'Welcome to Shelbyville' - an American town's immigration secrets

Two days in Dublin last week gave me the opportunity to join in the ‘Moving Worlds’ film festival organised by FOMACS – the Forum on Migration and Communications.  The event has emerged relatively recent on the annual calendar of special interest cinema programme and, as far as I know, is the only one in Europe which makes the topic of migration its central theme.

I was there to participate in a discussion about ‘Welcome to Shelbyville’.  This is a documentary which has been presented as the showcase for the ideals of the ‘Welcoming America’ movement – essentially a network of activists providing support and solidarity activities with the country’s new immigrant communities.

‘Welcome America’ tries to draw on the cultural and emotional capital which the United States has invested in its self-image as ‘a country built by immigrants’.  “We’ve always welcomed rugged, independent individuals” it proclaims in some of its promotional material, “Why stop now?”

Social historians line Mike Davis and Justin Akers Chacon, in their book ‘None One is Illegal; fighting violence on the US-Mexico border’ set out the reasons for doubting why the welcome mat is  really quite as ubiquitously displayed as is sometimes supposed.  The history of the growth of agribusiness along the Pacific coast and the South West pitched ‘nativists’ movements against a succession of Chinese, Japanese and Mexican incomers and marked local cultures with a record  of violent intimidation and the repression of the civil rights of hundreds of thousands of people which continues today.

‘Welcome to Shelbyville’s director, Kim Snyder was in Dublin for discussion about her film.  An established documentary film-maker who admits she was new to immigration issues before the cameras started to roll, she alighted on the Tennessean community because it illustrated so many of the changes which have hit similar towns and cities across the land in recent years.  Her time in Shelbyville, which coincided with the culminating weeks of the 2008 presidential election campaign, allowed her to talk to many of the its principals -  city and county mayors, the local paper’s chief reporter, the church leaders prominent in the ‘Bible Belt’ ethos of the district, the matriarchs of the local African-American community, as well as people from the immigrant communities – Latino and Somali – and others.

From the start of this film it seemed to me that another theme had eclipsed the apparent centrality of immigration on small town America: one that was mainly about change of many different kinds takes place  and how a range or ordinary people squared up to its necessity and inevitability.  The dominant personality of Beverley – sassy, black and as southern as fried chicken – watching a tv report of Obama’s procession towards presidential office, captures the moods in a wistful comment: “I don’t like change – but this is one I don’t mind.”

Lots of people  in Shelbyville don’t like change.  The local reporter chronicles events on his main street which are presented as calamities arising from the arrival of a new Muslim community in the town – the Somalis.  The trailer park family wonder what happened to the jobs which used to exist when Shelbyville proclaimed itself as ‘Pencil City, USA’ – before they closed the pencil factories. The pastors mull over the implications of what it means to live cheek-by-jowl with a group of people likely to be resistant to the idea of Washing Away their Sins in the Blood of the Lord. “You tell the congregation on Sunday morning that they gotta change?” one asks rhetorically; “That’s gonna make you a whole lot popular”, another ruefully comments.

The Mexican family, whose years of residence in Shelbyville have moved them a degree closer to acceptability, offer a narrative which proclaims the need for change on their part as they become American citizens.  Aware if the distance they have been obliged to move from their roots they also review the meaning of the Obama election and draw strength from the evidence that the USA is changing too.  Washington DC seems to be being reconfigured before their eyes as a new type of metropolis , and they resolve that they really must visit this emerging capital of hope.

Howa, the figure who references the Somali experience of Shelbyville recounts the facts that sum up her life.  “I came to Shelbyville because I was offered a job in Tysons”, the chicken processing plant which is the region’s last big employer.  Retaining the dress of her home country she attends the orienteering America classes run by Miss Luci, local Welcome America stalwart, looking forward to the day when she will become American.  “Talk to them” Miss Luci counsels.  “Tell them it hurts to read in the papers what they are saying about you. Talk to them in English, because that’s what we speak round here, and they will change.”                

Some sense of what change might look like follows in scenes shot in the homes of the Somalis, thrown open by Howa and her friends to facilitate a heart-to-heart discussion with the town paper reporter, who edgily hears the complaint that his articles offend and provoke fear.  Then Beverley and the women members of her clan appear to crowd into the kitchen to see how Somalis cook their chicken, urging their hosts to join in a spontaneous dance to music playing in the background.  Later, the food consumed  and the promise to exchange recipes, the American descendants of Africans turn to complementing their still African hosts on the resplendence of their dress.  What had previously been the greatest marker of difference – “hot and sweaty” Beverley had supposed – because the gangway to good humoured familiarity: change is happening.

Shelbyville is a town which in living memory had had the Klu Klux Klan parading in its streets.  It had since seen the rise of its black community to the point that they now provided the county with its mayor – the chief mayor – he insists, explaining his position to the sheikh of the Somali’s mosque. If that counts as progress there is also a more depressing narrative of economic decline, with jobs going (the documentary doesn’t mention this, but in all probability ‘migrating’ to the maquiladora (havens for low cost assembly-line production in the northern border regions of Mexico), promoting insecurity and the heightened sense of a fall from grace amongst the white establishment. Change, change, change – nothing you can do to hold it back.

But is it change for the better?  ‘Welcome to Shelbyville’ concludes with one of this cultural events which take place in small towns across the world which allow them to attain consciousness of their collective existence.  It is some sort of annual fair where the central attraction is a track around which strangely-attired riders prance on small ponies.  Fast-food stalls ply their trade and a marching band of high school students practice their moves with drums and flags.  Led my Miss Luci, the Somali women form their own small parade as they take in the sights and the rituals of their new home.  Their bright colours and swirl of their head coverings have almost ceased to mark them out as being different in an event which is absorbed by the exoticism of its own rituals.

With this conclusion the film affirms that some sort f ‘welcome’ ritual has been gone through and life appears to be returning to something like humdrum normalcy.  The problem is humdrum normalcy is probably not what Shelbyville needs if it is ever to learn the truth about itself and for its community to be equipped to meet the challenges of the future.  Just how long the apparent peace it has made with itself and its new immigrant communities will survive the challenges of capitalist America’s continued spiralling slip-away from its twentieth-century paramountcy  remains to be seen.