-cultural milieu. One of the eight basic components of
SIOP directly addresses making classroom learning engage with what students know and
experience outside of the classroom. The building background component instructs
teachers to "make explicit links to their students' background experiences and knowledge,
and past learning, and teach and emphasize key vocabulary" (Vogt and Echevarria 2008).
Other components emphasize using a variety of learning strategies, incorporating visuals
and hands-on activities, and paying attention to issues of appropriate pacing during a
lesson. Although based on a variety of research findings about effective teaching for
English-language learners, the components of SIOP resonate closely with research on
culturally responsive pedagogies pioneered by Gloria Ladson-Billings. Culturally
responsive pedagogies (CRP) incorporate and build on critical race theory by explicitly
recognizing that classical education practices are designed to be most relevant to the lives
and experiences of white, middle class teachers and students. CRP then explicitly
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advocates for education that resonates more broadly with diverse students, especially
non-white students and poor students.28
Nevertheless, rural minority populations, rural contexts generally, and the rural
Midwest do not figure prominently in either CRP or SIOP. Much of the research on CRP
has been conducted in urban areas that boast a particular non-white population, AfricanAmericans or Latinos primarily, as opposed to those in which students in a particular
class do not necessarily share cultural or linguistic frameworks. And research conducted
in East and West coast schools forms the basis for SIOP (Vogt and Echevarria 2008).
Teachers in places like Meatville have certainly benefited from findings and strategies
related to SIOP and the research on which it was based. But there is an assumption that
what works in urban coastal schools can be unproblematically transferred and
implemented in the rural Midwest. An administrator highlighted the relative invisibility
of rural Midwestern schools by sharing an experience he had at a conference promoting
SIOP and similar strategies. When representatives from Meatville asked whether SIOP
would work well in small schools, a presenter answered in the affirmative and cited
Elkhart, Indiana, school system as evidence. The laughter around the room and the
administrator's tone made it clear that the comparison seemed ridiculous because Elkhart
is decidedly urban relative to Meatville. Assuming easy applicability of SIOP in rural
contexts does not seem consistent with the approach's theoretical emphasis on being
thoroughly research-based and on adapting to students' experiences. Such an assumption
also demonstrates the invisibility of the rural Midwest and the diverse students who go to
school there for educational researchers and theorists that develop programs for
companies like Pearson.
28. Although this is the primary focus of CRP, it can also refer to other forms of diverse
experiences such as generational differences that result in students being more comfortable using
technology.
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The potentially controversial connection of SIOP to culturally responsive
pedagogy, and by to extension critical race theory, is obscured under the broad concepts
of relevance and relating new information to what students already know or have learned.
It is possible that this contributed to SIOP being accepted rather than contested by white,
English-speaking stakeholders in Meatville who had previously objected to programs that
they viewed as directed specifically at Latinos or Spanish-speaking students. In spite of
this, SIOP draws on critical race theories because of its emphasis on building on what
students already know or have experienced outside the classroom. Critical race theory
approaches promote teaching practices that help students see cultural and linguistic
frameworks in a comparative perspective, which allows them to be contextualized and
respected. In contrast, traditional teaching practices have presented both the explicit and
implicit white, middle class cultural framework as appropriate or correct. Research
demonstrates the effectiveness of comparing the grammar of AAVE (African American
Vernacular English, aka ebonics) with Standard English and presenting each as a useful
register in particular contexts. This is more productive than presenting Standard English
as the only correct form of communication and endlessly correcting "mistakes" in it
(Wheeler 2006). Another example of culturally relevant teaching strategies that attempt
to resist the institutional dominance of traditional teaching practices is the creative
reallocation of spatio-temporal boundaries. As Wortham and Contreras explain,
In many Latino homes, including ones that we visited in the
community described in this article, people tend to participate in
several activities at once. They move smoothly among chores,
conversations, television, homework and other activities not
serially, but by competently participating in more than one activity
at once. Many Anglo homes, and mainstream U.S. institutions like
schools, tend to discourage multiple simultaneous activities and to
demand focus on one activity at a time. Noting this apparent
mismatch between Latino and mainstream Anglo practices, and
concerned to provide culturally relevant pedagogy for her Latino
students, Margaret Contreras designed her ESL room to be more
like a Latino home. She allowed multiple simultaneous activities,
and she encouraged fluid boundaries between these activities
(2002).
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By attempting to recognize and build on what students already know rather than
seeing students as empty vessels to be filled, SIOP implicitly applies critical race theory
and culturally relevant pedagogical strategies. This is particularly useful because it helps
teachers recognize difference in productive ways by encouraging them to reflect on how
their cultural and linguistic frameworks can differ in a variety of ways from their
students' (generation, experience with formal education, race, rural or urban background,
home life, familiarity with technology). Such reflection pushes teachers to recognize that
all people "have culture." And because SIOP is a program directed at teachers, it places
responsibility for making adjustments or changes on the authority figures who are most
enfranchised.
However, it remains somewhat unclear within SIOP how teachers can or should
learn enough about their students' cultural or linguistic frameworks to effectively
incorporate these into their teaching. This may have contributed to some teachers'
questions and ambivalence about implementing SIOP. Additionally, SIOP skirts a key
aspect of power raised by critical race theory: it does not encourage teachers to think
about issues of power connected to these cultural frameworks. Therefore it remains hard
for teachers who do not already recognize it to see the achievement gap as a problem
partially created by ethnocentrism and the dominance or assumed normalcy of white,
middle class cultural frameworks. It is clear that SIOP provides a wealth of researchbased ways to plan, execute, and reflect on effective lessons that employ a variety of
strategies to engage diverse students. But SIOP does not help teachers or administrative
supervisors think critically about how they or their institutions might contribute to
maintaining the achievement gap or how to successfully engage with cultural and
linguistic difference. And teacher fatigue related to continually adopting and rejecting
new initiatives might also reflect their understanding that the for-profit business of
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educational materials and assessments often does not adequately measure student
achievement or their effectiveness as instructors.
Mixed Messages: The implicit lessons of "policy"
Scholars of public school education in the U.S. have noted that formal education
teaches students much more than the explicit content of classes. It teaches things like
heterosexual normativity, social class, and race. Authors who focus on (post)colonial
contexts have also dealt with education's connection to citizenship and belonging (Kelly
1991; Stoler 2001). This was also true in the case of adult education in Meatville where
both the process of filling out multiple forms requesting similar information and the
actual content or format of the questions themselves created social distance between the
institution and the students. A nearby community college offered classes at satellite
locations in several rural communities in the area, including in Meatville. I worked as an
instructor (both as a volunteer and as a paid position) for bilingual Spanish/English GED
classes and English classes. For both of these courses students filled out registration
materials and periodic assessments. These materials all contained questions about a
student's race and/or ethnicity. Nearly every time students filled them out, they asked
questions about the race and ethnicity sections. One registration form listed first ethnicity
and then race separately while the other listed the choices together. So, on one form
students chose between Hispanic, African-American, Asian, Native American, and white.
On the other form, they first chose an "ethnicity" (Hispanic or non-Hispanic) and then a
"race": African-American/black, Native American, Asian, or white. For many of my
Latino students, the ethnicity part was easy but they were confused about how to answer
the race question separately and given these particular choices. Several times I handed
the forms back to students reminding them to fill out the second box only to have
students respond, "But I already marked Latino."
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One Dominican student had casually and laughingly referred to himself as black
in a couple of conversations with me before he ever attended a class but he and I both
hesitated and wondered aloud whether to identify him as black for official purposes
according to American criteria. And the majority of Mexican and Central American
students hesitated to choose "white." While they clearly felt that none of the other
categories described them, they doubted aloud whether they should choose white. When
another man filled out papers and left the second part (about race) blank, I asked him to
please mark a choice for race because I had been instructed to monitor the process and
make sure all the demographic information was correctly filled in for statistical purposes.
After examining his choices he looked back at me quizzically. I prompted him to mark
"white" and he said, "Vaya" in a tone conveying a level of surprised fascination that I
would translate into English as, "well, would you look at that." This was typical of most
of my Latino students who, without direction had chosen only an ethnic category because
of a feeling that none of the other choices applied to them. One woman asked, "¿Qué se
supone que marque aquí?" [What are you supposed to mark here?] When I said, "white"
the woman laughed and said, "No me atrevía" [I didn't dare.] By using this particular
phrase, the woman noted not only her assumed exclusion from that racial category but
also an understanding that the "white" category carries a more positive value relative to
the others.
Authors like Evelio Grillo (2000) and Ruth Glasser (1995) who focus on
Caribbean-American identities have discussed the ways racial definitions are "taught" or
enforced by institutions such as the U.S. military. Glasser discusses World War I
musicians through a historical lens while Grillo writes about personal experiences. Both
demonstrate how segregation was forced on soldiers through the very organization of
their military lives. Separate living quarters and separate duties enforced the distinctions
between United States' definitions of "black" and "white." Often, as both Grillo and
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Glasser point out, these "official" racial distinctions divide people according to criteria
that do not match the way people actually describe or think of themselves. Dominguez
(1986) explores racial identifications in New Orleans from an anthropological
perspective, pointing to the ways that definitions of whiteness and creolité have changed
over time. Isar Godreau et al. (2008) have demonstrated that a public elementary school
curriculum in Puerto Rican history presented an explicit message about the equal value of
Spanish, Africans, and indigenous peoples in contemporary Puerto Rican national
identity but was subverted by the implicit message of the importance of Spanish colonial
culture to the virtual exclusion of other contributions. Although the information collected
on the registration forms by the community college was not for the express purpose of
either dividing people along racial lines for certain types of instruction, in the classic
segregationist mode, or for explicitly teaching about U.S. racial hierarchy, it did reinforce
a particular construction of racial and ethnic difference. Although the forms contained no
value judgments linked to ethnic or racial choices, students' remarks as they filled out the
papers indicated that they knew and acknowledged the existence of different values or
privileges associated each identifier, and in some cases assumed their exclusion from
those categories or privileges.
Students didn't, and perhaps couldn't, articulate the reason for their confusions
over the race and ethnicity questions on the form, namely that the labels provided were
unsatisfactory to them. Nevertheless, their confusion signals real separation from some
parts of the community along racial lines. All of my adult education students had
previous experience with racial hierarchies in the United States (and their home
countries) from which they learned. These everyday experiences of learning about race
did not match the choices they were given on the form with Hispanic listed as an
ethnicity separate from race. The binary and mutually exclusive choice between
Hispanic/Latino and white allowed for a choice that reflected their treatment as outside
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the white category. But they hesitated to choose white to describe themselves when race
and ethnic categories were separate. They were not treated as white or referred to as
white in other contexts, and so they doubted whether it was accurate to declare
themselves to be white on this official form. Given the other options, most guessed that
"white" was the most logical choice; they were pretty sure that they were not Asian,
Black, Native American or Pacific Islanders. Nevertheless, almost every student chose
not to make a choice without asking me whether it was the "right" answer first. While
these students clearly had experience with U.S. racial hierarchies, both discrimination and
privilege, the registration forms did not reflect the position or category they felt they
occupied. By not presenting a satisfying choice that reflected their experiences with race
in everyday life, the institution implicitly disavowed or ignored the value of these
experiences. While some students may have interpreted their categorization as white as
empowering, I came to view it as one more lesson that students had to learn in order to
accommodate the demands of institutional administration.
The dissonance between the racial/ethnic choices provided on the two forms and
students' own experiences of their ethnic or racial "othering" made for a confusing choice
for students. I interpret this particular experience as a racial microaggression (Solorzano,
Ceja, and Yosso 2000) in that it conveys a lack of understanding by those in power of the
minority experience. Microagressions are not purposefully malicious. Rather, they are
small acts. However, the cumulative effect of multiple recurring experiences can serve to
create a climate of exclusion. In this particular case, the events created or maintained a
sense that formal schooling is a white social realm or at least one in which they are not
expected to be. There are people who "make rules": which forms need to be filled out;
the choices on those forms; even the language in which the forms are available (only
English). And the process of filling out these forms constructed the rule makers as both
authoritative and different from the students. In this way, forms that were seen by those
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familiar with institutional education (administrators, instructors, secretarial staff) as
everyday formalities, for my non-white, not English proficient students, the questions on
the forms served to create U.S. formal education as a white social space.
Pay No Attention to "the Man" Behind the Curtain: School
Registration Processes
It is not only particular questions or information on forms that "others" students
and families, but also the formal, text-based, repetitive, and lengthy process of
registration paperwork that burdens and others those unfamiliar with the system or the
language. As Sharma and Gupta argue, "It is through such mundane activities that the
primacy of the state is reproduced, and its superiority over other social institutions
established. And it is through the daily routines of proceduralism and precedent setting
that social inequalities, such as those of class and gender, are produced and maintained"
(Sharma and Gupta 2006: 13). For high school students, the parents/guardians who often
fill out the paperwork for/with them, and adult education students the registration forms
present a first interaction with the school. I volunteered as an interpreter during school
registration and helped Spanish-speaking parents and students fill out the necessary
paperwork. And as an instructor for GED and English, I was also responsible for helping
students fill out registration forms. For me and for the people I was helping, these
experiences were lessons in bureaucratic red-tape. The Meatville School District
registration packet, which contained forms to fill out and information for parents, was
more than twenty pages long. Parents had to sign forms including one stating that they
understood students can get concussions while playing, several forms regarding policies
about appropriate behavior (ranging from acceptable physical contact to technology use),
and two different forms granting permission to publish the student's likeness or name in
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the local newspaper and on the school website.
29
Parents also had to fill out identifying
information such as name, phone number, and address in four or five different places in
the registration packet. Similarly, adult community college students who registered for
non-credit GED and English classes in Meatville had to fill out their identifying
30
information on three different forms.
In the case of the public school, there was a
concerted effort to provide all the necessary information in Spanish (and eventually
Chin), while in the case of the community college all forms were exclusively in English.
Filling out registration forms for classes also provided a clear example of how
identifying oneself to an institution is a culturally constructed process. Registration forms
for both the public high school and community college classes required identifying
information: name, phone numbers, addresses, birthdates. In helping people register for
classes and with other tasks, like buying plane tickets, I was surprised to learn just how
problematic these kinds of questions can be. Addresses can be problematic for
(im)migrants, especially the poor who may change residences frequently and live
between two households. For example, a poor or immigrant student may spend some
days at a grandparents' house and others at an aunt's house. Phone numbers are also a
problem, not because people don't have phones but precisely because so many do. Some
people in Meatville seemed to have a new phone and a new phone number at least several
times a year. And while it would seem simple to know one's own name and birthdate,
there were people for whom this was also not so clear. Many non-white people in
Meatville are known primarily or exclusively by their nicknames. In the case of Chin
people, one's name can change over the life course so that, for example, a mother or
29 The state required that parents read a form explaining the risks of students getting a
concussion while playing at school, not only in sports activities but also during any type of play.
30 Or, alternatively, the instructor could copy the information from one form onto the
two other forms on their own time.
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father becomes known as the parent of their first-born child (Angelama, Angelapa or
Davidma, Davidpa). Additionally, Chin people do not traditionally have first names and
surnames so their "refugee" name on official paperwork may also reflect changes to
accommodate naming practices that require separate and inheritable surnames.
