Global Heartland

<p><i>Global Heartland</i> is the account of diverse dispossessed and displaced people brought together in a former sundown town in Illinois. Recruited to work in the local meat-processing plant African Americans Mexicans and West Africans re-create the town in unexpected ways. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the US Mexico and Togo Faranak Miraftab shows how this workforce is produced for the global labor market; how the displaced workers' transnational lives help them stay in these jobs; and how they negotiate their relationships with each other across the lines of ethnicity race language and nationality as they make a new home. Beardstown is not an exception but an example of local-global connections that make for local development. Focusing on a locality in a non-metropolitan region this work contributes to urban scholarship on globalization by offering a fresh perspective on politics and materialities of placemaking.</p>