Meatpacking America: How Migration, Work, and Faith Divide the Heartland

September 08, 2021
book cover
Kristy Nabhan-Warren
ISBN: 
978-1-4696-6348-7

From the UNC Press website:

Whether valorized as the heartland or derided as flyover country, the Midwest became instantly notorious when COVID-19 infections skyrocketed among workers in meatpacking plants—and Americans feared for their meat supply. But 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, both native-born residents and recent migrants from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. In Meatpacking America, she digs deep below the stereotype and reveals 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.

Across the flatlands, Protestants, Catholics, and Muslims share space every day as worshippers, employees, and employers. On the bloody floors of meatpacking plants, in bustling places of worship, and in modest family homes, longtime and newly arrived Iowans spoke to Nabhan-Warren about their passion for religious faith and desire to work hard for their families. Their stories expose how faith-based aspirations for mutual understanding blend uneasily with rampant economic exploitation and racial biases. Still, these new and old midwesterners say that a mutual language of faith and morals brings them together more than any of them would have ever expected.

Related: Nabhan-Warren publishes new book, Meatpacking America


About Kristy Nabhan-Warren

Professor Kristy Nabhan-Warren is the inaugural V.O. and Elizabeth Kahl Figge Chair in Catholic Studies in the University of Iowa Department of Religious Studies. In addition, she holds appointments in the Departments of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies and History, and serves as the interim director of the Division of Interdisciplinary Programs and interim chair of the Department of Rhetoric. Her work focuses on American Catholicism, Latinx lived religion, ethnographic methods in the study of North American religions, youth and religion, and women and American religion. She joined the University of Iowa faculty in 2012.