UA Anthropologist Wins Rockefeller Fellowship To Study Immigration In The Southern United States

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - Increasing cultural diversity and rapidly changing economies today in the U.S. South have brought with them new patterns of migration to the region’s rural and urban areas. Migrants are permanently reshaping the culture and politics of the communities in which they settle. Anthropologist Steve Striffler, assistant professor in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas, has won a Rockefeller Foundation Resident Fellowship to study these issues as a visiting scholar in the Transnational South Project at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

During the 2000-2001 academic year, Striffler will be one of two scholars who will serve as postdoctoral fellows in the Project, a three-year program funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to support research, teaching, seminars, and workshops on the recent flows of people and capital between the U.S. South and Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Asia, and elsewhere. In 2000-2001, participants will explore the theme of "Transnational Migrants in the American South and the Cultural Politics of Citizenship."

"I’ll be focusing on Arkansas, which has the fastest growing Latino population in the United States," said Striffler. "I’ll be asking how the process of migration shaped their experience in the South, and Arkansas specifically. What kinds of relationships are these new Arkansans maintaining with their communities of origin? Under what conditions, and in what forms, are Latinos living in Arkansas?"

Arkansas has only recently become a destination for immigrants, unlike other states in the country such as Texas and California, which have long attracted migrant communities. Striffler, a cultural anthropologist whose specialty is Latin America, will examine local political struggles and cultures to uncover their influence in bringing about social change.

When the project ends in 2002, all participating scholars will be invited back to deliver a paper at a final conference, the results of which will be submitted for publication in either a book or journal.

Striffler joined the UA Department of Anthropology in fall 1999, after earning his doctorate from the New School for Social Research in New York. Past recipient of a Fulbright dissertation fellowship and a Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Dissertation Award, he served as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University in 1998-1999.

A forthcoming book, In the Shadows of State and Capital: The United Fruit Company and the Politics of Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 1900-1990, is under contract with Duke University Press. In it Striffler examines the social history of a period spanning from the 1930s through the 50s during which Ecuadorian workers on plantations owned by Chiquita rebelled and took over. The workers were displaced when local capitalists retook the land. Today Chiquita contracts with those owners and the workers are once again laboring on the plantations.

Visiting Assistant Professor Garth Green will assume Striffler’s duties during the coming year. Green, who wrote his dissertation on how the national Carnival festival in Trinidad and Tobago has been shaped by ethnic conflicts and the politics of identity, has previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at Davidson College, North Carolina.