ABSTRACT
Introduction During the 1990s, towns in Tennessee and across the American South underwent a metamorphosis. Sleepy ‘-burgs’ and ‘-villes’, where ‘Waffle Houses’ dot the landscape and boiled peanuts can be bought at the side of the road, began receiving a steady stream of Spanish speaking newcomers. Colorful Iglesias, Tiendas, and Taquerias began sprouting up next to ‘Buddy’s Barbeques’ and ‘Piggly Wiggly’ markets in regions nearly untouched by international migration in over a century. Outside city limits, moreno workers began appearing on the mushroom farms, in the orchards, and even in the cotton fields. What all of these changes point to is a new South emerging from the old – a multicultural, transnational dominion in what was once America’s pre-eminent bi-racial landscape. This chapter explores the dimension and importance of these changes. It does so by combing through the vast amount of data made available by the U.S. Census and pulling out strands that can help us understand how Tennessee communities are evolving. Statewide figures actually tell us very little about how Tennessee has changed over the past decade. The impacts of immigration are not spread evenly over the region’s surface, but rather are concentrated in just a few locales. It is in these places where the transformations wrought by immigration are felt and where the imprints of change are left indelible on the landscape. It is these places that will either provide Latinos with the opportunity to settle comfortably and climb the economic ladder or will leave them struggling. It is therefore through the lens of place that this chapter examines ‘the Nuevo South’. The chapter begins by mapping out the cities in Tennessee and neighborhoods within them that Latinos are moving to. It details the forces producing these patterns at both the regional and the neighborhood scale. Next, it contrasts levels of human capital among Latinos living in locales heavily impacted by migration with statewide and national trends in human capital among Latinos. More broadly, human capital-the skills and abilities used in employment-is important because it is a measure of the resources immigrants have for upward mobility. Examples of
human capital include education, job training, language ability, and an understanding of the local economy etc. Just as immigrants themselves are not evenly distributed throughout the landscape, there is also a geography to where immigrants with more and less human capital settle. Further, different places provide different opportunities for upward mobility. This combination of factors has important consequences for the allocation of government resources to programs designed to aid in Latino integration and points to both hurdles and opportunities available to ‘the new neighbors in Dixie’. The Geography of Latino Migration to Tennessee In the Western United States, Latino communities have taproots that extend deep into the region’s history. Cities in the West, like Los Angeles, Albuquerque, and El Paso, trace their origins back to the era when the American Southwest belonged to Spanish-controlled Mexico. The scattering of Mexican communities left after the battles of the U.S. Mexican War were later joined by hundreds of thousands of Latino immigrants in the ensuing century and a half (Gonzales, 1993; Ortiz, 1996). Though barrios did not predate statehood in the Midwest and Northeast, the naissance of many of these neighborhoods was over a century ago (Valdés, 1991). Before the 1990s, Latinos were immigrating in large numbers to areas across the United States: Cubans to Miami, Puerto Ricans to New York, Mexicans to the southwest, the Rocky Mountain States and Midwest (see Portes and Rumbaut, 1996). Latinos were moving almost everywhere except the American South. During the 1990s, the tide of migration that had previously swept around Tennessee began to pour into it. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 92,763 Latinos moved to the ‘Volunteer State’ between 1990 and 2000, leading to almost a threefold increase in the Hispanic population according to official statistics. Some groups, such as the Tennessee Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, charge that census figures capture as little as a quarter of the actual Latino population in some areas (Wadhwani, 2004). Yet despite these changes, by the year 2000 Latinos were officially only 2.3 per cent of Tennessee’s population. One might be tempted to dismiss the new arrivals as a drop in the demographic bucket, but as William Clark (1998) points out in the California Cauldron, immigrants do not settle uniformly across an area. Instead, they gravitate towards locales where the demand for low-wage labor is high and a network of family and friends already living in the area can provide temporary housing and job information, lessening the risks of moving to an unfamiliar part of the world (MacDonald and MacDonald, 1974; Gurak, 1992; Waldinger, 1996). Latino migration to Tennessee has followed this pattern of limited concentration. As revealed by the long tail in Figure 2.1, most towns in Tennessee have been largely bypassed. A handful of areas, however, have become magnets in the past ten years. Table 2.1 lists the ten cities with the highest percentages of Latinos in Tennessee. Notably absent from this list are Tennessee’s largest metropoles. Instead, a handful of medium sized Tennessee towns have been greatly
Source: Calculations from the U.S. Census Bureau, 2000. Figure 2.1 Percentage of Latino population in Tennessee towns and cities
(populations greater than 1,500), 2000 Table 2.1 Ranked list of towns with the highest percentages of Latinos in
Tennessee and the largest employer of Latinos in these areas Rank City Per cent
Latino Total Population
Major Employer of Latinos
1 Bells 22.8% 2,171 Pictsweet Vegetables (packaging plant)
2 Monterey 16.3% 2,717 Perdue Farms (chicken processing) 3 Shelbyville 14.6% 16,105 Tyson Foods (chicken processing) 4 Morristown 10.4% 24,965 Koch Foods
(food processing) 5 Collegedale 7.7% 6,514 McKee Foods (makers of Little
Debbie snacks) 6 Springfield 6.9% 14,329 Electrolux Appliance
(manufacturing) 7 McMinnville 6.8% 12,749 Wholesale Nursery Industry 8 Clarksville 6.0% 103,455 Fort Campbell Military Base 9 Lenoir 6.0% 6,819 Monterey Mushrooms 10 Lewisburg 5.2% 10,413 Walker Die Casting 12 Nashville-
Davidson 4.7% 545,524 Diverse
29 Memphis 3.0% 650,100 Diverse Source: Calculations from the U.S. Census and author’s interviews with local Chamber of Commerce officials.
