![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
Small towns throughout the rural upper Midwest have been experiencing dramatic economic restructuring and an unprecedented influx of new immigrants of color, triggering conflicts and tension between almost exclusively white residents and the new immigrants. Analyzing the roots and content of white residents’ responses to their encounters with new immigrants in a small town in rural Minnesota, the concept of spaces of encounters draws attention to the relational quality of identities and attitudes and the active role of emotions and spatiality in processes of Othering and racialization, as well as the potential of the encounter to disrupt preconceived boundaries and racial stereotypes. White residents racialize immigrants and space, although the specific form taken by processes of racialization is inflected by individuals’ social positionality and place identities and by longer term and broader scale racial stereotypes and dominant discourses about immigration, race, and nation in the United States. The racialization of immigrants defends white privilege and culture; recovers an imagined idealized place, past, and future; and establishes that belonging to the national and local community is conditional on immigrants conforming to white American values and norms—an assimilationist imaginary that runs up against the multicultural and multiracial reality of the town. Residents’ reflections on their own racial prejudice and different forms of racism, as well as intimate social relations they forge with individual migrants, hold promise for social relations that transcend differences across racial and cultural divides.
Pequeñas ciudades a lo largo del sector norte del Medio Oeste rural han experimentado una dramática reestructuración económica y un flujo sin precedentes de nuevos inmigrantes de color, desencadenando conflictos y tensiones entre casi exclusivamente los residentes blancos y los nuevos inmigrantes. Se analiza el origen y el contenido de las respuestas de los residentes blancos a sus encuentros con los nuevos inmigrantes en un pequeño pueblo en la zona rural de Minnesota, el concepto de los espacios de encuentro llama la atención por la calidad relacional de algunos, las actitudes y el papel activo de las emociones y la espacialidad en los procesos de “los otros” y racialización, así como la posibilidad del encuentro para romper barreras preconcebidas y estereotipos raciales. Los residentes blancos racializan a los inmigrantes y el espacio, aunque la forma específica dada en los procesos de racialización es modulada por la posicionalidad social de las personas y el lugar de identidad, por el plazo más largo y la más amplia escala de estereotipos raciales y discursos predominantes sobre la inmigración, la raza y la nación en los Estados Unidos. La racialización de los inmigrantes defiende los privilegios de los blancos y la cultura, recupera un lugar imaginario idealizado, el pasado y el futuro, y establece que la pertenencia a la comunidad nacional y local está condicionada a que los inmigrantes se ajusten a los valores y normas de los estadounidenses blancos—un imaginario asimilacionista que se enfrenta a la realidad multicultural y multirracial de la ciudad. Las reflexiones de los residentes sobre sus propios prejuicios raciales y las distintas formas de racismo, así como las relaciones sociales íntimas que forjan con los migrantes son prometedoras para que las relaciones sociales trasciendan las diferencias entre razas y diferencias culturales.
Acknowledgments
The research for this article was supported by grants from the Russell Sage Foundation and the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota. I would like to thank Eric Sheppard, Teresa Gowan, Patricia Ehrkamp, two anonymous reviewers, and the editor for their helpful comments on earlier drafts and Kathy Fennelly for her help with the empirical research.
Notes
1. Other studies have shown significant differences across generations. These are not explored in this study, which focuses on adults between the ages of twenty-eight and seventy-four.
2. Following Ahmed (2004a), I do not distinguish affect from emotion.
3. Different authors assign different meanings to racialization, emphasizing different aspects of Othering—aspects of physical corporeality and embodiment versus aspects of culture and ideology (for a detailed genealogy, see Barot and Bird Citation2001).
4. Viscosity refers to the holding together of bodies based, for example, on physical characteristics such as skin color or certain types of behavior.
5. Projection refers to the capacity “to attribute to other people … feelings of various kinds” (Klein 1960, cited in Sibley Citation1995, 6).
6. Each focus group had five to ten participants, 55 percent female and 91 percent identified as Lutherans and Catholics. Participants ranged in age between twenty-eight and seventy-four, with the majority (about 67 percent) between forty and sixty-four. Ninety-one percent had lived in Devereaux more than ten years, with 50 percent born there. Regarding income level, 21.1 percent had an annual income of less than $20,000, 37 percent earned between $20,000 and $50,000, and 42 percent exceeded $50,000. The names used here are pseudonyms. Focus groups were organized around such broad themes as sociospatial transformations in town; experiences, perceptions, and contacts with immigrants; and understandings of community.
7. The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, often referred to as the Welfare Reform Act, partly eliminated the previously existing social safety net for the poor, reduced assistance, and required welfare recipients to work, in exchange for time-limited assistance.
8. Due to space constraints I only report selected aspects of these. Remarks about immigrants’ corporeality cannot be separated from cultural characteristics, however; cultural characteristics become embodied, and bodily characteristics are culturally constructed.
9. One of the most often cited positive cultural differences was the upholding of family values by Asian and Hispanic immigrants. They are seen as embodying and rendering visible values and practices that whites have lost but long for. Although this representation reproduces an “us” versus “them,” this positive cultural stereotype can be incorporated into a discourse of acceptance and inclusion.
10. For a discussion of the role of trailer parks in housing low-wage and racialized workers, see Nelson and Hiemstra Citation(2008).
11. Thomas's (2008) work on immigrant teenage girls of Latina and Armenian descent in a Los Angeles high school suggests that although they profess postracial attitudes (i.e., racial differences do not matter), their narratives are infused with race thinking and racialized resentment.
12. More than half a century ago, Allport Citation(1954) formulated the contact hypothesis, which suggests that interpersonal contact is one of the most effective ways to reduce prejudice between minority and majority populations if certain conditions are met, including equal status of the groups, common goals, lack of competition between groups, and authority sanction for the contact. These conditions are not present in many intergroup contacts, however.