New Destination Dreaming

Immigration, Race, and Legal Status in the Rural American South

Helen Marrow

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780804773089, 9780804773072
• eBook ISBN: 9780804777520
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles have long been shaped by immigration. These gateway cities have traditionally been assumed to be the major flashpoints in American debates over immigration policy—but the reality on the ground is proving different. Since the 1980s, new immigrants have increasingly settled in rural and suburban areas, particularly within the South. Couple this demographic change with an increase in unauthorized immigrants, and the rural South, once perhaps the most culturally and racially "settled" part of the country, now offers a window into the changing dynamics of immigration and, more generally, the changing face of America.

New Destination Dreaming explores how the rural context impacts the immigrant experience, how rapid Hispanic immigration influences southern race relations, and how institutions like schools and law enforcement agencies deal with unauthorized residents. Though the South is assumed to be an economically depressed region, low-wage food processing jobs are offering Hispanic newcomers the opportunity to carve out a living and join the rural working class, though this is not without its problems. Inattention from politicians to this growing population and rising black-brown tensions are both factors in contemporary rural southern life.

Ultimately, Marrow presents a cautiously optimistic view of Hispanic newcomers' opportunities for upward mobility in the rural South, while underscoring the threat of anti-immigrant sentiment and restrictive policymaking that has gripped the region in recent years. Lack of citizenship and legal status still threatens many Hispanic newcomers' opportunities. This book uncovers what more we can do to ensure that America's newest residents become productive and integrated members of rural southern society rather than a newly excluded underclass.

I

Geography

1

“I’m a Person Who Likes Tranquility a Lot”

Southern Region and Rural Space in the Hispanic Newcomer Experience

BY 2003, Vera had lived in the United States for 16 years. When she was a young child in the early 1970s, she spent four years living with her father in Dallas, and then in the border city of El Centro, California. After he was jailed for dealing drugs, Vera went back to their small village in Querétaro, Mexico, where she remained for the next 15 years. At 23 she returned on her own to the United States in 1991—this time to eastern North Carolina with a temporary H-2B visa in hand to work in crab processing, an industry that is spread over the state’s coastal tidewater region (Griffith 1993, 1995b, 2006; Hall 1995). Over the next decade, Vera moved from one crowded crabhouse to another, to the orange groves in Florida, to a cucumber nursery and a dirt packing plant in two other southeastern states, and to the infamous Smithfield Foods pork processing plant in Tarheel, North Carolina (Associated Press 2007; Gartner 2007a, 2007b; LeDuff 2000) where she worked glazing cuts of ham. From Smithfield, Vera moved to the night shift in the worksite I call Textile Mill (a pseudonym) in Bedford County, to an aerosystems components manufacturing company in that same county, and finally to her current job as an ESL teacher in Bedford Elementary School.¹ Because it was difficult getting American employers to recognize her two-year college diploma from Mexico, Vera earned a GED through Even Start, an innovative parent-child continuing education program affiliated with Bedford County Community College and Bedford Elementary School (see Gozdziak and Bump 2008), and took courses toward an associate degree at Bedford County Community College.

Because Vera had lived in urban areas in two traditional immigrant gateway states, Texas and California, I was curious to know what she thought about life in the rural South, and whether she had plans to stay or eventually leave. Overall, she reported liking the region and had no plans to move. To her, not only is eastern North Carolina less crowded and safer than California, but its public schools are also “a lot better” and its police more “trustful.” She even said it feels more like home to migrants like herself who come from small villages abroad. Therefore, even though Vera still has family in California and acknowledged that her wages might be higher there or in other big cities, she preferred the “country” lifestyle for its peacefulness, beautiful natural landscape, and safety for children:

Vera: People from California want to know why I live here. My cousins say, “How’s the life there?” I say, “Oh, it’s kind of country life.” “And you like that?” they ask. “Of course, I like that! I don’t like to live around crime and all of that stuff. I’m diabetic!” [laughs]

Interviewer: So they don’t understand it?

