Global Heartland: Displaced Labor, Transnational Lives, and Local Placemaking, Faranak

Miraftab. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. 310 pages. ISBN 978-0-253-01942-4

By Aaron Arredondo

Faranak Miraftabs Global Heartland presents an excellent account of immigrant newcomers

lives in the small industrial locality of Beardstown, Illinois, where they take part in creating a

home-like environment while enduring the wide-ranging constraints of global capitalism.

Through her method, theory, and practice, Miraftab makes great strides in reconciling opposing

viewpoints on global-local relations in the urban scholarship. Whereas traditional ethnography

might focus on what communities are doing at the local level, a political-economic framework

would tend to overgeneralize the impact of global capitalism on populations. Miraftab offers a

relational perspective that makes sense of how the global processes of capital accumulation are

intimately connected to the everyday lives of peopleparticularly in their relationship to specific

localities across vast distances. This is what characterizes the relational dimension of

transnational lifehow people in different corners of the world construct the global through an

everyday cultural identity anchored in their localized practices.

Throughout the book, Miraftab presents two theoretical frameworks that inform the

relational production of difference in Beardstown. This is according to the various social,

cultural, and ethnic characteristics of immigrant newcomer population groups. These frameworks

are comprised of spatial theorizations and economic geography perspectives. Concerning the

spatial component, Miraftab pays close attention to the politics of in-placement, which is defined

by the process of creating a home-like environment in the destination country. Regarding the

economic aspect, she centers her discussion on the crisis of social reproduction, mainly referring

to the costs exported to families and communities in places of origin to ensure that the needs of

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newcomers are metultimately with the intention that they remain as healthy and productive

workers in Beardstown.

These features of spatial productionwithin the context of global capitalismunderline

how Mexicans, Togolese, and Black Detroiters are socially constructed in the context of an

industrial town according to their various legal, economic, linguistic, and cultural characteristics.

Miraftab encourages us to keep in mind how these productions of difference are formed against

the backdrop of a former "sundown town" historically an all-white locality that posed

restrictions on African-Americans remaining in, or entering after sunset.

This socio-historical reality is governed by the corporate operations of the Cargill meat-

packing plant, placing it as a principal node in the racialized landscape of Beardstown. As a

multinational that set the stage for immigrant settlement in a historically white locality, Cargill

sought out displaced workers from the Global Southdisplaced by the processes of

dispossession that uprooted them from their homes and drove them into the low-wage industrial

sector of the Global North. Because the agricultural and service sectors of the Global South have

been considerably undermined by global capitalism, Cargill has been able to actively recruit the

dispossessed as workers since the early 1990s. Such is the logic of capital accumulation that has

inevitably transformed the social landscape of Beardstown, reinventing and contexualizing it as

part of a Global Heartland.

To explain how changes in global capitalism shaped the demographic shift of

Beardstown, Miraftab points to the industrial restructurings that outsourced production to

economically distressed small towns in the U.S. South and rural Midwest. Seizing opportunity in

the context of an unrestricted market economy, Cargill undermined wages by driving out its

previous workforce and replacing it with immigrants from Mexico and Togo. Looking at the

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effect of these restructuring on the transnational lives of immigrants, Miraftab identifies how the

costs of care in maintaining a viable and healthy workforce are transferred over to families and

communities in the Global South. In this manner, social reproduction is organized around a

translocal rural-urban relationship where the localities of the Global South subsidize wages for

capital in the Global North.

Moreover, Miraftab affirms that the scholarship has not really concerned itself with

documenting how communities back home actually generate social reproduction in host

countriesspecifically, how the Global South operates at the sending end of remittances instead

of remaining at the receiving end. She finds that Cargill workers from Tejaro do not have much

of a choice but to go back to Michoacn and apply for Mexican social security and seek non-

profit health services when they find themselves ill or injured on the job. Evidently, not only has

Cargill taken advantage of the precarious labor conditions of Mexican workers, but sends them

back home to make use of increasingly scarce resources there. This transnational structure of

social reproductionas it concerns the economics of underpaid and free care work performed by

communities in the Global Southfurther ensures that immigrant workers remain in their low-

wage manufacturing jobs at Cargill.

