the underview.
The underview is an exploration of the shaping of our place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.
The underview is a series of discussions within and about the community of Northwest Arkansas. The underview explores our collective understanding and beliefs about the place we live.
These discussions will include topics that are foundational to the identity of our region, the history of our communities, the truth of conflict with the land and its people, and the current challenges and opportunities for our community.
the underview.
the Nuevo South with Dr. Perla M. Guerrero (ep 2b, 45).
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In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Perla Guerrero, Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland and author of Nuevo South, to explore one of the most significant transformations in Northwest Arkansas history: what happens when a place that was overwhelmingly white through most of the 20th century experiences rapid demographic diversification. Dr. Guerrero shares her own journey as an undocumented immigrant who moved from California to Fort Smith at age 16, drawn by her father's search for work in the poultry industry, and how that experience shaped her understanding of racialization, belonging, and public space in the American South.
Through her research and lived experience, Dr. Guerrero helps us understand how Northwest Arkansas responded to the arrival of Vietnamese refugees, Cuban refugees, and Mexican immigrants from the 1970s forward. We explore concepts like acts of spatial illegality, how immigrant communities were tolerated when hidden in factories but criminalized when they became visible in public spaces, and the plantation bloc, the enduring power structures that have controlled racialized labor from slavery through Jim Crow to contemporary immigration enforcement. This conversation bridges historical patterns to the urgent present, examining how regional legacies of racial violence shape who feels welcomed today and asking what community wholeness might look like in a place still reckoning with its past.
https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-underview-nuevo-south-dr-perla-m-guerrero
About the underview:
The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.
Website: theunderview.com
Follow us on Instagram: @underviewthe
Host: @mikerusch
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when I moved to Arkansas, my, my family had learned about the south through what they saw about the Civil Rights movement. And I remember my mother asking my father. What about like the police and the police dogs and the referring to the use of dogs during the Civil Rights movement to attack black protestors? And I had learned a little bit in, in my history classes about the civil rights movement. So I was like, I told her your ideas are antiquated. That's not what the South is anymore. I think that is true. That is not what the South was in 1996. It is undeniable that the foundation of the nation as a slave holding nation, the foundation of the South as a region that wanted to hold onto slavery, meant that we were really unprepared for grappling with what that place is and how these attitudes and approaches to race and racial difference would shape not just our experiences, but that place itself.
mike rusch.:Well, you are listening to the underview, an Exploration and the Shaping of Our Place. My name is Mike Ruschand today's episode, it may be one of the more difficult episodes to reckon with, but this is exactly why these conversations are needed. We need a space where we can both be honest, ask questions, and attempt to reckon, because reckoning can sometimes open the door that allows us to heal. Today we're asking a really hard question, what happens when a place that's been defined by a single ethnicity that of whiteness? What happens when it experiences rapid dynamic diversification? Throughout this season, this conversation has been building. Earlier this year, we learned from Dr. Steven Rosales about the forces that drew Latino workers to Arkansas and the poultry industry that needed them. We've listened to Magali Licolli describe the realities of that work, and we've examined with Olivia Paschal how corporate power shaped this entire region. We've heard from Irvin Camacho about the fear gripping immigrant communities right now. In fact, two weeks ago I slipped into a pizza place in Johnson to learn what it means to reckon with the history and these structures that are actively harming people in our community today actively harming our neighbors. Today we seek to understand how all of these threads might connect. How does history shape the present and how does Place and legacy influence who feels welcome and who doesn't? And perhaps most urgently are there patterns that we need to understand in order to comprehend what's happening right now. Today my guest is Dr. Perla Guerrero, associate Professor of American Studies, and the director of US Latina and Latino studies program at the University of Maryland. Her book, Nuevo South, examines the transformation of northwest Arkansas from the 1970s forward as Vietnamese refugees, Cuban refugees and Mexican immigrants arrived in a place that was in some places, almost 99% white through most of the 20th century. Dr. Guerrero isn't just an outside observer. She lived this story personally. Her family moved from California to Fort Smith when she was 16, drawn by the word of jobs in the poultry industry, and she arrived as an undocumented immigrant and experienced firsthand how Northwest Arkansas made sense of new arrivals during a time of very rapid change. What makes Dr. Guerrero's work valuable for our conversation is the question she asks, how do communities respond to demographic transformation? Why were some groups received differently than others? What does it mean when people are accepted as workers but become threatening when they become visible in public spaces, when they establish roots, and when they start to look like they're staying. This conversation is about trying to understand difficult questions. How do the same economic structures persist across generations, even as the faces change? And how does Racialization work as a process rather than a fixed category? And how might regional history, including histories we've explored throughout this past season around racial violence and exclusion, how does that shape contemporary responses to new arrivals? When Dr. Guerrero's book was published in 2017, in it, she asked why Arkansas had not enacted more punitive anti-immigrant legislation compared to other states like Alabama and Georgia. Today that question has a different answer. What does that shift tell us? What are we trying to maintain or control? And frankly, what are we afraid of? These aren't easy questions, but if we wanna understand this place and its people and how it's forming, we have to be willing to explore them. We have to ask what belonging actually means. Who gets to decide, and whether the patterns of the past are shaping the possibilities of the future. Alright, we've got a whole lot to work through today. Let's get into it. I have the privilege today of sharing a table with Dr. Perla Guerrero, who's the Associate Professor of American Studies and the director of the US Latina and Latino Studies at the University of Maryland. Dr. Guerrero, thank you for being a part of this conversation. Welcome to it. I'm glad to have you here today.
perla m. guerrero.:Thank you, Mike. I'm very happy to be here.
mike rusch.:I've got a whole lot of questions for you, so I hope you're ready because I think both the work that you've been doing and where we are in this cultural moment. I think there's a whole lot to talk about and to understand. And I guess my hope as we walk through this is that we can take away the understanding of really the lived realities of what our immigrant communities here in northwest Arkansas and even beyond that are looking like. So thank you , and I'll let you start wherever you would like. Maybe it'd be helpful to give a little bit of your personal background and maybe how you ended up in this field of study.