Vera: No, they don’t understand. They make fun of it, and way the people talk. But I say I like it better than California, New York, or those places. I even brought my sister here, because I didn’t want her to go to California. I told her to come to live here because it’s better now that we’re thinking about our kids. That’s the main thing. I might get more money for what I do, a better house, a Mercedes Benz car, a restaurant or something, a better life, but the community there is wild. Especially the Hispanics. They’ve got the Vatos Locos Forever [a predominantly Mexican street gang], and I don’t want that for my daughter. I could even go to Raleigh to make more money for my work, but I don’t want to live in Raleigh. Big cities stress me out. And another one of the reasons that I stay in this state is because it’s beautiful. The forest and all of that stuff. It’s quiet, nice, and . . . it’s like home! Yeah, you can adapt here like home. So people make fun of it here, but it’s a good life!

By contrast, Silvia is a Puerto Rican American from Spanish Harlem in New York City who married a man whose parents are originally from Bedford County. In the early 2000s, Silvia and her husband, with their daughter in tow, relocated to Bedford to be closer to his aging parents. When I interviewed her in 2003, Silvia was still undergoing both North-to-South and urban-to-rural shocks from the transition. Initially she was hesitant to admit it, afraid of possibly upsetting her new friends and colleagues, but she was extremely homesick for New York, a place where she said Americans have more knowledge of life outside a “black and white” box, and where they are “less close-minded” toward different cultural, ethnic, and religious practices. For Silvia, making friends and being accepted in the rural South is harder than she expected. For the first time in her life, she finds herself “confused” and “constantly defending my American identity,” because “being Puerto Rican just doesn’t make sense to other people down here.” With the potential exception of one “open-minded” white colleague in the local school system where she works, Silvia has had trouble befriending locals, many of whom she feels are close-minded and, because of being from a small town, “very stuck on their old ways.” Finally, her daughter, who was enrolled in challenging parochial schools in New York City, is bringing home stellar grades of 100+, leaving Silvia worrying that the educational environment in Bedford Middle School is not sufficiently challenging.

Silvia’s feelings about life in the rural South compared to that in a traditional immigrant gateway city are the polar opposite of how Vera feels about living there. When I asked Silvia if there was anything she did not miss about New York, she responded with an emphatic “No!” Silvia missed her extended family, the food, the “open-all-night” buzz of the big city, and, most important, having friends and neighbors of all stripes and colors. The things she used to complain about when she lived there—traffic, pollution, and delayed subway rides—she misses now. “If it was just me,” she told me quietly, she would go back in a heartbeat, but she also loves her husband and thinks that Bedford could ultimately offer a better life for her daughter. So she has learned how to put up with the strange looks she gets from passersby when she and her husband walk down the street, with the parents of her daughter’s soccermates who subtly ignore her on the sidelines at games, with the unwelcoming treatment from a local hairdresser, and even with the colleague whom she once had to correct for calling her “Yankee” instead of by her first name. Silvia is even steeling herself for the day her daughter will attend the local high school, ardently telling me that “she will not be competing” in the segregated, binary homecoming queen pageant there:

Silvia: I told her, “I don’t care if they vote you in and you get all the votes, you’re not going to be a part of that.” Because I teach her that you don’t look at people’s skin, you just make friends with whoever you feel comfortable with, and who you think is a good person.

. . .

How are we to make sense of such opposing viewpoints regarding the influence the rural South has on Hispanic newcomers in the United States, including their perceptions of opportunities for incorporation and mobility and their intergroup relations with American natives? Vera thought the rural South makes life better and less stressful and facilitates positive interactions with mainstream Americans (especially whites), even though it might not lead to as much economic success. By contrast, Silvia thought the rural South makes being accepted by both mainstream whites and blacks (especially whites) more difficult, and she still felt economically unsteady despite her and her husband’s lower-middleclass jobs. Of course, both women acknowledged the ambiguous or contradictory nature of living in the rural South, which involves economic tradeoffs and emotional bargains (on ambiguity and contradiction in rural areas, see Torres, Popke, and Hapke 2006). Yet Vera ultimately concluded that rural space is the deciding contextual factor, while Silvia argued the opposite, saying, “It’s a southern thing. I think if Hispanics go to Raleigh, which is the biggest city, or Charlotte, they’re still gonna feel the same way as I do.”

