Book Review: The Value and Endurance of Home Places
Book Review and Commentary by Ann M. Eisenberg.
Ann M. Eisenberg (West Virginia Law) shares this review of Amanda McMillan Lequieu’s Who We Are is Where We Are: Making Home in the American Rust Belt (Columbia UP, 2024).
It can be hard to write about “place.” If you write about one kind of place (urban, rural), critics will propose that you should have included other kinds of places. Or if you emphasize the importance of place, the proposition may arise that other factors—like class, race, or national origin—matter more to people’s lives than place. Finding the right balance between the case study—the granular ethnographic account of an individual place—versus a more structural inquiry with grand, transcendent lessons is similarly challenging.
Of course, place interacts with all of these other factors. Macro-level structural forces, local institutions, race, class, livelihoods, culture, landscapes, and neighborhood dynamics all come together to create something greater than the sum of their parts. It is at this essential intersectional nexus that Amanda McMillan Lequieu’s 2024 book, Who We Are is Where We Are: Making Home in the American Rust Belt, so adeptly advances the conversation on place-based marginalization and struggle.
Who We Are identifies this holistic, multi-factor intersection of place, culture, and economic survival as something we all instinctively know, but may still struggle to define: “home.” McMillan Lequieu takes the reader back and forth between two places people call home—one a marginalized urban place, the other a marginalized rural one—alternating and intertwining ethnographic accounts from a neighborhood of Southeast Chicago and its counterpart to the north, a community in Iron County, Wisconsin. While regionally and demographically distinct, both places exist at points along the same commodity chain of iron ore’s journey from extraction to steel manufacturing.
In addition to their literal interdependence, these two locales also share their experience of mid- to late-twentieth century deindustrialization after a heyday at the peak of the steel industry gave each place a fleeting taste of what it means to thrive and see a culture bloom. Thus, Southeast Chicago and Iron County have not merely class in common, but a shared reality that both places—with their unique environment and cultural nuances—evolved from an economic system and set of extractive processes that were never designed to sustain them, despite largely giving birth to them in all their enduring complexity.
The private companies that helped give rise to these communities and their “worker-citizens” are the same companies that eventually abandoned the workers, leaving disorganization and distress in their wake. The kind of distress that brings McMillan Lequieu’s interviewees to tears, like Jerry, resident of Southeast Chicago, whose eyes grow moist when he describes how companies “closed all of them mills down at one time” (p.68). But the sense of home remains, McMillan Lequieu argues, even as it transforms, potentially beyond recognition. The parent companies may leave, but new forms of social organization arise. These are stories of transformation, not merely disintegration.
McMillan Lequieu shows how homemaking and survival persist even in places we might deem abandoned, neglected, or finished. Her many interviews with residents of both places help fill in the details of how people continue to make sense of their communities and lives, despite their profound losses. Rebecca, for example, went from steel mill worker to waitress, off-books church custodian, and freelance landscaper, all so she could stay put in the place she called home (p.123).
One finishes the book with the understanding that Iron County and Southeast Chicago are both different and similar, and that each place’s story is at the same time unique and part of a much broader tale. Perhaps most importantly, both places are home to the people who live there. That reality endures, even as each place has borne a constant state of transformation at the hands of societal forces both close and distant, ranging from Japan’s export markets to the well-liked local supervisor who hangs up the sign saying the plant or mine is closed.
Who We Are engages timely questions that regularly appear in public and scholarly discourse. How are there so many populations and regions—like coal country, oil and gas country, timber country, and steel country—that pine for the better days, before the “bust” in their industry, or the abrupt departure of the one employer everyone depended on? What ought we make of the people and places who have been “left behind” in the modern economy, and is it not a deceptive euphemism to label widespread structural abandonment in this way? Should our society expect people to move every few years for a new job? Dare one even suggest that an expectation of staying put, and becoming attached to a home, even across generations, might be reasonable? Is such a hope naïve, somehow un-American? Or is a home something fundamental to the human experience—even an innate entitlement?
If the reader is left hungry for anything, it is for McMillan Lequieu to editorialize about the injustice of it all. And yet, making such a demand of this book feels a bit trite. The book does what it needs to do from a normative perspective by establishing how deeply economic precarity and displacement run in the American economic and cultural system. Abandonment, having the rug pulled out from under you and your community, displacement, and confusion emerge as features, not bugs, of the way of life portrayed in this book.
A discussion of the obvious policy solutions, like ensuring that displaced workers have adequate unemployment or relocation benefits, isn’t quite the kind of medicine that this story prescribes. Interrogating the concept of home, and how distant corporations can shape and reshape that concept with little accountability, cuts to the core of what our society is. The intersection of capital and home are contradictory, as McMillan Lequieu points out, yet also fundamentally intertwined in the American way of life. The sickness of how poorly the United States treats workers and places like Iron County and Southeast Chicago runs deep, and the cure is neither simple nor obvious.
