In Hard Luck and Heavy Rain Joseph C. Russo takes readers into the everyday lives of the rural residents of Southeast Texas. He encounters the region as a kind of world enveloped in on itself, existing under a pall of poverty, illness, and oil refinery smoke. His informants’ stories cover a wide swath of experiences, from histories of LGBTQ+ life and the local petrochemical industries to religiosity among health food store employees and the suffering of cancer patients living in the Refinery Belt. Russo frames their hard-luck stories as forms of verbal art and poetic narrative that render the region a mythopoetic landscape that epitomizes the impasse of American late capitalism. He shows that in this severe world, questions of politics and history are not cut and dry, and its denizens are not simply backward victims of circumstances. Russo demonstrates that by challenging classist stereotypes of rural Americans as passive, ignorant, and uneducated, his interlocutors offer significant insight into the contemporary United States.

Joseph C. Russo is Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wesleyan University.

"Overall, Hard Luck and Heavy Rain is a compelling book that offers a unique perspective on a region often dismissed as hopeless. Russo walks a delicate line throughout, inviting his readers to take a more nuanced and compassionate view of the residents of Southeast Texas while not presenting them as faultless or their views as harmless. . . . In the end, while Russo deliberately avoids a conclusion and specific recommendations, he succeeds in enhancing our understanding of the United States’ contemporary economic challenges—something we need to find a way forward."
-- Sara Beth Becker Economic Anthropology

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
1. The Strange Time of Hard-Luck Stories  17
2. The Higher the Hair, the Closer to God  47
3. Queer Character and the Golden Triangle  76
4. Ringing Out  94
Notes  119
Bibliography  127
Index  135