ABSTRACT
This matter-of-fact comment was made to me during a 2010 interview with Alejandro, a 33-year-old undocumented immigrant who had lived and worked in Rabun County, Georgia, for the previous 12 years.2 His comment emerged in the context of describing how, despite long hours on two different jobs to help support a wife and three children, he loves to play soccer at least once a week. Yet he had never played on the plentiful and often-empty sports fields that happened to be right next to where we were sitting during the interview (see Figure 9.1). His comment led me to
ask about soccer as I continued to interview adult male Latinos for a larger study in Rabun County. These subsequent interviews, conducted between 2010 and 2012, repeatedly affirmed that Latino immigrants – documented or otherwise – were not allowed to play soccer on sports fields in the community. This is not a formal rule to be found in any recreation department handbook, but a de facto practice. The only space Latino immigrants could access for soccer was an abandoned parking lot, a space prone to serious injury and bloodletting (see Figure 9.2). Despite the dangers of playing on it, a group of 10-15 Latino men played on this concrete “field” almost nightly during the summer months during our visits to northern Georgia. This chapter examines daily struggles over belonging and the right to recreation for Latino immigrants living in the rural South, drawing on research in Rabun County, Georgia – a “new destination” community that in 1990 was categorized by the US Census as 99.6 percent white. A small group of researchers, including myself, arrived in Rabun County in 2010 to conduct qualitative research exploring the emergence of immigrantbased labor regimes in the context of rural gentrification. We hypothesized that gentrification processes drove the astonishing 1,760 percent increase in Latino residents in the county between 1990 and 2010, as immigrants were actively recruited to work in construction, landscaping, and a range
of service industries tied to the arrival of wealthy, white “amenity” migrants to the area (Nelson et al. 2015). Perhaps this growth was not a surprising development given the extent to which immigrant-based labor regimes were expanding numerically and geographically during the 1990s across the United States (Kandel and Cromartie 2004; Zuñiga and Hernández-León 2005). Nevertheless, it was certainly completely new to Rabun County and to scholars of rural gentrification in the U.S., who until recently tended to ignore the arrival of immigrant workers in high-amenity, gentrifying rural locales in the 1990s and beyond (Nelson and Nelson 2011). To understand shifting labor markets and geographies of social reproduction, as well as explore how employers recruited immigrant workers to relatively isolated locales, we conducted fieldwork in Rabun County between 2010 and 2012. During three visits our research team conducted 128 interviews with employers, workers (immigrant and non-immigrant), gentrifiers (wealthy, white amenity migrants), and city and county officials, as well as other “locals” (the folks who usually trace their heritage back eight to nine generations). We undertook participant observation of public spaces throughout the county, in addition to collecting local textual sources from real estate ads to local planning documents. The focus of our efforts was to gather data on immigrant migration, work, and housing histories; on employer recruitment and labor practices; and on the ways various groups were negotiating belonging in everyday life. In all these areas and topics, we were attentive to the intersections of race, class, gender, and legal status in producing landscapes of production and social reproduction. Soccer and the politics of public space were not initially on our agenda, yet we were forced to grapple with the significance of the history, contemporary practice, and contested meanings of soccer for Latino male residents in the community (Latina women generally did not play soccer). It became clear that soccer games represent a set of spatial practices that spoke directly to the profound tensions between economic recruitment and social-civic exclusion faced by low-wage, racialized, and “illegal” workers. After our conversation with Alejandro, interviewees again and again confirmed that “Mexicans” (as all Latino residents were often labeled) were not allowed to play soccer on the county’s many well-groomed, public fields. It did not matter if one was documented or undocumented, no adult Latino soccer player we met felt entitled to venture onto a formal, public field to play soccer for either a pick-up game or formal one. Through players’ stories and a critical reading of landscape, this chapter explores the history of a short-lived, public Latino soccer league that played for three years between 2001 and 2003 and the subsequent emergence of the “parking lot” status quo for Latino soccer players in Rabun County. The analysis contributes to this volume’s effort to apply critical social theory to sports geographies, by considering how the spaces of
soccer – including exclusion from such spaces – reflect and enact immigrant residents’ social-political exclusion in a new destination community. Spaces of soccer shed insight into how race, class, and narratives of illegality become imbricated into daily life and shape the mundane social relations of belonging, findings that build on the burgeoning literature that uses fine-grained ethnographic approaches to exploring belonging and identity in new destination communities.3 Before turning to a discussion of soccer, the following section considers the political economic forces that recruited immigrants to Rabun County, as well as overviewing the spatial architecture of life in a place that demands immigrants’ productive labor, but excludes their social, including recreating, bodies.
