Voices from the Nueva Frontera

“This book will serve as a valuable resource for  other scholars in their attempts to better understand how Latino newcomers are transforming their new homes in this country.” —Melvin Delgado, author of Social Work with Latinos: A Cultural Assets Paradigm

The Dalton-Whit?eld County area of Georgia has one of the highest concentrations of Latino residents in the southeastern United States. In 2006, a Washington Post article referred to the carpet-manufacturing city of Dalton as a “U.S. border town,” even though the community lies more than twelve hundred miles from Mexico. Voices from the Nueva Frontera explores this phenomenon, providing an in-depth picture of Latino immigration and dispersal in rural America along with a framework for understanding the economic integration of the South with Latin America.

Voices from the Nueva Frontera sheds new light on the often invisible changes that have transformed this north Georgia town over the last thirty years. The book's contributors explore the changes to labor markets and educational, religious, and social organizations and show that Dalton provides a largely successful example of a community that has provided a home to a newly arriving immigrant work force. While debates about immigration have raged in the public spotlight in recent years, some of the most important voices-those of the immigrants themselves-have been nearly unheard. In this pathbreaking book, therefore, each chapter opens with an interview of a worker, student, teacher, or other professional involved in the immigrant experience. These narratives add human faces to the realities of dramatic change occurring in rural industrial towns.

Sure to spark lively discussion in the classroom and beyond, Voices from the Nueva Frontera gives readers a look at individual human stories and provides much-needed documentation for what might be the most important social change in recent southern history.

Donald E. Davis, Thomas M. Deaton, and David Boyle are on the faculty at Dalton State College. Jo-Anne Schick is the former director of the Georgia Project.