Taking your social capital back home to rural America

In a narrative that runs contrary to the standard rural brain drain, Michele Anderson wrote in the New York Times last week of her decision to return to her hometown, Fergus Falls, Minnesota, population 13,138.  The opinion piece is titled "Go Home to Your 'Dying' Hometown."  Anderson describes what it was like to make the reverse migration, in her thirties, from city (Portland, Oregon, where she moved to go to college and then stayed) back to the small town where she had family roots.  As the headline suggests, the phenomenon is full of greater nuance than we tend to credit, in part because of the dominant media narratives about rural America these days. 

I feel conflicted about my role here. Rural places like this one are facing countless questions about the economy, about identity and about the environment. It’s hard to know what we need to be stewards of and sustain, and what we need to let go or confront, to build a strong future.

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 [Rural life] can be stimulating and rewarding, a place for bold creativity. I am more involved in politics, and more outspoken about social and racial justice, economic development and feminism than I ever was in Portland. 

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I’m ready for a new kind of attention, one directed somewhere between bleak landscapes of ignorance and bigotry, and Pollyanna illusions of the pastoral life. This is where most rural Americans actually live and where some of the most important work is being done.

Another important issue on which Anderson touches:  the struggle to get the old guard to share power with "homecomers" like her.

I wrote about Michele Anderson and a fellow resident of Fergus Falls last year when they took on a Der Spiegel story about their home town, debunking a number of inaccuracies in it.  Read that here.