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Zen Buddhists take the bodhisattva vow to save all beings. At Clouds in Water Zen Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, this means engaging in specific activities geared toward eliminating social and systemic injustice while also working to eliminate the causes and conditions of suffering within oneself. At Ryumonji Zen Monastery in Dorchester, Iowa, the bodhisattva vow to save all beings means to wholeheartedly engage in everyday activities, such as doing the dishes, without attachment or aversion; Ryumonji sees no need to engage specifically in socio-political activities. Clouds has a robust program of workshops and retreats on social engagement and participates locally in socio-political activism as part of its Buddhist practice. On the contrary, Ryumonji does not have a distinct program for social engagement but contextualizes every activity as already having a socio-political effect. Ryumonji Zen Monastery and Clouds in Water Zen Center are less than a hundred miles away in the American Midwest and both follow the same Sōtō Zen lineage of the Japanese priest Dainin Katagiri. Yet, they offer two different ways of responding to the world’s suffering. This paper analyzes the differing views and practices for social engagement at Ryumonji and Clouds, revealing differing interpretations of the central Buddhist teachings of interdependence, the bodhisattva vow, and the inseparability of individual and social liberation. It situates the divergent interpretations in their respective rural and urban contexts, regional Midwestern context, and within the larger context of development of Buddhism in America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the author reflects on her own work in the agritourism field as a Latina woman in the Midwest. Connecting place to lived experience, the author describes how her gender, ethnicity, language, and education are positioned within the food industry and within her career trajectory. By examining her individual journey, the author reveals systems of oppression that continue to maintain colonial divisions of labor in ways often overlooked or ignored in the everyday. Her story is an example of the struggle many women of color face as they navigate upward mobility within White and/or male-dominated arenas. Utilizing logics based in intersectionality, feminism, raciolinguistic, and racial capitalism, this story bears witness to the ways identities continue to be perceived, performed, accepted, and rejected against dominant narratives in small-town America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beam engines introduced America to the steam age and powered the nation's progress for much of the 19th century, spearheading the navigation of its inland waterways, powering its mills and manufacturing industry, enabling the mining of its deep mineral resources, and supplying its growing cities with water. Development of the beam engine in America lagged that in Britain and Europe but followed a similar evolution until its displacement by other forms of steam engine and by electricity at the end of the 19th century. Development started with the introduction of America's first beam engine, imported from Britain in 1755, progressed through the rapid growth of American-built engines, and culminated in the mid- to late-19th century in the metropolitan waterworks of the American Midwest and East, in the deep mines of the American West, and in the paddle steamers that first brought America together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stories we tell about ourselves and our communities have the power to impact perceptions of marginalized communities, both positively and negatively. Narratives affect how people view themselves, their town, and other members of their community and thus shape personal interactions, local culture, social situations, and even decisions about allocation of resources. When those stories are rooted in discursive frames—what we can understand as the links between ideology and narrative—they can also perpetuate and reify power inequities. Within rural America, local elites and residents alike use narratives and discursive framing to erase or exclude communities of color and, at times, poor whites in unique ways. This happens through explicit and willful ignorance of narratives of difference that could both complicate normative assumptions and highlight histories of dispossession within rural towns. Drawing on 30 interviews and 12 months of ethnography in the midwestern town of Moses, we provide a case study that demonstrates how narratives perpetuated by both decision makers and residents, across racial and class backgrounds, are rooted in colorblind racism and classblindness regarding African Americans, Mexican Americans, and poor whites. These narratives frame perceptions of residents and neighborhoods, influence town‐level decisions, and erase local histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 2020, in a rural Rust Belt town in the Midwest, over 100 residents stood on the grounds of the county courthouse and publicly protested for Black Lives Matter. Once students began to arrive, the protest shifted. Latinx youth led chants, held signs, and stood in the front of the other protesters, moving the protest forward, away from the courthouse and toward the busy street of passing cars. I knew these de facto protest leaders well—they were my former students. This town is considered part of the New Latino Diaspora (NLD), a U.S. region not traditionally associated with Latinx settlement population. Here Latinx families represent almost 30% of the population and have been marginalized in community spaces and schools. Rural students are stereotyped, and Latinx students are marginalized as well, bearing layers of cultural and social inequity. This study disrupts the assumption of rural middle America as simple, homogenous, and conservative and, using geosemiotics, seeks to explore the intersectional ways in which Latinx youth position and identify themselves as activists, expanding current conceptualizations of rurality and literacy while examining how Black lives matter to Latinx youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the research on the new geography of poverty by examining how low-income residents fit into the governmental patchwork that defines metropolitan America. Our analysis pays particular attention to two features of local governments: their size and their status as incorporated municipalities or unincorporated areas. Relying on Census data, we study these patterns for the five largest metropolitan areas in each of the five Census-designated regions of the country (25 metros total) from 1990 to 2012–2016. We show that the distribution of poor people across jurisdiction types, and their concentration in particular jurisdictions or places, has changed over time. In the older metros of the Northeast and Midwest, poverty grew in smaller secondary cities while it expanded in unincorporated areas in the South and in larger secondary cities in the West. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these shifts for studying local governance and poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]