ABOUT THIS BOOK

Latinas/os and Asians are rewriting the meaning and history of race in the American South by complicating the black/white binary that has frequently defined the region since before the Civil War. Arriving in southern communities as migrants or refugees, Latinas/os and Asians have experienced both begrudging acceptance and prejudice as their presence confronts and troubles local understandings of race and difference—understandings that have deep roots in each community’s particular racial history, as well as in national fears and anxieties about race.

Nuevo South offers the first comparative study showing how Latinas/os and Asians are transforming race and place in the contemporary South. Integrating political, economic, and social analysis, Perla M. Guerrero examines the reception of Vietnamese, Cubans, and Mexicans in northwestern Arkansas communities that were almost completely white until the mid-1970s. She shows how reactions to these refugees and immigrants ranged from reluctant acceptance of Vietnamese as former US allies to rejection of Cubans as communists, criminals, and homosexuals and Mexicans as “illegal aliens” who were perceived as invaders when they began to establish roots and became more visible in public spaces. Guerrero’s research clarifies how social relations are constituted in the labor sphere, particularly the poultry industry, and reveals the legacies of regional history, especially anti-Black violence and racial cleansing. Nuevo South thus helps us to better understand what constitutes the so-called Nuevo South and how historical legacies shape the reception of new people in the region.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Perla M. Guerrero is an assistant professor of American studies and US Latina/o studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She has published research on relational and comparative race and ethnicity, space and place, immigration, labor, and US history in numerous book chapters and articles.

REVIEWS

This is the first comparative book on the transformation of race and place between Latina/os and Asians in the South. Guerrero challenges future scholars to broaden their understanding of the racial binary to explore and document the region's Latina/o and Asian history. A key contribution to Latina/o studies, Asian American studies, and American studies.

— Choice Reviews

I recommend this book to any student examining [immigrant incorporation and race and ethnic relations in the South], especially in new destinations, or the Nuevo South.

— Ethnic and Racial Studies

[A]n essential historical view into the longevity of racialization and anti-immigrant hostility...[Guerrero's] larger point is both clear and timely: whether for Vietnamese refugees in Fort Smith, Black students in Little Rock, or Latinx immigrants in Springdale and Rogers, place matters, and the legacies of racialized exclusions persist in uniquely place-based ways.

— Great Plains Research

This is a timely publication for Arkansans and historians alike to understand the contemporary role the region plays in the local and national debates on immigration...Nuevo South succeeds in revealing the complexity of race and ethnic relations as Arkansas continues to be a frontier space within which brave new pioneers continue to forge a homeplace.

— Fort Smith Historical Society Journal

Nuevo South demonstrates the power of place in defining race...While Guerrero's study calls us to study race in local and place-specific ways, her analysis of the interconnected and historically situated ways race has evolved offers much broader insight into the dynamic process of race-making.

— Pacific Historical Review

[A] suggestive look into the fitful ethnoracial transformation of an important southern place.

— Journal of Southern History

Perla M. Guerrero’s insightful book Nuevo South is important. She explores the immigration and migration of Vietnamese, Cubans, and Mexicans to northwest Arkansas and the local, state, and federal governments’ different, and often conflicted, responses to these people...This is a good book.

— Latino Studies

Comparing the experiences of Vietnamese, Cuban, and Mexican refugees and migrants, Guerrero demonstrates why we need a more nuanced understanding of how these groups, and others, changed the face of the South and its many regional racial thinking.

— New Books Network: History

For those interested in studies on comparative immigration, whiteness, and labor and class, Nuevo South opens a window onto the shifting contours of a lesser-known part of the South.

— Southwestern Historical Quarterly

As the first book to interweave Latina/o studies, Asian American studies, and Southern history, Nuevo South greatly advances all three fields. With its complex coverage of one of the South’s most important cultural and economic areas, it is a must read for any scholar interested in the US South, the rural United States, and migration...Guerrero has produced a groundbreaking work that will be cited for years to come and will likely inspire others to study the many regions of the United States that are changing with, and benefiting from, refugee and immigrant communities.

— Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies

An exciting book. Guerrero’s concept of ‘acts of spatial illegality’ is a brilliant insight, which will likely be cited in Latin@ studies work across disciplines in the future. It pulls together something that many of us have observed, but not with the incredible astuteness that Guerrero’s formulation displays.

— Julie M. Weise, University of Oregon, author of Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. New South to Nuevo South: Region, Labor, and Race
Chapter 2. Yellow Peril in Arkansas: War, Christianity, and the Regional Racialization of Vietnamese Refugees
Chapter 3. Mariel Cubans as an “Objectionable Burden” and “Illegal Aliens”
Chapter 4. Latinas/os and Polleras: Social Networks, Multisite Migration, Raids, and Upward Mobility
Chapter 5. “Northwest Arkansas’s No. 1 Societal Concern”: “Illegal Aliens,” Acts of Spatial Illegality, and Political Mobilizations
Conclusion: Race, Plantation Bloc, and Nuevo South
Notes
Bibliography
Index