For some Latinos problems arose because their names varied slightly across
contexts: Juan Diego Martínez at work and Diego Martines outside of work. This could
be for a variety of reasons including the fact that names and birthdates are not as
meticulously recorded or tracked in other countries. This type of disconnect resulted in
situations like that of Santos Hernández whose "real" birthday was the 22nd but because
of a clerical error on his birth certificate had been recorded as the 24th. Also in Santos'
case, his son shared the same name but it was written as Santo Hernandes. This was an
error made possible, in part, by a regional accent that uses coda simplification, dropping
or changing the final sounds of some words. When I asked Santos about the difference
he said, "Es que en nuestros paises, la gente es bruta. No saben escribir." [It's just that in
our countries, people are stupid. They don't know how to write.] In the context, this
meant that they don't have a good grasp of spelling or grammar, rather than that they are
illiterate. The difficulty, then in filling out basic information, points to the flux of
working class and immigrant experience, the limited literacy abilities of some, and for
others the possibility that they had multiple "identities" because different information was
used in different contexts. But it was not just these issues that made filling out
identifying information tricky. I saw that, despite repeatedly filling out forms, many
people still just didn't remember this type of information. Teaching English and helping
people fill out forms helped me to see that for some people this type of information was
just not memorable or important. Indeed, I was surprised at how important I thought it
was. After much consideration, the only really compelling reason I could think of to
have identifying information memorized was in the case of reporting an emergency.
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Thus, something that might seem a routine formality to middle-class, formally
educated, English proficient Americans was actually much more burdensome and
intimidating for some people. I noticed in the way some people painstakingly signed
their name in block letters and the way they passed me papers quizzically (subtly asking
me to read them aloud), or the way they stared at the papers clearly not able to follow the
prose that they had only the most basic literacy abilities. Some people were also
hampered by undiagnosed or untreated eye maladies and/or hand injuries that prevented
them from effectively gripping writing utensils or having fine motor control. The sheer
amount of reading comprehension necessary to fill out the public school registration
packet was daunting. Although some of the forms included issues of legal consent, most
of the middle-class, English-proficient people I met had enough bureaucratic experience
to simply skim quickly through the packet, read what might have been new since last
year, and sign in the appropriate spaces.
For parents who had limited literacy or reading comprehension, I found that my
expected role as a bilingual registration volunteer was not only to interpret and translate,
but also to read or paraphrase the written Spanish text. I was frequently called upon to
explain both the content of the forms as well as the bureaucratic logic behind them.
Parents would ask me why they had to sign a form acknowledging that they understand
their child could get a concussion while playing or why they should list the date of a
child's last dental appointment. The dense and official linguistic register of the text
combined with its length, solidified a notion that school was a place where they did not
belong, did not understand how things worked, and had no authoritative position from
which to interact with school personnel. For example, several parents punctuated
inquiries about school or registration forms with the phrase "Soy muy burro/a." Loosely
translated, the phrase means, "I'm so ignorant/dumb" with the word "burro/a" [donkey]
being used in its adjective form to describe the speaker. The phrase was often inserted as
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a way to explain why the person had a question and also frequently coupled with an
explanation of how the person didn't go to school (I'm just so ignorant, I never went to
school, that's why I don't know what social studies is). Thus, rather than an empowering
first interaction with school, the forms and their complex language (even when translated
into the native language) served to create distance between the parents and the school and
reinforced some parents' insecurities about their own educations.
School as Culture-Neutral
People usually referred to high levels of in and out-migration, poverty,
racial/ethnic minorities, or English-language learners when discussing problems or
challenges the Meatville school confronted. But the notion of school being a post-racial
or multicultural space prevented wide recognition that structural or institutional
inequalities contribute to the school's problems. In this view, the school is an even
playing field that is not influenced by culture, and so it becomes an individual and even
moral issue that students have not performed well on tests. If the school is presented as
culture neutral where everyone has an equal chance of success, then lack of high
performance can be attributed to lack of ambition or effort on the part of students. In this
context, the concept of achievement by personal merit diminishes the significance of
racialized outcomes or realities. That nearly all the teachers, administrators, school board
and city council people are white in a community where sixty percent or more of the
student body is Latino becomes the responsibility of Latinos who don't want to
participate. And the fact that decision-makers are wielding power from within a white,
middle-class cultural framework is also made invisible.
Low test scores were most often framed as either lack of knowledge or lack of
motivation. Several civic leaders expressed to me that "we just have to make them
[referring to both students and parents] understand how important this is" with reference
to education and standardized testing scores. And when I asked one Latina single mother
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who was a longtime local resident why she thought there were no Latinos on the school
board or city council she said, "Lazy." She went on to explain that the school was a good
example of this and related how one administrator had tried to encourage participation.
He's pretty tough on the kids but he's, I have a lot of respect for
him and he's tried to get the Latino community involved, called
some meetings. He's set some meetings at 7 o'clock so parents can
show up and kinda go and say what they think and what they want
to say and what they want to have done in the school. But it's the
same ones every time, you know, people that care for the kids. The
ones that are having problems in school, their parents don't even
show up because they don't really care about these kids. The kids
get low on the ITBS tests and it's like they don't understand how
important it is to tell their kids to study, the school might be gone
by next year, or ten years from now. We don't have a budget.
What are they gonna do? [...] There's a lot of us that like me that
have already been through the school system here and have kids in
school now like I do with my kids but they don't care. That's what
I'm saying, it's just like I know that you're working and that you
work long hours but I also work and I work long hours, I'm a
single parent, but still you know, I do want my kids to have
everything that is good enough for them, like give them an
education, sometimes you know, a lot of parents just don't care.
Some of the students supported both stances in small discussion groups with
booster club members. They reported, "we didn't know how important the tests were"
and "we didn't know anybody cared how we did." The students recounted anecdotes of
how other students (sometimes implicating themselves) would get tired of taking the tests
and just randomly fill in bubbles. School officials thus see part of their job as teaching
not only students but also other community members, especially parents, about the
school. For example, a school official described (at a Conference on Racial Justice
sponsored by a local church group) how he deals with demographic changes saying: "We
have to teach them what our expectations are" as a school district. Given the number of
newcomers to Meatville who are not familiar with the U.S. public school system, such a
didactic approach is certainly called for. However, in the context of referring specifically
to non-white and immigrant parents, framing the problem as one of ignorance maps the
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two qualities of race and education or intelligence onto one another in a way that extends
rather than questions what Villenas (2001) terms “benevolent racism.”
The fact that many school personnel are long-time residents means they often
convey nostalgia for the "good old days" of their high school youth and winning football
team. Understandably, they wish for today's students to have the same positive
experiences they had as youth. While it is necessary for the school to educate all parents
about school practices and teachers' expectations, the fact that school is not also explicitly
emphasizing the dialogic component of the learning process means that because school
personnel are primarily white and parents are mostly not, the "teaching" can take on a
paternalistic and assimilationist tone. In addition, because of the rural context, the small
size of the community, and the emphasis on face-to-face interactions, any reference to
racism even as structural or institutional is deeply personal. In an urban school district, to
accuse school administration of suspending students of color at disproportionately high
rates might mean spreading blame among 20 or more individual actors; however, in a
rural school district the "administration" might consist of two or three individuals who
have well-defined positions of respect and positive reputation in the community.
The discourse of colorblindness attempts to erase inequalities while
multiculturalism interprets difference in ways that essentialize "culture" and "value
diversity," often in superficial ways. Neither approach validates quotidian transnational
experiences of identity or personhood. Many interviewees (including Latinos) were
unable to name any benefits of diversity beyond the fact that the town now has some
great Mexican restaurants. Most people I spoke with said that they "value diversity" or
"culture." The evidence they offered was an appreciation of the food, clothing, or music
of "other cultures" or even their own. Thus, while major stakeholders could agree that
Cinco de Mayo was a "cultural" expression that warranted support, they could not agree
that practicing and supporting literacy in Spanish would contribute to English-language
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acquisition and by extension higher test scores. Apparently, this view led to the gradual
elimination of a dual language elementary school program before I moved to the
community. Meatville Community Schools, for a variety of reasons, ended up
eliminating a dual-language pedagogy that they had experimented with implementing at
the elementary school while schools in two other Iowa communities were experiencing
relative success with their dual-language programs. In fact, during my residence in
Meatville, West Liberty graduated its first group of seniors who had started the duallanguage program in kindergarten. The misrecognition of culture as being about food,
clothes, dance, and music means that more nuanced cultural ways of knowing and being
remain unvalidated. It also means that differences among co-ethnics were made
invisible. None of the people I interviewed recognized what Gonzalez, Moll, and Amanti
(2005) calls "funds of knowledge." It seemed particularly challenging for some school
personnel to recognize that the skills needed to negotiate transnational bilingual kin
networks and informal economies on a daily basis might be transferrable to other arenas
like the classroom. Like the parents in Reed-Danahay's (1996) account of rural French
people resisting constructions of their identity by the nationalized education system,
people in Meatville are often negotiating their identities as individuals and as a
community in the social spaces associated with the public school system.
In part because of the inconsistencies between the ways institutions define people
and the ways people define themselves, it is tempting to want to find a "neutral" category
that can include "everyone" and serve as a unifying label. In the case of Meatville, the
public school is often noted as one such category, complete with a color scheme and
mascot. One teacher/coach even told me, "I don't care what your ethniticity [sic] is, I
want you to be, your color that matters to be blue and white. It's the only thing that
matters to me." But privileging the public school as a local identifier also has some
drawbacks. It elides the real historical differences and social experiences of "others."
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While it provides a locus around which to unite, the unity also silences real divisions that
the school may either create and/or perpetuate. It doesn't allow recognition that it might
feel different to be a "Tiger" if you have darker skin or if your parents don't speak
English. It also privileges parents, relatives of students, and school workers over other
entities in the community who are not drawn into the activities of the school by the
participation of someone to whom they are close. This is particularly the case with new
immigrants who tend to either not yet have children or whose children are not yet schoolaged. While there are advantages to the centrality of the public school as a central
location for building and identifying "community," it also is not necessarily as broadly
inclusive as it might appear.
Public High School Social and Community Involvement
In 2010 several local businessmen became aware of low standardized test scores
and their consequences in terms of state and federal sanctions on the local school district.
At the time, potential courses of action included closing the Meatville Public School
District and busing all the students to other schools or replacing all the teachers at the
school. In response, several businessmen formed the academic booster club by inviting
their fellow business people to join. They named the group "Paws First" in reference to
the school mascot and the position they were hoping to attain. The goal of the group was
to figure out how to support the school, demonstrate their belief in the mutual
dependence of the school and the local economy, and bring to bear their own resources
wherever possible to improve the situation. The existence of this group in Meatville
represents an explicit effort to reach across some of the typically identified barriers to
education for disenfranchised groups: linguistic, class, racial, generational. Group
members recognized that today's high school students might be future residents, business
owners, and community leaders. They wanted the students to also understand how
important they were to the survival of Meatville in preparing for and possibly taking on
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those roles. The creation of an academic booster club and the ways members articulated
connections between school success and the survival of Meatville as a socio-economic
community illustrates how local entities are enmeshed in education as a national project
as they advocate for local community development.
One of the challenges in getting people together for meetings or events in
Meatville was the reliance on personal relationships to communicate information. On
one hand, face-to-face interactions represented an element of similarity between rural
Iowa culture and the rural backgrounds of many immigrants to Meatville. And the
organizers were successful in using their contacts to gather key white business owners
and civic leaders together. On the other hand, privileging face-to-face interactions also
had the effect of making what was meant to be an open, public meeting seem to be an
exclusive, invitation-only event. Because individuals’ personal networks might not have
been as diverse as they imagined them to be, information communicated through those
networks sometimes didn't get disseminated as far as they thought it did. The dates and
times of Paws First meetings weren't published anywhere, so you needed to be added to
the bank secretary's email list or accidentally bump into someone who knew when the
next meeting would be. At first, I had the distinct impression that I was "crashing" Paws
First meetings. I continued to attend, figuring that someone would kick me out if they
didn't want me. Then, I ran into one of the members and asked when the next meeting
would be, mentioning that I hoped to continue crashing them for my research project. He
told me to ask the bank secretary because he couldn't remember and assured me that
"everybody is welcome to come to the meetings." I later spoke with another person
active in community organizations who asserted that the Paws First group was "by
invitation only" and that, not having been invited, she was not likely to be warmly
received.
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Adding somewhat to the air of exclusivity was the fact that meetings were held in
the boardroom of a local bank after it had closed for the day (meetings usually began at
around 3:45pm). This meant that the bank secretary would let all attendees in through the
otherwise locked door before the beginning of the meeting and attendees would snake
their way through the back of the bank to the boardroom where refreshments waited. Of
course, this meant that the secretary knew each attendee by sight and potentially had the
ability to turn people away, although I never saw her actually do this and doubt that she
ever would. While I doubt the group was intentionally exclusive or private, both timing
during regular business hours and the venue in the bank boardroom, as well as the
methods of communication employed by the group served to create both an air of
exclusivity and actual barriers to wider participation.
The Paws First group emerged at around the same time that a woman in the
community was trying to start a parents' (of students) organization whose founding
members had hoped would become an officially recognized PTO (Parent Teacher
Organization) chapter. Perhaps unwittingly, influential community members came to see
these two groups as mutually exclusive. According to Sally Connors, the woman who
was trying to organize the parents' group, the school board exerted its power in
discouraging her from forming a group and told her that if she or others would like to be
involved, she should join Paws First. Never one to give up easily, Sally forged ahead and
the fledgling parent group became involved in helping with events, primarily at the
elementary school. She defined the two groups as having different but complementary
roles to play in supporting students and the school. She explained the differences by
saying,
Parents are completely different group and have a completely
different goal than a community-centered group.... I've never been
to a wildcats first group meeting, I've never been asked. But they
started with the administration and the teachers. We started with
the parents. And the difference between the two is that the parents
are going to have more of an effect on the students and your
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community leaders are going to have more of an effect on your
teachers and administration. That and I have some parents in my
group who would be very intimidated by several of the members of
the wildcats first group.... I mean we have some parents who are
probably here illegally that come to our meetings and the last thing
they want to do is go have a meeting with the mayor or with the
chief of police there, you know?
Sally's description highlights some of the issues of class and power related to the
two groups that I address below. Comments made by several Paws First leaders at a
meeting where a new administrator was introduced highlight the mutual construction of
the two groups as having both different agendas and different participants. One leader,
John Wilcox, opened the meeting by asking for a show of hands from members with
children at the school; fewer than half the people present raised their hands. He cast this
as a positive quality of the group and interpreted it as a demonstration that "we don't have
some ax to grind; it's a community deal." Of course, had the question been phrased to
include an older generation who were school alumni themselves or had children or
grandchildren in the school, there would have been a majority but the exercise
demonstrates how the two groups envisioned themselves differently. John went on to
point out that the group was explicitly non-political, collected no dues, and elected no
officers, thereby highlighting the democratic, grassroots nature of the organization.
Another founding member added that, "it's not our interest in running the school and
telling you professionals how to run the school. We want you to tell us what direction to
go." Paws First founders prided themselves on having a broader appeal and characterized
their goals as more positive even though both groups came to exist out of concern about
low standardized test scores and the general low morale that low test scores seemed to
create.
