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

Preface

Preface We began conceptualizing this project in 2007 when Oklahoma lawmakers —concurrent with other legislators elsewhere in the country—passed a draconian law attempting to expunge the undocumented population from the state. As Latin Americanists educated in New York and California, we were disturbed by the many inaccuracies disseminated about immigrants, the scapegoating of people of Latin American heritage, and the countless diatribes about “illegals” in the media. Before long, this new wave of antiimmigrant fervor had crystallized into an angry narrative alleging an “unworthiness ”—and possibly even criminal intent—on the part of nearly all Latin American immigrants. Over and over we heard people ask: Why were they here? What public services were they taking advantage of? Why didn’t they speak English? What part of illegal don’t you understand? From our perspective, the prevailing public discourse that so dehumanized border crossers stood in sharp contrast to the hardworking and morally grounded individuals and families we knew. Miguel, a talented corrido songwriter from Michoacán, worked as a landscaper tending the lawns of individuals who barely knew of his existence. As a day laborer, his full life as a musician, father, and friend remained unknown. Juan’s daughter, Amanda, with undocumented status, actually supported her unemployed American husband working as a nanny. Antonia, having buried a husband and leaving seven children behind in Guatemala, followed a cousin’s path to rural Oklahoma where she worked in a cafeteria kitchen and sent her paychecks home. The determined work ethic of these people, as far as we could see, ran contrary to the often prejudicial, two-dimensional portrayal of “Hispanics.” Given these and many other similar situations, we felt inspired to render a more humane depiction of Latin American migrants in the U.S. Heartland. xii . Preface As we explored the immigration dynamics taking place in Middle America, we uncovered an emerging body of literature that explained the hard economic times many rural heartlanders have experienced in recent years under the prevailing market-fundamentalist paradigm. From the farm crisis of the 1980s, to the boarding up of mom-and-pop shops on Main Street making way for the onslaught of big-box stores that followed, to the chipping away of labor protections codified in right-to-work (RtW) laws, the emerging history of the region revealed tales of corporate greed and social-psychological devastation. The more we uncovered from the wreckage of the U.S. rural Heartland, the more it resembled the story of rural restructuring in Mexico and other Latin American nations. Since the 1990s we have observed the impact that the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have had on the corn industry of Mexico, the systematic erosion of labor and environmental laws in the privatization of once-nationalized industries, the reorientation of domestic manufacturing to export processing exemplified in the maquiladora model, and the resulting migratory networks that have emerged as individuals have been forced to deal with the restructuring . More recently, however, we connected this south-of-the-border history with works such as Broken Heartland: The Rise of America’s Rural Ghetto (1996), Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War (2007), Any Way You Cut It: Meat Processing and Small Town America (1995), and Agrarian Socialism: Marx, Jefferson and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside (2002)—all works that recount the trials of working-class folks in rural America who have tried to keep afloat while their communities and livelihoods have sunk under a sea of neoliberal corporate expansion. Academically, the fields of Latin American migration and U.S. Heartland studies have not typically been linked. Indeed, in an age of growing multiculturalism under globalization, the bridging of the predominantly white working class with foreign migration and labor has often been at odds. While we note some obvious commonalities particularly in regard to issues related to family life, religion, and labor, others argue that the social identities of heartlanders and Latin Americans are primordially different. Class solidarity has been displaced by a new ideological discourse about “race” and ethnicity under the aegis of a purportedly rational state apparatus. Distorting the potential for more cross-class analysis, the project of nationalism and its accompanying neoliberal agenda presents obstacles to building mutual respect. Our volume is an attempt to understand intraregional developments in the U.S. Heartland by presenting the distinctly unique characteristics of place while at the same time contextualizing this geographic area into a...