Latino Heartland: Of Borders and Belonging in the Midwest by Sujey Vega (review)

The Border Protection, Antiterrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005, introduced by Wisconsin U.S. Representative, Jim Sensenbrenner, displayed on a grand scale that the immigration debate was no longer confined to issues of border security, but had now reached the Midwest (xv). In response to this draconian legislation that not only further militarized the border, but also criminalized citizen contact with undocumented individuals, immigrants and allies responded nationally with well-organized protests that were the largest immigration related protests in U.S. history. In Latino Heartland: Of Borders and Belonging in the Midwest, Sujey Vega uses this significant legislation as a touchstone to note a change in the treatment of Latino residents by largely White individuals in Lafayette, Indiana from ambivalence to outright hostility after 2006. Vega's ethnography relies on interviews with Latino, White and Black community members in concert with a cultural studies analysis of political flyers, letters to the editor and responses to news stories on blogs. Latino Heartland contributes to a growing body of scholarly work on Latinos in so-called "non-traditional" destinations like the Midwest and Southeast.

Recognizing that Latinos were not just new immigrants to Lafayette, but asserted ownership of their home city as "pioneers" (x), Vega uses belonging as an analytic for understanding local community dynamics. Expounding on Renato Rosaldo's (1994) "cultural citizenship," Vega proposes "ethnic belonging" as a way to theorize how ethnicity, nationalism, transnationalism and local belonging are not in opposition to one another, but are a "crossroads" of the everyday experience of Latinos in Lafayette (14). Vega's "ethnic belonging" refers to the mundane and organic expressions of ethnic identity that do not inherently have any connection to civic duty, cultural organizing or communal activism (196). Rather, "ethnic belonging accounts for those daily acts that construct ethnic identity and weave an ethnic sense of belonging necessary for cultural citizenship … ethnic belonging points to those beginning steps necessary for claiming the 'right to be different and to belong'" (179).

Latino Heartland reminds us that the rural Midwest, in opposition to romanticized images of White homogeneity, has long been a site of racial, ethnic, and cultural contact and conflict. Vega seeks to "understand the present through the past" by positioning current hostilities about immigrant incorporation and reception within a historical continuum (24). Discussing the forgotten histories of settler colonialism, the Underground Railroad, the KKK and anti-German sentiment in Lafayette, Vega skillfully denaturalizes the narrative of the Midwest as a historically White space. Hegemonic memories privilege Whiteness and cultural amnesia, and overlook the reality that Latinos and other people of color have longstanding memories of Lafayette since the 1950s (24). This "pathology of forgetting" is endemic to White subjects and key in maintaining the power and preeminence of Whiteness (25). For instance, White settler colonialism in Indiana began "a system of White privilege [that] delegitimized people of color from being thought of as co-citizens," and this same logic operates in today's immigration debate (40). Despite the anti-immigrant and anti-Latino sentiment that erupted in 2006, Latinos "asserted belonging" in the Midwestern city through their public celebration of traditions like the Virgin of Guadalupe Day parade. Vega contends that such individual and public rituals create "space belonging" for Lafayette's Latinos and, in the process, also create new meanings for faith and belonging in the Midwest (62).

Overt and covert racial hostilities impacted Latinos with renewed fervor after 2006. Vega discusses how anti-immigrant White interviewees' opinions of Latinos fixated on discussions of legality that quickly transitioned to racist arguments about culture (tendency toward criminality and the "anchor baby" myth, for example) and White victimhood (109). In the case of Latinos, microaggressions (like cross glances or choosing not to park next to Latino males in Walmart) were tied to a White tendency to view "immigrants" as new groups and predominantly criminal "illegals" who were unwilling...