When I first attended meetings there were two Latino businessmen in attendance
but, as I continued to attend the meetings, I noticed that they rarely attended the Paws
First meetings. When I spoke with them, both men attributed their sporadic attendance to
conflicting commitments involved in running their small businesses. However, I also
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noticed a more subtle power dynamic that mitigated the explicitly-stated openness of the
group. One of the two Latino men who occasionally participated in Paws First (and
would later become an elected official for the city), pointed out during pre-meeting chit
chat with a school administrator that Latino attendance at parent-teacher conferences
might be low because parents or even students are embarrassed about their low
proficiency in English. As mentioned elsewhere, this stance is supported when parents at
conferences made comments like "(student) tiene padres muy burros" ([student]) has
stupid parents) as a way to elaborate either on why they're so proud that the student is
doing well or as an explanation for why they aren't able to help the student do better at
school. Despite its validity, the administrator effectively made this profound observation
invisible by not responding to it and by promptly changing the topic of conversation.
Although it could have simply been a quirk of the conversation, the power
dynamic at play seemed palpable. First, the look on the face of the businessman
conveyed slight annoyance at his contribution not being recognized. Later, when I
broached the subject with him in a conversation, he brushed it off expressing to me that I
shouldn't be surprised when important people don't pay attention to Latinos' concerns.
Second, the topic of conversation had been introduced by a question from the
administrator. So, ignoring the response took on more meaning than a simple change in
the topic of conversation. Third, many of the subsequent Paws First meetings involved
discussions about how to improve parent participation in school events, particularly
Latino parents. Thus, although the group specifically lobbied Latino business owners
(and later, Chin community members) to participate in Paws First, they were in the
untenable position of being asked to both speak for or represent the entire Latino or Chin
community through their participation and at the same time not powerful or authoritative
enough within the group to successfully reframe cultural frameworks of the other
participants.
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By attending meetings I learned that the group hoped to find out what they could
do to help improve the situation "at the school" and take action to do so. They had
formed the group in part because they noticed that although the sports and other
extracurricular activities all had some kind of adult/community support group, academics
did not. Attendees drew connections between formal education and economic success
(most often using their own personal experiences as a foundation) and expressed a desire
to create a pipeline of community involvement to remedy the heavy reliance of many
activities on the time and resources of retirees in the community. Members frequently
mentioned their commitment to "showing them how much we care and how important it
is to us that they do well." The leaders of the academic booster club recognized both that
rural Iowa has a "brain drain" problem and that they hope at least some of the students
will eventually come back to the area "after college or whatever" as one man put it. In
the absence of white-collar jobs for those students (because they are assumed to "go
away" from the community primarily for the purpose of attending college), what might
draw them back to Meatville is nebulous. In their explanations of the purpose of the
group, members often mentioned that they hoped not only for the return of those who left
but also specifically that they would return to Meatville to "raise their children."
I heard Paws First members explain their purpose in a variety of contexts:
presentations to high school students, in meetings, in informal gatherings, at school board
meetings, and in articles in the newspaper. Over time, participants developed a concept
of how they were hoping to have an effect. At one meeting, members explained why
they were meeting with students as members of the Paws First organization. One person
said simply, "Because we care about them as a community." Another person (a school
official) emphasized the role of the group in creating a positive environment that was
continuous between school and community, "It shows how important the culture that we
create with kids is, when they feel valued and a part of the community. We need to do
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more of that at school [to improve test scores] and create a culture of high expectations."
After the first year, he also shared with the group that he felt that the "number one reason
the kids did better last year was because kids felt like people cared about them." One of
the founding members of Paws First said that the group was formed because participants
"wanted to do some things the school wanted us to do" and that in their meetings with
students they were "trying to teach them that there's a community and how we as business
owners get along. And if the school isn't successful then that impacts us." This
explanation of Paws First’s goals include what is perhaps an implicit distinction from the
parents' group that some people characterized as wanting to impose their ideas on the
school or teachers. It also makes explicit the often repeated concept among the members
that there is a vital connection between the vitality of the school and the vitality of local
businesses, both in the economic sense (the school is a key component of what allows
people to live in Meatville rather than only commuting to work there) and in the social
sense of having a vibrant community with generational continuity into the future.
Paws First was successful in gathering together some of the most influential civic
and business leaders in the town. I remember walking in to the first meeting and
thinking, “Well, if I need to get something done in this town, this is the place to come”
because all the most powerful people in the community are sitting around one big table!
That this was the case speaks to the power of the original group of organizers as well as
to the interest of participants in being actively involved in supporting academic success at
the school. Over the first two years the group held back-to-school parties to help boost
morale and generate excitement about the beginning of the new school year. The idea
was to have free food and music to celebrate the beginning of school in the same way that
a pep rally gets people excited for a big football game. Food was donated by local
businesses including the meatpacking plant and church ladies from several local Christian
denominations made myriad desserts. These parties were generally well-attended by a
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diverse cross-section of community members that included several generations of family
members, people of various ethnicities, and various social classes. The informal, social
event provided an ideal platform for community members to bridge social barriers. The
group also held a Steak Fry at the golf course each fall to demonstrate their appreciation
for teachers with meat again donated by the processing plant. Although this meeting was
a bit more formal and considerably more homogeneous, one Paws First leader
characterized it as a success based on the fact that he knew of two longtime teachers in
the district (more than 10 years) whose spouses had never met each other until this event
(presumably because they each lived somewhere other than Meatville and the teachers
commuted to their jobs).
The major effort that the group undertook was an attempt to build mentorship
relationships and moral support or encourage students in the junior class because theirs
were the scores that determined whether the whole high school would be placed on the
low-achieving list or not. The Paws First members divided into small groups and each
met with a group of homeroom students and their teacher several times over the course of
the year. The adults tried to learn about the students through informal discussions over
treats and then at subsequent encounters engaged in further discussions that included testtaking strategies, making encouraging posters to hang in the school hallways, and
practicing test taking through a multiple choice quiz about the Meatville. This was
designed to be a fun activity that Paws First members also hoped would encourage a
sense of community among the students by helping them learn some interesting facts
about the town and its history. MacTavish and Salamon's research about marginalized
trailer park youth supports the potential benefits of attempts to foster positive and
supportive relationships between students and enfranchised adult civic leaders.
The relationships each flourishing youth constructed with
community mentors were intense.... For flourishing youth, such
relationships indicated access to social networks of peers and
adults across the contexts of church, school, and town. Being
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incorporated into the social networks of the small town or church
adjacent to their trailer park marked flourishing youth as belonging
to that community.... In contrast, floundering youth perceived
barriers in accessing nonpark relationships and opportunities. For
these teens, peers and pop culture icons were identified as central
to their lives. The peers and adults floundering youth associated
with were typically deviant. Combined with isolation from
resources, such associations presented significant risks to these
youths (MacTavish & Salamon 2006: 169-170). These findings about rural Midwestern youth who live in trailer parks show that
relationships with adults that transcend both the physical boundaries of the trailer park
and the socio economic milieu it represents played a crucial role in the lives of
"flourishing" youth. In contrast, their "floundering" trailer park compatriots were not
able to capitalize on these types of relationships and instead frequently became involved
in destructive behaviors such as drug and alcohol abuse and petty crime.
Although the Paws First organization unintentionally created an air of exclusivity
regarding their meeting practices, they were able to create situations that allowed them to
make cross-boundary connections with some of the school's students. Whether these
relationships are able to transcend the confines of structured interactions imposed by the
school remains to be seen but comments from both students and adults involved in Paws
First activities indicated that the meetings provided at least a good stepping stone to
knowing each other better. The Paws First activities successfully employed local norms
that emphasize face-to-face communication as a way of knowing people in order to
establish or strengthen relationships that they viewed as key to the success of both the
school and the community.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have shown how different kinds of institutional mechanisms and
bureaucratic processes, particularly those associated with schooling, constrain the
enfranchisement or perpetuate the disenfranchisement of some members of the Meatville
community. While the official messages of institutions and organizations may indicate
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equal opportunity and access, their implicit messages sometimes contradict this.
Particularly by indicating that it is the responsibility of othered or disenfranchised
community members to incorporate themselves in the established operating frameworks,
the ethnocentrism of these frameworks becomes invisible and is maintained as the
obvious or natural way of doing things. In other words, community members erect or
maintain barriers to belonging that the enfranchised do not recognize as barriers.
Because people don't recognize them as barriers to inclusion, they believe that there is no
impediment to belonging and thus blame the lack of enfranchisement on the most
disenfranchised people. When barriers are recognized, they are framed either as
understandable reasons of culture and social class (for example, that people work hard at
manual labor jobs and are tired) or as morally loaded reasons (such as laziness or lack of
investment in civic participation).
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CHAPTER 6 INDUSTRIAL WORK AT HOME
So far, I have shown that schools were key sites in Meatville for the negotiation of
identity and ways of belonging but so too were households and families. In this chapter I
explore how housing, definitions of family, and face-to-face ways of knowing shaped
local experiences of belonging in Meatville. While jobs at Meat Corporation were a
primary factor in attracting migrants to Meatville, family connections and a sense that
one could make a home in town were also reasons to stay. Kin connections served as key
resources in household economic strategies and sharing of information. However,
because concepts of kin, family, and the appropriate roles of family members are often
idealized, making family was challenging in the face of immigration, economic
constraints, meatpacking employment, and cultural expectations.
While a variety of institutions claim some jurisdiction over the everyday practices
of home and family life, in many respects, these quotidian activities take place away from
powerful institutionalized surveillance. Instead, the surveillance and enforcement of how
people make their homes and constitute their families are popularly and unevenly
policed. In this chapter I highlight some of the tensions that remain unsettled in this
popular negotiation in the Meatville context. I also call attention to some points of
convergence among the many nested communities within Meatville and, in doing so,
suggest that framing them more prominently in the narrative of who Meatville residents
are will enhance a sense of unity among diversity and stability in the face of economic
change.
Return to "Lo Familiar"
One reason many people have chosen to live in Meatville either temporarily or
long-term is that they or their families had lived there before. After employment, family
was the top reason people cited for coming to or staying in Meatville. For Euro-
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American residents, particularly those who were just beginning to start families (i.e.,
getting married, having children), settling in Meatville was a happy return to the place
where they had grown up. Their positive memories of childhood and high school were
recuperated by raising their own children in the same place. For returnees and new
31
arrivals, Meatville proved familiar.
Many residents of various ethnicities and backgrounds came to Meatville because
members of their kin group were already there. White families and a small number of
Latino families, were "coming back home" where relatives continued to reside during
their absences of varying lengths. For others, such as some Mexican immigrants, their
kinship networks drew them to come "see what it was like" and many ended up staying.
Practically every Latino I knew had someone who "brought" them or invited them to
Meatville. Especially for immigrants of the 1990s when Meat Corporation offered
recruitment incentives of up to $1000 to employees who brought in new workers, kin
would come for a short while to "check it out" and then end up staying. Although
employment was the draw, a key factor was the presence of kin and their initial physical,
financial, and emotional support.
Once in Meatville, people also explicitly attributed their decision to stay in the
community to the presence of kin. One semi-retired white couple came to care for the
husband's ailing mother. Another young white couple came at least in part so they could
raise their children near extended family. A single Latina mother, Isabel Domínguez,
who immigrated to Meatville with her nuclear family as a teenager, chose not to move
permanently to Chicago (where she worked briefly) because her parents lived in
Meatville and provided childcare. A white middle class mother named Sally Connors
said, "I felt it was important for my kids to know their family and grandparents." Lisa
31. "Familiar" in Spanish can refer to something that is "recognizable" or that is related to
family.
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Adams, another white middle class mother who grew up in a nearby town, explained how
relatives factored prominently in connecting her to Meatville, "my family, I have a lot of
family that lives here. My dad went to school here, he graduated from here. I always said
I would bring my family back to a small town to raise. And so that's what I did, I moved
back here." Cross-generational kinship ties that drew people to the community suggest
not only the importance of kin but also the economic constraints within which kin groups
operate. Family can offer emotional support and contribute to the economic stability of a
kin group by providing free childcare or elder care. Kin networks can provide a safety
net in unstable economic circumstances, supplying everything from food to childcare.
Another key aspect of "familiar-ity" in Meatville was a sense of safety. As
illustrated in the quotes above, the face-to-face nature of "knowing" someone and the
importance of getting to know people by seeing them and spending time with them
reinforces a sense of rural safety. Although lamenting some changes to the community
during their absence, usually to pursue higher education or begin a career, returnees
favorably compared Meatville to other places. These comparisons might be based on real
experiences or perceptions of other places. Parents said they felt their children could play
outside with a minimum of vigilance or fear. Rural to urban migrants from areas like Los
Angeles, Chicago or New York contrasted the relative safety of small town life with the
danger and anonymity of cities. And for both white and Latino people originally from
rural areas, this was an element of their childhood that they wished to provide for their
own children. Whether they had grown up in the rural Midwest, rural Mexico, rural
Central America, or rural Burma, life in the small town of Meatville for many people
meant a metaphoric return to a familiar place.
Coming to Meatville was a return of another sort for Chin Baptists. The history
of the Chin people in Burma has been touched by a variety of historical influences
including British colonial rule, struggle for democracy and self-determination, and the
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missionary work of several very influential Baptists. Today's Chin Baptists recount a
missionary history which has left an enduring legacy of Baptist faith in the Chin region
and visible on the landscape in churches and bible schools. Faithful twenty-first century
Chin Baptists relate the names and accomplishments of a string of missionaries going
back at least 100 years. One of these missionaries, Arthur Carson, was born in Valley
View, one of the small villages in the Meatville Micropolitan Area. It is difficult to know
the extent to which these associations influenced Chin settlement in or attraction to the
rural Midwest in general or Meatville in particular.32 It is unlikely that without Meat
Corporation, the connection to this missionary alone would have spurred Chin settlement
in the area but having made the connection after the fact has seemed to provide
affirmation and a sense of familiarity or connection that validates Chin settlement in
Meatville. The Methodist minister, for his part, was very excited to discover the story of
the missionary's history and delighted in sharing it with groups of civic leaders and at a
Chin National Day celebration in Meatville where he and I were the only two non-Chin
attendees. As of this writing a member of the Meatville Chin congregation was writing a
book about Reverend Carson.
32. There are a variety of Baptist denominations and organizations around the world.
Individual Baptist churches are free to operate independently or affiliate with one another to form
groups such as the American Baptist Association or the Chin Baptist Churches USA. Some of
these groups have participated in cooperative arrangements with other churches and
denominations to officially receive resettled refugees. Baptist churches for the most part have
tended to concentrate their welcoming efforts at a more grassroots level in contrast to agencies
established by Catholic and Lutheran churches, for example. In part because the Chin Baptist
Churches USA operates largely as an independent entity and conducts business primarily in Chin,
local Baptist churches were mostly unaware of and at best loosely involved in Chin settlement in
Iowa.