perla m. guerrero.:Yeah, thank you. Thanks again for inviting me. I'm happy to share a little bit about my own story along with my research. So I am an immigrant who's born in Mexico. My family moved my family engaged in what scholars call step migration. My dad came to the United States first and then we joined him five years later. I don't remember if I say this in the book, but we were undocumented. My, my family all entered undocumented. We were able to legalize through IRCA, which is often called Amnesty which is legislation this passed in 1986. And I say that because it's important for folks to know that at least in my case, I'm very aware of the legal structures that have defined my life. Although I am now a US citizen, my entry point into this country was as an undocumented immigrant. So my dad moved or migrated to California in 1980. We joined him in 1985. We lived in a place called Pico Rivera, California, which is on the east side of LA, a majority Mexican American and Mexican immigrant community. We lived there until I was 16. My family moved to Arkansas right in the summer between my junior in the summer, between my sophomore and junior year. And I really love LA, LA is where I grew up. It's, it holds a special place in my heart. Arkansas was and when I tell people that I moved right at 16, they're like, whoa, that must have been really hard. And it was challenging, but more so in hindsight, I didn't quite know what to expect when I moved. But it, it was just a very different place. California, again, is majority Mexican American, so what that meant is that I wasn't really any different then so many other people. Now, I don't want to paint a picture of this rosy picture of California's not being racist or not having nativist sentiments. I was definitely called racial slurs in California by Mexican American people. But because everyone was Latina Latino it, I didn't feel as othered in my everyday life the way I did when I moved to Arkansas. California, the nation experienced large recession in the mid 1990s that left my dad unemployed. And after struggling with unemployment for two to three years, we had a friend of the family whose brother had moved to Arkansas, and it was through this social network that word came down to my dad that there were plenty of jobs in something called "pollería", which is what a lot of people call the poultry industry, Spanish speakers. My dad didn't really know what that meant, like working with chickens. Nobody really knew what that was, but they knew that it was a cheaper place to live. They knew that there were plenty of jobs and my dad's never been afraid of hard work, so he's like, let me go check it out. And yeah. And so we moved to Arkansas. I moved to Fort Smith. I arrived to North Side High School, which I would later find out was largely both working class and a high school where a lot of students of color went. In Fort Smith, it's north side versus south side for the public schools. South Side High School is much whiter and the kids that go there, at least when I attended, tended to be kids of solidly middle to upper middle class families. North side is where the rest of us were. And so I finished high school at Northside and then I went to UCA for my BA and I lived through the transition of Arkansans, excuse me, not really knowing how to make sense of me, how to racialize me, which we can talk about in a moment to. Being cast as a quote unquote illegal alien as a criminal, as a drug user, if not me, as an individual in my community. And so that's really where my interest in my research was born through my not just my own individual experience as a Latina and as an immigrant, but actually in seeing the way that Arkansans made sense of people like my dad who worked in the poultry industry of neighbors that I had, including Vietnamese families. And so I left to graduate school to try to figure out how my race could change simply by having moved 1500 miles east from California to Arkansas because I tell this anecdote in the book, but my very first thing, junior high, a girl came up to me and she asked me, "what are you?" And this is a question that I hadn't heard before in California, and it's unfortunately a question I would hear many more times in Arkansas. But I thought she was trying to be funny. So I asked her to guess, and she guessed Vietnamese, she guessed Laotian, which I was initially confused by, but then later made sense to me, given the other communities in Arkansas, native American, south Asian Eskimo Inuit. And I was really dumbfounded that she didn't understand me as Mexican or racialized me as Mexican. And when I told her that's what I was, she looked at me very confused. And with this exception, in this case, it was a young Asian American girl. Every other time I heard this in Arkansas, I was always white people, always in public spaces. In the most, for me, initially, unexpected places, checking out at the grocery store, buying something at the corner store. And so this was my first introduction to being aware that I was being policed in public space, that other Arkansans were looking at me, trying to suss me out, trying to make sense of me. And it, yeah, it was a long process of a realization of the fact that I was gonna have to be very aware of the way that I moved in public space.
mike.:I'm curious because you arrive in this place, which is traditionally , uh, Almost exclusively, white and there's a lot of change that's happening at this time as well. We have refugees from Vietnam that are arriving and people from Cuba , and so I'm curious kind of what your early memories are there about being cast as different from what people would say was normal or expected in that space. It, this feels like a really critical understanding of how you Yeah, found yourself and your sense of belonging there, if you did it all.
perla m. guerrero.:Thank you. That's a great question. So in preparing for a conversation, I was thinking back to my time in Arkansas and one of the things that I don't talk about as much in the book, but it is definitely one of the, one of the through lines in my experience is that I am the child of working poor people. We were working poor in California, we're working poor in Arkansas. My parents and I only ever lived in apartment complexes. And so my first sort of memories of being in Fort Smith are about walking to places and being really aware that very few other people were ever walking. You know what? I lived on apartments behind, beside Northside High School on E Street. And even walking from E Street to Grant Avenue, just 2, 3, 4 blocks, nobody walked anywhere. And so in my family, when, when my dad started talking to us about Fort Smith, he would tell us that it was , pueblo , a ghost town because there were so few people walking anywhere. My dad never owned a vehicle in Arkansas. He only ever walked places way before there were bus lines. The only thing you could use to get around besides your own two feet were taxis. Those like really big 1970s sort of Ford LTDs. They smelled of smoke, like 20-year-old stagnant smoke. But that was it. It, I say that because I got to know the city, the architecture, the built environment, local Catholic churches through walking through the city and then entering the grocery stores , the convenience stores. I I literally remember walking into a Walmart and it was like a scene out of a movie where I walk in and everyone turns and looks at me and pauses and just stares. And then they're trying to understand who I am, compute, who I am, and they can't easily place me, at least in those early years. And after a pregnant pause, they go back to what they're doing. But it was such an odd experience for me coming from a place where everyone was Mexican. It seemed, that's not true, there's lots of diversity in Pi River in California. But certainly so many Latinas, Latinos what I experienced being cast as different was realizing that initially it was. What are you? And then it was, oh, you're Mexican. And then after that it was like, you're Mexican, and this is who Mexicans are. Illegal aliens, criminals, drug users gang members. So I saw the shift in the way the information that people used to make sense of me. Initially, it was maybe confusion. And later it was and I ideas about who I was that were related to my ethnicity, that were imbued with racial meaning. And that's what we, that's what racialization is. Racialization is when you view someone or something with racial meaning, most of the time that's negative, right? You can think of something like an adamant object like a hoodie, right? And if I'm wearing it , people make certain assumptions about me. If you're wearing it as a white guy in Arkansas, they make different assumptions. And if it's a black man, arkansan also different assumptions. It's the same object, right? It's the folks are looking at our bodies, are looking at our skin color, looking at our hair texture, and drawing from these Id longstanding ideas about who white, black and Latinx people are to determine whether they're gonna engage with us and in what way they're gonna do that.
