UC Merced

In the late 1980s, northern meat packaging plants in the United States shut their doors and moved South in search of a lower paid workforce and deregulated labor laws. Hispanics throughout the United States and abroad migrated to work in these plants, most of which were in predominantly white communities that had not seen immigration in several generations. Until then, through racial cleansing practices and the use of sundown towns, parts of Arkansas and the majority of northwest Arkansas (NWA) remained overwhelmingly white. Considering this context of a predominately white geographic area with a history of racial discrimination against ethnic minorities, I adopt a lens of racialization to examine Hispanics’ sense of belonging in the U.S. South. During May and August of 2018, I interviewed Hispanics in NWA aged 18 to 26 (n=35). Consistent with previous research, my results suggest that some Hispanic youths experience a contradictory sense of belonging as they feel a strong sense of belonging in some spaces, yet simultaneously experience exclusion in other spaces. Negative racialized experiences, racial discrimination, and anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric force Hispanics to constantly renegotiate their sense of belonging in NWA and draw boundaries between where they belong and where they do not belong. Insofar as previous research has focused primarily on newly arrived immigrants, this study is novel since it focuses on the experiences of their children.