Nuevo South

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.

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., 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., [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., 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., 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.

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.