mike rusch.:I think part of this that you, the world that you entered into it, it comes with a pretty long and difficult history of how we think about anti-black violence, we think about racial cleansing that these things over time created a, I would call it a framework, that probably shaped the reception of what new groups coming into this racialized society would really encounter. And I'm curious how your view of the history of northwest Arkansas in this area set the stage for what you arrived to. And you're more than welcome to start to carry this into kind of more modern day too, and how this has evolved over time.
perla m. guerrero.:Thank you. So when I moved to Arkansas, I didn't know what I know now, right? My, my family had learned about the south through what they saw about the Civil Rights movement. And I remember my mother asking my father. What about like the police and the police dogs and the referring to the use of dogs during the civil rights movement to attack black protestors? And I had learned a little bit in, in my history classes about the civil rights movement. So I was like, I told her your ideas are antiquated. That's not what the South is anymore. I think that is true. That is not what the South was in 1996. It is undeniable that the foundation of the nation as a slave holding nation, the foundation of the South as a region that wanted to hold onto slavery, meant that we were really unprepared for grappling with what that place is and how these attitudes and approaches to race and racial difference would shape not just our experiences, but that place itself. So I moved to Fort Smith. We moved to a working poor area, which also included working poor white people. But later I realized, I never really had black neighbors I in, in Northside. The school was in some ways so segregated and I was in honors and AP classes. I only ever had one black peer in any of my honors or AP classes in a school that had a large number of black students. The other times I shared spaces with black kids were like the art class, like a more sort of general education course. And I think schools that are really important site where you can understand the underpinnings of what makes a place. So I was already in honors and AP classes when I transferred it into the school district. And everyone in class was white, except for me. And then there was a handful of Asian students, specifically Vietnamese American Children of refugees and some Laos students, children of refugees, no black person to my knowledge, no indigenous person. And then just me. And when I realized that, I said, oh, it, it's interesting, for lack of a better word to realize that we could be in at least a city that had a large, like 10, 15 percent black population and still lead such a segregated life. Now, I wanna be clear, California also was highly segregated. There were small numbers of black students in my classes, and that's for its own reasons. So in some ways I don't wanna exceptionalize Arkansas or the South as like the only place that has these things, but it shaped Fort Smith and Arkansas in very specific ways. I came through research to find out about the racial cleansing that occurred in many sites in northwest Arkansas that extended into places like in Oklahoma, Missouri, there's Northwest Arkansas as part of a swath of counties, places that experienced racial cleansing. This was, these were anti-black terror campaigns that sought to remove and of often did remove black communities from the area. And by the time I arrived, by the time I went to college, Northwest Arkansas was overwhelmingly white. Some counties were lily white, meaning there were zero black people, zero Latinx people, zero indigenous people. And that's not by accident. I would come to find out later, that was a very very much at the core of what made northwest Arkansas a particular kind of place.
mike rusch.:It's interesting to me because as many people know, Fort Smith and its history was one of the relocation centers where refugees coming after the Vietnam War came as a place to be, I guess to, to be welcome, to be processed, to enter into this country. And I'm curious how you may view kind of the experience of those refugees that kind of came before you and really this kind of immigrant movement into Arkansas. And maybe how did those either share stories or how did those experiences diverge?
perla m. guerrero.:That's a really great question. Broadly speaking, the what makes refugees different than so many other groups like immigrants is that refugees enter through this legal category, refugee, it's a legal status that is offered to people usually after the United States has engaged or intervened in some way. With Vietnamese, it was in the wake of the end of the Vietnam War after many years of US intervention, that includes Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, Hmong, et cetera. With Cubans who entered as refugees in 1980 and before that , they were given refugee status because the United States was fighting communism. And so they wanted to welcome an offer, a safe haven to, to Cubans fleeing the island. For immigrants. You have a much wider pot, right? You have legal immigrants who can migrate if they have the economic means to do and you have to either have a lot of money. I think there's something called a golden visa, and I believe now you have to have, it's either$500,000 or million dollars to invest in the United States in order to enter that way. But if you enter that way, you're on a path to becoming a legal permanent resident and eventually US citizen. Then you have other categories like temporary protected status, which is temporary legal status offered to folks experiencing chaos. More recently we've had this with Venezuelans in the past. It's also been offered to Salvadorans and then you have a undocumented immigrants. Undocumented immigrants enter without documentation because there is no line for them to get into. Undocumented immigrants tend to be working poor, working class. There is no legal means for them to enter. They are folks who are trying to make better lives for themselves, their children. And so in the 1990s, you start finding these groups in Arkansas, right? Vietnamese were process through Fort Chaffee in 1975. Cubans process through Fort Chaffee in 1980, and then Latinx immigrants started arriving in the 1990s. I think the Malia the, the landscape now is quite different and folks like to believe that Vietnamese were welcome with open arms. But the reality is that they were offered a begrudging acceptance both nationally and at the state level. Why begrudging? Because o other folks made the argument that , that Vietnamese people were, had been our allies, that the United States had made promises to them that the United States needed to keep those promises. In order for refugees to be sponsored out of a processing camp, especially back then, they had to have financial sponsors. This would be either an American family or sometimes American churches would sponsor larger families where they take the, on the financial responsibility of helping to provide for the family until they can find their own means, their own jobs, acclimate to the language, acclimate to the customs, et cetera. With Cubans in 1980, although they were also eventually recognized as refugees, there was a little more resistance to them because this cohort of Cubans had grown up under communism, so they were cast as communists. They were also casted as criminals. Castro said he opened the prisons and let criminals go, which was true. But, But really, so many of the people that were incarcerated in Cuba were incarcerated for having organized against the Castro regime. They were folks who were fighting against his government. They were folks who were maybe have sold on the black market food stuffs. And so in the end, less than 3% of the Cubans from 1980 were denied entry because they had actually committed violent crimes. And yet the rhetoric of them was their communist criminal homosexual, they're a danger to us in Arkansas. We don't want them, the reception Cubans received in Arkansas was quite different than Vietnamese refugees. They were essentially sponsored in very small numbers and then quickly run out of town. Families did not want to sponsor them. They had a hard time adjusting because what do you do when you're in a place where nobody wants you, you find another place. And so a lot of Cubans ended up leaving, which is part of the reason why you don't find as many Cubans from that particular era. When I was doing research for my book I found some anecdotal evidence that maybe only 12 Cubans from that era remained out of several hundred that had been sponsored versus the Vietnamese American community, which has slowly continued to grow since that time.
