The White Iowans and Latino and African migrants of the meatpacking industry

The heartland. Flyover country. The Corn Belt. The parts of rural America where the meatpacking industry thrives are dismissed by many people as a sea of red counties on election maps. Yet these small towns and villages are also where abstract debates about immigration, work, and faith put on flesh and blood—where migrants and refugees share packing lines and church pews with White, native-born Americans. In Meatpacking America, Kristy Nabhan-Warren destabilizes the often oversimplified view of the midwestern Corn Belt, focusing in particular on Iowa. She reveals a far more nuanced and layered story of how White Iowans and Latino and African migrants manage the shifting dynamics of American life.

Nabhan-Warren presents a series of ethnographic portraits that illuminate the role of work, faith, family, and food as common denominators in a seemingly divided America. She tells the stories of her encounters with migrants, White Iowans, priests, and meatpacking executives. She contends that their lived experiences give insight into the complexities of immigration, people’s desire to work, and the role of faith through it all. Drawing connections between the stories of past Europeans settling the frontier and migrants of today, Nabhan-Warren takes a “lived religion” approach, examining the ways religion functions in her subjects’ daily lives and inspires survival in often strenuous circumstances. In the Corn Belt, “religion lives in the fields, farms, and packing plants as much as in the churches,” and Nabhan-Warren’s conversations with Iowans reveal a deep connection between the land, agriculture, and personal faith.

She focuses much of her narrative on the meatpacking industry, painting the Corn Belt as a modern “Ellis Island for asylum seekers and refugees” because “where there is meat, there is work.” Whereas the industry used to be urban-centric and dominated by Eastern Europeans, it has since shifted to small towns in right-to-work states like Iowa, with the majority of workers being of Latin American or African descent.