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Abstract:
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Since the mid -1990s , Central Mississippi has become home to a new population of migrants from across Latin America . Recruited by the chicken processing industry , these newcomers work alongside a longstanding and disenfranchised Black workforce in the country’s lowest paid and most dangerous jobs . This study addresses the globalization of rural Mississippi , its relationship to capital and labor , and its human implications for established Southern communities as well as new immigrant groups . It explores the ways in which people of different backgrounds understand and experience migration , shaped to a large degree by the historical and contemporary political economies of race and white privilege in this region . It examines the changes in the poultry industry over time that led to its recent recruitment of foreign -born laborers , and it illustrates the ways in which difference is constructed and maintained among people of diverse backgrounds in both communities and workplaces in the area . Through ethnography of discourses and interactions across lines of difference - -both inside the plants , where identity categories are exploited for labor control and profit , and outside , as workers go about their everyday segregated lives - -the dissertation argues that transnational migration is both transforming and consolidating social hierarchies in the region . Migrants are not entering society at the bottom , but rather are inserted into a precarious space between white and Black , and their positioning in society is often shifting and situational . This conclusion holds vital implications for workers’ prospects for political mobilization . It suggests that in the globalized present , organizers of lowwage workers must understand class as but one of a number of cross cutting axes of identity formation , and that class struggle alone will not bring about social change in a newly multicultural workforce . In a world increasingly driven by neoliberalism and divided by racial and ethnic conflict , the research creates a deeper awareness of the relationships between industrial restructuring , transnational migration , and political economies of race , revealing both challenges and possibilities for newly multicultural communities seeking social , economic , and workplace justice . |