On Thursday, Mississippi University for Women’s Gordy Honors College Forum Series will feature Angela Stuesse, author of “Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South.”
The book is based on Stuesse’s six-year collaboration with workers in central Mississippi’s chicken processing plants, where large numbers of Latin Americans were recruited in the mid-1990s to labor alongside an established African American workforce.
Against the backdrop of the state’s history of racial inequality, Stuesse explores reactions to the arrival of Latino immigrants and prospects for their integration into local communities, as well as the industry’s efforts to lower labor costs and workers’ efforts to organize.
While in Mississippi, Stuesse was also a founding collaborator of the MPower worker center in Morton, where she helped facilitate dialogue between immigrant and U.S.-born poultry workers.
Now assistant professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Stuesse also studies the experiences of undocumented young people in higher education and immigration enforcement in Atlanta. She has also conducted research in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
This presentation is free and open to the community and begins at 6 p.m. in Nissan Auditorium on the campus of The W. For more information, contact the Honors College at [email protected] or 662-241-6850.
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