Nostalgia and precarious placemaking in southern poultry worlds: Immigration, race, and community building in rural Northern Alabama

Abstract

In popular discourse, Alabama is often taken as a metonym for Trump's America: emblematic of the misogynist, racist and xenophobic politics of the populist groundswell. I interrogate this characterization by examining politics and community building in Albertville, Alabama a rural city (in a county where 82.8% voted for Donald Trump) dominated by the influence of the poultry industry and, in a related turn, dramatically reconstituted by a doubling of Latinx immigration (now 29.8% of the population) over the past 15 years. In Albertville, the poultry industry forms the apex of systemic precarity, where workers face low wages with hazardous work conditions and owners compete in a market with notoriously small margins for profit: 28.7% of the town lives below the federal poverty line. Despite widespread poverty, Latinx migrants are positively recognized by the white community for their economic contributions from working the majority of poultry jobs and providing strong secondary effects to the local economy. Instead of anxieties about the economy and job displacement, I argue that white Albertville residents were primarily politically motivated by racialized nostalgic notions of nation and community. I track this nostalgia ethnographically in community organizations aiming to recapture town heritage by promoting the aesthetic erasure of the Latinx presence in town despite everyday resistance of Latinx community members. This leads me to reframe authoritarian populism in terms of its nostalgic affective politics and imagine how this might give rise to new forms of resistance.