Maria Kefalas

Can Immigration Save Small-Town America? Hispanic Boomtowns and the Uneasy Path to Renewal

In the often polarized discussions over immigration, the point is sometimes missed that immigration often brings immediate and tangible benefits. Nowhere is this truer than in the hollowing-out parts of America. Many nonmetropolitan counties in America have seen net out-migration for decades. While young people have always left small towns, the loss of this group comes at a time when opportunities for those who stay have been severely reduced. One trend that runs counter to the decline of many nonmetro areas is the influx of immigrants, the majority of Hispanic origin, during the 1990s and 2000s. The authors argue that if immigration is “done right,” it can provide a lifeline to many places that are hollowing out. In this article, the authors outline the complex nature of immigration in rural America and offer two case studies of small towns, one where immigration became a lightning rod for controversy and division and one where the process has occurred with little divisiveness and a great deal of success. The authors conclude with some policy suggestions as to how to better accommodate immigration in rural America.

“Marriage Is More Than Being Together”: The Meaning of Marriage for Young Adults

Based on 424 qualitative interviews with a racially, ethnically, and socio-economically diverse population of young people ranging in age from 21 to 38, the authors ponder the paradox of the evolving role for contemporary marriage within the developmental perspective of the transition to adulthood. The authors identify two groups: marriage naturalists and marriage planners. Naturalists comprise one fifth of the sample, are largely from rural America, and follow the fast-track into marriage that defined the mid-twentieth century. Planners comprise the remainder of the sample, are based in metropolitan areas, and follow an elongated transition to adulthood. The authors examine the views of each group on commitment and the nature of relationships, and apply their findings to the debates about whether marriage is resilient, in decline, or becoming deinstitutionalized.

Motherload: Making It All Better in Insecure Times

newer immigrants alongside leftist activists, cosmopolitan Europeans, and an LGBTQ community. Turam looks at several cases that produced contestation in Kreuzberg, examining both splits across groups of pious Muslim immigrants and between older, more bohemian Kreuzberg residents and newer, more mainstream inhabitants of the gentrified sections of the neighborhood. She argues that these spatial neighborhood divides parallel new bonds across diverse Kreuzberg residents, as taste, lifestyle, and consumption habits unite individuals across more traditional divides. Thus, similar to the Tes xvikiye case, the Kreuzberg case illustrates how an unforeseen structural change can reposition a neighborhood in ways that foster collaborative action across expected divides. In conclusion, Turam traces her key arguments and calls for a broader definition of power and political transformation to understand how mundane spatial transformations can be consequential for democratic development as new urban alliances emerge. The study of democratic development and urban politics, Turam argues, needs to move beyond analyses that focus primarily on structural and institutional issues to include more quotidian accounts of everyday transformations in contested urban sites and of how urban contestation has the potential to forge new alliances. Overall, there is much to learn from Turam’s book, and I find its flaws relatively minor. Regrettably, Turam does not do enough to situate the fieldwork that forms the empirical basis for her arguments. The book lacks even the most basic introduction to how the fieldwork was done, how many interviews she conducted, or how much time she spent in various sites. This makes the book less usable for graduate coursework than it could be, since it is harder to gauge the depth of the evidence, particularly because the author has a tendency to occasionally summarize the evidence without drawing on specific empirical examples. More substantively, at times Turam seems to impute too much intentionality to spatiality. For example, she describes some of the UF campus politics as being grounded in ‘‘spatially framed democratic goals’’ rather than ‘‘revolutionary’’ ones (p. 111). My read of the word ‘‘framing’’ implies an intentionality that isn’t really evidenced by her findings. If anything, her more compelling findings are that unplanned—perhaps unframed— spatial circumstances can be quite consequential for the development of democratic protest and alliances. Later, such protests may become spatially framed (as in the Gezi case)—but the earlier developments Turam traces were in part so compelling because they were coincidental (but consequential). Finally, the book could have done more to link these practices of urban contestation— even in the opening or closing frames of the book—with protests in urban squares and sites globally, from Tiennamin Square to Oaxaca. But these are relatively minor concerns in what is otherwise a compelling book that is well worth a close read.

From the Music Man to Methland

Methland, a journalists portrait of what ails small-town Iowa reveals that rural problems are not so different from those of the big city. Meth in Iowa, reviewer Maria Kefalas says, is linked to larger issues of joblessness and downward mobility in middle America.

Book Review: Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice: How Women are Choosing Parenthood without Marriage and Creating the New American Family. By Rosanna Hertz. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 304 pp.,

When family scholars talk about unmarried mothers, they usually mean the welfare-dependent ones. But what about Angelina Jolie and the other super-successful moms who decide they can no longer wait for love and marriage before they start pushing a baby carriage? Fortunately, sociologist Rosanna Hertz has crafted an overdue account of the elite women choosing this path. Based on conversations with single, professional-class women who adopted, conceived through artificial insemination, or conceived by a man who is not interested in parenting; Hertz takes us into the lives of women “creating the new American family.” Feminists and the other critics of nuclear families may be disappointed to learn how Hertz’s mothers are reluctant warriors in the culture wars. They believe in coparenting and husbands, and for most of them, becoming a single parent feels like winning the first-runner-up prize. When they insist on distancing themselves from those other single mothers who collect food stamps and WIC, they sound like finger-wagging callers to talk radio. After all the soul-searching, adoption agencies, case workers, and fertility clinics, once the women achieve the goal of motherhood, they struggle just as hard not to advertise how much they have broken the rules. “They rewrite their stories and conceal their agency, not wanting to break with broader prescriptions of gender,” and “separate out genetic and social families by deconstructing men, but then build back up the preeminence of genetics” (p. 134). Mothers fight “to protect themselves and their children from the claims of a father (or birth parents), only then to resurrect these figures in order to conform” (p. 134). And it is Hertz’s examination of how these nontraditional families try to accommodate the traditional families’expectations that provide us with some of the book’s best moments. There is a poignant discussion of how women construct fathers out of sperm bank records for children who are hungry to find out who they are. It seems that the anonymous donors, which