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75 The Midwestern Context Many small Midwestern towns have the familiar presence of red brick, twostory buildings lining the main street, typical from the late 1800s. On first impression, their appearance suggests a timeless, seamless homogeneity and solidity of the community. In some towns, however, about half of the first-story businesses have signs in Spanish. Venturing a walk along the main street of Ligonier, Indiana, you will notice that many customers are Latino. Wandering into the rear of El Milagro Supermarket (once a Kroger’s), you can sit at the old sodafountain -style counter. The store is reminiscent of Woolworth’s, except norteño music is playing loudly and the cook is frying lengua [tongue] for a torta [Mexican sandwich]. Beyond the back door and parking lot, run-down housing is crowded with Latinos who have arrived to work in the local factories. It is a short distance to the town park, and if you sit there long enough, you will observe at least one, probably several, Amish buggies pulling up. Families will unload; the men, in white shirts and black trousers or overalls, will tie up the horses. The women, in blue dresses and bonnets , will fill water buckets for the horses from the fire station before they walk to the dentist, bank, or dollar store. The family is running errands during the men’s days off from factory work. Run-down housing lines the foot of a street that rises up a small hill. Up the street, as the housing begins to improve, a small but imposing portico with Greek columns leads into a tiny jewel of a Carnegie library. Still further along the street are magnificent Victorian homes, some well preserved. One enormous pink house is now a bed and breakfast inn. Its dining room ceiling was painted in Europe and shipped here. The sliding doors have Honduran mahogany on one side, oak on the other, to match the wood in the adjoining rooms. C H A P T E R F O U R Research Overview: The Rural Midwestern Context and Qualitative Methods Ann V. Millard, Maríaelena D. Jefferds, Ken R. Crane, and Isidore Flores 04-T3109 75 04-T3109 75 9/29/04 6:53:08 AM 9/29/04 6:53:08 AM 76 Millard, Jefferds, Crane, & Flores Across the street, a turreted house has an elevator. Ligonier has seen splendorous times. Crane, field notes Waves of people of different ethnic groups and religions have populated Ligonier over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most of the newcomers would have been considered “outsiders” in the region when they first arrived. The earliest were western Pennsylvanians who founded the town, then Jewish refugees, next “hillbillies” from Appalachia, and most recently, Latinos of Mexican descent. Other refugee populations, including Mennonites and Amish, settled in surrounding towns. All the later arrivals were subjected to attitudes of exclusion from those who consider themselves descendants of the original settlers of European ancestry. Arriving in the small, northern Indiana town from the west, you first pass a large automotive parts plant on the left, and immediately on your right is a run-down trailer park with large puddles in the unpaved driveway. A shiny, twin-prop aircraft in good working order is parked at the end of the trailer park’s dirt track, imparting a feeling of contradiction to the scene. That is only the beginning of a series of surprises to the visitor who has time to look around. As you window-shop along the main street, you will come to one sizable shop full of exotic carvings. On closer inspection, they are African carvings of human figures, some as tall as eight feet; there are many baskets of dried palm fronds and several masks. There is no sign on the door or name. (It turns out that these are the remnants of a failed import business begun by a local man who had traveled extensively in Africa and who now is the main landlord of Latino tenants in the town.) Up the street and over one block is a former synagogue built in 1889 to serve the 60 Jewish families in town. A distinctive characteristic of town history is its Jewish heritage; the town seal has the Star of David among its other images. That history is now a historical footnote, as the earlier families left, and the town synagogue was turned into a museum. There you will learn that Ligonier was founded by a man...

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