Latin American Migrations to the U.S. Heartland: Changing Social Landscapes in Middle America

Contributors

Contributors Linda Allegro is a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Oklahoma State University. Her publications appear in Latin American Perspectives , Red State, Centro: The Journal of Puerto Rican Studies, and Latino America: A State by State Encyclopedia. She hosted a cultural segment called “Huellas Hispanas” on a local Spanish-language cable station in Tulsa, Oklahoma , and is engaged in immigrant and worker advocacy. She calls herself trilocal, living between Miami Beach, Tulsa, and Nicaragua. Independent historian Tisa M. Anders earned her PhD in religion and social change at the University of Denver/Iliff School of Theology. She is currently CEO/founder of Writing the World, LLC. Anders specializes in agricultural history, nineteenth-century U.S. reform movements, and oral history. Publications include “L. Maria Child: One Woman’s Spiritual Journey in Nineteenth Century America” (Swedenborg Foundation, in progress ); two chapters with coauthor Rosa Cobos on gender and migration in the edited collections: “Gender and Rural Migration: Realities, Conflict and Change,” Glenda Tibe Bonifacio, ed. (Routledge, in progress) and “Farming across Borders: Selections on Transnational Agricultural History in the North American West,” Sterling Evans, ed., Connecting the Greater West series (Texas A&M University Press, in progress); and “Junius Groves,” an encyclopedia entry in the online African American and African history encyclopedia BlackPast.org (http://www.BlackPast.Org, 2008). Anders grew up in Western Nebraska and retains strong, current ties to the area. She thus brings an insider focus to her topic. 312 . Contributors Scott Carter is associate professor of economics at the University of Tulsa. He has published in the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, the Review of Political Economy, and the American Journal of Economics and Sociology. His interest in the connection between immigration and labor struggles began in the mid-1990s in New York City’s Chinatown through organizing with the Chinese Staff and Workers Association and its executive director, Wing Lam. In addition to immigration issues, his research interests include labor economics, theories of growth and distribution, heterodox theory and pedagogy, and original archival research on the Cambridge, England, economist Piero Sraffa. He is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Union of Radical Political Economics (URPE). Caitlin Didier is a cultural anthropologist and small business owner in Columbus, Ohio. Her research focuses on the development and maintenance of ethnic identity in Postville, Iowa, a rural meatpacking town that has undergone rapid social, religious, and economic change. She centers her research on the impact of globalization and the social, economic, and political policies that affect immigrant integration in the United States. Her other research interests lie in the area of new religious movements and the strategies employed by members of those movements to address problems that plague their communities. Caitlin is currently finishing her PhD through the University of Kansas and is a part-time instructor at Denison University. Miranda Cady Hallett holds a position as assistant professor of anthropology at Otterbein University in Columbus, Ohio. Miranda completed a PhD in cultural anthropology in 2009 from Cornell University. Her dissertation , “Disappeared Subjects: Migration, Legality, and the Neoliberal State,” analyzes the precarious legal condition of many transnational migrants as the construction, through law, of racialized hierarchies that serve neoliberal production regimes. Recent publications include a 2011 article in Urban Anthropology on Salvadoran activism for diasporic voting rights and a 2012 piece in the journal Latino Studies entitled “Better Than White Trash,” looking at the discursive boundary work Latinos in Arkansas use to make moral claims of belonging. Miranda has conducted research on Salvadoran communities since 1998 and on transnational migration into the rural South and Midwest since 2004, and her current research project focuses on insights into transformations of statehood in the era of neoliberal globalization, based on ethnographic interviews from 2005 to the present with officials in Salvadoran government offices. In addition to her scholarly pursuits, Miranda is also an engaged public anthropologist with a history of Contributors . 313 activism and collaboration with social movements such as migrants’ rights and the workers’ center movement in the United States. Edmund “Ted” Hamann is an associate professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education at the University of Nebraska– Lincoln (UNL). He earned his PhD in education from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999 and his master’s degree in anthropology in 1995 from the University of Kansas. He is author of Education in...