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Return to Agriculture and the Accessibility of Natural
Resources
Returning to an agricultural way of life or the greater accessibility of natural
resources was another common thread in participants' narratives about choosing to live or
remain in Meatville. Participants' references to their own childhoods indicated that
speakers had idealized images of pastoral-agricultural rural families. In some cases they
remembered nostalgically childhoods "in the country" where they were free to run around
and play. Although people sometimes mentioned hardships like not having shoes or
contributing to subsistence activities, speakers from both Latin America and the United
States often spoke fondly of idyllic country lifestyles in their childhood. They
sometimes framed these activities explicitly in a temporal past with phrases like "It was
safer back then." This adds a temporal dimension to their separation from agriculture or
nature.
But the appeal of country living and a sense that nature was more accessible also
influenced decisions to live in Meatville. When I asked Mrs. Knott, who had traveled
extensively, why she chose to live in Meatville she said, "I could see living in a city and
going down to the restaurants, what I consider city living, living in an upstairs apartment,
right in the middle of town, hitting the restaurants, hitting the movies, the plays, and
having an urban life. I could see that. But if I were to take you to my home right now, I
look on a timber, right here in [Meatville]. I live by a ravine, I hear a stream, you know,
like I tell you, I own a third of one farm, I own a half of another and I have a lake home,
all within 25 minutes. I can visit the city, [but] I can't buy that."
The experience of Chin Burmese refugees also illustrates the idea of coming
home to a familiar way of life through agricultural practices and the greater accessibility
of natural resources. Rural Iowa living made it possible to resume agricultural practices
many had experienced before becoming refugees. They had grown up in isolated
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communities in the Chin Hills where many families participated in subsistence
agriculture, and much of their socializing took place in the context of their Baptist faith
community. Between leaving Burma and arriving in Iowa, many Chin Burmese had
spent time in the Burmese capital, Yangon (formerly Rangoon), Kuala Lumpur, and
Indianapolis or other urban and suburban centers in the U.S. including Seattle, Dallas,
and Baltimore. Although the climate was not appropriate for growing the dietary staple
of white rice, within two years of arriving in Meatville Chin Burmese people had
managed to rent, borrow, or own space in which to create gardens. This allowed them
not only to supplement their diet with fresh "organic" food but also to grow plants and
varieties typical of their regional cuisine that weren't commonly found for sale.
In Meatville, the struggle to maintain agricultural practices in an increasingly nonfarm-based population is evident. While the entire Meatville population could be
considered rural given both its location and size, it is not by-and-large agricultural; most
adults do not earn money directly from farming. As mentioned previously, many people
with family farms have supplemented their incomes by working jobs in town. From the
1980s farm crisis and subsequent consolidation of many smaller farms into much larger
corporate enterprises, there has emerged a new generation of Iowans who have grown up
urbanizing, a trend that global economic forces have also created in many Latin
American and other underdeveloped countries. In the context of nostalgic agricultural or
pastoral memories and the economic realities of the present, tension emerges over
traditions and heritage connected to agricultural practices.
These tensions are visible in discussions about what 4H or FFA activities should
look like, and the date when school should resume after a summer break. Parents and
grandparents who have fond memories of showing animals at the State Fair, and
participating in a variety of "farming" 4H and FFA activities, are forced to confront the
fact that industrial farming and farm consolidation have created a generational divide in
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experiences of farming. For example, a Meatville teacher named Alicia Bryan said, "I
don't know how many farm kids I have in my classes. Uh, I would say probably less than
5% in my classes and in FFA, the same. I mean, I'm not raising farmers and I know that.
I'm raising kids in agribusiness to go into horticulture or those other fields." As she
explains, neither she nor the FFA organization assumes (as it might have in years past)
that most of its participants will be running family farms; rather, many of the activities
focus on a variety of kinds of business opportunities associated with science, agriculture,
and community service.
The decreasing emphasis on agriculture and declining power wielded by farming
families are felt in tensions around public school decisions. A tradition of local control of
school districts by school boards rather than a more centralized system of state control
means that schools set their own calendar following some general state-level guidelines.
Public schools in the state, especially rural ones, have generally planned the start of
school so that it occurs after the end of the Iowa State Fair. This allows students who are
showing animals or participating in other projects (everything from vegetables and baked
goods to dance competitions and woodworking) to do so without missing school. Even
farther back in history, the Midwestern school calendar was devised to match agricultural
rhythms with school breaks roughly coinciding with busy farming periods. Today,
according to one administrator, many more students in Meatville's school district miss
classes to be spectators at the state wrestling tournament than to participate in State Fair
activities. He argued that the school doesn't cancel classes to accommodate the wrestling
competition (instead, simply counting the absences as excused, thus not penalizing the
student) and therefore should take the same approach to State Fair absences. This proved
difficult to accomplish, and it is possible that his position as an administrator reinforced
the idea that he was not connected to, or invested in, agricultural traditions. Unlike some
other local leaders, I never heard him tell stories about participating in agricultural
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activities as a child. By not participating in these discourses about agriculture or pastoral
nostalgia, he was not able to assert his commitment to agriculture and gain a position of
trust from which to advocate for change. For parents and other adults who view
participation in the State Fair as quintessentially Iowan and a critical element in state
identity and citizenship, the school's choice to begin classes before the State Fair ends is
seen as both an affront to tradition and a challenge to their attempts at preserving
pastoralist, agriculturalist notions of rural life. This is the case even when those parents
or adults are themselves largely removed from agricultural activities as they have homes
"in town" and/or do not earn a majority of their income from farming.
Housing in Meatville
In Chapter 3 I discussed some ways that people described "getting along" with
one another. Another measure of how people "get along" is residential segregation.
Although the town's layout developed largely around natural land features like bluffs,
ravines, and waterways, there are distinct neighborhoods in the town distinguished by
class and ethnic markers. Such markers include practices of home and lawn
maintenance, styles of using space, and displays of ethnic affiliation like national flags or
surnames on car windows. Today, the most influential aspect affecting residential
proximity to co-ethnics is the availability of affordable housing. Particularly for urban
migrants, the relatively small size of the community (it's possible to drive through the
entire micropolitan Meatville area in under 15 minutes) makes further effort to create
ethnic enclaves pointless.
Neighborhoods and Types of Residences
Distinguishable patterns of residence and what Davidson calls the "housing crisis"
(1996: 127) illustrate the complicated nature of the relationship between Meatville and
Meat Corporation. The housing "crisis" refers to a lack of affordable, available, and safe
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places to live and has existed at least since the first industrial meatpacking operation
opened in town. At the time, migrants from throughout the region had come to apply at
the newly opened plant; they slept in cars or under bridges or rented sleeping rooms until
their first paycheck materialized. Describing one such housing arrangement, a historian
wrote, "Despite its rundown appearance, some in town believe this building symbolizes
the kind of creative spirit that will keep towns like [Meatville] strong, no matter what
changes are in store" (Davidson 1996: 128). Such perspectives indicate the initial
optimism associated with the influx of jobs and people. They also point to the implicit
assumption that these living arrangements would be temporary as workers accumulated
the capital to invest in local real estate.
Housing options in Meatville exist on a spectrum from homelessness at one
extreme to owning income-generating properties at the other. The limited availability of
housing, the geographic size of the community, and the relatively small population mean
that most people in Meatville have a sense that nearly everyone is their neighbor. An
early history of lax zoning regulations resulted in different kinds of dwellings in close
proximity. For example, some two-story single-family homes sat next to residential lots
with a trailer. In addition, the relationships among the inhabitants of a particular dwelling
varied: blended stepfamilies live next to a nuclear family who lives next to a
multigenerational family. Despite the variation, residential proximity created a feeling of
familiarity among people who saw each other around town and associated particular
residences with particular people.
Trailers or mobile homes are common in Meatville and vary from well-kept
nearly permanent structures (with porches, stairs or carports attached) to precarious
structures cobbled together with scrap material. Usually, a particular individual or
company owns trailer park lots and/or the trailers on them and takes responsibility as
landlord. In Meatville, an earlier incarnation of Meat Corporation established a trailer
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park to provide worker housing. Located at the edge of town along a two-lane highway,
it is possible to walk to the center of town (in one direction) and to the packing plant (in
the opposite direction). Over time as it underwent changes in ownership and
management, the company divested from this endeavor, and at the time of my fieldwork,
the trailers were either owned or rented by local individuals. Some of these trailers were
homey while others might be best described as total dumps. I saw a trailer for rent where
the floor was layered pieces of plywood and, when I pushed one of the plywood pieces
aside with my foot, I saw the ground. Many available living spaces were infested with
dangerous mold and bugs, especially cockroaches. Cockroaches are attracted to the glue
with which some trailers and their furnishings are manufactured, so even meticulous
housekeepers can be plagued by these pests. Many trailers were old, worn, or damaged
with holes in floors or walls and do-it-yourself heating, plumbing, and electrical wiring.
Flimsy construction means trailer dwellers are at greater risk of losing life and property to
flooding and tornadoes.
In contrast, the area "up by the school" contains mostly newly-built homes.
Typically white-collar workers, primarily teachers and upwardly mobile, Englishproficient Latinos own these homes. Part of the area was a development project intended
to add affordable housing but in practice most workers were priced out of the market for
these homes. These single-family homes boasted fresh paint in neutral colors, welltended green lawn space, attached garages, paved driveways, and neatly hung curtains.
These houses tended to be in compliance with safety ordinances with regard to wiring,
adequate exits, and smoke detectors. Families were mostly nuclear, although some
households were multi-generational (i.e., with grandparents and children or grandchildren
living together). Also, in the tradition of upper Midwest single-family homes, most had
basements, which in addition to extra square footage also provides shelter from
tornadoes.
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Buildings on the main commercial street in Meatville, also referred to as
"downtown," mostly date from the first half of the twentieth century and have apartment
units on the second floor above the commercial space. Some owners have updated these
apartments, while others are in rougher shape. Together with a variety of rundown
houses these apartments represent the least expensive housing options. Multiple families
or individuals often rent these spaces together to increase their affordability. Residents
tended to be the least enfranchised: they were the most recently arrived, the poorest, and
the least English proficient. While affordable, these dwellings are also less safe with
vintage wiring and plumbing. Some landlords were very conscientious about renting
affordable, clean, safe dwellings while others appeared to be less concerned with safety.
More than 15 years after historian Osha Gray Davidson (1996) outlined rural
housing issues, there is still a housing "issue" in Meatville. Homelessness and "sleeping
room" arrangements have not disappeared. Neither have there been successful efforts to
provide more affordable rental housing for workers. There were three apartment
buildings/complexes in town in 2012, at least two of which participated in a government
program to provide subsidized housing to the poor and elderly. While some people I met
lived in these apartment complexes comfortably and happily, others did not. One friend
who briefly lived in the Pine Bluffs complex said the manager entered her apartment
(illegally because of insufficient notice) and "snooped around" on several occasions
while she was gone. Some Latinos told me they wouldn't consider living in the
subsidized apartments because they were one and two bedroom apartments that were too
small to serve the needs of their families. Another one of these buildings was at the end
of a lane hidden by trees and brush in a rather upscale neighborhood. This apartment
complex was home to a number of non-white, mostly male, residents, some of whom
could be seen walking the several miles to work at Meat Corporation or downtown.
Because none of the apartment complexes or buildings was located near downtown,
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residents who did not have a car or a driver's license faced serious barriers to
accomplishing tasks like grocery shopping, doing laundry, and getting to work even
though theoretically all these things could be done in Meatville.
The dearth of affordable and appropriate housing encourages migration and
mobility as people seek alternatives or solutions to their housing needs. Teachers, city
workers, and others see the harmful effects of this mobility. Inadequate housing options
push residents to use strategies that can compromise their safety. They build additions on
structures, use space heaters for entire homes or run extension cords to work around
substandard wiring. They may also seal doors and windows to keep in the heat during the
winter or to keep thieves out, which prevents exiting in emergencies. At a municipal
level, increased education and code enforcement might minimize some of these dangers,
but an enduring solution lies in finding a way to augment appropriate, safe, desirable,
affordable local housing options.
A Fire
Local newspaper articles indicate that the city council of Meatville discussed
concerns about affordable housing over many years, including at a meeting in 2008.
Although the city once allowed people to put mobile homes or trailers on residential lots,
this was no longer the case when I lived in Meatville. At time of this research, civic
leaders were less concerned about the safety of mobile homes than about single-family
dwellings that had been turned into rooming houses.33 In one case repeatedly singled out
by those concerned, a single family house had apparently been divided up into individual
sleeping areas with chalk lines drawn on the floor. The Spanish-dominant Latino
landlord charged rent per chalked area. Toward the end of 2012, the city moved to make
33. I learned in 2013 that mobile home safety was part of a longer range housing
inspection plan slated to begin with code enforcement of rental properties.
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housing codes more clear and enforceable. The city council incorporated enforcement
responsibilities into the existing job description of a city hall employee who planned to
begin inspecting properties in 2013.
The issue of housing safety resurfaced in 2011 when an apartment fire downtown
resulted in the deaths of two African American residents. Although the risks and
consequences of the local "housing issue" had simmered unresolved for quite some time,
the issues literally exploded with the fatal apartment fire. A longtime white resident and
local business owner had rented out small rooms next to and above his workshop, mostly
to single African American men. There had long been concerns about safety issues in the
building including wiring, plumbing and exits. A local plumber had reported issues in
this and other rental properties to local authorities who were apparently equally
concerned but unable (or unwilling) to take any particular ameliorative action at the time.
While city ordinances regulated housing and safety, no one was responsible for enforcing
such regulations. Moreover, some parts of the code were so vaguely worded as to be
unintelligible and thus unenforceable. The results of the official investigation (despite
speculation and rumors around town that the fire and subsequent explosion was the result
of meth manufacturing) concluded that one of the two men killed had accidentally started
the fire by leaving an unattended cooking pot on the stove in the communal kitchen. It
appears that the secondary exit in the back of the building was blocked or locked thus
leaving only the front exit near the ignited kitchen as an escape route. Eventually, the fire
ignited flammable gas in the building causing it to explode and making it impossible to
attempt more rescues. People gathered all along the street to witness the fire and rescue
operations, knowing that at least one person laid dead in the burning building as fire
personnel were unable to reach him.
The recognition that it could have been any one of us who rented affordable
housing in the community was clearly etched on the faces of those gathered. Later I had
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conversations with friends, acquaintances, and students in my adult education classes
about smoke detectors, fire safety, and renter's insurance. Several people with whom I
spoke believed a landlord would be financially and legally responsible for replacing the
renters' lost possessions or at least providing temporary assistance. They were surprised
to learn that this was not the case. Many quietly hoped that the landlord would face some
kind of legal sanction or consequence for the unsafe conditions that resulted in the loss of
life, but, as of this writing, no such action had been taken. Some Latinos I spoke with
attributed this to his being a longtime resident and influential white business owner while
some white residents seemed to feel there was no evidence of negligence, even pointing
out that he had been next door and was injured trying to help evacuate the residents.
Some also felt that the life-threatening injuries the landlord sustained and the financial
loss of the building had somehow served as punishment enough. My Spanish-dominant
Latino housemates responded by augmenting the number of smoke detectors in the early
20 century home we rented.
th
Although I had lived in the community for some time and experienced a variety of
"firsts," seeing this fire and learning about what had happened made me seriously
consider leaving Meatville. I had never before been confronted by such visceral,
uncontrollable, and unpredictable risks of being poor. This experience gave me a deeper
appreciation of what inequality can look and feel like, even in the context of a mostly
welcoming, neighborly community. I decided to continue living in Meatville because it
was cheaper than the university town but was aware that many people I knew did not
have the financial means to even consider such a move and that their responses were
limited to small actions like those taken by my housemates to invest in more smoke
detectors.
