Memory as Resistance: Industrial Decline and the Reinvention of Cultural Identity among Mexican Immigrants in the U.S. Rust Belt

Abstract (English)

This ethnographic study examines the interplay between collective memory and cultural identity among Mexican American communities in South Bend, Indiana, a declining industrial city in the U.S. Rust Belt. Focusing on families who migrated in the 1970s–80s to work in automotive manufacturing, it explores how their narratives of labor, Catholic rituals, and political mobilization (re)construct belonging amidst deindustrialization and anti-immigrant policies. Drawing on Foucault’s power-memory framework, I argue that memory practices—from storytelling to religious festivals—serve as both sites of cultural preservation and tactical resistance against erasure. By tracing their shift from factory jobs to service work or entrepreneurship, this research reveals how memory becomes a resource to navigate precarity, asserting dignity in the face of economic marginalization and nativist hostility. The study contributes to anthropological debates on migration, memory, and neoliberal dispossession by centering the Rust Belt’s racialized labor history.