Lise Nelson

Latino immigrants and the renegotiation of place and belonging in small town America

This article compares the politics of place and belonging within two non-metropolitan communities—Woodburn, Oregon, and Leadville, Colorado—that have witnessed a significant increase in Latino immigration during the last fifteen to twenty years. Today both communities are approximately 50 per cent Latino, a demographic change that has reworked understandings of place identity and social belonging in each. Through a comparison of the two towns we seek to chart the unique regional political economic dynamics driving these changes, examine their spatial imprint, and interrogate how local context shapes the extent to which new arrivals are able to make effective claims to a sense of place and belonging despite hierarchies of race, class and ‘illegality.’ Assessing the differences between these two immigrant destinations provides insights into how sociospatial relations are crucial to analyzing immigrant–receiving society interaction, and contributes to scholarship on the uneven geography of immigrant incorporation in the contemporary USA.

The global rural: Gentrification and linked migration in the rural USA

This article explores the possibility that US rural amenity destinations are affected by ‘linked migration’ streams similar to ones connecting the fate of high-wage professionals and low-wage immigrants in global cities. To date, the possibility of such a linkage has not been considered in the vast literature on migration and social transformation in rural America, a literature that has treated the arrival of these two groups (high-wage professionals and low-wage immigrants) in rural spaces as separate processes. We explore the possibility that these two groups, in a particular set of US rural amenity communities, are structurally linked. We focus on the theoretical implications of documenting such linkages, arguing that the presence of linked migration dynamics in rural areas would transform scholarly debates on: (1) Latino immigrants in the rural USA; (2) amenity migration and rural gentrification, not only in the USA but in a range of postindustrial economies; and (3) theories of globalization and mobility, as well as the place of the rural in globalization dynamics.

Decentering the Movement: Collective Action, Place, and the ‘Sedimentation’ of Radical Political Discourses

The alternative political discourses and identities associated with social movements in Latin America are frequently examined at the height of mobilization and visibility of these same movements. In response to growing concern about the limits of such analyses, I propose thinking about the ‘sedimentation’ of social-movement discourses in place. ‘Sedimentation’ refers to the complex processes through which discourses (including ‘identities’, political vocabularies, and practices) deployed in moments of collective organization and protest become translated and socially embedded by a variety of actors, not only over time but through disparate social and political arenas. Social-movement theorists in geography and other disciplines could more fully understand the longer term political and cultural impacts of social movements if they engaged theories of place—particularly in ways that decenter ‘the movement’ as the central category of analysis. An approach that centers on place and sedimentation processes, rather than on the fate of ‘the movement’, facilitates understanding the complex (and often contradictory) ripple effects of collective protest over time and through various social arenas—some seemingly far removed from ‘the movement’ itself. To illustrate my argument I draw on ethnographic research that explores, over a ten-year period (1988–98), collective mobilization and changing political discourses in a Purhépechan indigenous community of Mexico.

Racialized landscapes: whiteness and the struggle over farmworker housing in Woodburn, Oregon

Through an analysis of political resistance to the construction of subsidized farmworker housing in Woodburn, Oregon between 1991 and 1996, this article explores the defense of normative whiteness in relation to a largely undocumented Mexican immigrant population residing in the community. It is argued that for many (mostly white) city leaders and residents, the construction of urban farmworker housing represented a racialized and spatial transgression that undermined the normalized geography of farmworker invisibility — the labor camp. While the racial anxieties linked to the permanent settlement of low-wage immigrant workers had percolated for many years, the public debate over farmworker housing represented a moment when the longstanding anxiety of white residents could be publicly articulated, as well as coded and expressed as something other than race. The analysis builds on work in geography examining how spatial metaphors and practices are used to police the borders of whiteness and difference.

