Articulations of Place, Poverty, and Race: Dumping Grounds and Unseen Grounds in the Rural American Northwest

Abstract

This project extends poverty research by addressing the lack of knowledge about place and race differences in poverty processes ( Blank 2005 Blank, R. 2005. Poverty, policy and place: How poverty and policies to alleviate poverty are shaped by local characteristics. Regional Science Review, 28(4): 441–64. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar] ). Rural places experience a range of modes of articulation within the global division of rural labor and we observe three distinct modes of articulation in the American Northwest: “playgrounds,” “dumping grounds,” and “unseen grounds.” We attend to the recursive relations between political-economic restructuring and the discursive production of social difference across class and race lines. Poverty is produced in the reciprocal relations among local historical, ecological, and social processes and the articulation of those places with new rounds of capital accumulation under neoliberal restructuring. Our empirical investigation focuses on white and Latino poverty across nonmetropolitan counties of the American Northwest (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana). We first map county-level patterns of white and Latino poverty in relation to county-level economic restructuring during the 1990s across the region. We then employ in-depth comparative case study research to explore the intersections of specific forms of neoliberal restructuring with place-based historical, ecological, and social processes to understand rural white and Latino poverty in the region.