ABSTRACT
Background and Context Prior to the 1990s, Hispanic/Latino1 voices in Charlotte, North Carolina, like most other southern cities, were infrequent. When heard, they were likely to belong to someone visiting or passing through on their way to some place else, somewhere outside the region. Fifty miles to the East, in rural Montgomery County, Hispanic agricultural laborers have long been a critical but transitional part of the annual farming cycle. They appeared from distant places, stayed for weeks or months at a time, laboring as needed, and then moved on when the work was done. Until very recently, the stories of Charlotte and Montgomery County echoed across the South. This was a place Latinos would visit, a place they would ultimately leave and impact little. Over the course of the last twenty years however, the story of Latinos in the South has been rewritten and a recurring theme in the region’s cities and rural communities is one of settlement, permanence and the transformation of place. As recently as 1991, the American South was regarded by analysts as part of the Hispanic migration frontier – a place with incipient and uncertain settlement. With the exception of Florida, where even before Castro’s revolution the ebb and flow of immigration from across Latin America sustained a vibrant Latino population, the states in the South housed very few firmly established Hispanic communities. Beyond the South, of course, Latinos have long been a part of the American fabric. Mexicans in particular have been the immigrant laborers of choice for American capitalists since the 1880s (Gutiérrez, 1999). Cheap immigrant labor and a freer and more open border than exists today propelled the historic development of the U.S. and Mexico border-states into the nation’s contemporary Latino core. In the context of examining the inter regional migration geography of Chicanos in the United States, Saenz (1991) identifies Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas as ‘Aztlan’ – the nexus of settlement for persons in the U.S. of Spanish heritage. Emphasizing this area’s importance as a nucleus for Chicanos, other scholars have labeled this area MexAmerica and further subdivided it into the ‘Hispano Homeland’ of Northern New Mexico (Nostrand, 1970; Carlson, 1990) and the ‘Texas-Mexican’ homeland in
South Texas (Arreola, 1993). The culture and history of Mexican and other Hispanics in these areas is well established and firmly entrenched. Outside of this core, Latinos have also established a prominent presence in several other areas of primary and secondary settlement. In New York City, for example, Puerto Ricans became a major component of the urban population as early as the 1940s with Caribbean and South American born Hispanics following suit in the 1960s and 1970s (Lobo, Flores and Salvo, 2002). Opportunities flowing from the need for low wage labor in seasonal agriculture, agribusiness and manufacturing lured many Hispanics into the states of the northwest (Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming) and midwest (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin) as early as the first quarter of the twentieth century (Haverluk, 1998). Bolstered by continued migration flows and the in-situ development of strong social networks, Hispanic communities in these non-core regions were built and are sustained into the present day. A comparative lack of available low wage jobs, the selectivity of migrants themselves and other intervening obstacles all played a role in ensuring that the South, even into the latter portion of the twentieth century, remained a ‘frontier’ to all but a very few Latino migrants. Thus, across the 11 states that lie at the heart of the traditional American South, in large and small cities as well as rural crossroads and farms, Hispanics have been historically absent from the demographic, economic, cultural and political landscape (Figure 1.1). In this context, the patterns of Latino migration and settlement that unfolded throughout the 1990s marked a profound shift. In a region where social status, economic relations, and public consciousness have been framed by the bi-racial constructs of ‘White’ and ‘Black’, the arrival of a growing number of culturally different and linguistically alien immigrants has had far reaching effects. Cultural conventions and social institutions have been challenged. Commercial and residential landscapes have been transformed. New Latino migrants are cautiously viewed as ‘assets’ and/or more boldly as ‘problems’. In a region that continues to grapple with long held traditions of privilege, belonging, and ‘race’, the growing presence of Latinos complicates the traditional mythology of southerness and gives rise to yet another iteration of the so called ‘New South’. The idea of a New South whose characteristics and development path set it apart from its historic lineage has of course been a part of the regional ethos for a long time. Dating back to the immediate post civil war era, political and economic interests developed and promoted the concept to emphasize a future of progress and prosperity that would stand in stark contrast to both the antebellum and war ravaged southern eras (Mixon, 1989). In many ways this rhetoric also served to gloss over the inequality, injustices and racial discrimination that continued to thrive despite the region’s movement towards modernization and industrialization in the early 20th century. More recently, the terminology of the New South has again been used to describe the post-industrial trajectory of the region, its growing globalization, as well as the escalating numbers of Hispanic migrants arriving and settling in the region when phrased as the ‘Nuevo South’ (Mohl, 2005). As Mixon (1989) writes in his entry to the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, the danger is
that by claiming something is new one suggests that the ills of the past have been replaced and that something fundamentally new and improved is afoot. In a region defined by its enduring biraciality, the rapid and large scale introduction of Hispanics raises profound questions about the way in which new populations either force a rethinking of old precepts or lead to an entrenchment and extension of them. The degree to which the New South into which Hispanics are entering is a place of true transformation, adjustment and acceptance or a veneer masking entrenchment, difference and conflict is a central question uniting the collective chapters in this book.
