Meatpacking America: How Migration, Work, and Faith Work to Divide the Heartland by Kristy Nabhan-Warren

Abstract

Reviewed by: Meatpacking America: How Migration, Work, and Faith Work to Divide the Heartland by Kristy Nabhan-Warren Elaine A. Peña Meatpacking America: How Migration, Work, and Faith Work to Divide the Heartland. By Kristy Nabhan-Warren. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. xxii, 280. $19.95. ISBN: 978-1-469-66349-4.) In Meatpacking America: How Migration, Work, and Faith Unite and Divide the Heartland, Kristy Nabhan-Warren examines a diversity of Catholic devotion across rural Iowa. Taking a lived religion approach that is sensitive to race and migration, she joins Bethany Moreton and Nicole Kirk (among others) in advancing the study of the “religiosity of workplaces” (p. 6). Thinking about Catholicism’s long-standing minority status in Iowa alongside the state’s place as a secondary destination for refugees and economic migrants, she purposefully asks, “Are inclusive religious and workspaces possible in the twenty-century United States?” (p. 65). Ultimately, Nabhan-Warren argues, inclusive spaces are possible with “close working relationships” (p. 65) and, most importantly, a deep, hands-on investment among and across those at the top of the meatpacking industry, community leaders (e.g., laity, business) and slaughterhouse laborers. Seven years of ethnographic research and “voluntary immersion experiences” (p. 57), including a fifty hour-workweek shadowing laborers that can “resemble meat ninja warriors” (p. 171), bolster Nabhan-Warren’s claims. In the vein of anthropologist Steve Striffler’s Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food (2007), an ethnography of the poultry industry, she devotes an entire chapter to describing “hot side” labor (e.g., “the kill floor” p. 180) and “cold side” labor (e.g., “boning chucks and ribs” with USDA inspection, p. 191). Nabhan-Warren offers readers smelly, aching, viscose-thick description of the how of religion—how [End Page 823] higher ups’ unequivocal acceptance of religion on company property is intimately tied to inter-corporate “evangelical Christian terminology” and a multi-generational “Faith at Work movement” (pp. 109–11); and how time-sheet-holding HR personnel oversee devotional acts, including when Muslim women modify workspace to observe Salat, or prayer (pp. 165–66). While we do not hear from the women themselves about working with pork and creating locker-cum-sacred space amidst stubborn stenches and stains, Nabhan-Warren’s perceptive observation of non-Christian practice illustrates what one can miss when pursuing a study focused on Catholicism in U.S. workplaces. Indeed, in the introduction, the author offers a refreshing and straightforward explanation of the conceptual shift she decided to take once field research had shown her that keeping Catholicism in the spotlight, as she had initially intended, was impossible. Many of the slaughterhouse laborers with whom she worked, and the majority nationwide, are Latinx; but it goes without saying that not all Latinx are Catholic, or even Christian for that matter. Moreover, her steadfast attention to the broader history of refugee resettlement in Iowa, acknowledging the migratory legacies of the Bracero Program (1942–64), and the winding life stories of laborers from the Congo, Burma-Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, and Vietnam, for example, open up generative pathways for future research. Nabhan-Warren had to pivot, and she did so with admirable transparency, especially when it came to acknowledging her own race, class, and citizenship privileges. Her self-awareness is painstaking, almost too careful, but productive, nonetheless. She introduces the term “politics of inclusivity” (p. 52) to grapple with the antagonistic residue of racial politics that make inclusivity, religious and otherwise, challenging. In other words, workplace leaders may dutifully sanction religious practice among a global labor force, but that inclusivity does not necessarily hold off-site. That point is crystallized when a chance encounter between “white” Iowans and a non-white woman produces palpable tension in the basement of a Catholic parish—in theory, an inclusive space. That vignette further reminds us that inclusivity is not just participatory, it is inherently spatial—and spaces have existing claim histories. That chance encounter is telling, and Meatpacking could do with more of those moments, but the organization of the book makes it hard. For the record, we should not overlook the fact that Nabhan-Warren carried out years of research...