Latin American Migrations to the U.S. Heartland ─ Changing Social Landscapes in Middle America

Responding to inaccuracies concerning Latino immigrants in the United States as well as an anti-immigrant strain in the American psyche, this collection of essays examines the movement of the Latin American labor force to the central states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa. Contributors look at the outside factors that affect migration including corporate agriculture, technology, globalization, and government, as well as factors that have attracted Latin Americans to the Heartland including religion, strong family values, hard work, farming, and cowboy culture. Several essays also point to hostile neoliberal policy reforms that have made it difficult for Latino Americans to find social and economic stability. The varied essays in Latin American Migrations to the U.S. Heartland seek to reveal the many ways in which identities, economies, and geographies are changing as Latin Americans adjust to their new homes, jobs, and communities.

Contributors are Linda Allegro, Tisa M. Anders, Scott Carter, Caitlin Didier, Miranda Cady Hallett, Edmund Hamann, Albert Iaroi, Errol D. Jones, Jane Juffer, Laszlo J. Kulcsar, Janelle Reeves, Jennifer F. Reynolds, Sandi Smith-Nonini, and Andrew Grant Wood.

Linda Allegro is an independent scholar engaged in immigrant and worker advocacy in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Andrew Grant Wood is the Stanley Rutland Professor of American History at the University of Tulsa. He is the author of Revolution in the Street: Women, Workers and Urban Protest in Veracruz, 1870–1927 and editor of The U.S.-Mexico Border: An Encyclopedia of Culture and Politics.