As a result of the fire a city council plan to review and overhaul the housing code
gained urgency and was supported by the regional planning commission. This was a
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continuation of efforts characterized as "already in motion" to "do something about the
housing situation." One early proposal included the possibility of uniting with other
nearby municipalities to jointly employ a housing inspector. Several civic leaders
believed the housing code's wording should be amended from an unintelligible definition
of a household to one that was both clear and enforceable: "to consist of not more than 4
unrelated people." A city worker argued that other municipalities, particularly college
towns, had adopted similar definitions to prevent over-crowding in housing populated by
students. When I expressed concern about the potential number of households this might
affect, two city officials separately assured me that they intended to selectively enforce
the ordinance which was directed at abusive landlords and that they did not intend to
create undue hardships. In my opinion such a definition of "household" would do little to
increase safety and had the potential to make the housing situation more precarious.
Definitions of "family" and "related" were culturally constructed and flexible. Would a
new definition of household present challenges for people whose economic strategies
involved living with non-nuclear family members or fictive kin?
The discussion of "household" in the city code demonstrated the relative strength
of white decision-makers who had trouble seeing the ways that decisions based on their
own cultural frameworks might impact others. The author of a book about a meatpacking
town in western Iowa, Denison, describes a similar attempt to define and legislate the
definition of households (Maharidge 2005). He describes discussions on the subject as
obviously racially inflected despite careful avoidance of explicit references to race. In
both Meatville and Denison, there were Latino and white landlords who would be targets
of enforcement, but poor, undocumented, minority, and non-English-proficient renters
would disproportionately feel the effects of the proposed rules as they tried to secure
housing with limited options and resources. In such towns the lack of explicit discussion
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about race or ethnicity belies the raced and classed realities of housing options in rural
towns.
Everyday Dynamics of Housing Instability
People dealt with the combination of poverty and housing by doing the best they
could with what they had. Many I knew shared households, and I myself initially shared
a house with a man I met through a friend. Eventually, after a series of roommates who
each lived in the house for less than three months, the house was occupied by me, two
men, and one of the men's 12-year-old son. Later, I moved with the man and his son into
a house in Sand City, one of the villages in the Meatville Micropolitan Area, while a
woman and her several children (at least one of whom was an adult) moved into our
previous residence. Within a few months, my housemate's son had returned to his home
country; soon after, his brother and two children left New York City to come live with us
in Sand City. These informal and temporary co-habitation arrangements make
homelessness less visible and more difficult to define. This instability does not
contribute to a sense of comfort or being at home, and it prevents neighboring. No Child
Left Behind and state legislation "counts" some housing strategies (like sleeping in shifts
because there aren't enough beds for everyone in the household or living with nonnuclear family members) as homelessness or inadequate shelter (Education 2012). Given
that most people do not have formal rental agreements, such arrangements are dependent
on the stability of the personal relationships between the people involved. While offering
the flexibility of being able to shift to something better, the unpredictability of these
arrangements can contribute to both the physical instability of having a place to stay as
well as the emotional uncertainty and stress of not being confident from one moment to
the next whether one is still welcome to continue living in a particular place. Lack of
affordable, satisfactory housing meant that a significant number of people moved
frequently. Not counting my arrival in Meatville, I moved twice in the four years I lived
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there and had the possibility of moving many more times. People frequently moved both
within and outside of Meatville in an attempt to acquire better quality accommodations,
to lower payments of rent, or to reduce the expenses of commuting. These housing
options contributed to a local climate in which the workforce was seen as transitory and
temporary.
The dynamics of an informal rental arrangement are illustrated in the story of one
household in Hampton, one of the tiny suburbs that make up the Meatville micropolitan
area. A Latino man rented out a three-bedroom addition on his existing home to several
other Spanish-dominant Latinos. The addition included a bathroom, kitchen and living
area, which the landlord partly used as extra storage space for things like lawn ornaments.
The running water in the addition's kitchen wasn't working. For several months the
tenants had been using a garden hose attached to an outdoor spigot that they passed
through the window for running water in the sink! Later in the winter the landlord,
despite below freezing temperatures, never ensured that the central heating system
worked in the addition; for months the tenants used portable heaters in their bedrooms as
the indoor temperature plummeted. In contrast to the freezing cold bedrooms, something
wacky with the ventilation in the original part of the house meant that the bathroom was
the temperature of a sauna. I saw a small rubber drainage hose coming through the
bathroom wall and attached with rubber bands to the faucet so as to drain into the sink, so
I suspect that the dryer in the owner's part of the house vented into the small bathroom
rather than outside, making the bathroom very hot. Because there was no ventilation from
a bathroom fan or window, the unfinished drywall in the bathroom was perpetually
moldy. The tenants did not seem preoccupied by the health implications and solved the
mold problem by periodically painting over the drywall.
One day, the landlord announced that he was going to increase the rent to cover
the energy expenses for the house, probably prompted by his seeing a tenant storing the
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window air conditioning unit he had been using before the weather turned cold and
moving a portable heater into his bedroom. The renters balked at the increase, arguing
that they worked all day and used the house primarily to sleep in at night, thus consuming
a small percentage of the dwelling's energy. Nevertheless, two of the three renters agreed
to continue renting at the increased rate. They did so in part because the landlord agreed
to ensure that they did get some heat from the central system. In addition, the renters
explained to me that he was generally a good landlord. He did some things they didn't
like such as checking the mailbox and forgetting to give them their mail. However, he
did not hassle them when they were sometimes late with the rent, let them do whatever
they wanted without any problem, helped shovel the driveway and parking area when it
snowed, and sometimes gave them rides to work if their car broke down. I suspect that
the arrangement suited them for a few other reasons: there was no rental agreement so
they could leave if they found something better; they could deal with the landlord in
Spanish; they could pay him in cash; he didn't care about their legal status. So, even
though I felt he was taking advantage of his co-ethnics' limited options by renting an
unsafe and unhealthy property, the tenants themselves viewed their situation as relatively
advantageous and their relationship with the landlord as symbiotic.
Issues around housing became more visible in three particular situations. One,
like the fire mentioned above, was safety catastrophes (such as asphyxiation from
improperly ventilated heating sources, tornadoes). A second was the arrival of several
hundred Chin Burmese immigrants between 2010 and 2013. Chin Burmese immigrants
rented spaces that had been recently vacated, sometimes by Latinos or African Americans
who had moved to other nearby towns or into better accommodations in Meatville. One
city worker commented that Chin people must be moving among households frequently,
because it seemed like she was processing changes in their address or municipal utilities
bill practically every day. This type of mobility was also visible to management at Meat
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Corporation as they tried to increase the stability of their workforce and minimize
turnover by helping make sure workers had safe housing. Some of these concerns were
dealt with informally by a part-time Chin interpreter at the packing plant. Although she
had a full-time job in a nearby city, her work as an interpreter also sometimes involved
culture brokering and facilitating access to doctors and law enforcement. She explained
things like curbside recycling to newly arrived Chin residents and spent at least one
weekend teaching some Chin renters how to remove mold from walls by scrubbing with
bleach water. She mentioned that she had occasionally called landlords to request that
they send an exterminator. Later, a Spanish-speaking management-level employee at
Meat Corporation told a group of civic leaders that finding affordable local housing was
still a problem as he found when he tried to help the family of a recently-hired worker
move to town rather than commute from further away.
A third situation in which housing issues became visible was at the public school.
Teachers and administrators at the public school expressed concern both with the
instability of so much household movement (they included in this issues with students
moving back and forth between the households of divorced or separated parents) and the
lack of affordable, safe housing for students and their families to live in. While the
school, with help from state and federal government programs, could assist students
whose housing was inadequate, the needs far outstripped the resources. Nevertheless,
teachers and administrators were keenly aware of the need to increase both the quantity
and quality of housing in Meatville.
When I asked some middle class white homeowners about the housing situation in
Meatville, most were sympathetic. Several people also explained that new arrivals were
happy to live in conditions that middle class white Americans would deem inadequate or
unsafe because these conditions were "so much better" than how they lived before
migration. These interlocutors were correct that for many people Meatville housing
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conditions were an improvement, whether new arrivals were coming from overcrowded
apartments in places like New York and Kuala Lumpur or from a refugee camp or from a
village in their country of origin. One woman told me, "They don't even think it's bad
because it's better than what they had where they're from." Such a stance constructs poor
people as not only resigned to unsatisfactory living conditions but as actively choosing
them. This absolves civic government, local employers, and landlords from
responsibility and supports an idealized view of the United States as the "best country" in
comparison to "where they're from," painting citizens and long-time residents as
benevolent hosts.
A discourse of "they choose this" arose when influential community members
argued that some residents of Meatville chose to live in unsatisfactory housing because
they would rather send money "back home." Remittances from meatpacking
communities like Meatville play an important role in other national economies,
particularly Mexico. I knew people in Meatville from several Latin American countries
who either had or were in the process of building a house in their countries of origin.
Some lived in less-than-ideal housing situations because they saw it as a necessary
sacrifice in order to send as much money as possible to other people (usually kin) in other
parts of the world. Enfranchised locals seemed to feel that if the residents themselves
were not "making a big deal" of the housing situation, it shouldn't be a pressing issue for
their fellow residents or the civic government. A couple of lifelong rural middle-class
English speaking Iowans told me that if it were really important to people to live in better
housing conditions, they would send less money in remittances and instead spend their
money on improving their situation in Meatville. Some English-dominant long-time
residents expressed the view that sending remittances and local investment were mutually
exclusive. This discourse frames residents' actions as an agentive choice of priorities and
an inability to direct or save earnings appropriately rather than as a result of low wages,
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inadequate, or unaffordable housing options. In doing so, speakers positioned housing as
an individual responsibility and not an issue of humanitarian need, community-building
or health.
Knowing and Face-to-Face Communication
Knowing about School
Making use of face-to-face communication is something that many poor, less
literate, and less English-proficient newcomers to Meatville shared with long-time,
middle class, literate, English-proficient Meatville residents. I addressed the idea of
seeing as knowing in Chapter 4 and I return to the concept now to explain how
privileging face-to-face interactions was an important factor in how Meatville residents
leveraged information about institutions and perceived each other's priorities.
For example, cross-generational networks were a main mechanism by which
knowledge about the public school circulated. Many long-time Euro-American residents
were themselves school teachers. Their continued presence and involvement in
community and family activities positioned them to be knowledgeable about the public
system of education and to interpret public policy issues relevant to education. Former
teachers or their relatives figured prominently in some school board debates, and they
occasionally held positions on the board themselves. Shared experiences of the local
public school often provided a sense of cohesion in terms of cross-generational shared
experience, especially in long-time resident and white families. Parents participated in
the same school events as their children do today: football games, homecoming
traditions, prom, fundraisers, and even having the same instructors!
Teachers and influential community members used physical presence at events
and activities as indicators of parents' investment in education. To many educators'
chagrin, parents in the community sometimes decided that their work schedules, kinship
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obligations, or familial bonds of trust outweighed educational responsibilities. The
following interview excerpt illustrates the viewpoint of many English-dominant, middle
class parents and educators in Meatville.
Lisa: I feel like a lot of our Hispanics really still don't value
education as much as the traditional American values are.
Cristina: What makes you say that?
Lisa: Because they pull kids out [of school] for three or four weeks
to go on vacation and don't think anything about it. Or [they say] 'I
need you to stay home and babysit' or 'I need you to go to the
doctor with me,' 'hey I need you to do this,' 'I need you to do that.'
And so school takes second fiddle to all those things. And I think
the understanding and the value of education-, they want their kids
educated but not at the expense of inconveniencing them. You
know and I say that and I don't mean it in a mean way. I think they
have access to people that will translate and do things but they
don't utilize that, they utilize their kids and it hurts their kids. And
it puts the kids in the middle.
What bothers me, because we've had kids come to us and say
"mom and dad's taking us to Mexico for three weeks. I don't want
to go but they're making me go." And they're caught in between
'cause they know they want to stay. They know they need to stay
and there's a huge-, it puts kids in the middle. So I think that's
probably one of the biggest challenges. We're getting there but
you know.
Cristina: Why do you think parents do that?
Lisa: Well, it's family. They're very family-structured. I do
understand that. And...but I don't know why outside of that.
Because to be real honest, I would love to go on vacation for three
weeks sometime. I just don't know how some of 'em get off
[work] four, five weeks to be able to go. That I've never figured
out. But that's, if I were going to visit family far away, I wouldn't
go for three, four weeks. One, I'd pick a convenient time that's
convenient for my kids because there's my priority right now. And
two, I wouldn't go for that length of time. And it's still, to me it
still goes back to that American value of education and everything
with, when your kids are from prekindergarten to senior, to 12
grade, you revolve around the school. Your life revolves around
the school, your life revolves around that time and involvement [in
their activities]. I have a hard time seeing kids at activities without
a parent or somebody there to watch them.
th
This discussion illustrates how Lisa and others use student attendance and
parental presence at public school activities to gauge investment in education and tie it to
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a national identity. Local involvement with the school becomes a marker of citizenship
and the rural context facilitates the expectation that individuals' presence at events will be
recognized. Lisa's argument that parents' lives should revolve around their children's
school activities is an example of concerted cultivation and emerges from a particular
context of race and class. Lisa explicitly positions herself as understanding saying, "I
don't mean it in a mean way" and "They're very family-structured. I do understand that."
Yet it was clear that she did not understand how a family member would be more trusted
as a interpreter than a stranger or that kinship obligations might take precedence over the
school calendar. Unable to view alternative practices of family, participation, and
education as either valid or logical from a specific cultural or class context, Lisa depicts
them as un-American and selfish. Similarly administrators, teachers, and even a school
board member characterized non-attendance as "not caring about school" or "not
knowing how important school is."
Parents were often aware of the consequences of missing school but did not view
them as more important than kinship commitments or attempts at cultural preservation.
Like the educator who said,"[teaching white culture quote from curriculum director],"
they recognized that their language and culture were not taught or validated at school.
The perception that public school culture and Latinidad are mutually exclusive is
damaging to the cohesion built through shared experience. By not valuing the informal
education of experiences like traveling to visit family in Mexico or managing kinship
obligations, the school privileged particular kinds of knowledge and learning and fostered
a disconnect between educación at home and formal education at school.
While family connections to people who have immigrated earlier often provide a
source of information for those who are newly arrived, their understandings gained
through personal experiences, while valuable, may also be partial or faulty. In Meatville I
noticed that residents, especially those with limited literacy skills, often did not
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distinguish between the accuracy or validity of knowledge gained from personal
experience and written policies. Both kinds of knowledge circulated by word of mouth
and both were accepted as equally reliable. I remember a conversation between some
acquaintances, one of many on the topic, about how long driving privileges would be
restricted after a DUI conviction. One man said his was only restricted for a year, so the
other man requested that I call the DOT and find out why his paperwork indicated a two
year restriction before seeking reinstatement of full driving privileges. Information on
the DOT website outlining different restrictions and lengths of restriction (first offense
versus 3rd offense or refusal to take a breath test) was not satisfactory to the interlocutors
who insisted that the lengthier time might be some kind of error. In the same way that
knowledge about driver licensing circulated, knowledge about school and the events that
happen at school circulate in the community.
