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This chapter examines the changing face of agribusiness in the Middle West. It explains how agribusiness transformed large sections of the Middle West during the last third of the twentieth century and was reshaped as it became part of a global food production and marketing system. The transformation was particularly evident in the region's increasing emphasis on packaged-food production, ranging from frozen dinners for wholesale and retail markets to boxed beef and poultry for fast-food franchises. Commercial feedlots, animal-slaughtering facilities, and poultry-processing and meatpacking plants appeared with increasing frequency in southwest Kansas, western Oklahoma, central and eastern Nebraska, western Iowa, parts of Minnesota and South Dakota, and northwestern Arkansas. The chapter considers why small towns provided an attractive venue for large agriculture-related businesses in the Middle West. It looks at the case of Garden City, Kansas, to illustrate the long-term as well as recent developments in heartland agribusiness.

This chapter focuses on low-skilled employment. It shows that employers have a racial hierarchy of preference and that they rely on word-of-mouth hiring to attract Latino and Asian workers with the racial and/or immigrant abilities they prize. The chapter gives special attention to meatpacking, a sector that has been racially remade in the past few decades. It then explores the ways Title VII of the Civil Rights Act should prevent this kind of hiring and shows how judges have created new opportunities for employers to use word-of-mouth hiring to build and maintain their Latino and Asian workforces without running afoul of the law. This chapter also shows how two other laws, the Immigration Reform and Control Act and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, would seem to prohibit immigrant realism but have nonetheless failed.

This essay focuses on Latina/o claims to belonging in the community and the nation while working and living in Perry, Iowa. Attracted to jobs in the meatpacking industry, Latinas/os made connections to Perry and developed a sense of belonging despite feeling initially unwelcomed by the town’s residents. Among the challenges confronted by Latina/o residents were the policing of their use of Spanish, negative perceptions of a local Spanish-language radio station, and the racialization of Latinas/os as criminals and foreigners. By confronting these challenges and claiming a place in the community, Latinas/os demonstrated the changing nature of the rural heartland. The town’s Latinas/os characterized themselves as integral to the social, economic, and political fabric of their community and the nation.

This chapter discusses the role of immigrant workers in the meatpacking and poultry processing industry. It also examines immigration enforcement of meatpacking workers and explores the government's failure to prevent the employment of unauthorized workers.

This chapter examines the rise and fall of pork bellies as commodities traded on the futures markets. As a financial instrument, pork bellies were iconic. For many, the image of greedy traders as pigs at the trough was equally iconic. Until pork belly became a headliner on restaurant menus, few knew exactly what a pork belly was. Pork bellies created a viable market at a precarious time for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and they lasted for a half-century, until the market closed in July 2011. This chapter first explains what a pork belly is before discussing how trading of hogs and pork parts began. It then considers how novel manufacturing techniques—pioneered in Cincinnati—transformed the meatpacking industry, and how Chicago supplanted Cincinnati as Porkopolis. It also looks at the Chicago stockyards and particularly the “disassembly line” that rose up to slaughter and process hogs, pork belly trading during the Civil War era, the disapperance of bacon from supermarkets, pork belly's revival on American diets, and how technology drove pork bellies out of commodity exchanges.

This chapter contextualizes Central American migration to the United States, describing especially the work and migration histories of women from Honduras and El Salvador. The “ethnic succession” perspective is explored as an explanation for labor struggles and labor-market changes at the end of the twentieth century, with a focus on the meatpacking industry.

This chapter continues the exploration of the themes of family, faith, and experiences of racism and economic poverty but within the context of Addie Wyatt's nascent marriage to her high-school sweetheart, Claude Wyatt Jr., and her subsequent motherhood. The need to find employment in order to contribute to her household drove her to seek employment in the Chicago stockyards during World War II, thus introducing her to the gendered and racialized environment of meatpacking plants as well as the labor movement through the United Packinghouse Workers of America. The chapter also brings to light an important era of community and faith-based activism for Wyatt in the Altgeld Gardens housing project where she and her family resided from 1944 through 1955.

This chapter examines the implications of U.S. antitrafficking policy and practice for both trafficking survivors and immigrant workers across labor sectors. In U.S. media and public policy discourses alike, the term “human trafficking” has become synonymous with sex trafficking, which in turn has been equated with sexual violence and prostitution. Yet the many forms of violence enacted in human trafficking can include racial and sexual violence as well as economic and imperialist violence. This chapter argues that the current U.S. anti-sex trafficking agenda is so narrowly focused on the sex industry and instead gives more emphasis on enforcement and prosecution as well as the explicit and exclusive criminalization of prostitution. In order to highlight the dangers and pitfalls of this policy, the chapter considers a case of extreme labor abuse, tantamount to trafficking, of immigrant workers in the United States in the meatpacking industry in Postville, Iowa.

In December 2006 and again in May 2008, the Midwest was the setting for large-scale Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in rural meatpacking towns that drew national attention. In the first raids, concurrent sweeps in six different communities that hosted Swift plants, children, and schools emerged as important and sympathy-generating themes as children were separated from detained parents and schools were left struggling to figure out what to do with those children. Both of these issues distracted from the intended law enforcement thrust of the raids, reducing their popularity and making them more controversial. In contrast, the May 2008 raid at a kosher meat-processing facility in Postville, Iowa, had the ICE enforcement agents querying their detainees about whether they had children and placing those who answered yes under house arrest. Although this, too, destroyed the former workers' chance at earning a livelihood, it did not separate mothers from children, nor did it require schools to become emergency sanctuaries for frightened and marooned children. Thus, two key sympathy-generating factors that could make the larger public dubious of ICE enforcement were bypassed. Invoking trope theory, this chapter looks at local and regional mainstream print media coverage of both raids to see how the imagining of children, school, transnationality, and workers in and by Middle America was changed between the two raid cycles, in turn changing the semiotics of how these raids were to be responded to.

This chapter analyzes Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle to elucidate his sensory politics and his proposed indictment of industrial capitalism. The Jungle is a fictionalized account of Chicago's meatpacking industry and its appalling working conditions. Sinclair's exposés shocked readers' senses, turning their stomachs with descriptions of rats tossed into sausage hoppers. However, his novel also had much to say about how work in the meat factories dulled the senses of their workers. This chapter examines how Sinclair drew lines of class, ethnicity, and race in sensory terms in order to simultaneously express sympathy and solidarity as well as repulsion and social distance from immigrant workers in Back of the Yards. It also considers how Sinclair described the salvation—socialism—of the characters in The Jungle in non-sensory terms, arguing that he neglects to explain how socialism promised to rejuvenate the senses.