Persistent Poverty In Rural America by Rural Sociological Society

Author:Rural Sociological Society [Rural Sociological Society]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9781000315813
Google: du6aDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-05-28T03:47:28+00:00

Common Problems and Unique Situations

The single, most obvious characteristic that reservations, colonias, and rural black communities have in common is that all of them are desperately poor places--among the poorest places in American society. Another trait they have in common is that they are isolated from the rest of American society. By definition, their rural location makes them physically isolated from the urban mainstream. These communities also have been devastated by racial discrimination and repressive measures that have kept them socially isolated from an otherwise prosperous society.

Reservations, colonias, and rural black communities, unlike other communities, share the experience of living nearby the historical remnants of institutions designed to conquer and oppress them. A list of these institutions is depressingly long: the Bureau of Indian Affairs, tribal police, labor contractors, immigration authorities, slavery, Jim Crow, sharecropping and plantation agriculture--to name only the most obvious ones. These institutions, along with unremitting discrimination and the constant threat of physical harm, have been extremely effective in subordinating minority communities throughout the history of this nation. Despite these common experiences, it is important to remember that these communities also have unique qualities that defy generalization.

American Indian reservations, for example, have a unique political and legal status. The doctrine of tribal sovereignty guarantees tribes a measure of political autonomy seldom found in colonias or rural African-American communities. Furthermore, most tribes have some kind of reservation land base. Reservation lands may or may not be well-endowed with natural resources but at the very least, they are property that tribal communities may claim in common. Political sovereignty combined with land, and possibly natural resources, offer tribes development opportunities that have been limited by institutional barriers erected in the past.

Colonias have the doubtful benefit of being more recent in origin, and escaped the most brutally repressive periods in U.S. race relations history. They have not experienced violence on the same scale as that used to maintain slavery or establish the reservation system. Besides their relatively recent origins, these communities are perhaps most unique for their dynamic populations. From their inception, colonias have been primarily immigrant communities, and as such, they have had abundant populations, and especially abundant numbers of able-bodied workers. They are communities with a rich reserve of undeveloped human capital. Colonias also are unique because they have the distinction of being concentrated in the most economically dynamic region of the nation--the so-called "sunbelt". The combination of human capital reserves and proximity to southwestern "sunbelt" economic growth presents these communities with development opportunities not available to either reservations or rural black communities. However, colonia residents must find ways to overcome the institutional barriers that in the past have prevented them from developing the human capital of their workers and that have denied them access to the mainstream economy of the southwest--overcoming the institutional measures that have enforced their isolation.

Rural African-American communities are unique for many reasons. One is their legacy from slavery, the most oppressive of all known social institutions, Another is their place in the Civil Rights

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