Although I met and heard about both Latino and white families who had crossgenerational knowledge of the local school system, what people knew was very different.
Both had personal experiences with the school but, for most white families, that personal
experience included people who were not only students but also educators (certified
teachers, paraeducators, administrators). These kinship networks contained a formally
recognized and validated knowledge of the school system; their personal experiences
were reinforced by having received certificates or diplomas that gave institutional weight
to their knowledge about the school. Thus, when they contributed to discussions,
particularly public policy ones as at a school board meeting or city council meeting, their
opinions were often perceived as more objective or as based on fact. Many of the Latinos
I talked to about the school also spoke from their personal experiences, particularly as
students, with the local public school system. But their experiences were often treated as
more subjective and as individual occurrences rather than as representative of Latino
experience at school. Their decisions were more often interpreted as coming from a lack
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of understanding about the school system (which undoubtedly happened, but I would
argue not more frequently for Latinos). While former teachers, all white, could speak
authoritatively about the atmosphere and events at the local school, former students'
knowledge was frequently constructed as subjective and partial.
Kin and "Knowing" People
Kinship in Meatville also functions as a way to place someone socially.
Recognizing another person as part of a family or kinship network is one way that people
are "known" to each other. Even if people don't have much information about each other,
they are more socially recognizable if connected to a kin group. While my previous
experience with Latino culture had prepared me to expect this in the Latino community, I
was surprised by how prevalent these questions were from non-Latinos. I noticed, for
example, when helping with parent-teacher conferences. Teachers, counselors, and
paraeducators often made remarks such as "Are you Liliana's sister?" or explained to me
who students were by making connections such as, "Do you know Julio? Well, that's his
sister's step-son." And when I first called Meat Corporation to arrange a tour, the woman
who answered the phone asked, upon hearing my Latino last name, whether I was related
to anyone who worked there.
However, there were some disjunctures in the ways some Latinos and some EuroAmericans recognized family. One example of this was the "cousin problem." White
female teachers twice recounted incidents in which Latino students referred to someone
as their "cousin." The teachers noted with surprise that they hadn't realized that the
parents of the two students in question were siblings. When the students responded that
they weren't, the teachers explained that meant the students weren't really cousins. Both
women laughingly said they told the students that "neighbors" isn't the same thing as
"cousins." Similarly, when I went to dinner with my family and some local friends, the
waitress and a teenager at the table introduced themselves to my parents as cousins. A
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lengthy discussion ensued when the young man noted that neither his mother nor his
father was the woman's sibling. It was finally determined that they were, in American
parlance, second cousins (his father was the waitress's first cousin). The bilingual
waitress clarified that not only is it acceptable to not distinguish between "degrees" of
cousinhood in Spanish, but also that as cousins the waitress and the young man's father
had grown up together in their grandmother's household and had been raised more as
siblings. The subject was officially settled as my mother, nodding her head
appreciatively, said firmly, "You're second cousins." While family connections is one
way to "know" people locally, understandings of kinship did not necessarily translate
effectively across cultures. Interestingly, the white women referenced here participated
in the negotiation of appropriate kinship terminology from a standpoint that assumed the
translate-ability and universality or objectivity of their concepts of kinship without
realizing that such concepts are subject to change across cultures and over time. As
educators, all three women understood the conversation as a teachable moment for
English vocabulary rather than an exchange about cultural difference. In addition to kinship, seeing others and being seen in public was a key factor in
being "known" in the community. As with the connection between parental presence at
school events and perceived investment in education, the rural context permits an
assumption that local residents will be recognizable to one another. A teacher named
Marsha Cole described her growing discomfort in the community which she attributed
partly to a loss of face-to-face knowledge.
When I was in high school… I knew everybody. I knew every
student in the school and now, I look at the halls and there's a lot of
kids that I have no idea who they are. And that's weird for me
because I really remember that feeling of knowing everybody,
which in some cases isn't always good but, you know, just that
feeling of a strong high school, and that's cool. And now I look at
like um, homecoming and sports events and when I was in high
school, you couldn't set foot around the football field there were so
many people there. Now it's like a ghost town because the
community doesn't come like they used to.
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Although Marsha saw a waning of her face-to-face knowledge, the degree to
which rural community members expect to be able to place one another sets it apart from
more urban settings. Being recognizable in public has specific consequences for what
people know about a family or individual. For example, some people purposefully
traveled to other towns to purchase birth control or use food stamps because they didn't
want that information to become public. Knowledge about a person's class and spending
choices easily became public and produced a particular source of tension in Meatville.
Educator Lisa Adams illustrated how her children made judgments about others' spending
choices based on knowledge gained from seeing them in public saying, "We have kids
that are free and reduced lunch, come with brand new iPhones and those kinds of things.
That's very frustrating for kids that are paying. 'Mom, they've got better things than we
do and I see them with food stamps downtown.'" While people in urban areas also see
each other publicly and make class judgments about one another, in the rural context, this
is compounded by a level of individual recognition that is not necessarily limited to a
performance of class or identity but rather combined with actual knowledge of a person
or kin group.
Gender and Responsibility: Perceived Stability,
Alcoholism, and Domestic Abuse
Creating Stability, Making Family
Industrial meatpacking work impacts household structures in Meatville and the
perceived stability of the community, both in the literal physical sense of people
remaining in one place and in the sense of moral security. For both residents and civic
leaders, making Meatville "home" was tied to creating stable households by enacting
specific gender roles, conforming to cultural expectations about how to "do" family, and
buying homes. Although in seasonal agricultural labor and the early years of rural
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meatpacking, the primary migrants were single young males, this is no longer the case.
Community leaders recognized that Meatville's population reflected that of the state:
aging and elderly. With little besides employment to tie them to the community, young
single men (including those with partners not in Meatville) were seen as transitory. Their
increased free time and sparse social control from kin made them more likely to engage
in risky behaviors like drinking alcohol. Today, civic leaders see young non-white and
immigrant families as part of a community development process that will preserve
community vitality.
Beginning in 2010 there was a series of meetings of community leaders and
stakeholders which included representatives from banking establishments, law
enforcement, community development, city government, public health, the public school,
and the public library. These stakeholders discussed how to facilitate local integration
after the sudden arrival of several hundred Chin Burmese immigrants. At each of these
meetings people expressed the hope that Burmese people would stay in the community
long term, making it their home by buying real estate and bringing other family members
to live in Meatville. A key issue at initial meetings was high household mobility rates
among new Chin residents. A city worker exclaimed: "It seems like they have a new
address every week!" This had apparently been an issue with Latinos in the past and reemerged with the Chin. Everyone understood that people moved to find better living
situations but, unable to improve the housing situation, the group hoped that mobility
would die down on its own. English dominant community members said things like,
"Hopefully some of them will start bringing their families soon" or "It will be nice when
some of them can start buying houses." By 2013, a city worker reported that "things
seem to have settled down." This concern demonstrates local investment in the notion of
household stability as an element of home-making and community belonging.
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Community leaders discussed having a wife, children, and parents or in-laws
living locally as one step toward long-term local residence; the next step was
homeownership.34 Nationally, homeownership has long been touted as a key component
of the American Dream and a measurement of the vitality of a community. In rural
communities like Meatville, homeownership is not only a symbol of citizenship by
consumer participation but also a declaration of local commitment through investment.
And nearly all the people I met in Meatville (Chin, Latino, White) connected
homeownership to having a family. In 2012, non-white people were still not
proportionally represented among local homeowners but many still aspired to that goal
and were encouraged to pursue it by community leaders who saw homeownership as a
sign of stability and long-term local involvement. Between 2009 and 2013 a number of
houses were on the market in Meatville and ranged from $40,000 to $190,000. Properties
for sale included one bedroom fixer-uppers and more high-end move-in-ready or historic
homes.
Still many industrial workers had a difficult time accumulating economic capital
given the national economic crisis, the relatively low wages, and the relatively short
periods that they were able to remain physically healthy enough to keep working in laborintensive industrial jobs. One of the calculated risks that upwardly mobile laborers run is
that, although they may have steady work and income at the time they purchase a home,
they are at high risk for being injured and thus not being able to make payments. The
risks of such an injury are much greater for Meat Corporation workers than, for example,
the public school teachers who might also purchase homes locally. Less visible
economic responsibilities such as sending remittances also diminished the ability of
workers to accumulate both sufficient capital and a sufficiently good credit history to
34. Although not all immigrants or newcomers were male or straight, this was still the
assumption of most community members, including newcomers themselves.
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become homeowners. Additionally, a crucial aspect of wanting to become a homeowner
is imagining oneself as a long-term rather than a temporary resident of Meatville.
Especially those whose future plans include returning to a home country or even another
location in the United States are less likely to invest in local real estate. According to one
city employee, this is problematic from a civic planning perspective because a number of
people (in her opinion) view their residence as temporary but end up staying for a very
long time.
Trauma, Violence, and Alcohol as Barriers to Stability The lingering effects of childhood abuse, the trauma of immigration, and the
effects of alcohol abuse contribute to household instability in Meatville and prevent
individuals from belonging in productive ways. As community leaders and culturally
diverse residents negotiated daily life in Meatville, residents struggled with popular
discourses that blame minority cultures for negative outcomes or placed responsibility for
dealing with "cultural" problems onto "othered" people themselves. Here, I illustrate
how both white and non-white residents employ popular conceptions of cultural
hierarchy that position white, middle class cultural frameworks as an ideal or as morally
superior. For many working class Latinos, physical or other types of abuse featured
prominently in their transnational experience. Intermittently employed in industrial jobs
and as a musician, Miguel recalled his father beating him and his siblings as children in
rural Mexico. Phrases like "that's how they did things then" or "that's how it is there"
created both temporal and geo-cultural distance by emphasizing that the events occurred
a long ago in Mexico where "las leyes no son como aquí" [the laws aren't like they are
here]. Miguel's adult life was also marked by violence. As they drank beer one
afternoon, Miguel told a group of friends in Spanish of crossing the border many times as
an undocumented immigrant. They nodded understandingly at the emotional and
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physical traumas he described. Zavella (2011) also describes the trauma of border
crossings and the gendered associations that these carry. His personal story led to a
discussion of drug cartels and the literal torture they have visited on immigrants. The
details in this discussion made it clear that such knowledge was not rumor or speculation
but their own experiences and those of people they knew well. Explicitly or implicitly,
Miguel created distance between this violence and his life now in Meatville. In doing so,
the narratives also reflect an internalization of the idea of white middle class U.S. life as a
cultural or moral ideal, free from domestic violence and the danger of undocumented
status.
Miguel's home life as an adult in Meatville was also marked by violence. He had
lived for many years in the U.S. and the year I met him he'd spent time in a county jail
and undergone court-mandated treatment for anger management and substance abuse
after threatening his wife with a gun in a drunken jealous rage. Nevertheless, family
continued to be an important touchstone for him even through his legal and marital
troubles. His brother had married his wife's sister, so when he was released from jail he
went to live with his brother and his brother's wife (his sister-in-law). When I asked the
sister-in-law if she had any trouble taking in the man who threatened to kill her sister, she
argued that in addition to being part of her family she knew Miguel to be a good man.
She also said her sister preferred he stay someplace safe as he began to put his life back
together.
In some ways the different paths of these two couples also illustrate different
outcomes of marriage as a potential strategy of upward economic mobility. Both
husbands were from rural Mexico and had (at least at some point) entered the country
clandestinely. Both of the wives, on the other hand, were U.S. citizens of Latino heritage
who had come to rural Iowa after living most of their lives in a major U.S. city. While
both couples had experienced economic hardship as children, after moving to Iowa both
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managed to parlay industrial meatpacking work into jobs with relatively less risk and
more pay. In part, both wives' fluency in written and spoken English enabled these
couples to take steps toward homeownership, stable employment, and enduring local
residence. Upward mobility continued as children of both couples graduated from high
school and continued living in Meatville with one child marrying into a well-established
white family.
Domestic violence interrupted Miguel's path to upward mobility as well as his
household stability. He was physically (and later legally) separated from his kin group
after serving his sentence. After a few months, he moved out of his brother and sister-inlaw's house to an empty home he rented from another family member. Within a couple
of years, he was officially divorced which also resulted in the loss of medical insurance
he had through his wife's job. Although in the long-term he remained on relatively good
terms with his ex-wife, children, and kin-group, the legal and physical separation
compounded the effects of his judicial sentence and hindered his ability to continue to
capitalize on assets like English fluency and U.S. citizenship available in his kin group.
Dominant discourses in white, middle class, English-dominant contexts such as
substance abuse treatment and the justice system as well as popular discourse among
Latinos support the idea that abusive behavior by parents, particularly men, is an
unfortunate component of machismo. The association between Mexican or Latino
identity, masculine gender roles, and abuse or violence obfuscates other factors that
contribute to intimate partner or parental violence. Such factors include lack of
knowledge about or access to culturally and linguistically appropriate mental health
services, substance abuse, stress associated with poverty or even lack of power in the
workplace, and lack of familiarity with models of non-violent relationships. Cultural difference also played a role in discussions among community leaders in
2010 and 2011about Chin men getting ticketed or arrested for alcohol-related infractions
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like driving under the influence, public intoxication, and public urination. Law
enforcement officials were concerned with the disproportionate number of Chin men
involved in these incidents and their extraordinarily high levels of intoxication. Their
concern was compounded by recognition of linguistic barriers and lack of knowledge
about Chin cultural frameworks. One community leader thought marriage and the
resulting mothers-in-law might provide increased social controls while another suggested
a program like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) could be made available in Chin. A Meat
Corporation representative said the company had already attempted this with limited
success. They believed this was partly because, like many Latinos, Chin people did not
conceive of alcohol as a social problem in the same way as Americans and therefore did
not see AA as necessary. A Chin interpreter also pointed out that as Baptists, they might
see alcohol problems as "not being right with God," and the appropriate remedy as
attending church or discussing their problems with a pastor. The pastor of the Chin
Christian Fellowship assured the group that he would continue to address issues of
alcohol consumption from the pulpit.35 The Chin congregation was very large, averaging
300 people at a service, and sermons reached a large number of listeners. However,
relying on the pastor overlooked the fact that some people might not attend church or
would not be swayed by religious exhortations.
More enfranchised Chin residents also did what they could as cultural brokers
regarding alcohol consumption. A Chin translator said when he first arrived (without any
family and therefore with a little extra free time) he gave intoxicated Chin men rides
home and counseled them to quit drinking or at least quit drinking so much. He
35. A substance abuse counselor serving clients from Meatville said a Chin-speaking
client told her that the pastor refused to help interpret for substance abuse counseling sessions.
Having interpreted for such sessions myself, I understand that the pastor may have had very good
reasons for refusing to participate but I found it interesting that he never brought these issues or
concerns to the public meetings.
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explained laws about drinking and being in public or urinating in public to them.
Another Chin man explained to me that in Burma alcohol is for rich people and most
people can't afford to drink much, so drinking is not a salient social activity. Postimmigration Chin men in Meatville have more disposable income, more free time, and
less vigilance from people they know, all of which makes alcohol consumption a
particularly accessible pastime.
