the Nuevo South with Dr. Perla M. Guerrero (ep 2b, 45).

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
perla m. guerrero. (00:02):
when I moved to Arkansas, my, my family
had learned about the souththrough what they saw about
the Civil Rights movement.
And I remember mymother asking my father.
What about like the policeand the police dogs and the
referring to the use of dogsduring the Civil Rights movement
to attack black protestors?
And I had learned a little bitin, in my history classes about

(00:26):
the civil rights movement.
So I was like, I told heryour ideas are antiquated.
That's not what theSouth is anymore.
I think that is true.
That is not what theSouth was in 1996.
It is undeniable that thefoundation of the nation as
a slave holding nation, thefoundation of the South as

(00:46):
a region that wanted to holdonto slavery, meant that we
were really unprepared forgrappling with what that place
is and how these attitudesand approaches to race and
racial difference would shapenot just our experiences,
but that place itself.

mike rusch. (01:50):
Well, you are listening to the underview,
an Exploration and theShaping of Our Place.
My name is Mike Ruschandtoday's episode, it may be
one of the more difficultepisodes to reckon with, but
this is exactly why theseconversations are needed.
We need a space where we canboth be honest, ask questions,
and attempt to reckon, becausereckoning can sometimes open
the door that allows us to heal.

(02:11):
Today we're asking areally hard question, what
happens when a place that'sbeen defined by a single
ethnicity that of whiteness?
What happens when it experiencesrapid dynamic diversification?
Throughout this season, thisconversation has been building.
Earlier this year, welearned from Dr. Steven
Rosales about the forcesthat drew Latino workers
to Arkansas and the poultryindustry that needed them.

(02:34):
We've listened to Magali Licollidescribe the realities of that
work, and we've examined withOlivia Paschal how corporate
power shaped this entire region.
We've heard from Irvin Camachoabout the fear gripping
immigrant communities right now.
In fact, two weeks ago Islipped into a pizza place
in Johnson to learn whatit means to reckon with the
history and these structuresthat are actively harming

(02:55):
people in our community todayactively harming our neighbors.
Today we seek tounderstand how all of these
threads might connect.
How does history shape thepresent and how does Place
and legacy influence whofeels welcome and who doesn't?
And perhaps most urgentlyare there patterns that
we need to understand inorder to comprehend what's
happening right now.

(03:15):
Today my guest is Dr. PerlaGuerrero, associate Professor
of American Studies, and thedirector of US Latina and
Latino studies program atthe University of Maryland.
Her book, Nuevo South,examines the transformation
of northwest Arkansas from the1970s forward as Vietnamese
refugees, Cuban refugees andMexican immigrants arrived

(03:37):
in a place that was in someplaces, almost 99% white through
most of the 20th century.
Dr. Guerrero isn't justan outside observer.
She lived this story personally.
Her family moved fromCalifornia to Fort Smith
when she was 16, drawn by theword of jobs in the poultry
industry, and she arrivedas an undocumented immigrant

(03:57):
and experienced firsthandhow Northwest Arkansas made
sense of new arrivals duringa time of very rapid change.
What makes Dr. Guerrero's workvaluable for our conversation
is the question she asks,how do communities respond to
demographic transformation?
Why were some groups receiveddifferently than others?
What does it mean when peopleare accepted as workers but

(04:19):
become threatening when theybecome visible in public
spaces, when they establishroots, and when they start
to look like they're staying.
This conversation isabout trying to understand
difficult questions.
How do the same economicstructures persist
across generations, evenas the faces change?
And how does Racializationwork as a process rather
than a fixed category?

(04:39):
And how might regional history,including histories we've
explored throughout thispast season around racial
violence and exclusion, howdoes that shape contemporary
responses to new arrivals?
When Dr. Guerrero's book waspublished in 2017, in it,
she asked why Arkansas hadnot enacted more punitive
anti-immigrant legislationcompared to other states

(05:00):
like Alabama and Georgia.
Today that questionhas a different answer.
What does that shift tell us?
What are we trying tomaintain or control?
And frankly, whatare we afraid of?
These aren't easy questions,but if we wanna understand
this place and its people andhow it's forming, we have to
be willing to explore them.
We have to ask whatbelonging actually means.

(05:20):
Who gets to decide, andwhether the patterns of
the past are shaping thepossibilities of the future.
Alright, we've got a wholelot to work through today.
Let's get into it.
I have the privilege today ofsharing a table with Dr. Perla
Guerrero, who's the AssociateProfessor of
American Studies and thedirector of the US Latina
and Latino Studies at theUniversity of Maryland.

(05:42):
Dr. Guerrero, thankyou for being a part
of this conversation.
Welcome to it.
I'm glad to have you here today.

perla m. guerr (05:47):
Thank you, Mike.
I'm very happy to be here.

I've got a whole lot of questions for you, so
I hope you're ready becauseI think both the work that
you've been doing and where weare in this cultural moment.
I think there's a whole lot totalk about and to understand.
And I guess my hope as we walkthrough this is that we can take
away the understanding of reallythe lived realities of what
our immigrant communities herein northwest Arkansas and even

(06:11):
beyond that are looking like.
So thank you , and I'll let youstart wherever you would like.
Maybe it'd be helpful to givea little bit of your personal
background and maybe how youended up in this field of study.

Yeah, thank you.
Thanks again for inviting me.
I'm happy to share a littlebit about my own story
along with my research.
So I am an immigrantwho's born in Mexico.
My family moved my familyengaged in what scholars
call step migration.
My dad came to the UnitedStates first and then we
joined him five years later.
I don't remember if Isay this in the book,

(06:42):
but we were undocumented.
My, my family allentered undocumented.
We were able to legalizethrough IRCA, which is often
called Amnesty which islegislation this passed in 1986.
And I say that because it'simportant for folks to know that
at least in my case, I'm veryaware of the legal structures
that have defined my life.

(07:03):
Although I am now a UScitizen, my entry point
into this country was asan undocumented immigrant.
So my dad moved or migratedto California in 1980.
We joined him in 1985.
We lived in a place calledPico Rivera, California, which
is on the east side of LA, amajority Mexican American and

(07:25):
Mexican immigrant community.
We lived there until I was 16.
My family moved to Arkansasright in the summer between my
junior in the summer, betweenmy sophomore and junior year.
And I really love LA,LA is where I grew up.
It's, it holds a specialplace in my heart.
Arkansas was and when I tellpeople that I moved right at

(07:46):
16, they're like, whoa, thatmust have been really hard.
And it was challenging,but more so in hindsight,
I didn't quite know whatto expect when I moved.
But it, it was just avery different place.
California, again, ismajority Mexican American,
so what that meant is that Iwasn't really any different
then so many other people.

(08:06):
Now, I don't want to paint apicture of this rosy picture of
California's not being racist ornot having nativist sentiments.
I was definitely calledracial slurs in California
by Mexican American people.
But because everyone wasLatina Latino it, I didn't
feel as othered in myeveryday life the way I did

(08:29):
when I moved to Arkansas.
California, the nationexperienced large recession
in the mid 1990s thatleft my dad unemployed.
And after struggling withunemployment for two to three
years, we had a friend of thefamily whose brother had moved
to Arkansas, and it was throughthis social network that word
came down to my dad that therewere plenty of jobs in something

(08:50):
called "pollería", which is whata lot of people call the poultry
industry, Spanish speakers.
My dad didn't really knowwhat that meant, like
working with chickens.
Nobody really knew what thatwas, but they knew that it
was a cheaper place to live.
They knew that there were plentyof jobs and my dad's never been
afraid of hard work, so he'slike, let me go check it out.

