Skyscrapers and Chicken Plants: Latinos and Sunbelt Immigration Politics in Greater Charlotte, 1990–2008

This paper argues that the fast-growing suburban cities and exurban counties of the metropolitan hold the keys to understanding Latino immigrants’ encounters with the politics and ideologies of race, class, and citizenship in the early 21^st-century U.S. South.  In the South’s metropolitan areas, tensions emerged between Latino immigrants and both whites and blacks in schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods.  “The” of business-driven racial accommodation, however, changed the calculus within the city itself. ’s whites, generally higher income earners than their ex-urban counterparts, were more likely to embrace positive stereotypes of Latinos as “hard workers.” African American political leadership resisted Latinos at times, but at others favored a practical politics seeking to benefit from the influx economically and politically.  Meanwhile, a myriad of human relations and international relations commissions, legacies of the civil rights era and the city’s deliberate attempts to fashion itself as an international financial center, mobilized to calm tensions.

In fast-growing suburbs and exurbs, by contrast, class politics structured anti-Latino sentiment as middling whites focused not on Latinos’ storied work ethic but rather the perceived burden they placed on public services such as schools.  This suburban class politics did not attack “the working class” or “laborers,” but rather assigned essentialist qualities to a new category of person, “illegals,” widely understood to be Latino.  Latinos’ arrival to suburbs and exurbs thus marked a new phase of division in Southern politics, in which legal immigration and citizenship status became alarm bells heralding a new proxy for racial essentialism.  Outside itself, neither Latinos nor their potential allies vocally challenged this movement.  Thus, white suburbanites and exurbanites in Greater Charlotte and throughout the South became key cultural, ideological, and political authors of a national anti-immigrant movement that projected arguments about race and class onto the axis of citizenship.