We Wanted Workers, We Got People: Rural Midwest and Corporate Labor Recruitment Among African and Latino MigrantsFaranak Miraftab, Urban and Regional Planning, Illinois

Faranak Miraftab draws on an ethnographic study of a small Midwestern town that has changed from an all-White sundown town to a multi-racial multi-lingual and multi-cultural society in the span of the last decade.  This change has been due to transnational labor recruitment strategies of the local meat packing plant among francophone West African and Spanish-speaking Latino immigrants. She will discuss how—in the absence of institutional arrangements by the state and corporation—the local residents (immigrants and old timers) negotiate this process of community change and the emerging transnational social landscape of the rural Midwest.

Parenting Among Chinese Immigrants Living in Central Illinois
Angela Wiley, Human and Community Development, Illinois

Angela Wiley uses dinnertime observational data to investigate parental praise of young children in Chinese immigrant and European American families living in a mid-sized Midwestern town. She examines how immigrant families use praise to promote independent or interdependent behavior of children. The findings will be discussed in terms of their implications for the development of broader cultural understanding.