Contesting Diversity and Community within Postville, Iowa

• Main Authors: Reynolds, Jennifer F., Didier, Caitlin
• Format: Book
• Language: unknown
• Published: University of Illinois Press 2017
• Subjects: Brooklyn; Postville
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252037665.003.0008

This chapter considers the following question: How do small-town middle Americans adapt to rapid cultural change that is more typical of big-city life? Postville, Iowa, was singled out for attention over all the other rural midwestern or southern towns that also house corporate beef, pork, or chicken food-processing plants. It had all the trappings of an “exotic” case study; the new owners of the meat-processing plant were city people, from Brooklyn, and they observed an orthodox form of Judaism, Hasidism. And despite the fact that the kosher meat-processing plant, Agriprocessors, was family owned and operated, it has been managed much like other notorious corporate firms that have relocated to rural places to cut costs related to unionized labor and the transportation of livestock. Management, moreover, recruited immigrant labor from the ex-Soviet republics, Asia, Israel, and Latin America. When Immigration officials raided Agriprocessors on May, 12, 2008, it was further revealed that the majority of the workers were undocumented. This chapter is based on ethnographic research, conducted at different points of time in the town's recent history. It draws upon a tradition of critical ethnographic inquiry into transnational circuits of migration and meat-processing communities to examine the particulars of how this place is a contested social field wherein different players struggle over macrosociological meanings of citizenship and belonging in locally specific ways.