num_pages: 304
description: 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 laborers from Mexico, West Africa, and Detroit, and the newcomers transformed and revitalized this former “sundown town.” Faranak Miraftab draws on ethnographic research in Beardstown, Mexico, and Togo to analyze a space that is often overlooked in scholarship on globalization. Tracing the global processes that produce displaced workers and the social relationships that maintain them, she offers a fresh perspective on place and placemaking.
language: English
title: Global Heartland: Displaced Labor, Transnational Lives, and Local Placemaking
publisher: Indiana University Press