mike rusch.:I'm curious, as you start to see really all these different groups start to enter into this traditional, very white space how you view that kind of understanding of this idea of who deserves to be welcomed here? it sounds like we see a shift in what was an initial welcoming. You've talked about this a little bit and how that really became a very different definition.
perla m. guerrero.:Who deserves to be welcomed? I think in my most Pollyanna days, everyone deserves to be welcomed. One of the things that also makes this place different is the religious underpinning. I was raised Catholic in California, but it's a sort of Catholicism that's cultural. It's like you're going through the motions. It's not as imbued with like fervor. And that was something the religious, the strong religious beliefs were all that I found in Arkansas were something that were new to me. And so I learned all about Christian Brotherhood and, welcoming thy neighbor and all these really amazing ideas. And then I saw how short people fell, like self-declared Christians fell in really welcoming other people. I think it's easy for us to maybe judge other folks, especially when we don't know very much about communities or who they are. But I think if we really look into the sort of like our family's dirty underbellies of, has so and so ever lied, has so and so ever broken the law, has my uncle ever done this? Things that are from inappropriate to outright abuse. Like we would understand that. No one has lived an untainted life. And if we ever use that idea of, I don't know, being tainted or being sinners as the only reason why you exclude another community it sets up a dynamic where really nobody is ever good enough or where you have to demonstrate, you have to perform your vulnerability or perform your your pain. Offer up your pain as evidence as to why your neighbor should not call ICE on you. And I think that's just the very troubling dynamic because it's a slippery slope of okay, you meet this criteria, and so I will Magnanimously offer you a welcome, but as soon as you don't abide by these arbitrary sets of rules, then I'm no longer going to be a welcome space for you. Your family's no longer gonna be safe here. And I think it's really antithetical to Christian teaching in the sort of truest sense of the word.
mike rusch.:Uh, In listening to you and in reading your book, you use this term of "spatial illegality" to really refer to how Latino immigrants, they became criminalized not through their legal status alone, but through really and listening to you talk about this really their visibility and presence in these public spaces that were historically white. And that infused with this kind of Christian dualism of hospitality and exclusion. Help us unpack that a little bit. What, how does this presence, to your point, start to become or maybe why problematic, especially within this kind of religious context?
perla m. guerrero.:Yeah, so I think it goes back to an earlier question about being cast as different, right? On the one hand, folks can say immigrants, refugees are coming from different countries. They have different languages, they have different cultural practices. Sometimes they have different religious beliefs. But the problem is that when you start to believe that. That somehow you have all the information that you need to understand every person, every child, every parent. That's where we fall into the trap. So the concept of spatially illegality goes back to that moment of walking into Walmart. I had done nothing except walk into a store and then literally record scratch. Everyone turns and looks at me, pregnant pauses. They're trying to process who or what I am, and they go back to their daily life. Question of what are you? Questions about being followed in source simply because I'm trying to buy something and because I look a certain way. What became clear to me was that the folks who encountered me in everyday life didn't know anything about me. They didn't know anything about my being on their honor roll, they knew nothing about my family background. It, they knew nothing else about me, but they decided to take it upon themselves to make me feel unwelcome in public spaces. And the added element of spatial illegality and the argument that I make in the book is that Latinos, Latinas don't actually even have to break with social norms to be cast in this way, to be cast as law breakers. So I'm not sure if it's in the book, but the instance I often think about is in, you know what, Arkansas is still has a hunting culture. People go out, they hunt deer, they dress the deer. They, and they, there started being complaints when Latinos were dressing a goat or preparing a goat for barba to, to smoke it and process it. And it's like, how do you, on the one hand say, we as Arkansans love to hunt and dress deer, and you're eat, eat the meat. And on the other hand, you have another group preparing the meat of a much smaller animal. But you're saying that because Latinos are doing it now it should be a crime. Now it's illegal. In the book too I remember I write about this, which is the use of public parks. On the one hand, Latinos were accused of not assimilating to local norms. But on the other hand, when families would go out to use the park to play soccer to play with their kids. Then all of a sudden, there's too many of them. You go to the park on the weekend on, all you see are Latinos. If they would just be inside, it wouldn't bother me as much. And that's, that's a, I'm paraphrasing a quote that's in the book, but that to me speaks to the idea that Latinos at a certain point, were reluctantly accepted if they were invisible inside their homes, but were actively rejected if they were visible in public space, like going to Walmart, like going to the park and it had nothing to do with not speaking English. She had nothing to do with breaking social or cultural norms. It was literally who embodied who embodied this activity? Who is the person walking through the mall, walking through Walmart and it's a very stressful, a alienating way of moving through a community.
mike rusch.:Maybe to dig in this a little bit more. I think as you talked about this, one of the things that stood to me as you and this maybe goes back into some of the earlier history within the poultry industry, you talked about how this really shifted, Latinos were primarily understood as workers that were hidden kind of inside factories or inside the home. But it changed to this racialization as illegal aliens who were, I think you used the term invading. I'm curious keep moving forward in this idea because not just the spatial illegality was problematic. It seemed to go beyond that, if I understand correctly.
perla m. guerrero.:Yeah, absolutely. The poultry industry was crucial to the migration of Latinos, to the US South, not just Arkansas. There's a scholar by the name of Steve Str who said something like, the role of poultry cannot be underestimated. Absolutely. Part of the reason why is because the poultry industry was looking for more workers and there weren't enough in and around Arkansas, so Latinos started migrating. And what happens when people start working in an industry is that first they're hidden inside the warehouses, or the processing plants. And so the idea the construction of the community as illegal aliens started taking off when there were more families when. People like my dad started bringing their wives and their children to live with them. When you started seeing elementary schools with 25, 30%, 40% Latinx kids. And then all of a sudden the construction was they're invading, they're taking over. There's just so many of them. There's always some sort of imaginary magical line where you can have diversity, but it's not too much where we love to eat tacos, but it's not like tacos everywhere. And that's a really unfair burden to put on any community, whether we're talking about la, Latinx people, Asian Americans black people, indigenous folks, because it sets up this arbitrary line that a presupposes, we know what that magical sort of number is, but b. It's a false claim because it continues to set up people as if they're not making their lives in Arkansas, building their families in Arkansas, choosing actively to be there, to be southerners. To add to the richness of this place to make friends with, their white peers or Vietnamese peers. I think it's it's almost like a low lying fruit to accuse people of taking over and invading. But it, again, it presupposes like an ideal subject. An ideal citizen an ideal member of the community. And unfortunately, like Arkansas is not unique in, in contributing to othering communities that are newer to, to a state or a region.