(09:13):
And yeah.
And so we moved to Arkansas.
I moved to Fort Smith.
I arrived to North Side HighSchool, which I would later find
out was largely both workingclass and a high school where a
lot of students of color went.
In Fort Smith, it's northside versus south side
for the public schools.
South Side High School ismuch whiter and the kids

(09:37):
that go there, at least whenI attended, tended to be
kids of solidly middle toupper middle class families.
North side is wherethe rest of us were.
And so I finished high school atNorthside and then I went to UCA
for my BA and I lived throughthe transition of Arkansans,
excuse me, not really knowinghow to make sense of me, how

(09:59):
to racialize me, which we cantalk about in a moment to.
Being cast as a quote unquoteillegal alien as a criminal,
as a drug user, if not me, asan individual in my community.
And so that's really where myinterest in my research was
born through my not just myown individual experience as

(10:19):
a Latina and as an immigrant,but actually in seeing the
way that Arkansans made senseof people like my dad who
worked in the poultry industryof neighbors that I had,
including Vietnamese families.
And so I left to graduate schoolto try to figure out how my
race could change simply byhaving moved 1500 miles east

(10:42):
from California to Arkansasbecause I tell this anecdote
in the book, but my very firstthing, junior high, a girl
came up to me and she askedme, "what are you?" And this
is a question that I hadn'theard before in California,
and it's unfortunately aquestion I would hear many
more times in Arkansas.
But I thought she wastrying to be funny.
So I asked her to guess, andshe guessed Vietnamese, she

(11:03):
guessed Laotian, which I wasinitially confused by, but
then later made sense to me,given the other communities
in Arkansas, native American,south Asian Eskimo Inuit.
And I was reallydumbfounded that she didn't
understand me as Mexican orracialized me as Mexican.
And when I told her that'swhat I was, she looked
at me very confused.

(11:23):
And with this exception,in this case, it was a
young Asian American girl.
Every other time I heard thisin Arkansas, I was always white
people, always in public spaces.
In the most, for me, initially,unexpected places, checking out
at the grocery store, buyingsomething at the corner store.
And so this was my firstintroduction to being aware that

(11:44):
I was being policed in publicspace, that other Arkansans were
looking at me, trying to suss meout, trying to make sense of me.
And it, yeah, it was a longprocess of a realization of
the fact that I was gonna haveto be very aware of the way
that I moved in public space.

mike. (12:01):
I'm curious because you arrive in this place,
which is traditionally , uh,Almost exclusively, white and
there's a lot of change that'shappening at this time as well.
We have refugees from Vietnamthat are arriving and people
from Cuba , and so I'm curiouskind of what your early
memories are there about beingcast as different from what
people would say was normalor expected in that space.

(12:22):
It, this feels like a reallycritical understanding of
how you Yeah, found yourselfand your sense of belonging
there, if you did it all.

Thank you.
That's a great question.
So in preparing for aconversation, I was thinking
back to my time in Arkansas andone of the things that I don't
talk about as much in the book,but it is definitely one of
the, one of the through lines inmy experience is that I am the
child of working poor people.
We were working poorin California, we're

(12:52):
working poor in Arkansas.
My parents and I only everlived in apartment complexes.
And so my first sort of memoriesof being in Fort Smith are
about walking to places andbeing really aware that very few
other people were ever walking.
You know what?

(13:12):
I lived on apartmentsbehind, beside Northside
High School on E Street.
And even walking from E Streetto Grant Avenue, just 2, 3, 4
blocks, nobody walked anywhere.
And so in my family, when, whenmy dad started talking to us
about Fort Smith, he would tellus that it was , pueblo , a

(13:34):
ghost town because there wereso few people walking anywhere.
My dad never owned avehicle in Arkansas.
He only ever walked places waybefore there were bus lines.
The only thing you could useto get around besides your
own two feet were taxis.
Those like really big1970s sort of Ford LTDs.

(13:56):
They smelled of smoke, like20-year-old stagnant smoke.
But that was it.
It, I say that because I got toknow the city, the architecture,
the built environment, localCatholic churches through
walking through the city andthen entering the grocery
stores , the convenience stores.

(14:16):
I I literally remember walkinginto a Walmart and it was
like a scene out of a moviewhere I walk in and everyone
turns and looks at me andpauses and just stares.
And then they're tryingto understand who I am,
compute, who I am, and theycan't easily place me, at

(14:36):
least in those early years.
And after a pregnant pause, theygo back to what they're doing.
But it was such an oddexperience for me coming
from a place whereeveryone was Mexican.
It seemed, that's not true,there's lots of diversity
in Pi River in California.
But certainly so many Latinas,Latinos what I experienced
being cast as different wasrealizing that initially it was.

(15:01):
What are you?
And then it was,oh, you're Mexican.
And then after that it waslike, you're Mexican, and
this is who Mexicans are.
Illegal aliens, criminals,drug users gang members.
So I saw the shift in the waythe information that people
used to make sense of me.
Initially, it wasmaybe confusion.

(15:23):
And later it was and I ideasabout who I was that were
related to my ethnicity, thatwere imbued with racial meaning.
And that's what we, that'swhat racialization is.
Racialization is when youview someone or something with
racial meaning, most of thetime that's negative, right?
You can think of somethinglike an adamant object

(15:44):
like a hoodie, right?
And if I'm wearingit , people make certain
assumptions about me.
If you're wearing it as awhite guy in Arkansas, they
make different assumptions.
And if it's a blackman, arkansan also
different assumptions.
It's the same object, right?
It's the folks are looking atour bodies, are looking at our
skin color, looking at our hairtexture, and drawing from these

(16:06):
Id longstanding ideas about whowhite, black and Latinx people
are to determine whether they'regonna engage with us and in
what way they're gonna do that.

I think part of this that you, the world that
you entered into it, it comeswith a pretty long and difficult
history of how we think aboutanti-black violence, we think
about racial cleansing thatthese things over time created
a, I would call it a framework,that probably shaped the
reception of what new groupscoming into this racialized

(16:40):
society would really encounter.
And I'm curious how your viewof the history of northwest
Arkansas in this area set thestage for what you arrived to.
And you're more than welcome tostart to carry this into kind
of more modern day too, andhow this has evolved over time.

