Dispatches from the "Viejo" New South: Historicizing recent Latino migrations

Latino migration to the US South is not a new phenomenon. Claims of a "Nuevo New South" are thus products of the scholarly and popular imaginations rather than the historical record. Indeed, the claim of a rupture with the past has the potential to obscure the fact that contemporary relationships of race and class have their roots in the dilemmas that have confronted white and black Southerners since Emancipation. If the times and places of "the New South" meant something different to African Americans than it did to white observers and boosters, what have the times and places of the "Nuevo" South meant to Latino immigrants? Do those meanings, in fact, originate in a novel globalizing moment at the turn of the twenty-first century? And how can teasing out Latino immigrants' own narratives about the region help social scientists and historians find more appropriate ways of conceptualizing Latino immigration's meaning for the South as a whole?