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xvii Preface In 2002 I arrived in Nashville, Tennessee, to commence a study of Latino immigrant workers and their experiences in the city. This project began my career as a scholar of immigration, race, and American cities and eventually led to the research on immigrant incorporation in Nashville schools, neighborhoods, and wider urban politics on which this book is based. I did not stumble onto that initial 2002 study accidentally. Throughout the late 1990s, I had worked summers at a horse barn near Nashville and had watched the city change ethnically and racially in ways that surprised many local residents. I had heard rumors of immigrant workers, mainly Mexican, in parts of the Nashville labor market and had listened to coworkers describe their parents’ desire to leave neighborhoods that had begun to change and were becoming unfamiliar. As I returned to Nashville each summer, the transformations I saw in the city reminded me of what I was also observing in rural western Kentucky, where I grew up. Immigrants, primarily from Mexico, had arrived in these small Kentucky towns in the mid to late 1990s to pick tobacco and work in the chickenprocessing plants opening across the area. At local hardware stores and feed shops, farmers often discussed their new employees, whose work ethic was easy to describe but whose identity seemed more difficult to frame in the available social categories. When asked about their new workforce, farmers often struggled to find the right words. “They’re . . . they’re just . . . they’re Mexicans, I guess,” they often responded when asked about their new workforce, revealing their uncertainty about how to fit the category “Mexican” into local racial parlance and how to describe being Mexican in rural Kentucky. Seen as neither white nor black, immigrant workers in small-town Kentucky were indescribable in the racial grammar of these rural places, and the minimal description “just Mexican ” had yet to be incorporated into local understandings of race, identity, and place. xviii Preface Questions concerning this struggle to place newly arrived Latino immigrants in locally available categories of race followed me to Nashville, where I began a study of workplaces transitioning toward an immigrant workforce (Winders 2008b). In Nashville, I soon found find my questions about how Latino immigrant workers were or were not drawn into the city’s racial politics, formations, and relations being answered with a broader question: Why did I want to study immigration to Nashville in the first place? Although my research made sense to both Nashville employers and service providers, who increasingly recognized the new needs and issues brought on by Nashville’s internationalization, for many scholars in migration and urban studies, not to mention my friends and family, the question of “Why Nashville?” nearly always came up. Reviewers of my work questioned the census data I cited to show growth in Nashville’s immigrant population, and at the end of a long presentation in 2004, I was told that immigrants would return to California and that I should find something else to study. Nashville, these scholars stressed, was a minor player in comparison to the large American cities on which most urban scholarship focused and, like other southern cities, was entirely absent in the study of immigration. What could a city so marginal in research on immigration, race, and American cities teach us? Why would anyone study immigration to Nashville? More than a decade later, I am asked this question less frequently. There is now a large and established literature on new immigrant destinations like Nashville, and new destinations themselves are increasingly part of mainstream academic and policy discussions of immigrant settlement in the United States. It now seems empirically obvious that new destinations merit scholarly attention. Immigrant communities, especially Latino ones, are well established in these places, the second generation is coming of age, and immigration has become a central aspect of the local social fabric and public discourse. Owing in part to these transformations, new destinations in the South especially are home to some of the nation’s most vitriolic anti-immigrant politics, as well as the site of new alliances between immigrant and civil rights advocates. This mix creates compelling political reasons to study new destinations and their responses to immigrant settlement. New destinations have settled immigrant populations, many of them quite large, and their impact on political and policy debates around immigration frequently makes front-page national news. Thus, there are now clear reasons to study immigration to cities like Nashville. The question “Why...

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