In addition, Miraftab clarifies that remittances sent back home are not just limited to

money. In part two of the book, the aspirations of Lomelese at winning the visa lottery shows

how certain social remittances (Levitt 2001)which are symbolic resources in the form of

recognition, affirmation, and affecthave inspired many in the community to relocate to the

Global North. This is how Miraftab makes the point that a relational theorization framework is

useful for making sense of the multidirectional flow of resources that enable the social and

cultural reproduction of immigrant workers.

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 So, instead of presenting a reductive account of the economic forces that promote

industrial restructurings, or zooming in narrowly into the motives behind immigrants decision to

relocate, Miraftab documents why people move around the world as workers and how those

patterns and motives connect to the larger global processes that produce a cheap labor force. In

accounting for the localized component, she is able to theoretically integrate the agency of

displaced workers who, in creating a home-like environment for themselves, transform the places

of their destinationwhat Miraftab calls in-placement. Its conceptual application offers an

assessment of how displaced persons construct the reality of their lived experience as they

navigate the currents of global capitalism.

Concerning the materiality of place, which is a concept that refers to the surrounding

physical world in terms of the built environment, Miraftab notes that the story we repeatedly hear

is about remittances being sent back to the Global South for developing infrastructure there.

What tends to be overlooked, according to her, is how these places themselves shape the

development of the destination localityin this case, how families and communities in Mexico

and Togo enrich the built environment of Beardstown. Through this mode of community

development, Cargill workers are able to engage in the process of creating a home-like

environment over time.

These placemaking practices have also resulted in economic gain for long term white

residents, particularly through property tax revenues. Since Mexican homeownership was made

possible in Beardstown in the early 1990sa time when immigrants were not required to show

legal residency documentation to obtain a low interest mortgagethey were able to rent out to

later waves of West Africans who had initially settled in the neighboring town of Rushville in

2000. At the same time that their commute to work became more untenable with rising gas prices

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in 2008, these housing market transactions further promoted the residential integration of

Beardstown. Local whites who stood opposed to the demographic shift had no choice but to

adapt to the presence of newcomers or find a way to exit Beardstown entirely.

As a point of critiqueconsidering how new destination settings tend to marginalize

newcomers participation in the localized public realmconceiving of placemaking as a

politicized practice enables a new way of thinking about the racialized locality of a former

"sundown town." By expanding the conceptual margin of placemaking to account for the

abstracted dimensions of politics and culture, there exists greater possibility in reconfiguring a

localized racial order that outlines human exchange within and throughout the public domain of

everyday associational life.

However, Miraftab had already responded to a related argumentative logic that privileges

the more symbolic and immaterial aspects of spatial arrangements and practicesshe identifies

this as a post-material position (p.217). The idea is that newer urban scholarship in the twenty-

first century often focuses too much on the representational aspects of space, paying little or no

attention to its materiality. Accordingly, it is this post-material turn which she identifies as

having fostered a metrocentrism that obscures the range of place-based political possibility in

localities outside the metropolis. Following Miraftabs reasoning, it makes sense to pay close

attention to the material dimensions of placemaking, especially when a powerful multinational

corporation engaged in the workings of industrial production maintains significant oversight of

place-based social relations. Then again, it was Cargill who introduced newcomers to a setting

that had never experienced the physical proximity of neighboring with culturally diverse people.

Furthermore, although Miraftab integrates accounts of soccer play and festivities as

important cultural dimensions of placemaking, she does not seem to seriously engage the

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narrative of local whites or immigrant newcomers in how they construct the reality of their lived

experience. The question remains of how these groups themselves directly inform the realms of

politics and cosmopolitan possibility in Beardstown.

In the entire chapter "We Got People"which is dedicated to immigrant newcomer

placemakingMiraftab mainly features two extended vignettes: one from a dual language

teacher, and the other from a local community leader. Both accounts speak in terms of their

observations about Beardstown newcomers and what they think is the manner in which they are

caricatured in the localized white imaginary. Despite having interviewed eleven multicultural

soccer leagues, Miraftab only introduces a few lines from Roberto, the founder of a soccer

league. His position, as a community organizer of sorts, ethnographically locates him as yet

another community leader. Narratives coming from such vantage points often entail a different

perspective from that of immigrant workers relegated to the lowest sectors of manufacturing.

