Voices from the Nueva Frontera: Latino Immigration to Dalton, Georgia, and: Latino Voices in New England (review)

All across the country, Latino workers are living, working, and contributing to the economy and cultural diversity of the U.S. Increasingly, they are moving out beyond the border states to the East Coast and interior of the U.S.—what are their experiences, how are they received? Two new books that draw upon oral history interviews explore these questions.

In Voices from the Nueva Frontera, Donald E. Davis, Thomas M. Deaton, David P. Boyle, and Jo-Anne Schick provide an excellent in-depth analysis of the dramatic changes occurring in Dalton, Georgia, now home to one of the highest concentrations of Latino residents in the southeastern U.S. Internationally known as the "Carpet Capital of the World," Dalton drew an increasingly large portion of its work force from Mexico over the last few decades. According to one estimate, Latinos now number some 45,000 in Dalton, more than 50% of the city's population, leading Dale Russakoff of the Washington Post to refer to Dalton as "a U.S. Border Town" even though it lies more than 1200 miles from the Mexican border. The authors (the first three are professors at Dalton State College and Schick is former Director of the Georgia Project) provide an excellent model of genuinely collaborative research and writing that is empirically grounded and nuanced in its analysis.

Voices examines Latino (im)migration, dispersal, and reception in the American interior. Although it focuses on one city, the high quality of all nine chapters that alternately examine changes to labor markets, workplaces, and educational, religious, and social organizations makes it a very useful model for other studies as well as an interesting and timely case study of its own. Beautifully written and organized, Voices is rich in empirical data and insights. It not only provides what it promises, an investigation of the sweeping changes taking place in Dalton, but it does so in a balanced and humane way. In the nine chapters that explore various aspects of the economy; schooling at primary, secondary, and university levels; religious institutions; social services, social problems, and community responses, the authors consistently draw upon oral interviews they conducted with over 100 Latino and Anglo residents. They then end each chapter with the words and a photo of a Latino worker, teacher, and student—representing a diversity of Latino voices within the community and their first-person perspectives.

One gets the sense that this research really mattered to the authors who, as residents of Dalton, understand the complexities and challenges of a rapidly changing workforce and community. They not only report on demographic changes, economic challenges, and cultural (mis)understandings, they engage in participatory research that seeks out and presents various perspectives that represent the diversity of the community under consideration and in the process, help build bridges. As researchers-teachers-residents, they take care to delve not only into the social problems but also the opportunities and become part of the force for creative problem solving. They also do so without any funding.

The initial inspiration for the book came from a session at the 2002 Appalachian Studies conference during which three Latino students gave powerful testimonies describing their journey from Mexico to the U.S. That began the discussion among the authors of doing the Dalton oral history project. As the authors state, they unfortunately could not include the voices of undocumented workers given the college's current Institutional Review Board requirements, so any handwritten notes or audio recordings done with undocumented workers were destroyed.

While acknowledging the controversies that emerged over the challenges that came with a recently growing Latino population in Dalton, the authors also note that "by the late 1990s, mill owners...