Global Heartland ─ Displaced Labor, Transnational Lives, and Local Placemaking

In recent decades, Beardstown, Illinois, like other towns of the Midwest’s rural rustbelt, experienced population decline and economic stagnation. The meat processing plant that is the town’s main employer replaced its white, native-born workforce by recruiting in Mexico, in West Africa, and among African Americans in Detroit. Over time the newcomers transformed Beardstown. The town’s economy has been revitalized, and racially integrated neighborhoods have emerged in this former "sundown town." Faranak Miraftab draws on fieldwork in Beardstown, Mexico, and Togo to explore the dynamics of the production and social reproduction of a global migrant workforce and the impact of these workers on towns such as Beardstown. Miraftab argues that rather than siphoning resources from the town through their remittances, it is the families and public institutions in immigrants’ communities of origin that are contributing to the development of places like Beardstown.

Faranak Miraftab is Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is author of Women’s Empowerment: Participation in Shelter Strategies at the Community Level in Urban Informal Settlements and editor (with David Wilson and Ken Salo) of Cities and Inequalities in a Global and Neoliberal World, Cities of the Global South Reader, and Planning and Decentralization: Contested Spaces for Public Action in the Global South.