In this chapter, I paint a picture of the ambivalent and contradictory ways in which both Hispanic newcomers and natives interpreted the influence of the rural South on Hispanic newcomers’ lives. Respondents frequently conflated the two contextual effects—that of the southern region with that of rural space—and they also differed in their evaluations of the mechanisms behind and consequences of each one. This complexity may not be surprising; a rural and agricultural character has historically distinguished the South, making it difficult to isolate one effect from the other. Yet ultimately I identify rural space as the dominant influence on the Hispanic newcomers’ American experience. I also show that its most positive effects emerged for lower-status Hispanic newcomers from rural origins (like Vera), while its most negative ones emerged for higherstatus Hispanic newcomers from urban areas (like Silvia). These differences carry important implications for Hispanic newcomers’ differential prospects for incorporation and assimilation as they disperse throughout the country.

Characteristics and Stereotypes of the Rural American South

To understand how the rural South might influence Hispanic newcomers’ experiences, we first need to identify the salient characteristics and stereotypes of both rural America and the American South. Let’s take rural America first. The significant convergence between nonmetro and metro areas since the mid-twentieth century (Albrecht 2006; Friedland 2002) has caused considerable decline in the many once-salient metro-nonmetro differences in America, such as educational level, income, family size, and birth rate. Nevertheless, metro areas still tend to exhibit more diverse employment structures, more numerous higher-level positions in their employment structures, higher income, and less poverty. By virtue of their physical location, these areas have more advantaged access to markets and consumers and higher property values compared to nonmetro areas, both of which can facilitate wealth accumulation (Albrecht 2006; RSS 2006a, 2006b). This set of relative economic costs of rural life may have a negative impact on Hispanic newcomers’ lives. At the same time, the recent restructuring and relocation of low-wage industry to nonmetro areas may counter this with greater job opportunities, as may the lower cost of living in nonmetro areas (Fraga et al. 2010; McConnell and Miraftab 2009; Torres, Popke, and Hapke 2006).

Next, major improvements in communication and transportation since the mid-twentieth century have also reduced metro-nonmetro cultural differences by lessening the cultural isolation of nonmetro residents (Albrecht 2006). Nevertheless, rural residents continue to be associated with cultural isolation, parochialism, traditionalism, moral and political conservatism, and intolerance for diversity and ambiguity, including intolerance for racial and ethnic minorities (Albrecht 2006; Saenz 2000). This set of cultural costs of rural life may influence Hispanic newcomers’ lives negatively by slowing their acceptance (Fennelly 2005; Fennelly and Federico 2008).

Third, nonmetro areas are distinguished by their lower population size and density, which scholars argue reduce the total number of social contacts, allowing rural residents to become acquainted with one another on a personal level—that is, in terms of primary as opposed to categorical and secondary relationships—more easily than urban residents can (Albrecht 2006). On the one hand, this ecological factor of rural life may have a negative impact on Hispanic newcomers’ lives by leading to more exclusionary attitudes, values, and behaviors among natives. On the other hand, it may affect Hispanic newcomers’ lives positively by widening opportunities for primary-level social contact with mainstream American natives who have strong community networks (Cuadros 2006; Dunn, Aragonés, and Shivers 2005; Erwin 2003; Kandel and Parrado, 2006; Silver 2009).

Other ecological characteristics of rural life, such as closeness to nature, peacefulness, and safety, may also influence Hispanic newcomers’ lives positively, and potentially balance out some negative ecological effects such as those wielded by lesser racial and ethnic diversity (K. M. Johnson 2003) and a less developed public transportation infrastructure (Atiles and Bohon 2003; Barcus 2006; Bohon 2008; Lacy 2007, 2008b, 2009; Odem 2009; Verdaguer 2008). Comparatively lax immigration enforcement may also shield many newcomers (especially unauthorized ones) from heightened institutional scrutiny in rural compared to urban areas (Lacy 2009; McDonnell 2008; H. A. Smith 2008; Torres, Popke, and Hapke 2006), although some scholars argue that immigrants may be more visible, not less, in sparsely populated communities, at least to community residents and local law enforcement authorities even if not to federal immigration officials (Winders 2008b; Zúñiga and Hernández-León 2005a).