Thank you.
So when I moved toArkansas, I didn't know
what I know now, right?
My, my family had learned aboutthe south through what they saw
about the Civil Rights movement.
And I remember mymother asking my father.
What about like the policeand the police dogs and the
referring to the use of dogsduring the civil rights movement

(17:18):
to attack black protestors?
And I had learned a little bitin, in my history classes about
the civil rights movement.
So I was like, I told heryour ideas are antiquated.
That's not what theSouth is anymore.
I think that is true.
That is not what theSouth was in 1996.
It is undeniable that thefoundation of the nation as

(17:42):
a slave holding nation, thefoundation of the South as
a region that wanted to holdonto slavery, meant that we
were really unprepared forgrappling with what that place
is and how these attitudesand approaches to race and
racial difference would shapenot just our experiences,

(18:03):
but that place itself.
So I moved to Fort Smith.
We moved to a working poorarea, which also included
working poor white people.
But later I realized, Inever really had black
neighbors I in, in Northside.
The school was in some waysso segregated and I was
in honors and AP classes.
I only ever had one blackpeer in any of my honors or AP

(18:28):
classes in a school that had alarge number of black students.
The other times I shared spaceswith black kids were like the
art class, like a more sortof general education course.
And I think schools that arereally important site where you
can understand the underpinningsof what makes a place.
So I was already in honors andAP classes when I transferred

(18:51):
it into the school district.
And everyone in classwas white, except for me.
And then there was a handfulof Asian students, specifically
Vietnamese American Childrenof refugees and some Laos
students, children ofrefugees, no black person to my
knowledge, no indigenous person.

(19:12):
And then just me.
And when I realized that, Isaid, oh, it, it's interesting,
for lack of a better word torealize that we could be in
at least a city that had alarge, like 10, 15 percent
black population and stilllead such a segregated life.
Now, I wanna be clear,California also was
highly segregated.

(19:32):
There were small numbers ofblack students in my classes,
and that's for its own reasons.
So in some ways I don't wannaexceptionalize Arkansas or
the South as like the onlyplace that has these things,
but it shaped Fort Smith andArkansas in very specific ways.
I came through research to findout about the racial cleansing
that occurred in many sitesin northwest Arkansas that

(19:56):
extended into places like inOklahoma, Missouri, there's
Northwest Arkansas as part of aswath of counties, places that
experienced racial cleansing.
This was, these were anti-blackterror campaigns that sought to
remove and of often did removeblack communities from the area.

(20:16):
And by the time I arrived,by the time I went to
college, Northwest Arkansaswas overwhelmingly white.
Some counties were lily white,meaning there were zero black
people, zero Latinx people,zero indigenous people.
And that's not by accident.
I would come to find outlater, that was a very very

(20:38):
much at the core of whatmade northwest Arkansas a
particular kind of place.

It's interesting to me because as many people
know, Fort Smith and its historywas one of the relocation
centers where refugees comingafter the Vietnam War came as
a place to be, I guess to, tobe welcome, to be processed,
to enter into this country.
And I'm curious how you mayview kind of the experience
of those refugees thatkind of came before you and

(21:03):
really this kind of immigrantmovement into Arkansas.
And maybe how did those eithershare stories or how did
those experiences diverge?

That's a really great question.
Broadly speaking, the what makesrefugees different than so many
other groups like immigrantsis that refugees enter through
this legal category, refugee,it's a legal status that is
offered to people usually afterthe United States has engaged
or intervened in some way.

(21:34):
With Vietnamese, it was inthe wake of the end of the
Vietnam War after many yearsof US intervention, that
includes Vietnamese, Cambodian,Lao, Hmong, et cetera.
With Cubans who entered asrefugees in 1980 and before
that , they were given refugeestatus because the United
States was fighting communism.

(21:55):
And so they wanted to welcomean offer, a safe haven to,
to Cubans fleeing the island.
For immigrants.
You have a muchwider pot, right?
You have legal immigrantswho can migrate if they
have the economic meansto do and you have to
either have a lot of money.

(22:15):
I think there's something calleda golden visa, and I believe now
you have to have, it's either$500,000 or million dollars
to invest in the United Statesin order to enter that way.
But if you enter that way,you're on a path to becoming
a legal permanent residentand eventually US citizen.
Then you have other categorieslike temporary protected

(22:35):
status, which is temporarylegal status offered to
folks experiencing chaos.
More recently we've had thiswith Venezuelans in the past.
It's also been offered toSalvadorans and then you have
a undocumented immigrants.
Undocumented immigrantsenter without documentation
because there is no linefor them to get into.

(22:57):
Undocumented immigrants tend tobe working poor, working class.
There is no legal meansfor them to enter.
They are folks who are tryingto make better lives for
themselves, their children.
And so in the 1990s,you start finding these
groups in Arkansas, right?
Vietnamese were processthrough Fort Chaffee in 1975.

(23:19):
Cubans process through FortChaffee in 1980, and then
Latinx immigrants startedarriving in the 1990s.
I think the Malia the,the landscape now is quite
different and folks liketo believe that Vietnamese
were welcome with open arms.
But the reality is that theywere offered a begrudging

(23:39):
acceptance both nationallyand at the state level.
Why begrudging?
Because o other folks madethe argument that , that
Vietnamese people were, hadbeen our allies, that the United
States had made promises tothem that the United States
needed to keep those promises.
In order for refugees to besponsored out of a processing

(24:00):
camp, especially back then, theyhad to have financial sponsors.
This would be either anAmerican family or sometimes
American churches would sponsorlarger families where they
take the, on the financialresponsibility of helping to
provide for the family untilthey can find their own means,
their own jobs, acclimateto the language, acclimate

(24:22):
to the customs, et cetera.
With Cubans in 1980, althoughthey were also eventually
recognized as refugees,there was a little more
resistance to them becausethis cohort of Cubans had
grown up under communism, sothey were cast as communists.
They were alsocasted as criminals.
Castro said he opened theprisons and let criminals

(24:42):
go, which was true.
But, But really, so many of thepeople that were incarcerated
in Cuba were incarceratedfor having organized
against the Castro regime.
They were folks who werefighting against his government.
They were folks who weremaybe have sold on the
black market food stuffs.
And so in the end, lessthan 3% of the Cubans from

(25:04):
1980 were denied entrybecause they had actually
committed violent crimes.
And yet the rhetoric ofthem was their communist
criminal homosexual, they'rea danger to us in Arkansas.
We don't want them, thereception Cubans received in
Arkansas was quite differentthan Vietnamese refugees.
They were essentially sponsoredin very small numbers and

(25:24):
then quickly run out of town.
Families did notwant to sponsor them.
They had a hard timeadjusting because what do
you do when you're in aplace where nobody wants
you, you find another place.
And so a lot of Cubansended up leaving, which is
part of the reason why youdon't find as many Cubans
from that particular era.
When I was doing research formy book I found some anecdotal

(25:45):
evidence that maybe only 12Cubans from that era remained
out of several hundred thathad been sponsored versus the
Vietnamese American community,which has slowly continued
to grow since that time.

I'm curious, as you start to see really all
these different groups startto enter into this traditional,
very white space how you viewthat kind of understanding
of this idea of who deservesto be welcomed here?
it sounds like we see a shift inwhat was an initial welcoming.
You've talked about thisa little bit and how
that really became a verydifferent definition.

Who deserves to be welcomed?
I think in my mostPollyanna days, everyone
deserves to be welcomed.
One of the things that alsomakes this place different is
the religious underpinning.
I was raised Catholic inCalifornia, but it's a sort of
Catholicism that's cultural.
It's like you're goingthrough the motions.
It's not as imbuedwith like fervor.