mike rusch.:It's interesting to me because I think, and we touched on this just a little bit more, but really this changing concept of as you started with refugees and this idea of Christian hospitality and welcoming in this is the things that we should be doing and how this changed over time. This is happening at the same time where the emergence of their religious right, Southern Baptist Convention those churches in northwest Arkansas are starting to grow. That it really, this is where, correct me if I'm wrong, we started to see really a change in the kind of welcome that refugees and immigrants were offered. And I'm curious how you view, again this idea of this change of welcome or this idea of who's being welcome and maybe, within our political and religious systems, it feels like this is the origin. Is that a fair statement?
perla m. guerrero.:I think that is a, a fair statement. I think we're certainly living through a moment that's not the result of the election, the presidential election. This is something that has been brewing or growing for several decades. So when I started really diving into the role of religion, in the reception of refugees and immigrants in Arkansas, there were a couple of things that really struck me. On the one hand, for refugees, it is true that many churches organized of all different faiths, as Baptist, Methodists. And actually as a quick sort of aside there, there's at least one or two scholars who have argued that part of the reason you have a substantial number, whatever that number might be of Vietnamese Baptists, is because White Baptists sponsored their families in the wake of the Vietnam War. And as a sort of gesture of thanks or gratitude, they converted to the Baptist religion. Vietnamese Baptist is not something that you encounter in large numbers in other places that have large Vietnamese American communities. So Vietnamese, Methodist, other religious states came together, sponsored refugees. In Arkansas, there's an evolution. As part of Arkansas, as part of the Bible belt, there was an evolution of Christian piety or the way that you earn your way in, into the afterlife that is really tied with individual effort and dare I say, a capitalist work ethic. So there's a book by, I think the scholar's name is Bethany Morton, that's called"to Serve God and Walmart." And she has this really interesting argument about the way in which families like the Walton family or even the Tyson family they are able to marry the idea of a sort of a Protestant work ethic. Of working in some ways, like working to the bone, that is the way that you're gonna earn your way into the afterlife. And so they're able to motivate southerners, Christians into really buying into individualized ideas of what Christian charity can be or do. It's like a version of I'm gonna get this phrase wrong. What is it? Hate love the sinner. Hate the sin.
mike rusch.:Yeah. That's it. Yeah. Love the sinner. Hate the sin. Yeah.
perla m. guerrero.:Love the sinner. Hate the sin. So it's a version of that in that it's yes, love the sinner, hate the sin, but also the sinner needs to work. The sinner needs to work. Including a low paying job like Walmart another job like the poultry industry. And there's um, talking about it now, it's, it almost seems like a magic trick to the, the way certain members of the religious right were able to really tell poor people that they were poor simply because they hadn't worked hard enough. And one of the places where you can work hard enough are places like Tyson and Walmart and then there's an extension of that logic of you're poor and you haven't worked hard enough. But then there's, there are these other people that are taking your jobs, right? So one of the things that Latinos and other immigrant communities are accused of is, we're taking American jobs. In the case of poultry, what poultry is now for better or for worse. Is only the case because Latinos came in with the manpower to really expand the poultry industry. And so there's the, there's definitely a sort of conservative individualized take to Christianity that, that serves larger political agendas or approaches, but also serves to keep certain families and certain businesses quite wealthy. And I think that's the interesting or the powerful intersection that folks were able to marry the idea of Christianity and Christian piety with a hard day's, a hard day's work. In places specifically like Walmart and Tyson, not like working out in the prairie and not like agricultural subsistence farming. It was, you have to find a way to make a buck and keep these companies going.
mike rusch.:it, it's Interesting to me because you know, at some point there's just too many people from somewhere else that are here obviously needed to to help provide a labor force. But because of that, and because of maybe where the origins of some of this change, the racialization change. What happens or Where's that kind of pivot point where it becomes about casting people as you described in your own story around being illegal aliens or criminals. And then this starts to take on a, a political force as well too. And this is something that, we're not even into, you know, 2010 yet this is starting to happen back in the early two thousands. So yeah. I'm curious how you start to frame this or where that change is to where Yeah, it does absolutely start to take on this really negative connotation to it.
perla m. guerrero.:Okay. So the thing that's interesting, for lack of a better word to think about is. In Arkansas, these changes are happening, right? The poultry industry is booming. Latinos are providing a lot of the labor power needed to make that industry grow. People are hearing Spanish in places like Walmart. Upside there are more tacos, pan. There are other things that people seem to enjoy. Like we are in a country, and again, Arkansas is not unique in this. Like we are in a country that really values or prizes. The homegrown son, like people who are like I am, I live in DC now and I sometimes hear like I'm a fifth gener generation Washingtonian. People say that with a lot of pride, right? Like that they're firmly rooted. So there, there is an idea. In the United States, maybe it's because, maybe it's for other reasons, but there's an idea in the United States that those of us who are able to claim being from a place for 2, 3, 4, 5 generations are somehow, somehow the rightful heirs of that place, like that place belongs to us and it should not belong to anybody else. So in Arkansas politics some politicians were able to mobilize to stoke the fear of the other, to stoke the fear of people who are like, wait a minute, I'm hearing Spanish more often. Wait a minute, I'm seeing soccer games played on the weekend to essentially make an argument that. Latinos were dangerous, that they were criminals, that they were bringing in drugs, that there were gang members. When politicians started pushing this rhetoric, most of that was like untrue, unfounded. It's like a case of one gun in one house, in one city not this large scale crime wave. But there's this concept that I sometimes teach my student called "a moral panic." A moral panic is this idea that, you make people scared of someone or something. It could be muggings, it could be gangs, it could be speaking Spanish. And what that does is then you stoke their fear and because they're fearful of this thing or this action, or this group, then that then as voters, they will support, tougher crimes for gang members. They will support English only in schools. They will support building another prison in the state of Arkansas. It's a way that you can continue to blame another person, another group, a new group, as opposed to holding politicians accountable for the fact that they're not providing for their own citizens, their own community members, their own constituents. Instead of saying, Hey, actually you voted against me receiving my food stamps that I need to feed my children. It's oh, I have to vote against. Feeding your children via food stamps because there are these criminals that are taking over the state and we need to build more prisons. It's a slide of hand. It's and it's a way that politicians themselves don't have to hold themselves accountable. And it also serves to create a sort of insider group because you can find alliances with people that agree, oh yeah, there's, there are too many Latinx kids in the public schools. Oh yeah, there's too, there's too much Spanish, there's too much this, there's too much staff. And you start creating that install group that really reify the idea of us versus them. It's either we get stuff or they get stuff as opposed to recognizing that if we took a different approach, there's actually plenty, there's plenty of stuff to go around. There's plenty of money to put into public schools. If we didn't use them in other things like prisons or, I don't know, buying like even more guns. Any number of a range of things.