Moving on to characteristics and stereotypes of the American South, and considering economic characteristics first, we find that the traditional South still exhibits the country’s highest poverty rate, lowest unionization rate, and weakest labor movement arrangements in the country (Bauer and Reynolds 2009; Cornfield 2009; Eckes 2005; Fink 2003; Smith-Nonini 2009), all of which may have a negative impact on Hispanic newcomers’ lives. However, because the South has also emerged as “the nation’s most racially integrated and economically dynamic region” since the mid-twentieth century (Cobb and Stueck 2005: xi), the economic effect of living in the region is no longer clear, nor solely negative.

As part of the great economic “harmonization and convergence” of American regions since the mid-twentieth century, major improvements in communication and transportation have also reduced southern-nonsouthern cultural differences by reducing the cultural isolation of southern residents (Eckes 2005). Nonetheless, southerners continue to be associated with the same characteristics as ruralites—cultural isolation, parochialism, traditionalism, moral and political conservatism, and intolerance for diversity and ambiguity, including intolerance for racial and ethnic minorities (Griffin 2006; Mantero 2008; Reed 1986, 1993; Saenz 2000).² Although some of these cultural attributes of southern life may influence Hispanic newcomers’ lives negatively (Duchón and Murphy 2001; Griffin and McFarland 2007), others—particularly hospitality and traditional family values—may do the opposite.

Finally, ecological characteristics of southern areas, including warm climate, may have a positive impact on Hispanic newcomers’ lives, and potentially balance out negative effects such as those wielded by less racial and ethnic diversity and lower-quality community services.

Southern Region: Ambivalent and Contradictory

In some ways, the southern regional context exerts discernible economic and noneconomic effects on Hispanic newcomers’ experiences in eastern North Carolina, although they range from negative to positive. Like Vera, Stephanie, a legal permanent resident who originally migrated illegally to California from Guanajuato, Mexico, in 1991 before settling down in North Carolina with her husband in 2001, felt her economic opportunities are more limited in the traditional South. Having lived previously in California, Indiana, and Nebraska, she hoped to move back to California so that her husband “can find a job for more than $15 an hour. It is very hard for him to find a job here that is well paid.” Similarly, Muriel, a Puerto Rican American who was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, grew up in Florida, and migrated to Wilcox County in 1997, argued that Hispanic newcomers experience more racial or ethnic profiling by law enforcement officers in the traditional South than elsewhere, including Florida and Texas:

Muriel: I see more racism here, especially when you get to Alabama and Georgia and stuff, and all the places that are like that. For example, I can’t remember what part of the United States we were driving in, but I want to say Alabama because we were going to Texas. Some highway patrolmen stopped us on the side of the road and asked for my [Mexican immigrant] husband’s driver’s license, and he gave his license to one of them. Then the patrolmen made us follow them to some kind of building thing. They looked in our truck, searching for drugs. And they broke our gas thing where they were putting metals and stuff in there. The doors, they messed them up. They wanted us to undress at one point, so they could check us. I said, “No, I will not undress unless there’s a female to do that.” “Well, do you want to go to jail?” “Well, I’ll go if I have to because I’m not going to undress for you.” So we didn’t have to undress or anything, but they treated us real, real bad. And it was for nothing, because we weren’t even doing nothing. We were just driving. And that was real wrong of them.

Like Muriel, Alvaro, a formerly unauthorized immigrant from the city of Saltillo in the state of Coahuila, Mexico, who migrated directly to North Carolina in 1990 and then became a legal permanent resident in 1997, thought that Hispanic newcomers suffer from greater prejudice in the traditional South. Alvaro suspected that this stems from two of southerners’ cultural characteristics—higher religious fundamentalism and greater intolerance for racial and ethnic minorities—and ultimately he felt that such prejudice limits Hispanic newcomers’ upward economic mobility:

Alvaro: Being a foreign or Hispanic person living in North Carolina, I feel a lot of pressure to succeed. Because there’s a lot of people who are p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Immigrant Incorporation in Rural New Destinations
• Part I: Geography
• Part II: Economy
• Part III: Race and Citizenship
• Part IV: Politics and Institutions
• Conclusion: Promises and Pitfalls in the Rural American South
• Appendix: Terminology and Methodology
• Notes
• References
• Index