(26:43):
And that was somethingthe religious, the strong
religious beliefs were allthat I found in Arkansas were
something that were new to me.
And so I learned all aboutChristian Brotherhood and,
welcoming thy neighbor and allthese really amazing ideas.
And then I saw how shortpeople fell, like self-declared

(27:06):
Christians fell in reallywelcoming other people.
I think it's easy forus to maybe judge other
folks, especially when wedon't know very much about
communities or who they are.
But I think if we really lookinto the sort of like our
family's dirty underbellies of,has so and so ever lied, has

(27:30):
so and so ever broken the law,has my uncle ever done this?
Things that are frominappropriate to outright abuse.
Like we would understand that.
No one has livedan untainted life.
And if we ever use that ideaof, I don't know, being tainted
or being sinners as the onlyreason why you exclude another

(27:51):
community it sets up a dynamicwhere really nobody is ever
good enough or where you haveto demonstrate, you have to
perform your vulnerabilityor perform your your pain.
Offer up your pain as evidenceas to why your neighbor
should not call ICE on you.
And I think that's just thevery troubling dynamic because

(28:14):
it's a slippery slope ofokay, you meet this criteria,
and so I will Magnanimouslyoffer you a welcome, but as
soon as you don't abide bythese arbitrary sets of rules,
then I'm no longer going tobe a welcome space for you.
Your family's no longergonna be safe here.
And I think it's reallyantithetical to Christian

(28:35):
teaching in the sort oftruest sense of the word.

Uh, In listening to you and in reading your book,
you use this term of "spatialillegality" to really refer
to how Latino immigrants, theybecame criminalized not through
their legal status alone, butthrough really and listening
to you talk about this reallytheir visibility and presence
in these public spaces thatwere historically white.
And that infused with thiskind of Christian dualism of

(28:59):
hospitality and exclusion.
Help us unpackthat a little bit.
What, how does this presence,to your point, start to become
or maybe why problematic,especially within this
kind of religious context?

Yeah, so I think it goes back to an
earlier question about beingcast as different, right?
On the one hand, folks cansay immigrants, refugees are
coming from different countries.
They have differentlanguages, they have
different cultural practices.
Sometimes they havedifferent religious beliefs.
But the problem is that whenyou start to believe that.

(29:36):
That somehow you have allthe information that you need
to understand every person,every child, every parent.
That's where wefall into the trap.
So the concept of spatiallyillegality goes back to that
moment of walking into Walmart.
I had done nothing exceptwalk into a store and then
literally record scratch.
Everyone turns and looksat me, pregnant pauses.

(29:59):
They're trying to processwho or what I am, and they
go back to their daily life.
Question of what are you?
Questions about being followedin source simply because I'm
trying to buy something andbecause I look a certain way.
What became clear to me wasthat the folks who encountered
me in everyday life didn'tknow anything about me.
They didn't know anythingabout my being on their

(30:20):
honor roll, they knew nothingabout my family background.
It, they knew nothing else aboutme, but they decided to take
it upon themselves to make mefeel unwelcome in public spaces.
And the added element of spatialillegality and the argument
that I make in the book is thatLatinos, Latinas don't actually
even have to break with socialnorms to be cast in this way,

(30:44):
to be cast as law breakers.
So I'm not sure if it's inthe book, but the instance
I often think about is in,you know what, Arkansas is
still has a hunting culture.
People go out, they huntdeer, they dress the deer.
They, and they, there startedbeing complaints when Latinos
were dressing a goat orpreparing a goat for barba to,

(31:07):
to smoke it and process it.
And it's like, how doyou, on the one hand say,
we as Arkansans love tohunt and dress deer, and
you're eat, eat the meat.
And on the other hand, you haveanother group preparing the
meat of a much smaller animal.
But you're saying thatbecause Latinos are doing
it now it should be a crime.
Now it's illegal.
In the book too I rememberI write about this, which

(31:30):
is the use of public parks.
On the one hand, Latinoswere accused of not
assimilating to local norms.
But on the other hand, whenfamilies would go out to
use the park to play soccerto play with their kids.
Then all of a sudden,there's too many of them.
You go to the park onthe weekend on, all

(31:51):
you see are Latinos.
If they would just be inside,it wouldn't bother me as much.
And that's, that's a, I'mparaphrasing a quote that's in
the book, but that to me speaksto the idea that Latinos at a
certain point, were reluctantlyaccepted if they were invisible
inside their homes, but wereactively rejected if they were
visible in public space, likegoing to Walmart, like going to

(32:14):
the park and it had nothing todo with not speaking English.
She had nothing to dowith breaking social
or cultural norms.
It was literally who embodiedwho embodied this activity?
Who is the person walkingthrough the mall, walking
through Walmart and it's a verystressful, a alienating way
of moving through a community.

Maybe to dig in this a little bit more.
I think as you talked aboutthis, one of the things that
stood to me as you and thismaybe goes back into some of
the earlier history withinthe poultry industry, you
talked about how this reallyshifted, Latinos were primarily
understood as workers thatwere hidden kind of inside
factories or inside the home.
But it changed to thisracialization as illegal

(32:56):
aliens who were, I thinkyou used the term invading.
I'm curious keep movingforward in this idea
because not just the spatialillegality was problematic.
It seemed to go beyond that,if I understand correctly.

perla m. guer (33:09):
Yeah, absolutely.
The poultry industry was crucialto the migration of Latinos, to
the US South, not just Arkansas.
There's a scholar by the nameof Steve Str who said something
like, the role of poultrycannot be underestimated.
Absolutely.
Part of the reason why isbecause the poultry industry
was looking for more workersand there weren't enough

(33:32):
in and around Arkansas, soLatinos started migrating.
And what happens when peoplestart working in an industry
is that first they're hiddeninside the warehouses,
or the processing plants.
And so the idea the constructionof the community as illegal
aliens started taking off whenthere were more families when.

(33:53):
People like my dad startedbringing their wives and their
children to live with them.
When you started seeingelementary schools with
25, 30%, 40% Latinx kids.
And then all of a suddenthe construction was they're
invading, they're taking over.
There's just so many of them.
There's always some sort ofimaginary magical line where

(34:15):
you can have diversity, butit's not too much where we
love to eat tacos, but it'snot like tacos everywhere.
And that's a really unfairburden to put on any community,
whether we're talking about la,Latinx people, Asian Americans
black people, indigenousfolks, because it sets up
this arbitrary line that apresupposes, we know what

(34:39):
that magical sort of numberis, but b. It's a false claim
because it continues to setup people as if they're not
making their lives in Arkansas,building their families in
Arkansas, choosing actively tobe there, to be southerners.
To add to the richnessof this place to make

(35:00):
friends with, their whitepeers or Vietnamese peers.
I think it's it's almost like alow lying fruit to accuse people
of taking over and invading.
But it, again, it presupposeslike an ideal subject.
An ideal citizen an idealmember of the community.
And unfortunately, likeArkansas is not unique in,
in contributing to otheringcommunities that are newer

(35:24):
to, to a state or a region.

It's interesting to me because I think, and we
touched on this just a littlebit more, but really this
changing concept of as youstarted with refugees and this
idea of Christian hospitalityand welcoming in this is the
things that we should be doingand how this changed over time.
This is happening at the sametime where the emergence
of their religious right,Southern Baptist Convention

(35:48):
those churches in northwestArkansas are starting to grow.
That it really, this iswhere, correct me if I'm
wrong, we started to seereally a change in the kind
of welcome that refugeesand immigrants were offered.
And I'm curious how you view,again this idea of this change
of welcome or this idea ofwho's being welcome and maybe,

(36:09):
within our political andreligious systems, it feels
like this is the origin.
Is that a fair statement?