Geographies of State Power, Protest, and Women's Political Identity Formation in Michoacán, Mexico

Womens narratives of protest in three indigenous communities of Michoacán, Mexico, after the massive electoral protest of 1988–1989 indicate that the jurisdictional positioning of these communities created paths and spaces of protest that shaped the formation of gendered political identities and, over time, the politicization of ethnicity in the region. The women of Cherán played a dominant and consistent role in opposition electoral mobilizations in ways that allowed them to confront traditional gendered hierarchies that had cast them as apolitical. In contrast, although women in the communities of Pichátaro and Tacuro also actively engaged the electoral opposition, they did not experience profound gendered transformation. Due largely to the jurisdictional positions of their communities, they instead politicized their ethnicity much more forcefully in the wake of electoral mobilization. Thus, race and gender as nonessential categories intersect differently through space in ways that are often crucial to inquiry within political geography. Exploring local and regional patterns of political identity formation through a feminist lens elucidates the interconnected geographies of state power and protest, as well as the geographical constraints on indigenous rights and democracy in contemporary Mexico.

FARMWORKER HOUSING AND SPACES OF BELONGING IN WOODBURN, OREGON*

This article traces the history of efforts to build subsidized farmworker housing in Woodburn, Oregon, during the early 1990s. Although the northern Willamette Valley has been dependent on Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers since the 1940s, until the 1980s most of those workers had been migratory and lived in labor camps. Political economic transformations shifted these dynamics, causing an increasing number of farmworkers to settle permanently in towns such as Woodburn. Rising housing costs, in combination with skyrocketing demand for low‐income housing, led to a housing crisis in the late 1980s. The Farmworker Housing Development Corporation, established in 1991, successfully built two housing projects in Woodburn despite fierce resistance from city leaders and many longtime residents. These housing projects not only provided safe and affordable housing for farmworkers but also claimed a space of belonging for a group profoundly marginalized in terms of economics, race, and legal status in Oregon and throughout the United States.

Topographies of citizenship: Purhépechan Mexican women claiming political subjectivities

A variety of politics are waged through recourse to the language of ‘citizenship’ and ‘democracy’: from George W. Bushs selling of free trade for the Americas by invoking freedom and democracy, to the calls for citizenship and equality by popular movements throughout Latin America and other regions. This article links these paradoxical and transnational constructions of ‘citizenship’ to the daily economic and political struggles of indigenous women in rural Mexico. A transnational and what Cindi Katz calls a ‘topographical’ analysis of local processes deepens and complicates our understanding of local changes as they articulate with global dynamics, and it transforms how we conceptualize the global. Drawing on an ethnography of local gendered political transformation in Cherán, Mexico, I map processes visible locally onto spatialities of power and meaning across scales, weaving together various symbolic and material processes—the intentional actions and negotiations of individual women; the history of Cherán as a place and community; neoliberal economic globalization; and the effects of profoundly gendered and racialized nationalisms—in order to produce a situated knowledge of global citizenship politics. This approach highlights how women in Cherán, situated within global political economic relations and the symbolic horizons of ‘modernity’, transform the meaning and practice of citizenship and political subjectivity.

Women and Change at the U.S.–Mexico Border: Mobility, Labor, and Activism

complex than liberals believe. We are sorely in need of the kind of uncomfortable absolutes and utopian heralds that come with potent movements for environmental limits, racial justice, organized labor, and governmental leadership (meaning real city planning, higher taxes, and major social redistribution and investment). Such radical certainty makes liberals uncomfortable and the ruling elite hopping mad. As a matter of fact, that is what already happened after the New Deal, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the 1960s, and it is what must happen again. To use Klingle’s two principal metaphors, the return of the salmon and the Emerald City, it will not be enough just to pull back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz or to get people to think more holistically about salmon habits and habitat. What will be required is to oust the kings of Wall Street (as Frank Baum’s Populists wanted in the 1890s), give workers and people of color more power (more brown in the green), and put more monkey wrenches into the spinning wheels of electronic commerce that drive Seattle’s gluttonous economy, among other things. I do not want to end on a sour note for such a marvelous book and one, moreover, that should be essential reading for concerned Seattleites and environmental historians alike. There is always a need for good histories of places that can, indeed, make clear how much of the past is still before us and how much social regrading must be done to arrive at a better future.