mike rusch.:One of the things you wrote about in, in your book, Nuevo South, was that in the state of Arkansas there was legislation passed. Now your book was written in 2017. We're gonna flash forward, obviously now to 2025, but you made a comment in there around some anti-immigrant legislation that was passed at the time, 287(g), which has been part of our dialogue and conversations in the state now, because at the time you had asked the question about why was this, this legislation not really being used at the time, but now we flash forward, seven years later. And I would characterize the use of that as being used aggressively. We hear community organizers talking about this and it's really I think their words where they say it's really created this kind of climate of fear where people who are following legal processes are still being othered, they're still, they're being detained. So I'm just curious, like this restraint that you talked about in your book has now come into its own and this foundation being set that's now really being used in a very overt way. I, yeah. What did you see then? What do you see now? How is this political force changing maybe what was done in back then and how that's working itself out today?
perla m. guerrero.:That's a good question. Spoiler alert for anyone who's gonna read the book one of the last chapters I write about the book ends around 2005 when a couple of Arkansas politicians were proposing even stricter anti-immigrant legislation in Arkansas. And I also write about what was then called the Arkansas Friendship Coalition, which was a coalition of businessmen, religious leaders, and some government officials. And I make this argument in the book about I cast that, that approach as part of the Good Old Boys club why that, why the good Old boys club? Because the, at least as it was recounted to me by people involved in that process, they continued to go to do things the old school way, talking to each other over golf. No sort of deep policy planning. It's like a sort of verbal agreement between these three different groups who are interested in keeping Latinos in the state, for business purposes, for religious purposes, and for political purposes. And so I, one of the things that makes Arkansas so different than other places is that because it was still such a relatively small state in terms of the population, it is a small state in terms of who the heavy hitters are, right? The fact that the Tyson family, the Walton family are deeply rooted in Northwest Arkansas made it so that they had disproportionate power to actually facilitate or manage statewide legislation in a way that's impossible in a place like California and a place like Illinois. But it is similar maybe to a place like Georgia or other states. So I say that because one of the things that this coalition was able to do was to. Try to, was to prevent more anti, more, more punitive anti-immigrant legislation from being passed in Arkansas through these agreements. However, one of the policies that existed back then that has been put on steroids now is something called 287(g). 287(g) is part of a legislation that has existed since the 1990s. And what it does is it deputize local law enforcement officers to act as ice agents. What does this mean? This means that if there was an undocumented immigrant let's say you're driving without, there's an undocumented immigrant driving a car. His tail light is out. That's the reason the local officer uses to stop him, right? It's a safety check. In the process of this safety check through the 287(g) agreement, local law enforcement could check whether this person is legally present in the United States. If they're not legally present. They are authorized to both detain the individual and to call ICE to come pick this person up. When you have both 287(g) and spatially illegality, like when Latinos and other communities of color are already constructed as being other, already constructed as being different, already constructed as being criminal, you have people being stopped. Essentially for made up reasons. You say your headlights are not bright enough. You were driving erratically, you were driving yes in a suspicious kind of way, but because now you have 287(g) agreements, you have authorized local officers who act as ice agents, which then creates another realm of terror. It's one thing to walk into Walmart and have everyone stare at you, but it's another thing to walk into Walmart when, when you run the chance of, of encountering an a local officer who has been empowered by the federal government to act as an ICE official, to ask you for your documents, to stop you as you're dropping off your child at school to pepper spray you because they say you're, you're acting out. And so I think each place that has a 287(g) agreement has its own local dynamic, its own local approach. Its own racialized anxieties is about what communities they're targeting, right? And other places it could be monk people, it could be Ethiopians. But what I think is indicative and really important in terms of what I study is that at least last time I talked about a year ago of about 111 287(g) agreements , 80% of them were in the US South. So this means that the US South as a region is disproportionately participating in processes that ultimately lead to deportations, that terrorize local communities that give local law enforcement, disproportionate power.
mike rusch.:I think it's interesting too because questions about who is in the country legally or not is a civil offense . It's not a criminal offense. And yet you have this, what feels like this blurring of the lines now between the two. Is that a fair assessment of that?
perla m. guerrero.:Absolutely. It's a fair assessment. And it's also what happens when you criminalize people, right? When you criminalize movement, unauthorized en entry is a civil offense. However, what's really dangerous is that the line about what is a criminal act keeps moving, right? One of the, one of the reasons people are really experiencing terror in heightened waste today is because you increasingly have cases where, let's say let's say you, you are a young person, you're partying in Fayetteville, you're driving intoxicated, so you have 1D UI in your record. You pay the fine or you do the time, whatever, whatever. State law dictates you move on with your life and then you go into naturalized for your naturalization interview. What was back then, let's say it was 10 years ago, what was back then, a minor offense can now be deemed a cause for removal. These are folks who thought they had done the time they have. Sometimes folks don't have other any other sort of run in with the law, any other crime, any other fine. And yet they're, they are finding that something that they thought was resolved is now unresolved, is now cause for removal. And I think that's, that's the really dangerous thing when we. Keep tweaking laws and keep, we keep moving the goalpost, under us criminal law, we're supposed to believe in rehabilitation, in redemption. But what is increasingly happening in and out of an immigration context is saying, actually this fault is something we're gonna hold against you for forever. What do you do when you actually thought you had done everything else correctly? What do you do when you are afraid of leaving your house? Because you, you're afraid that dropping your children off at school is gonna be the place where ICE picks you up. And I really wanna emphasize that, in immigration stuff, it's always a person, right? It's always the undocumented immigrant who's responsible. They're the ones that broke the law, they're the ones, et cetera, et cetera. But, places like Tyson, places like Walmart, local landscaping businesses, construction sites hire undocumented people. Their undocumented workers are hired, not just because there's, they have such a great work ethic. They are hired because they are more vulnerable. They are hired because they can be paid less. They are hired because often they're not in unions, in labor unions where they would have to be paid more. And so they are a cheaper labor force that is more easily controlled. That has facilitated the economic growth of so many industries, and yet. When it comes to issues of immigration, all that larger context evaporates. And then it's this person just made a bad decision. They just made a poor choice. They shouldn't be here, they should wait in line. But most of us do not understand the extent to which we rely on undocumented labor to make our clothes, to pluck our chickens, to do our landscaping, to make our food. We are relying on their laborer, and we are not holding ourselves responsible for the condi, the conditions that they have to navigate to make a life for themselves in the United States.