I think that is a, a fair statement.
I think we're certainly livingthrough a moment that's not
the result of the election,the presidential election.
This is something that hasbeen brewing or growing
for several decades.
So when I started really divinginto the role of religion,
in the reception of refugeesand immigrants in Arkansas,

(36:38):
there were a couple ofthings that really struck me.
On the one hand, for refugees,it is true that many churches
organized of all differentfaiths, as Baptist, Methodists.
And actually as a quick sortof aside there, there's at
least one or two scholars whohave argued that part of the
reason you have a substantialnumber, whatever that number

(36:59):
might be of Vietnamese Baptists,is because White Baptists
sponsored their families inthe wake of the Vietnam War.
And as a sort of gestureof thanks or gratitude,
they converted tothe Baptist religion.
Vietnamese Baptist is notsomething that you encounter
in large numbers in otherplaces that have large

(37:19):
Vietnamese American communities.
So Vietnamese, Methodist, other religious states came
together, sponsored refugees.
In Arkansas, there'san evolution.
As part of Arkansas, as partof the Bible belt, there was
an evolution of Christian pietyor the way that you earn your
way in, into the afterlifethat is really tied with

(37:42):
individual effort and dare Isay, a capitalist work ethic.
So there's a book by, Ithink the scholar's name is
Bethany Morton, that's called"to Serve God and Walmart."
And she has this reallyinteresting argument about
the way in which families likethe Walton family or even the
Tyson family they are ableto marry the idea of a sort

(38:06):
of a Protestant work ethic.
Of working in some ways, likeworking to the bone, that is
the way that you're gonna earnyour way into the afterlife.
And so they're able to motivatesoutherners, Christians
into really buying intoindividualized ideas of what
Christian charity can be or do.

(38:26):
It's like a version of I'mgonna get this phrase wrong.
What is it?
Hate love the sinner.
Hate the sin.

Yeah.
That's it.
Yeah.
Love the sinner.
Hate the sin.
Yeah.

Love the sinner.
Hate the sin.
So it's a version of thatin that it's yes, love the
sinner, hate the sin, butalso the sinner needs to work.
The sinner needs to work.
Including a low paying joblike Walmart another job
like the poultry industry.
And there's um, talking aboutit now, it's, it almost seems
like a magic trick to the,the way certain members of the

(38:58):
religious right were able toreally tell poor people that
they were poor simply becausethey hadn't worked hard enough.
And one of the places whereyou can work hard enough are
places like Tyson and Walmartand then there's an extension
of that logic of you're poor andyou haven't worked hard enough.
But then there's, there arethese other people that are
taking your jobs, right?
So one of the things thatLatinos and other immigrant

(39:20):
communities are accused of is,we're taking American jobs.
In the case of poultry,what poultry is now for
better or for worse.
Is only the case becauseLatinos came in with the
manpower to really expandthe poultry industry.
And so there's the, there'sdefinitely a sort of
conservative individualizedtake to Christianity that,

(39:44):
that serves larger politicalagendas or approaches,
but also serves to keepcertain families and certain
businesses quite wealthy.
And I think that's theinteresting or the powerful
intersection that folkswere able to marry the
idea of Christianity andChristian piety with a hard

(40:06):
day's, a hard day's work.
In places specifically likeWalmart and Tyson, not like
working out in the prairieand not like agricultural
subsistence farming.
It was, you have to finda way to make a buck and
keep these companies going.

it, it's Interesting to me because
you know, at some pointthere's just too many people
from somewhere else that arehere obviously needed to to
help provide a labor force.
But because of that, andbecause of maybe where the
origins of some of this change,the racialization change.
What happens or Where's thatkind of pivot point where

(40:43):
it becomes about castingpeople as you described in
your own story around beingillegal aliens or criminals.
And then this starts totake on a, a political
force as well too.
And this is something that,we're not even into, you
know, 2010 yet this isstarting to happen back in
the early two thousands.
So yeah.
I'm curious how you startto frame this or where that

(41:05):
change is to where Yeah,it does absolutely start
to take on this reallynegative connotation to it.

Okay.
So the thing that'sinteresting, for lack of a
better word to think about is.
In Arkansas, these changesare happening, right?
The poultry industry is booming.
Latinos are providing a lotof the labor power needed
to make that industry grow.
People are hearing Spanishin places like Walmart.
Upside there aremore tacos, pan.

(41:34):
There are other thingsthat people seem to enjoy.
Like we are in a country,and again, Arkansas
is not unique in this.
Like we are in a countrythat really values or prizes.
The homegrown son, like peoplewho are like I am, I live
in DC now and I sometimeshear like I'm a fifth gener
generation Washingtonian.

(41:55):
People say that witha lot of pride, right?
Like that they're firmly rooted.
So there, there is an idea.
In the United States, maybe it'sbecause, maybe it's for other
reasons, but there's an ideain the United States that those
of us who are able to claimbeing from a place for 2, 3,
4, 5 generations are somehow,somehow the rightful heirs of

(42:18):
that place, like that placebelongs to us and it should
not belong to anybody else.
So in Arkansas politicssome politicians were able
to mobilize to stoke thefear of the other, to stoke
the fear of people who arelike, wait a minute, I'm
hearing Spanish more often.

(42:38):
Wait a minute, I'm seeingsoccer games played on
the weekend to essentiallymake an argument that.
Latinos were dangerous, thatthey were criminals, that
they were bringing in drugs,that there were gang members.
When politicians started pushingthis rhetoric, most of that
was like untrue, unfounded.
It's like a case of one gunin one house, in one city not

(42:59):
this large scale crime wave.
But there's this concept thatI sometimes teach my student
called "a moral panic." Amoral panic is this idea
that, you make people scaredof someone or something.
It could be muggings, itcould be gangs, it could
be speaking Spanish.

(43:20):
And what that does is then youstoke their fear and because
they're fearful of this thingor this action, or this group,
then that then as voters,they will support, tougher
crimes for gang members.
They will supportEnglish only in schools.
They will support buildinganother prison in the

(43:40):
state of Arkansas.
It's a way that you cancontinue to blame another
person, another group, a newgroup, as opposed to holding
politicians accountablefor the fact that they're
not providing for their owncitizens, their own community
members, their own constituents.
Instead of saying, Hey,actually you voted against me

(44:03):
receiving my food stamps thatI need to feed my children.
It's oh, I have to vote against.
Feeding your children viafood stamps because there
are these criminals that aretaking over the state and we
need to build more prisons.
It's a slide of hand.
It's and it's a way thatpoliticians themselves
don't have to holdthemselves accountable.
And it also serves tocreate a sort of insider

(44:27):
group because you can findalliances with people that
agree, oh yeah, there's,there are too many Latinx
kids in the public schools.
Oh yeah, there's too,there's too much Spanish,
there's too much this,there's too much staff.
And you start creating thatinstall group that really reify
the idea of us versus them.
It's either we get stuff orthey get stuff as opposed to

(44:48):
recognizing that if we tooka different approach, there's
actually plenty, there'splenty of stuff to go around.
There's plenty of money toput into public schools.
If we didn't use them inother things like prisons
or, I don't know, buyinglike even more guns.
Any number of a range of things.