Civic leaders, health workers, law enforcement officials, school personnel, and
community residents also explicitly drew comparisons and contrasts between Latino and
Burmese Meatville residents. Building on longstanding Asian stereotypes, rumors
circulated in both English- and Spanish-speaking circles about whether new Chin arrivals
might be eating stray cats. Two city officials observed that Chin-speakers were "more
interested" in learning English and had therefore become fluent faster. Both the linguistic
comparisons and concerns about excessive alcohol consumption may also have emerged,
at least partly, from the model minority concept. The comparisons certainly bolstered the
idea that as Christian refugees, Chin people were more morally grounded, more
authentically deserving of American citizenship, and more interested in assimilation than
Latinos.
Coordinating the efforts of community leaders at regular meetings helped
identify where resources were needed and how they could most effectively be put to use.
Among the things the group accomplished was to identify a nearby civil surgeon to do
immigration physicals for refugees.36 Nevertheless, the small, rural community had few
resources with which to cultivate and hire cultural brokers who could serve as key players
to ease the transition of Chin-speaking refugee newcomers. Because the Chin
36 A civil surgeon is a doctor certified by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to
conduct the medical examinations required for adjusting legal status, for example, when applying
for citizenship.
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community is relatively small, Meatville also had less access to culturally and
linguistically appropriate Chin resources from other U.S. communities that could be
adapted to the rural context. A less commonly spoken language, it did not seem a
prudent use of resources to invest heavily in researching Chin culture or encouraging
Chin or Burmese linguistic training. High levels of in- and out-migration and the longterm cyclical nature of local immigration may have made such efforts seem inadvisable
or a waste of effort. For most immigrants, Meatville was a secondary destination which
meant that few federal resources were available or allocated to deal with residents'
particular needs.
In housing and alcohol consumption, seeing change as an inevitable chronological
development prevented some community leaders from seeing other actions as necessary.
Waiting for others to assimilate, the housing market to improve, or those with cultural or
linguistic knowledge to be cultural brokers displaces responsibility for action. Many
community leaders including minority community members expected that, like Latinos
before them, Chin immigrants would soon get used to "how we do things here" and
become fluent in English or alternatively, give up and move elsewhere. Such a stance
obfuscates the barriers to belonging that still exist for racial and linguistic others as well
as the implicit privileging of white, middle class culture.
Intimate Relationships and Parenting
Husbands and Wives
Household composition in Meatville varies widely but generally is part of a
gender regime that privileges long-term heterosexual relationships. These arrangements
tend to be focused on procreation and child-rearing. People feel compelled by social
forces to participate in idealized forms of household arrangements even if they have
already done so elsewhere (like in another country). In a rural context, this can prove
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particularly challenging because there are so few people. Additionally, the prevalence of
mutual surveillance among residents such as noticing whose car is parked in whose
driveway means that it is difficult to conceal a relationship.
For Chin people, the influence of Christianity, particularly Baptist beliefs,
resulted in intense social pressure to marry and have children. In many cases, religious
insistence on abstinence outside of marriage compounded the complications and stress
associated with being a refugee. Those who were married and separated by distance
suffered in one way while those who were not yet married (and sometimes felt compelled
to wait until they were resettled by the UNHCR) suffered loneliness of a different kind.
While their deep religious faith sustained many through the difficulties of being a
refugee, for others religious and social beliefs about proper behavior regarding intimate
relationships created more problems than they solved.
One Chin man, Van, told me he waited to come to the United States before
thinking seriously about a romantic relationship. He began a relationship with a local
Latina and fell deeply in love. He felt his co-ethnics were not supportive of the
relationship not because she wasn't Chin but rather because she had previously been
married and had children. He became devoted to her family, contributed to her
household economy, and anticipated they would eventually marry. As he explained, in
his cultural framework having sex indicates at the very least the intention to marry and
usually Christian Chin people do not engage in premarital sex. He was devastated when
she ended the relationship. He resumed smoking, quit studying for his GED, and
contemplated suicide both because of the heartbreak and not being able to discuss the
breakup with his co-ethnics for fear of ridicule. He said he thought other Chin people
would "laugh at [him]" because he had been "a fool" to become sexually involved out of
wedlock and especially with a woman who already had a failed prior relationship. In the
end, he sought advice from a Latino clergy member who helped him come to terms with
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the idea that he and his lover had viewed their relationship from within different cultural
frameworks.
By the time Van told me the story, he had begun to recover from the heartbreak
but was still negotiating cultural differences with his ex-lover. The woman had asked
him for money to bail her adult son out of jail, which he provided because he felt an
obligation to the family. He mentioned Biblical calls to give money to the poor and
asked if I thought he had done the right thing. I said I thought it was the right thing if it
made him feel good to do it but that I probably would not have done the same thing. I
asked him if he thought the son was innocent (no), if he thought the woman would do
something similar for him if he asked her for help (no), if he believed that having a
relationship with her created a lifelong commitment to her family (no), and why the new
man in her life didn't give her the money (he wasn't sure but thought the other man didn't
know about the arrest, didn't have the money, or had refused to give it). I advised Van to
seriously consider not helping the woman any more. We discussed culture and
relationships and I explained that cultural differences can create misunderstandings about
what is happening, what an act means, or what is anticipated for the future. Van seemed
relieved to know that I did not consider him foolish and that I could identify with his
situation. But his experience illustrates some of the challenging situations that confront
immigrants, particularly those to a rural community with few co-ethnics. Some of Van’s
fellow Chin Baptists turned to kin networks, matchmakers or the Internet to find a
suitable intimate partner. A man I met at English class, for example, told me he would go
to India after his citizenship paperwork arrived to marry a Chin girl he had never met.
Sometimes immigration and industrial employment clashed with culturally
dominant views of appropriate gender roles. George (2001) describes the class and
gender negotiations of Christian women from Kerala, India, who initiated immigration to
the United States with jobs as nurses, thus upsetting traditional gender roles in their
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ethnic and religious community. Latina and Chin women's decisions about work and
family also created tensions about appropriate behavior for women in Meatville. Latinas
who worked at meatpacking plants frequently contextualized statements about their lack
of education or the difficulty of home-making by saying, "trabajamos como burros" ("we
work like burros," a colloquial way to say that they work very hard with masculine
imagery referencing the physical labor of farm animals). As Villenas argued, "Labor is
intensified at home when children are not cared for by the community support system as
in their home countries” (2001: 17). In some cases, industrial labor made women the
primary breadwinner in their households or provided the economic and emotional
independence to seek separations or divorces from their partners.
Although teen pregnancies that led girls to suspend their formal education had
long been a concern for Meatville educators, one teacher expressed particular concern
that in 2010-2013 several Chin girls had dropped out of high school due to pregnancy.
She lamented that for the most part their English skills were not yet good enough for
them to complete courses online. And in 2013, I was approached by one Chin man for
my advice on how to advocate with Meat Corporation regarding their refusal to re-hire
Chin women who had quit their jobs to have children and wanted to return to work. In
part because the company had a steady supply of workers, they had begun enforcing a
policy of not re-hiring former workers and instead favoring workers new to the company
as a strategy to reduce worker turnover rates. This policy also affected workers with
strong kin ties to Latin American countries who in the 1990s had routinely quit their jobs
to spend several months at a time abroad and been re-hired promptly upon their return. The flux of immigration and the impermanence of industrial labor jobs for
workers conflict with people's desire to make family. Some people maintained more than
one intimate relationship or even household, one in Meatville and another elsewhere.
Complicating the picture is a practice of being "partners" without officially getting
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married. In Spanish, a person says that they are "juntado" [joined]. Unlike U.S.-style
cohabitation, being juntado is usually long-term, emotionally significant, and the partners
refer to themselves as husbands and wives, or even as married unless there is a reason to
clarify. Some people were juntado because divorce from a previous partner was too
complicated or too expensive, and others because they were far away from their original
partner. Being juntado allowed people who would otherwise not be paired (at least in the
context of Meatville) to perform social roles as heterosexually paired heads of household.
In the rural context of Meatville with few formalized adult social events, "doing" family
was a key way to spend free time. While for white middle class adults, this might have
consisted mostly of concerted cultivation activities like attending their children's sports
events, for others it mostly consisted of activities like eating together, shopping, and
attending celebrations on the weekends.
Parents and Children
In Chapter 4 I discussed how some parents viewed their roles differently from the
way school personnel viewed their roles. In Meatville, public acts of parenting made
visible and challenged parents' understandings of their roles as parents. Although directly
criticizing parenting of others to their face was infrequent, critics and parents were aware
of differences amongst themselves, whether they viewed them as cultural or not. The
way public difference became fodder for private comments points to how mutual
surveillance in the rural context goes beyond observation to become intensely personal
because the "other" is recognizable as a specific individual even as they may be referred
to or conceptualized as representative of a group (for example, poor people, Latinos, or
immigrants).
Parenting differences between English-dominant and Spanish-dominant parents in
Meatville generally correspond to Lareau's (2003) vocabulary of concerted cultivation
and natural growth. For example, at Spanish-language church services there was a
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constant hum of children's noise punctuated by frequent trips up and down the aisles. At
English-language services, the room was quieter with more people shushing their
children or telling them to sit still. When socializing with Spanish-speaking people,
babies were often handed to the nearest adult when a parent was busy and a child would
ask anyone at hand for help getting a drink or tying a shoe. With English speakers,
children would cross whole rooms full of people to seek such help from their own parent.
Very subtly, these kinds of differences indicated that Spanish-speaking and Englishspeaking people in the community were operating within different cultural frameworks.
Sometimes these differences caused tension as English speakers read them as a
lack of parenting skills or a product of poverty rather than as a cultural difference. Once
at the local gas station a Latino man was paying his bill while one of his children reached
above his head onto a counter for a free cookie sample. Bringing it down to inspect, the
child saw it was a kind he didn't like so he reached up to try again. As the father paid his
bill, the white female cashier expressed annoyance that he was "touching all the cookies."
The man absentmindedly told the boy that if he took a cookie he couldn't put it back on
the tray. The boy obeyed by sticking the dud cookies into his pocket and continuing to
fish for one he liked from the tray! In the Latino framework of parenting, the clerk would
have been within her role as both a woman and fellow community member to directly
instruct the child instead of directing her comments at the dad. The clerk, however,
seemingly understood correcting the child as the parent's responsibility and perhaps
thought talking to the child herself would be too confrontational.
At parent-teacher conferences, downtown, and in other public spaces some Latino
children played and socialized with little restriction or supervision. This caused
consternation for a number of white middle class community members who were
similarly critical of working class Latino parents who brought their children to El Paso, a
local ballroom that held events on weekends. Following a reference to a short-lived
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alternate social venue for young adults Marsha Cole said, "They'd rather go to El Paso
but there's alcohol there, and they're out 'til 2 in the morning these kids. And it's like, I
don't know, I've never been in there so I'm not going to say but...if you've got kids in
there around alcohol 'til 2 in the morning, there's probably something not appropriate
going on, I don't know." Both Mrs. Cole's comments about El Paso and criticisms about
lack of children's supervision in public spaces more generally reflect a local white middle
class perspective that privileges direct surveillance as a safety mechanism as well as a
primary activity of parenting. Remarks like Mrs. Cole's frame activities like alcohol
consumption and laissez-faire adult involvement in children's play as dangerous by
asserting that the sale of alcohol at El Paso should mark the space as exclusively for
adults, and implying that responsible parents don't let their children stay up "til 2 in the
morning."
In contrast, El Paso was a familiar space for many Latinos and access to alcohol
did not make it exclusively for adults. For them, El Paso was family space; kids ran
around and played games of pool, toddlers fell asleep on laps or piles of coats, teenagers
played out their social dramas in small groups, and adults danced, socialized, and drank.
Several times I saw men holding small children with one hand and deftly leading a
female partner around the dance floor with the other. Even for those without a family, El
Paso served as an important social touchstone. The sights, sounds, smells, and social
norms observed created a familiar space outside institutional spaces of work, school, or
church where Spanish-dominant and bilingual Latinos could forge and reaffirm social
and kinship bonds on their own terms.37
Parents of various backgrounds noticed differences in parenting practices and
often explicitly attributed these differences to "culture." They did not, however, all
37. These include smaller bubbles of personal physical space, ways of greeting one
another, class hierarchies, acknowledgements of kinship, regional traditions, and styles of dress.
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recognize the class and race hierarchies that attached negative values to the parenting
practices of "others." The cultural practices explicitly valued by community members
who welcomed diversity in its expressions as music, dance, costumes, food, and parades
did not include these types of difference. Instead, most parents thought it seemed logical
that poor and non-English dominant "others" should change their parenting strategies to
conform to "American" or white middle class expectations of parenting, especially if they
desired upward mobility for their children.
Conclusion
In addition to the availability of factory jobs, kinship networks were a key factor
in what drew people to Meatville and motivated them to stay. The pull of kin and the
way people managed these relationships points not only to the affective aspects of their
presence but also the economic context within which kin groups operate. For a variety of
people who lived there, life in Meatville represented a kind of return to a recognizable
way of life and one that was conducive to "doing" family. Nevertheless, the quotidian
practicalities of this were complicated by the rural and economic contexts as well as by
negotiations of cultural differences within them. Although some people at times upheld
cultural, racial, and class hierarchies that privileged the white, middle class, the residents
of Meatville lived together in a transnational and diverse context that frequently brought
difference, resistance, and negotiation to the fore. In the daily activities of making home
and doing family people in Meatville demonstrated creativity, resilience, and
neighborliness as they contested negative characterizations of their identities or cultures,
resisted invisibility, and negotiated an increasingly diverse and transnational concept of
community.
Civic leaders expressed concern with housing safety, particularly in the wake of a
fatal fire. Nevertheless, everyday strategies for dealing with inadequate housing that
became visible were evaluated negatively as problems to be solved with increased
235
regulation rather than validated as strategies for survival that emerged from the specific
socio-economic context of Meatville. The legal system and law enforcement officials
routinely dealt with issues of alcohol consumption, drug abuse, and domestic violence but
the complex intersectional context from which these very visible manifestations emerged
remained almost completely invisible and therefore unaddressed by relevant service
providers or such services were inaccessible to those who could benefit from them. I
have also discussed how parents and the school personnel construct parenting and
educational participation in ways that privilege white, middle class, rural practices of
interaction. These types of surveillance and assessment of home or kinship practices
highlight the imbalance of control between more enfranchised residents and less
enfranchised residents. It remains to be seen which practices will continue and which
will be resisted or contested effectively.
236
CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSION
In this dissertation I have shown how transnational economic and political
processes and structures combine with local experiences of face-to-face daily activities as
people make their lives and negotiate community in a rural Iowa meatpacking town.
Meatville is not a backward or anachronistic bubble, nor is it an agricultural idyll.
Rather, Meatville is a site of profound change. The rural context provides not only a
unique vantage point from which to observe changes but is also a site that has been
largely overlooked in the academic literature on migration and ethnic identity.
Throughout this dissertation I have shown how people draw class, ethnic,
linguistic, and gender boundaries in subtle, almost invisible ways as well as explicitly and
obviously. The dominant historical narrative of the town emphasizes the agency of white
colonizers in opposition to Native Americans who disappeared and Latinos who were
brought to the community by boosters, industrial jobs, or their family members.
