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"Kristy Nabhan-Warren spent more than seven years interviewing Iowans-native-born residents and recent migrants from Latin America, Africa, and Asia alike. In Meatpacking America, she portrays the gritty realities of a Midwest that is a global hub for migration and food production-and also for religion. Here, Protestants, Catholics, and Muslims share space every day as worshippers, employees, and employers. Speaking from the bloody floors of meatpacking plants, bustling places of worship, and modest homes across vast flatlands dotted with confined animal feeding operations and processing plants, both native born and newly arrived Iowans explain their passion for religious faith and desire to work hard for their families. At the same time, their stories reveal how faith-based aspirations for mutual understanding blend uneasily with rampant economic exploitation of migrants and common racial biases"--
About the author
Kristy Nabhan-Warren is the V. O. and Elizabeth Kahl Figge Chair of Catholic Studies and a professor in the Departments of Religious Studies and Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. She is the author, most recently, of
The Cursillo Movement in America: Catholics, Protestants, and Fourth-Day Spirituality.
Summary
The Midwest is not simply the place where animals are fed corn and then butchered. Native midwesterner Kristy Nabhan-Warren spent years interviewing Iowans who work in the meatpacking industry to reveal the grit and grace of a heartland that is a major global hub of migration and food production - and also, it turns out, of religion.