mike rusch.:One of the things in your book that you argue is that you say"historical legacies shape the reception of new people to the region." And I guess my question is, do you think, can these legacies, can this history, can it be transformed? Or is this going to be a perpetual cycle that we continue to repeat and can't get out of?
perla m. guerrero.:I think it can absolutely be transformed. One of the, one of the changes that I saw after I, I published the book was the celebration of Juneteenth in Springdale. When I was working on this book, when I lived in Arkansas Juneteenth was not celebrated in that part of the state. It, it's almost as if black people didn't exist in, in the state as if black communities had not farmed in those counties, black families that lived and died on those lands. And I think, something like recognizing the power of Juneteenth as something both significant for black Arkansans and black Americans, but also for the rest of us, like it is not lost. It is not lost on me as an immigrant that, I am the beneficiary of black people, struggles for civil rights, for gender equality, for equal pay. And I think, the powerful thing I. When you get new people, when you get new blood, when you get young blood, is that people are deeply invested in making their communities better. And I think immigrants, refugees, migrants from other places like they're who have made a home in Arkansas, they're deeply invested in making that place better. And I think the best thing that we could do is to be historically informed so we understand where we fit and understand where prior struggles left things off, and where we can pick those battles up. I think no matter whether you're an immigrant, a refugee, a native born, US citizen, a white American, we can learn so much more. We can and should learn more from each other's struggles and from the successes and from recognizing the value that we. That we bring to a place, not just in terms of labor, but in terms of our our humanity and our recognition that we are sharing these places. We're sharing these communities and that, by sharing them with each other, we can make them better.
mike rusch.:As I listened to you I think your story that you shared at the beginning, just, it stays, yeah. It stays front of mind that this is not, while we talk about policy, this is not policy to you as we talk about spatial illegality. This is not spatial illegality to you. This is about real life and your own story and your own experiences. And I'm just curious, obviously from my social position there are gonna be things that I don't understand and I don't see, and I don't, I don't even have the capacity to really understand because of the lives and the experiences that we've had. And they would not ask just for your wisdom and your counsel, and what are those things that you know our white communities, our broader communities need to be listening to or need to understand if this is going to be a pattern that we are going to break.
perla m. guerrero.:Thanks for that. I appreciate the sentiment. So in preparing for this interview, I was thinking back to my own time in Arkansas and my friend group in high school were white and Asian, specifically Vietnamese and Lao. And as much as I am as different as like Vietnamese and Lao families are from Mexican families we shared, I guess what I would call now displacement. Our families had been displaced from their countries of origin. We were all navigating being in this place called Arkansas. Supposedly growing up as Americans, but managing and negotiating our own parents' expectations about what it means to be a good student, what it means to be a good, a good young woman. And I think I always felt a little bit of a social distance from my white friends that it took me a while to understand where that was coming from. And what I know now is that because so many of them had never had to migrate, because so many of them made me an exception to who they thought of as illegal aliens or who they thought of as Latino. I never actually felt safe enough to share things with 'em. I remember a friend of mine once making a comment about, oh they're busing people in, in the middle of the night. And I asked her some more details and come to find out it was just people, Latinos arriving through Yes, the bus. But it was like, you take, you used to take buses if you were too broke to buy flight to go to Mexico, and you arrive in the middle of the night because the bus has been driving for 40 hours and it drops you off. They were not illegal aliens. But I remember thinking, I don't have the energy to break this down for you. I was both too young and it's too close to it. And maybe I was afraid of the judgment or the questions that she would ask. So I say this because I think, I really believe in the possibility of , of being true deep allies with people from other backgrounds, class, race, ability, et cetera. But I think it also takes a lot of hard work and it takes a lot of learning, and it can't always be the person experiencing the marginalization that teaches an interested party, about this particular thing, right? I think there has to be a deep level of awareness and engagement, and you try to do the best you can and learn elsewhere and read from all the stuff published online, all the stuff that people have shared, and then your approach with humility and with caution to learn from people in your life who might be experiencing something, in Arkansas at this moment, nationally, at this moment, with so many rates happening. I'm pretty sure that no matter the legal status of any friends that you have, they know someone who's undocumented. And maybe they don't wanna share that with you. And if that's the case, you should ask yourself why that is the case, why people you love and care about do not feel like it, like you are a safe enough place for them to share that. And this is, this goes beyond politics. This really is about people's humanity. And I do think that it is true, that if you're gonna vote against my family, my interests, my wellbeing, then yes, that might be an un something we will never be able to breach. But if you don't even try, if you are just reproducing these pop culture narratives about who undocumented people are, then you're gonna find yourself even more and more even further away from friendships that you hold dear.
mike rusch.:I guess if we can't understand that as human beings and see the humanity. In the people in front of us we need to have a lot of other different conversations, i'm curious, do you have hope in this Nuevo South? Can I say that?
perla m. guerrero.:Yeah. I absolutely have hope. The Nuevo South is in the book refers to a particular approach to economic development, economic gains. It's not simply because Latinos speak Spanish, and I think there's a lot of hope in learning from each other's histories and learning from each other's experiences in learning about each other's pains and struggles. And I think I have hope. I just think hope takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of knowledge building, it takes a lot of humility. It requires us to both understand how our experiences are unique and how any, most people's lives are gonna be really hard. But also understanding that sometimes people face other obstacles and challenges. And if we're trying to build real solidarity, real coalitions, it requires understanding, holding the complexity and the specificity of people's experiences and struggles while understanding that we have so much more to gain by having each other's backs, by working for immigration reform, by working for a fair wage, by working for gender affirming care, by, by really truly valuing each other's humanity and. Doing the best we can to try to make sure that everyone has the care that they need, the care and support they need to thrive.