In any case, Miraftab briefly notes a conversation she had with spectators Diego and

Jorge on the occasion of a soccer tournament for a single day. As immigrants from Guanajuato

working at Cargill, their commentary is very revealing about the interracial dynamics between

Mexicans and West Africans, claiming that one of their points of solidarity stems from the reality

that they both grew up playing soccer barefoot.

Following this example, if Miraftab could more extensively integrate the stories of

marginalized newcomers, she would be better able to offer broader insights on how they

construct their lived experience as displaced workers and how they go about adapting, claiming,

and/or negotiating certain spaces for community development. What would they have to say

about adapting and appropriating local spaces as a form of resistance to their visibility and

invisibility in the public domain?

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 Case in point, when Miraftab conversed with Jorge, he mentioned that Latina/o/x had

revitalized Beardstown, but did not delve much into the meaning of that statement. It would have

been helpful to follow up on Jorges comment and see what others like him had to say about the

revitalization of the city and how they claim involvement in that process. Instead, Miraftab puts

forth the idea that what is actually taking place in Beardstown is a "politics of performance"

which nonetheless seems like a deductive theoretical application based on her own ethnographic

observations about culturally-specific festivities. Because Mexican Independence Day and Africa

Day celebrations were organized from below, she presents them as modes of placemaking that

disrupt the localized racial order through the performative element of racialized bodies being

present for a specific time across a particular space. In this regard, Miraftab contends that the

festivities were very much a politicized practice whether it was knowingly or unknowingly.

I wonder to what extent newcomers consider these cultural festivities a direct response to

the marginality of their lived experience, or how they intend on their presence having a

disruptive effect on the continuity of whiteness in Beardstown. As far as they are concernedare

they solely engaging in cultural celebration, or is this part of a greater effort at making a political

statement through temporally contingent occupations of public space?

Going into Miraftabs methodology, she draws substantially from Harts (2006) relational

comparison approach, weaving together the localities of Beardstown, Detroit, Lom, and Tejaro

as nodal points across a vast geography to reveal something more comprehensive about the

global. She also extends from Marcus (1995) multi-sited ethnography approachthe main

difference being that she does not follow and stay with participants, or move in with the

particular groups she writes about. She instead visits with the families and communities of

Cargill workers in their respective hometowns of Lom and Tejaro, in an effort to analytically

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move toward a broader understanding of the processes and power structures that connect

Beardstown to these localities.

Although she bases the validity of her analysis on this methodological protocol, Miraftab

does not cover much base, if at all, about the use of photoethnography as a principal component

of her method. Seeing how some of her main points of data are illustrated by these depictions,

the methods section could benefit from a thorough discussion of the use and importance of visual

research in ethnography and how it informs her specific research questions. Also, what

implications might her use of photography have for the ongoing debates in ethnography

concerning the portrayal of participants, particularly through the visual means?

Nonetheless, Miraftab offers an innovative way of thinking about the local and its impact

on conceptualizing the global and globalization. Through her work, she keeps moving forward in

overcoming the marginalization of the local in the mainstream urban literature and extends her

relational framework to mutually integrate the often juxtaposed components of the local and

global, especially as they pertain to the processes of placemaking and social reproduction.

In regards to the conceptual application of placemaking, Miraftab seems to reduce its

politicized potential by way of its use as a benchmark on which to expound the relationality of

transnational life. In doing so, she misses out on a further elaboration of how locally specific

forms of cultural-political efficacy could be instituted from below. It would be worthwhile

considering the extent to which racialized newcomers are able to create spaces of deliberation

that concern their involvement in local community matters.

Also, recognizing how her research questions are conceptually driven by the relational

ordering of the local and global within the context of global capitalism, there lacks a thorough

explanation of the significance of the local for the localized public realm itself. The study could

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make a more detailed account about the significance of this transnational arrangement for

addressing locally specific issues in Beardstown.

References

Hart, Gillian. (2006). Denaturalizing Dispossession: Critical Ethnography in the Age of

Resurgent Imperialism. Antipode 38 (5): pp. 977-1004.

Levitt, Peggy. (2001). The Transnational Villagers. Berkeley, CA: University of California

Press.

Marcus, George. (1995). Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited

Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24: pp. 95-117.

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