One of the things you wrote about in, in your
book, Nuevo South, was thatin the state of Arkansas
there was legislation passed.
Now your book waswritten in 2017.
We're gonna flash forward,obviously now to 2025, but
you made a comment in therearound some anti-immigrant
legislation that was passedat the time, 287(g), which
has been part of our dialogueand conversations in the state

(45:30):
now, because at the time youhad asked the question about
why was this, this legislationnot really being used at
the time, but now we flashforward, seven years later.
And I would characterizethe use of that as
being used aggressively.
We hear community organizerstalking about this and it's
really I think their wordswhere they say it's really

(45:52):
created this kind of climateof fear where people who are
following legal processes arestill being othered, they're
still, they're being detained.
So I'm just curious, like thisrestraint that you talked about
in your book has now come intoits own and this foundation
being set that's now reallybeing used in a very overt way.

(46:14):
I, yeah.
What did you see then?
What do you see now?
How is this political forcechanging maybe what was done
in back then and how that'sworking itself out today?

perla m (46:25):
That's a good question.
Spoiler alert for anyonewho's gonna read the book one
of the last chapters I writeabout the book ends around
2005 when a couple of Arkansaspoliticians were proposing
even stricter anti-immigrantlegislation in Arkansas.
And I also write about whatwas then called the Arkansas
Friendship Coalition, whichwas a coalition of businessmen,

(46:48):
religious leaders, andsome government officials.
And I make this argument inthe book about I cast that,
that approach as part of theGood Old Boys club why that,
why the good Old boys club?
Because the, at least as itwas recounted to me by people
involved in that process, theycontinued to go to do things

(47:08):
the old school way, talkingto each other over golf.
No sort of deep policy planning.
It's like a sort of verbalagreement between these
three different groups whoare interested in keeping
Latinos in the state, forbusiness purposes, for
religious purposes, andfor political purposes.
And so I, one of the thingsthat makes Arkansas so different

(47:28):
than other places is thatbecause it was still such
a relatively small state interms of the population, it is
a small state in terms of whothe heavy hitters are, right?
The fact that the Tysonfamily, the Walton family are
deeply rooted in NorthwestArkansas made it so that they
had disproportionate powerto actually facilitate or

(47:51):
manage statewide legislationin a way that's impossible
in a place like Californiaand a place like Illinois.
But it is similarmaybe to a place like
Georgia or other states.
So I say that because one ofthe things that this coalition
was able to do was to.
Try to, was to prevent moreanti, more, more punitive

(48:12):
anti-immigrant legislationfrom being passed in Arkansas
through these agreements.
However, one of the policiesthat existed back then that
has been put on steroids nowis something called 287(g).
287(g) is part of alegislation that has
existed since the 1990s.

(48:32):
And what it does is itdeputize local law enforcement
officers to act as ice agents.
What does this mean?
This means that if there wasan undocumented immigrant let's
say you're driving without,there's an undocumented
immigrant driving a car.
His tail light is out.
That's the reason the localofficer uses to stop him, right?

(48:55):
It's a safety check.
In the process of thissafety check through the
287(g) agreement, locallaw enforcement could check
whether this person is legallypresent in the United States.
If they're not legally present.
They are authorized toboth detain the individual
and to call ICE to comepick this person up.

(49:18):
When you have both 287(g) andspatially illegality, like when
Latinos and other communities ofcolor are already constructed as
being other, already constructedas being different, already
constructed as being criminal,you have people being stopped.

(49:38):
Essentially for made up reasons.
You say your headlightsare not bright enough.
You were driving erratically,you were driving yes in a
suspicious kind of way, butbecause now you have 287(g)
agreements, you have authorizedlocal officers who act as ice
agents, which then createsanother realm of terror.

(50:00):
It's one thing to walk intoWalmart and have everyone
stare at you, but it's anotherthing to walk into Walmart
when, when you run the chanceof, of encountering an a local
officer who has been empoweredby the federal government to
act as an ICE official, toask you for your documents,
to stop you as you're droppingoff your child at school to

(50:23):
pepper spray you because theysay you're, you're acting out.
And so I think each placethat has a 287(g) agreement
has its own local dynamic,its own local approach.
Its own racialized anxietiesis about what communities
they're targeting, right?
And other places itcould be monk people,

(50:44):
it could be Ethiopians.
But what I think is indicativeand really important in terms
of what I study is that atleast last time I talked
about a year ago of about 111287(g) agreements , 80% of
them were in the US South.
So this means that theUS South as a region is
disproportionately participatingin processes that ultimately

(51:09):
lead to deportations, thatterrorize local communities
that give local law enforcement,disproportionate power.

I think it's interesting too because
questions about who is inthe country legally or not
is a civil offense . It'snot a criminal offense.
And yet you have this, whatfeels like this blurring of
the lines now between the two.
Is that a fairassessment of that?

Absolutely.
It's a fair assessment.
And it's also what happens whenyou criminalize people, right?
When you criminalizemovement, unauthorized en
entry is a civil offense.
However, what's reallydangerous is that the line
about what is a criminalact keeps moving, right?
One of the, one of the reasonspeople are really experiencing

(51:55):
terror in heightened waste todayis because you increasingly have
cases where, let's say let'ssay you, you are a young person,
you're partying in Fayetteville,you're driving intoxicated, so
you have 1D UI in your record.
You pay the fine or you dothe time, whatever, whatever.
State law dictates you moveon with your life and then

(52:16):
you go into naturalized foryour naturalization interview.
What was back then, let's say itwas 10 years ago, what was back
then, a minor offense can nowbe deemed a cause for removal.
These are folks who thought theyhad done the time they have.
Sometimes folks don't haveother any other sort of

(52:37):
run in with the law, anyother crime, any other fine.
And yet they're, they arefinding that something
that they thought wasresolved is now unresolved,
is now cause for removal.
And I think that's, that's thereally dangerous thing when we.
Keep tweaking laws and keep,we keep moving the goalpost,

(53:00):
under us criminal law,we're supposed to believe in
rehabilitation, in redemption.
But what is increasinglyhappening in and out of
an immigration context issaying, actually this fault
is something we're gonnahold against you for forever.
What do you do when youactually thought you had done

(53:22):
everything else correctly?
What do you do when you areafraid of leaving your house?
Because you, you're afraidthat dropping your children
off at school is gonna be theplace where ICE picks you up.
And I really wanna emphasizethat, in immigration stuff,
it's always a person, right?
It's always the undocumentedimmigrant who's responsible.
They're the ones thatbroke the law, they're the
ones, et cetera, et cetera.

(53:43):
But, places like Tyson, placeslike Walmart, local landscaping
businesses, construction siteshire undocumented people.
Their undocumented workersare hired, not just
because there's, they havesuch a great work ethic.
They are hired becausethey are more vulnerable.
They are hired becausethey can be paid less.

(54:04):
They are hired because oftenthey're not in unions, in
labor unions where theywould have to be paid more.
And so they are a cheaperlabor force that is
more easily controlled.
That has facilitated theeconomic growth of so
many industries, and yet.
When it comes to issuesof immigration, all that
larger context evaporates.

(54:26):
And then it's this personjust made a bad decision.
They just made a poor choice.
They shouldn't be here,they should wait in line.
But most of us do not understandthe extent to which we rely
on undocumented labor tomake our clothes, to pluck
our chickens, to do ourlandscaping, to make our food.