Descriptions and definitions of “the community” are asserted and contested in myriad
small ways. These boundaries are drawn when a school administrator exhorts Chin
people not to be like Latino parents in the way they interact with the school. They are
contested when Spanish-dominant adult students share experiences of uneven law
enforcement surveillance of people of color. Public practice and policy broadly defined
are negotiated not only through official channels by voting, communicating with elected
representatives, or direct contact with institutional representatives like school
administrators but also in informal comments and passing discussions. Belonging is
negotiated when the quotidian fluidity of kin groups’ housing practices bump up against
housing inspection policies framed in a discourse of safety and which emerge from white,
middle-class concepts of kinship that privilege small, nuclear households. This
negotiation takes place not only in official public meetings but also in discussions outside
of the bank, in line at the grocery store, and over the hoods of cars as people pump gas.
237
Racialized, classed, and gendered physical spaces are defined by the presence and
absence of particular people or symbolic representations from particular places, whether
these appear to be purposeful or not and whether they are explicit or not. Boundaries are
transcended when people realize that they share values and beliefs like a preference for
rural life, shared food practices such as gardening, and the dream of education or upward
economic mobility for their children. Residents’ specific hopes may be different like a
booster who wants to see the high school football team recuperate past glory or a parent
who teaches their child to speak Spanish or Chin. Nevertheless, definitions of
community are expanded or made more inclusive when people realize that such hopes are
bound by a common desire to share, continue, or enable others to experience what has
brought them happiness. It is these acts of negotiating community and managing
belonging that I explore in this dissertation.
In Chapter 2 I have explained how large-scale industrial production in the form of
a single meatpacking plant has affected the way local Meatville residents conceive of
themselves and their community. Boosterism played a key role in Meat Corporation
locating in Meatville. And boosters continue to be key actors in the social, economic,
and political domains of Meatville life. But while the economic development of a meat
processing plant provided sufficient local employment to prevent Meatville from
shrinking into non-existence, it also posed serious challenges for constructing
community. Change continues in Meatville as work opportunities draw immigrants from
various parts of the world, most recently from the Chin State in Burma. While work is a
key factor in migration to Meatville, the town also possesses a variety of other qualities
that make people want to live there. One of these is rurality.
In Chapter 3 I explored how industrial meatpacking functions as a context for
community interactions. This means that meatpacking influences how locals manage
belonging and social participation even if they are not themselves involved in
238
meatpacking work as employees. Meatpacking is an economic and social force that
influence the ways Meatville residents interpret each other's social positions in ways that
combine complex understandings of class, race, and other kinds of inequalities.
Residents' mobility, social class, and transnational orientations challenged Ideas of Iowa
Nice and rural neighborliness. And strategies for survival that included different ways of
making money, setting up a home, defining kinship relationships, and navigating social
roles challenged feelings of belonging.
In Chapters 4 and 5 I addressed how the local school became a key site for faceto-face social interactions and negotiations of community identity. While the singularity
of the public school served to create a sense of common experience for community
members, the unity was challenged by some residents' difference and the contradictions
of a multicultural trend in education. While in Chapter 4 I approach the kinds of
invisibility tied up with these differences at the level of interpersonal interactions, in
Chapter 5 I point out the ways that institutional practices at a variety of levels contribute
to making difference visible or invisible in the most disadvantageous ways.
In Chapter 6 I explored how face-to-face ways of knowing, ways of making home
and family, and physical housing possibilities shaped local experiences of belonging. In
a variety of ways, Meatville represents a return to home or something familiar for many
different kinds of people who reside there. As they go about making their homes and
families in Meatville, residents of all kinds are negotiating the town’s identity and
meaning in creative ways that defy easy classification. While the particularities of the
meatpacking economy and rural Midwestern life affect them, they are also changing what
it means to be Iowan.
Theoretical Contributions
Both migration studies and studies of racial and ethnic identities have primarily
focused on urban and suburban places. This dissertation draws attention to the paradox
239
of places like Meatville: they are both rural and transnational. Ideas of transnationalism
and migration based primarily on urban contexts are not necessarily applicable to rural
experience. The emphasis on rural to urban migration experiences also ignores urban to
rural movements. Additionally, much work in migration focuses on the consequences for
sending communities, such as housing construction in rural Latin American towns
supported by remittances. It does not examine how such investment affects rural US
households from which that money is sent.
Scale is crucial to the way people experience their communities and is particularly
salient in rural discourses of face-to-face knowing. Rural experiences of anonymity are
mitigated when people see one another frequently in local spaces and know information
about one another through local surveillance. While rural residents receive the same
media messages and public discourse about race and ethnicity, they can also experience
these identities differently. For example, local histories and housing options can be more
salient factors in the definition of ethnic neighborhoods. And in the context of
transnational movements of people to rural US towns, it is important to consider how the
notions of identity that people bring with them and change over time. For example, a
Dominican student might have considered himself a nerdy outsider while living in New
York but upon moving to Meatville can assert a more aggressive, masculine identity as
an urban Latino. This is possible, at least in part, because there are few other Dominicans
in Meatville to challenge that assertion. While this particular identity assertion might
make the student “cool” among youth, it can also increase the perception of law
enforcement that they need to be more vigilant or make them believe that there is likely
to be an increase in gang activity. This example illustrates how the consequences of an
individual’s performance of ethnic identity can have particular consequences in the rural
context.
240
In a rural town that relies primarily on a single meatpacking plant, the plant
defines identities within the community. Industrial employment attracts relatively lesseducated, less English-proficient workers who tend to be people of color and migrants or
immigrants. The meatpacking plant reinforces or exacerbates sharp race, class, and
gender divisions by paying relatively low wages, opposing unionization, providing
limited possibilities for advancement within the company, and assigning different kinds
of jobs to men and women. The impact of such practices by meatpacking plants is
heightened by the absence of other large-scale employers. So the rural meatpacking
context is one in which other local workers or employees are visibly different from the
industrial employees, particularly in regards to education, class, and race. In short, by
attracting, selecting, and retaining particular kinds of workers for particular kinds of jobs,
the industrial employer shapes relationships at school, in households, and in civic policy.
Similar to the Latino population across Iowa, the majority of Latinos in Meatville
have Mexican heritage. Nevertheless, compared to some other meatpacking communities
where residents of a particular Mexican community have settled together, the Latino
community in Meatville is much more diverse. Latinos in Meatville come from a variety
of Mexican locations and other places including Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican
Republic, Honduras, and El Salvador. Nevertheless, many white, English-dominant
residents frequently lump them together as Latinos and sometimes as Mexicans. The
result of diversity among Latinos is that it's more difficult for them to come together
under a pan-ethnic identity that would allow them to build an infrastructure and
community cohesion necessary to more effectively assert their rights and opinions, and
make their voices heard in the public forum. Whereas hometown associations and similar
organizations have been quite active in some other communities because so many people
arrived from the same place, Meatville Latinos haven't been able to mobilize pan-ethnic
community in a way that's very productive, at least not at the time of this writing. So
241
diversity within the Latino community, in a way, has been detrimental to community
cohesion. The extent to which industrial policies or practices purposefully encourage
diversity among workers, particularly with regard to language, is unclear. While such
diversity can be an effective strategy for preventing worker cohesion and union
organization, safety policies and corporate vocabulary (such as referring to workers as
"team members") indicate that effective communication and a sense of belonging is a key
component of improving worker safety and maintaining high productivity.
Both Latino and Euro-American residents viewed Chin people as non-white.
However, Chin people were able to assume a relatively more enfranchised or privileged
position in the racial hierarchy, in part because many English-dominant, white people
viewed them as more deserving because they are refugees. As refugees, Chin people
have several highly valued qualities: they became refugees for religious reasons (they're
Christian); they also became refugees for political reasons (they're oppressed in their
homeland because they're pro-democracy); and they came to the U.S. with officially
recognized legal status. These qualities contribute to an existing model minority concept
that positions Asians as "better" than other racial minorities.
Post-immigration, this hierarchy is reinforced when some of the more
enfranchised Chin residents become more visible to English-dominant community
leaders. These Chin people appear to "assimilate" more effectively and learn English
more quickly than their Spanish-dominant counterparts. This is partly a misconception
based on the fact that English-dominant community leaders have more contact and
communication with the most enfranchised Chin people. Scale is also a key factor in the
difference between Chin and Spanish language use in Meatville. The Chin-speaking
population is relatively small in the world and in Meatville, so Chin language is less
accessible than Spanish as a means of daily communication. In addition, Chin refugees
have generally had more access to formal education, and been more successful with in
242
formal education relative to Spanish-dominant immigrants who come to meatpacking
communities like Meatville. Some Chin people were chosen for resettlement, at least in
part, because they have some education or language abilities that increase their potential
for success after immigration. All of these factors help position Chin people as superior
(or at least potentially superior) to Spanish-dominant Latino immigrants.
Among Latinos there is some ambivalence regarding Chin people. Latinos
recognize that Chin people come to Meatville for the very same reasons that they
themselves came: to improve their lives, to be upwardly mobile, and to raise their
children in a safe place. Nevertheless, Latinos are also keenly aware of the differences
between the two groups. As racial others, Latinos and Chin people shared some
experiences of discrimination or bias. However, Latinos also see that Chin people are
sometimes treated differently. They see that Meat Corporation hires more Chin workers
and attribute it to the fact that the company doesn't have to worry about the legal status of
refugee workers.
The rural US shares a variety of similarities with the developing world. More
dialogue between scholars of the rural US and those in development studies would be
productive. Scholars in both fields address similar dynamics and processes, which I have
mentioned throughout this dissertation. In both the rural US and in Third World
countries development is cast as positive and productive. For instance, changes in
agriculture and industrial processing are viewed as a next step in linear progress away
from rural "backwardness" and toward fuller incorporation into a modern globalized
economy.
Like residents of many developing countries, rural US residents experience a
paradoxical combination of isolation and connectivity. For example, while transportation
can pose a challenge because of geographic isolation and lack of public transportation,
people engage in transnational video chats and watch satellite television from other
243
countries. Like in many developing countries, poor residents are overrepresented in the
Meatville population. And rural people are also disproportionately affected by the
relative lack of public-use infrastructure. At the same time, responsibility for staying
connected is increasingly placed on individuals rather than the state, its institutions, or
other organizations resulting in greater needs and vulnerabilities. Like disenfranchised
people elsewhere, Meatville residents are valuable for their labor or their subject
positions as needy people (for example pilot programs, experimental initiatives, and
temporary projects).
Another similarity between rural communities in the US and those in the
developing world is that they do not draw the kinds of long-term investments that would
reduce inequalities because they do not have a critical mass of residents or wealth that
would indicate high returns on investment. Related to this idea of investments and return
is another shared circumstance of so-called brain drain. This means that trained or
educated people are attracted away from rural areas, so that even when local training
programs or recruitment efforts are successful, it is often difficult to maintain continuity
or attraction over the long-term.
Given these similarities, I argue that there should be more dialogue and
collaboration between scholars and that we should not so definitively draw a distinction
between ideas of development in the Third World and development in the US. In both
places similar global processes undermine community stability and produce specific local
consequences.
Policy Recommendations
As I conducted this research I became aware of some ways that Meatville
residents might leverage existing resources as they negotiate relationships within the
community. I present some of them here.
244
Many people (including school personnel themselves) told me that they felt the
school was not effectively communicating with students' families or parents. I suggest
that being able to reframe and incorporate a broader understanding or interpretation of
"education" would have a positive impact. By recognizing and validating alternative
ways of knowing and kinds of knowledge, the school and its teachers can combat the
perception they are ethnocentric or not communicating well with Spanish-speaking
families. In addition to a direct impact, this could also indirectly and positively impact
issues that might otherwise appear "culture-neutral" like test scores or absenteeism.
Although they have already begun to act on the issue of housing, I suggest that
Meatville civic leaders continue to reframe the issue of housing as a humanitarian need.
This has already partly been addressed through dedicated efforts with Habitat for
Humanity that produced a home nearly every year I was in Meatville. And the move
toward enforcing safety standards for rental housing is a positive one. Of course,
regulation will need to be accompanied by additional access to adequate and affordable
housing.
In my view, assuming that remittances and similar investment is something that
weakens the community or indicates split loyalty is detrimental. Reframing this
perception could help position Meatville as both economically vibrant and a global hub.
Instead, I suggest viewing remittances and investments outside of Meatville as a step
toward enhancing the enduring and bidirectional exchange routes connecting Meatville to
other communities around the world.
Similarly, community members and especially educators might consider ways to
support and foster literacy and fluency in languages other than English in the Meatville
community. Native language fluency and literacy enables speakers to more quickly
acquire other languages like English and are marketable skills only when they are fully
developed. Privileging English acquisition or assuming that the community's institutions
245
do not need to be involved in or validate these skills contributes to the perception if not
the reality of inequality in the community.
Policy makers as well as school personnel need to understand how the
burdensome nature of registration paperwork contributes to exacerbating social
differences that prevent some kinds of students and parents from feeling "welcomed."
Radically simplifying and streamlining the registration process would respond to the need
to reduce resources in regard to costs such as photocopies and work hours of school
personnel who assist registrants. More importantly, it would go a long way to creating a
more cooperative relationship between parents, students, and schools. Additionally, it
would allow more time and resources to be allocated to direct, personal communication
between school personnel and students/families.
Devoting resources to improving enfranchisement needs to be positioned as a
priority rather than assuming that newcomers or “others” will adapt to the status quo in a
place like Meatville. The most culturally responsive teachers and consequently those
who had the best relationships and most positive communication with students and their
families, for example, were those who were able to locate differences and similarities in
the interstitial spaces between themselves and others rather than placing both difference
and responsibility for it wholly with others. From this perspective, the challenges of
cross-cultural or cross-barrier understanding are mutually created and responsibility for
actions to address such challenges is distributed among all parties involved.
I applaud and encourage the efforts of some Meatville community members to
socialize across social boundaries. From a mail carrier whose talent for languages and
dedication to communication has allowed him to pick up both Spanish and Chin
conversational abilities to churchgoers and neighbors who help each other in their hours
of need to locals who brave the initial discomfort of shopping in ethnic stores, these
people have stepped far out of their comfort zones as they enact belonging in their
246
community. Despite the risks of misunderstanding or embarrassment, long-time Englishdominant residents are uniquely capable of expanding and deepening their social
interactions with continued and concerted efforts to socialize across language, cultural,
class, and other barriers.
In a similar vein, I would encourage white, English-dominant, prominent
community members to seriously consider their potential roles in perpetuating white
over-representation (relative to the racial/ethnic population of the Meatville Metropolitan
Area community) in governance positions such as city council, school board, and other
organizations.
Future Research
As I gathered data on Meatville and put my observations into writing, I realized
that there was so much more to be learned. Most compelling among the many issues that
I don't have room to explore here is the way rural schools and face-to-face ways of
knowing articulate with systemic bias. More specifically, in the last decade urban
schools have begun investigating and attempting to address not only academic
achievement gaps but also documented disparities in areas such as suspensions and
expulsions. Future research in rural schools can address whether students there are
subject to similar disparities and how rurality and the rural context of interpersonal
relationships might intensify or mitigate these disparities.
247
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