“Better Than White Trash”: Work, Ethic, Latinidad and Whiteness in Rural Arkansas

Diverse sites in the US South are being transformed by “new Latino immigration.” Rather than being a homogeneous process, experiences of migrant settlement are shaped by the racialized social worlds of particular historical social communities—and may in turn transform local racial formations (Winders, Progress in Human Geography 29:683–699, 2005). In one small town in rural Arkansas, Latina and Latino migrants perform boundary work (Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000; Hartigan, Race in the 21st Century: Ethnographic Approaches, Oxford University Press, New York, 2010), constructing their identities as “good” workers and neighbors. Although migrants assert belonging and dignity by framing themselves as “better than White trash,” nonetheless this belonging is predicated on the reproduction of racial and class hierarchy as well as conformity to the structural demands of neoliberal capitalism.