(54:47):
We are relying on their laborer,and we are not holding ourselves
responsible for the condi, theconditions that they have to
navigate to make a life forthemselves in the United States.

One of the things in your book that
you argue is that you say"historical legacies shape
the reception of new peopleto the region." And I guess
my question is, do you think,can these legacies, can this
history, can it be transformed?
Or is this going to be aperpetual cycle that we continue
to repeat and can't get out of?

I think it can absolutely be transformed.
One of the, one of the changesthat I saw after I, I published
the book was the celebrationof Juneteenth in Springdale.
When I was working on thisbook, when I lived in Arkansas
Juneteenth was not celebratedin that part of the state.
It, it's almost as if blackpeople didn't exist in, in the

(55:40):
state as if black communitieshad not farmed in those
counties, black families thatlived and died on those lands.
And I think, something likerecognizing the power of
Juneteenth as somethingboth significant for black
Arkansans and black Americans,but also for the rest of
us, like it is not lost.

(56:03):
It is not lost on me as animmigrant that, I am the
beneficiary of black people,struggles for civil rights, for
gender equality, for equal pay.
And I think, the powerful thingI. When you get new people,
when you get new blood, whenyou get young blood, is that
people are deeply invested inmaking their communities better.

(56:25):
And I think immigrants,refugees, migrants from other
places like they're who havemade a home in Arkansas,
they're deeply invested inmaking that place better.
And I think the best thingthat we could do is to be
historically informed so weunderstand where we fit and
understand where prior strugglesleft things off, and where
we can pick those battles up.

(56:46):
I think no matter whetheryou're an immigrant, a
refugee, a native born, UScitizen, a white American,
we can learn so much more.
We can and should learn morefrom each other's struggles
and from the successes and fromrecognizing the value that we.
That we bring to a place, notjust in terms of labor, but

(57:07):
in terms of our our humanityand our recognition that we
are sharing these places.
We're sharing thesecommunities and that, by
sharing them with each other,we can make them better.

As I listened to you I think your story that
you shared at the beginning,just, it stays, yeah.
It stays front of mind thatthis is not, while we talk
about policy, this is notpolicy to you as we talk
about spatial illegality.
This is not spatialillegality to you.
This is about real lifeand your own story and
your own experiences.

(57:41):
And I'm just curious, obviouslyfrom my social position there
are gonna be things that I don'tunderstand and I don't see, and
I don't, I don't even have thecapacity to really understand
because of the lives and theexperiences that we've had.
And they would not ask justfor your wisdom and your
counsel, and what are thosethings that you know our
white communities, our broadercommunities need to be listening

(58:04):
to or need to understand ifthis is going to be a pattern
that we are going to break.

Thanks for that.
I appreciate the sentiment.
So in preparing for thisinterview, I was thinking back
to my own time in Arkansasand my friend group in high
school were white and Asian,specifically Vietnamese and Lao.
And as much as I am as differentas like Vietnamese and Lao

(58:29):
families are from Mexicanfamilies we shared, I guess what
I would call now displacement.
Our families had been displacedfrom their countries of origin.
We were all navigating beingin this place called Arkansas.
Supposedly growing up asAmericans, but managing
and negotiating our ownparents' expectations about

(58:51):
what it means to be a goodstudent, what it means to be
a good, a good young woman.
And I think I always felt alittle bit of a social distance
from my white friends that ittook me a while to understand
where that was coming from.
And what I know now is thatbecause so many of them had

(59:13):
never had to migrate, becauseso many of them made me an
exception to who they thoughtof as illegal aliens or who
they thought of as Latino.
I never actually felt safeenough to share things with 'em.
I remember a friend of mineonce making a comment about,
oh they're busing people in,in the middle of the night.

(59:33):
And I asked her some moredetails and come to find out
it was just people, Latinosarriving through Yes, the bus.
But it was like, you take, youused to take buses if you were
too broke to buy flight to goto Mexico, and you arrive in
the middle of the night becausethe bus has been driving for
40 hours and it drops you off.
They were not illegal aliens.
But I remember thinking,I don't have the energy to

(59:55):
break this down for you.
I was both too young andit's too close to it.
And maybe I was afraidof the judgment or the
questions that she would ask.
So I say this because Ithink, I really believe in
the possibility of , of beingtrue deep allies with people
from other backgrounds, class,race, ability, et cetera.

(01:00:18):
But I think it also takes a lotof hard work and it takes a lot
of learning, and it can't alwaysbe the person experiencing the
marginalization that teachesan interested party, about
this particular thing, right?
I think there has to be adeep level of awareness and
engagement, and you try todo the best you can and learn

(01:00:40):
elsewhere and read from allthe stuff published online,
all the stuff that peoplehave shared, and then your
approach with humility andwith caution to learn from
people in your life who mightbe experiencing something,
in Arkansas at this moment,nationally, at this moment,
with so many rates happening.
I'm pretty sure that no matterthe legal status of any friends

(01:01:02):
that you have, they knowsomeone who's undocumented.
And maybe they don'twanna share that with you.
And if that's the case, youshould ask yourself why that is
the case, why people you loveand care about do not feel like
it, like you are a safe enoughplace for them to share that.
And this is, thisgoes beyond politics.

(01:01:23):
This really is aboutpeople's humanity.
And I do think that it istrue, that if you're gonna vote
against my family, my interests,my wellbeing, then yes, that
might be an un something wewill never be able to breach.
But if you don't even try,if you are just reproducing
these pop culture narrativesabout who undocumented

(01:01:44):
people are, then you're gonnafind yourself even more and
more even further away fromfriendships that you hold dear.

mike rusch. (01:01:52):
I guess if we can't understand that as human
beings and see the humanity.
In the people in front ofus we need to have a lot of
other different conversations,i'm curious, do you have
hope in this Nuevo South?
Can I say that?

perla m. guerrero. (01:02:07):
Yeah.
I absolutely have hope.
The Nuevo South is in thebook refers to a particular
approach to economicdevelopment, economic gains.
It's not simply becauseLatinos speak Spanish, and I
think there's a lot of hopein learning from each other's
histories and learning fromeach other's experiences
in learning about eachother's pains and struggles.

(01:02:29):
And I think I have hope.
I just think hopetakes a lot of work.
It takes a lot ofknowledge building, it
takes a lot of humility.
It requires us to bothunderstand how our experiences
are unique and how any,most people's lives are
gonna be really hard.
But also understanding thatsometimes people face other

(01:02:50):
obstacles and challenges.
And if we're trying tobuild real solidarity, real
coalitions, it requiresunderstanding, holding the
complexity and the specificityof people's experiences and
struggles while understandingthat we have so much more
to gain by having eachother's backs, by working for

(01:03:11):
immigration reform, by workingfor a fair wage, by working
for gender affirming care,by, by really truly valuing
each other's humanity and.
Doing the best we can to try tomake sure that everyone has the
care that they need, the careand support they need to thrive.

mike rusch. (01:03:31):
Yeah.
I think we can't talkabout that enough.
It feels like this is aconversation that yeah.
Is needed and necessary.
As you look towards thefuture here, like what, I'm
curious, the current workthat you're focusing on or
what do we need to be thinkingabout of either what's coming
next or how, what does itlook like to be an answer

(01:03:52):
to some of these questions?