mike rusch.:Yeah. I think we can't talk about that enough. It feels like this is a conversation that yeah. Is needed and necessary. As you look towards the future here, like what, I'm curious, the current work that you're focusing on or what do we need to be thinking about of either what's coming next or how, what does it look like to be an answer to some of these questions?
perla m. guerrero.:So to both, to and both on a maybe a sad note and a more optimistic note. My current work is about deportation, and I started working on this in 2018, and I've learned a lot from deportees or returnees. So folks who were essentially coerced to return to Mexico is the country that I focus on were coerced to return to Mexico because policies in states like South Carolina and Georgia made it untenable for them to continue living their lives in the United States. Many of the people that chose to return were coerced to return, wanted to study, and they couldn't, they were undocumented. Georgia has a ban on undocumented students and higher education at certain universities. So the sad note for me is that in some ways, like what I feared would happen in the US South did happen. It has become a really difficult place to live if you're undocumented. The upside of that is that there's, they're deportee and returnees are doing a lot of really hard but good work building coalitions both with other displaced people in Mexico, but also with the communities that they left in the United States, they're living family separation, except this time from north to south. They have siblings and parents here. Sometimes children, they continue to be deeply invested in the places that saw them grow up. I also have talked to folks and who grew up in other places like Utah, California, but the South continues to be a region unfortunately that, that has done a really good job at making it a very difficult place to live. And it's a challenge to see how effective laws have been at doing what they set out to do. But folks who are also organizing trans locally across Mexico and the United States to advocate and organize for policies that will foster lives policies that will allow them to thrive and for. The right to be able to see their families, even if it is just on a tours visa, that they are allowed back into the country to see their children and to see their parents. And organizing activism, solidarity takes many different forms. And I think if we are invested in each other's humanity, I think we also have to be invested in the humanity of people whose lives are across the border.
mike rusch.:One of the themes that we've tried to carry through all of these conversations is this idea of community wholeness. I don't, if I'm honest I'm not sure if that's a fair question to ask given yeah what is, what has happened, what is happening what could happen. But I am curious this idea of wholeness, if that is possible. I'm just curious your reaction when I use that term or what it could look like?
perla m. guerrero.:That's a really provocative question. To me, community wholeness means we are really including everyone. What does that mean? People like me, I haven't lived in Arkansas in over a decade. My family, my parents in particular have very fond memories of Arkansas. Mine are a little more complex, but, if if I felt welcomed that welcomed there that would be wonderful. But also people who maybe were deported, one of the things that were deported from these communities, one of the things that I often hear Deportees talk about is how hurtful it is for them to be plucked out of their communities and and removed and then the community continues as if they were never there, as if they didn't go to that corner store every Friday, to cash their paycheck or they didn't take their kids to school. So I think Community Wholeness can and should include people who helped to make Arkansas what it is today, even if they're no longer physically present, if they're interested in maintaining ties, if they're interested in cont continuing to advocate for policies that will benefit poultry workers and manufacturers and construction. I think community Wholeness really to my mind, has to account for , for everyone, not just immigrants, refugees, but also disabled people, trans people, incarcerated people are counted in the prisons where they're held and not the communities they were taken from. Even though the community, for better or for worse is the context that is the backdrop for their own engagement in society, their own trajectory in society. So I think community wholeness has to include everyone, and that in and of itself is a challenge. We're not all the same. We don't have the same values, but if we want to build a community in Arkansas or anywhere else we have to make a tent that is big enough for all of us. And if we center each other's humanity above anything else, then I think it is. Then I think it is possible and it's something that we should work toward.
mike rusch.:Dr. Guerrero, thank you so very much for the work that you've done, for who you are for helping Yeah. Us see this place in, in a way that hopefully is the whole story or a fuller story in a way that we have to reckon with, and we have to understand that. Who we are and the place that we live. It, it has real people with real lives that are being affected in so many ways. And so thank you for all of it. Thank you for your time. Yeah, just humbled incredibly humbled to be able to sit and share this space with you.
perla m. guerrero.:Thank you, Mike, for having me. I really appreciate the time. And I really hope folks got a little insight into some of the lives of their neighbors in Arkansas.
mike rusch.:I, yeah, and absolutely. It's gonna take me a while to process this one and obviously would love for people to, to read your book and we'll recommend that. We'll put that in the show notes. And yeah, please keep us informed on the work that you're doing and how we can help. And happy to always share this, because I think it's necessary and needed, and we just, we can't talk about it enough. Dr. Guerrero, thank you so much and we'll talk soon.
perla m. guerrero.:Thank you.
mike rusch.:Well, a deep thank you to Dr. Guerrero for sharing not just our research, but our own personal story with us today. What Dr. Guerrero helps us see is that the questions we're wrestling with today, questions about who belongs and who gets welcomed about who gets criminalized. These aren't new questions. They're questions that have been asked and answered in different ways across generations. The faces have changed, the specific policies have changed, but the underlying structures, the ways that power operates to decide who's in and who is out. Those patterns persist. We heard about acts of spatial illegality about how being visible in public spaces while being brown becomes its own form of transgression. We talked about racialization as a process and not a fixed category, and how our culture and Northwest Arkansas moved from not knowing how to categorize Latino immigrants to explicitly criminalizing them, we confront perhaps the most difficult question in a region with a history of racial violence, of sundown towns and erasure. How do these legacies shape who feels safe today and how do they shape who stays and who leaves? We will stay in contact with Dr. Guerrero as her current work. It focuses on deportation and return, and the people who have been removed from communities like ours and the family separations that follow. She's documenting how people organize across borders, how they maintain ties to places that raise them, even when those places made it impossible for them to stay. And she's asking us to consider what community wholeness really means, whether it can include people who were forced to leave, whether it can make space for everyone. So where do we go from here? Well, I believe Dr. Guerro offered us some hope, but hope that requires work. Hope that requires us to build knowledge and humility. Hope that requires understanding of how our experiences are both unique and connected. Hope that requires us to value each other's humanity above all other things, we'll continue exploring these questions of power and belonging.'cause if we're serious about building in northwest Arkansas where everyone belongs, we have to understand the forces that have shaped, who's been welcomed and who's been pushed out. We have to reckon with this history, we have to see the patterns and how they echo into today, and we have to ask ourselves what we're willing to do differently. I wanna say thank you for listening, and I wanna say thank you for being the most important part of what our community is becoming. This is the underview, an exploration in the shaping of our place.
