Abstract
Latino migration to the US South is not a new phenomenon. Claims of a “Nuevo New South” are thus products of the scholarly and popular imaginations rather than the historical record. Indeed, the claim of a rupture with the past has the potential to obscure the fact that contemporary relationships of race and class have their roots in the dilemmas that have confronted white and black Southerners since Emancipation. If the times and places of “the New South” meant something different to African Americans than it did to white observers and boosters, what have the times and places of the “Nuevo” South meant to Latino immigrants? Do those meanings, in fact, originate in a novel globalizing moment at the turn of the twenty-first century? And how can teasing out Latino immigrants’ own narratives about the region help social scientists and historians find more appropriate ways of conceptualizing Latino immigration's meaning for the South as a whole?
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Notes
Quoted in Cooper and Terrill (2009, 466–467).
For a more detailed explanation of the Latin American origins of migrants’ Southern strategies, see Weise (2009).
Amiri Baraka, quoted in Grossman (1989, 7).
It is unclear whether this indicates Laguna, Texas or Laguna, California, though Manuel Gamio's text indicates the latter. Deverell (2004, 169) posits that this lyric refers to the backbreaking labor at Simons Brick Company in “Simons, Laguna” East of Los Angeles.
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I am grateful to the other authors in this special issue for their feedback at our kickoff conference in February 2010. Michael Innis-Jiménez, Geraldo Cadava, and the anonymous reviewer of Latino Studies provided close reading and invaluable suggestions in the final stages of writing.
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Weise, J. Dispatches from the “Viejo” New South: Historicizing recent Latino migrations. Lat Stud 10, 41–59 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2012.10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2012.10