So to both, to and both on a maybe a sad
note and a more optimistic note.
My current work is aboutdeportation, and I started
working on this in 2018,and I've learned a lot from
deportees or returnees.
So folks who were essentiallycoerced to return to Mexico
is the country that I focuson were coerced to return to

(01:04:17):
Mexico because policies instates like South Carolina and
Georgia made it untenable forthem to continue living their
lives in the United States.
Many of the people thatchose to return were
coerced to return, wantedto study, and they couldn't,
they were undocumented.
Georgia has a ban onundocumented students

(01:04:39):
and higher education atcertain universities.
So the sad note for me isthat in some ways, like
what I feared would happenin the US South did happen.
It has become a reallydifficult place to live
if you're undocumented.
The upside of that is thatthere's, they're deportee
and returnees are doing alot of really hard but good

(01:05:02):
work building coalitions bothwith other displaced people
in Mexico, but also with thecommunities that they left
in the United States, they'reliving family separation, except
this time from north to south.
They have siblingsand parents here.
Sometimes children, theycontinue to be deeply
invested in the placesthat saw them grow up.
I also have talked to folksand who grew up in other

(01:05:25):
places like Utah, California,but the South continues to
be a region unfortunatelythat, that has done a really
good job at making it a verydifficult place to live.
And it's a challenge to seehow effective laws have been at
doing what they set out to do.
But folks who are alsoorganizing trans locally across

(01:05:47):
Mexico and the United Statesto advocate and organize for
policies that will fosterlives policies that will
allow them to thrive and for.
The right to be able to seetheir families, even if it
is just on a tours visa, thatthey are allowed back into the
country to see their childrenand to see their parents.

(01:06:10):
And organizing activism,solidarity takes
many different forms.
And I think if we areinvested in each other's
humanity, I think we alsohave to be invested in the
humanity of people whoselives are across the border.

mike rusch. (01:06:23):
One of the themes that we've tried to
carry through all of theseconversations is this idea
of community wholeness.
I don't, if I'm honest I'm notsure if that's a fair question
to ask given yeah what is,what has happened, what is
happening what could happen.
But I am curious this idea ofwholeness, if that is possible.

(01:06:44):
I'm just curious your reactionwhen I use that term or
what it could look like?

That's a really provocative question.
To me, community wholenessmeans we are really
including everyone.
What does that mean?
People like me, I haven't livedin Arkansas in over a decade.
My family, my parents inparticular have very fond
memories of Arkansas.
Mine are a little morecomplex, but, if if I felt

(01:07:08):
welcomed that welcomed therethat would be wonderful.
But also people who maybe weredeported, one of the things
that were deported from thesecommunities, one of the things
that I often hear Deportees talkabout is how hurtful it is for
them to be plucked out of theircommunities and and removed and
then the community continues asif they were never there, as if

(01:07:31):
they didn't go to that cornerstore every Friday, to cash
their paycheck or they didn'ttake their kids to school.
So I think Community Wholenesscan and should include people
who helped to make Arkansaswhat it is today, even if
they're no longer physicallypresent, if they're interested
in maintaining ties, if they'reinterested in cont continuing

(01:07:54):
to advocate for policies thatwill benefit poultry workers and
manufacturers and construction.
I think community Wholenessreally to my mind, has to
account for , for everyone,not just immigrants, refugees,
but also disabled people,trans people, incarcerated
people are counted in theprisons where they're held
and not the communitiesthey were taken from.

(01:08:15):
Even though the community,for better or for worse is the
context that is the backdrop fortheir own engagement in society,
their own trajectory in society.
So I think communitywholeness has to include
everyone, and that in andof itself is a challenge.
We're not all the same.
We don't have the samevalues, but if we want
to build a community inArkansas or anywhere else

(01:08:38):
we have to make a tent thatis big enough for all of us.
And if we center each other'shumanity above anything
else, then I think it is.
Then I think it is possibleand it's something that
we should work toward.

mike rusch. (01:08:52):
Dr. Guerrero, thank you so very much for
the work that you've done, forwho you are for helping Yeah.
Us see this place in, in a waythat hopefully is the whole
story or a fuller story in away that we have to reckon with,
and we have to understand that.
Who we are and theplace that we live.
It, it has real people withreal lives that are being

(01:09:14):
affected in so many ways.
And so thank you for all of it.
Thank you for your time.
Yeah, just humbled incrediblyhumbled to be able to sit and
share this space with you.

Thank you, Mike, for having me.
I really appreciate the time.
And I really hope folksgot a little insight into
some of the lives of theirneighbors in Arkansas.

mike rusch. (01:09:33):
I, yeah, and absolutely.
It's gonna take me a whileto process this one and
obviously would love forpeople to, to read your book
and we'll recommend that.
We'll put that inthe show notes.
And yeah, please keep usinformed on the work that you're
doing and how we can help.
And happy to always share this,because I think it's necessary
and needed, and we just, wecan't talk about it enough.
Dr. Guerrero, thank you somuch and we'll talk soon.

Thank you.

mike rusch. (01:09:59):
Well, a deep thank you to Dr. Guerrero
for sharing not just ourresearch, but our own
personal story with us today.
What Dr. Guerrero helps ussee is that the questions
we're wrestling with today,questions about who belongs
and who gets welcomed aboutwho gets criminalized.
These aren't new questions.
They're questions that have beenasked and answered in different
ways across generations.

(01:10:20):
The faces have changed, thespecific policies have changed,
but the underlying structures,the ways that power operates to
decide who's in and who is out.
Those patterns persist.
We heard about acts of spatialillegality about how being
visible in public spaceswhile being brown becomes its
own form of transgression.
We talked about racializationas a process and not a fixed

(01:10:42):
category, and how our cultureand Northwest Arkansas moved
from not knowing how tocategorize Latino immigrants
to explicitly criminalizingthem, we confront perhaps
the most difficult questionin a region with a history
of racial violence, ofsundown towns and erasure.
How do these legacies shape whofeels safe today and how do they
shape who stays and who leaves?

(01:11:04):
We will stay in contact with Dr.
Guerrero as her current work.
It focuses on deportationand return, and the people
who have been removed fromcommunities like ours and the
family separations that follow.
She's documenting how peopleorganize across borders,
how they maintain ties toplaces that raise them, even
when those places made itimpossible for them to stay.

(01:11:25):
And she's asking us to considerwhat community wholeness
really means, whether itcan include people who were
forced to leave, whether itcan make space for everyone.
So where do we go from here?
Well, I believe Dr. Guerrooffered us some hope, but
hope that requires work.
Hope that requires us tobuild knowledge and humility.
Hope that requires understandingof how our experiences are

(01:11:47):
both unique and connected.
Hope that requires us to valueeach other's humanity above all
other things, we'll continueexploring these questions
of power and belonging.
'cause if we're serious aboutbuilding in northwest Arkansas
where everyone belongs, we haveto understand the forces that
have shaped, who's been welcomedand who's been pushed out.
We have to reckon with thishistory, we have to see the

(01:12:09):
patterns and how they echointo today, and we have to
ask ourselves what we'rewilling to do differently.
I wanna say thank you forlistening, and I wanna say
thank you for being themost important part of what
our community is becoming.
This is the underview,an exploration in the
shaping of our place.

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