Voices from the Nueva Frontera: Latino Immigration in Dalton, Georgia

The Dalton--Whitfield County are a 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 the American interior 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 northwest Georgia town over the last thirty years. The book's contributors explore changes to labor markets as well as educational, religious, and social organizations and show that Dalton offers 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, each chapter closes with the words of a worker, student, teacher, and many others directly involved in the immigrant experience. These narratives add human faces to the realities of dramatic change occurring in America's rural communities and 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.