The Production of Race, Locality, and State: An Anthropology

Abstract

PrologueThis article emerges from a confrontation in North Carolina in 2001. The article, which is about Newfoundland as well as North Carolina, is a partial, necessarily unresolved attempt to come terms with that moment, for both its causes and its consequences seem to have very broad implications for an engaged anthropology.To tell even a brief story of the incident in 20011 have to start much earlier. For most of 1967-681 was doing rights organizing in Robeson County, North Carolina-on the swampy interior coastal plain, at the border with South Carolina. Robeson was then a particularly nasty place. It was the second richest rural county in the south, by value of agricultural produce shipped from the county, and at the same time one of the 50 poorest counties in the U.S. by average per capita income. A handful of Whites did very well, a substantial number were moderately well-off, and together they were doing whatever they could to keep it that way, against the interests and well-being of the African American and Native American peoples, who together comprised two-thirds of the county population, and who were, for the most part, desperately poor and hard-pressed.Part of the struggle we were then fighting was for school cafeterias and subsidized lunches, particularly in the rural Black and Indian schools. You could see kids rummaging around in the schoolyard garbage dumpsters in the afternoon looking for food. We involved a writer-photographer from the Charlotte Observer, then the most liberal paper in the state, who came down and took a stunning photograph: a young African American boy, about eight, inside a garbage dumpster, with his head and shoulders showing above the rim, leaning out and passing a clearly half-eaten sandwich to a younger boy, who was standing on his tip-toes, reaching up for the sandwich with an angelic smile on his young face. She published this on the front page of the Sunday edition of the paper, where folks could see it on their way to or from church. It blew the state legislature wide open; we got a lot of important programs from the ruckus it caused.Thirty-four years later, in 2001,1 am still working on issues in Robeson County, if now only episodically. In the previous five years, 8500 mostly African American and Native American women had been put out of work by the passage of the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA), and the ensuing closure of all the textile assembly cut and stitch mills that moved offshore. These mills had been the largest source of employment in the county, from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s. Before the mills were built, agriculture provided most of the work; very quickly after the mills left, poultry and hog packing became the primary employers, but with a completely different labour force. By 2000 county officials were estimating that there were 12 000-14 000 (as all Spanish-speakers and many other immigrant workers are called) in the county, about three-fourths of them undocumented, and all referred to as illegal Mexicans (for a similar instance see Striffler 2005). They were by very far the predominant workforce in the new poultry- and hog-deconstruction plants, and provided almost all of the seasonal agricultural labour. They were hard run both at work and off; most saving money at little more than minimum wage, and doing so by living packed into substandard housing, along with other severe restrictions on consumption expenses.My current research and engagement in this area focusses on the displacement of African American labour, after they won a modicum of civil rights, by undocumented immigrant workers with very few rights. A senior official in the county's Department of Social Services and a local teacher both took enough interest in my present research to tell me that there were about 70 living in a former chicken coop, telling me where it was, and suggesting I go. I went to see it and indeed there were. …