Broad nosed faces

My Grandfather and I in Castro Valley, California, 1996

Photo Credit: Veija Kusama

“広い鼻” (hiroi hana) he would tell me, tapping the slope of my nose with the calloused pad of his forefinger.

“アイヌ” (Ainu).

His tone was always reticent. Rooted in the belly of history, in the timbre of family and tradition. Laced with something bitter, a tinge darker. Not quite manifested as shame, never quite asserted as pride. I did not know what Ainu was. What it meant for me and my broad nose. Nor did I ask. Somehow, I knew not to.

Ainu Chieftan

Photo Credit: Midnight Believer

A human being

The name Ainu literally translates to ‘a human being’, traditionally contrasted with kamuy, or ‘divine beings'. Historically residing primarily in the Hokkaidō, Sakhalin, and Kuril Islands, the Ainu are believed to be descendants of the ancient Jōmon culture, which dates back over 10,000 years. Beginning in the 9th Century, Ainu communities began to fall to Japanese subjugation and by the 18th Century they were the target of concerted forced assimilation policies.

Throughout the Meiji Restoration of the 19th Century, Emperor Mutsuhito forced the Ainu peoples off their land, disrupting their relationships with their spiritual heartlands, and terminating their traditional ways of life. As Bri Lambright of Ursinus University notes:

"Ainu land was stolen, and small plots were returned with the express purpose of farming. With traditional hunting practices banned in order to allow Japanese manufacturers to capitalize on exporting deer meat and hides to the mainland, the Ainu were left with little option but to adhere to the government’s plans, lest they face starvation and burial beneath the waves of Japanese settlers who could readily take the community’s place."

Faced with an impossible choice, the Ainu were blamed for the predicament in which they found themselves, as evidenced by letters exchanged between the Nemuro and Naimushō Prefectures dated November of 1882:

“They have brought this difficulty upon themselves since they lack the spirit of activity and progress. In their society in the past there was nothing they needed to record through writing, no stimulus to develop their knowledge through learning; when thirsty they drank, when hungry they ate. They are a purely primitive people.”

Google Translation Screenshot - Ainu

Barbarian, savage, vandal

As the hallowed halls of Edo were devising the extinction of the living, a rising consortium of scientists began to covet the currency of the dead. As Noah Oskaw writes in his piece for Unseen Japan:

"The impetus for the veritable grave plundering of Ainu bones was ostensibly scientific: the desire by Japanese researchers to learn more about the physical and, later, genetic make-up of the indigenous ethnic minorities native to Japan’s northern borders… In both 1864 and 1865, mere years before the fall of the Tokugawa dynasty, the British consul in Hakodate led a group of foreigners interested in uncovering the mystery of the Ainu’s 'Caucasian' features to secretly raid Ainu gravesites… Most infamous of the grave robbers was Hokkaido University Professor Kodama Sakuzaemon, who led various state-sanctioned raids into local boneyards throughout the 1920s to 1970s – all against Ainu protests - sometimes police were called in to help hold off Ainu from physically preventing the unearthing of their ancestors."

Final resting places rendered temporary. Ancestors dragged to lay upon steel tables. Loved ones etched by the scalpels of foreign hands. For nearly one hundred years, the people of Ainu waited.

Interior of an Ainu Home in Yezo, 1906

Photo Credit: Snapshots of the Past

Homecoming

In 2012, a cohort of Ainu elders banded together to achieve the return of their ancestors. Banding together under the slogan, ‘Return the Ainu Remains to the Soil of the Ainu Kotan’, they brought suit against Hokkaidō University demanding repatriation. Mounting political pressures, further exacerbated by Japan’s recent ratification of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which includes a provision requiring governments to work for the return of indigenous people's remains, resulted in a historic 2016 settlement. The case was the first legal domino of its kind, and a chain reaction of “small but significant” repatriations have followed.

In July of 2007 the Berliner Gesellschaft fur Anthropologie returned a skull stolen from an Ainu cemetery in Sapporo by a German tourist in 1879. In May of 2023, a set of four skulls were returned from Melbourne, following their 1911 exploitation by a pair of anthropological pen-pals: a prewar exchange by which the National Museum of Australia sent Aboriginal skeletal remains to the University of Tokyo in return for Ainu skeletal material. And next month, officials from the Japanese government will travel to Britain to receive the remains of five Ainu previously housed at the National History Museum in London and the University of Edinburgh’s Anatomical Museum.

Ainu Woman Playing the Mukkuri

Photo Credit: Midnight Believer

Locating the lost 

While the ten sets of returned remains mark a promising trend, the number of stolen Ainu is estimated to be in the thousands, and for a culture on the brink of extinction, preservation has begun to equate survival. Today, only a few isolated pockets of Ainu people remain scattered across rural Hokkaido, with most of the estimated 20,000 Ainu assimilating into cities and towns around the island. After decades of government proscription, the Hokkaido Ainu language is likely extinct, as there remain no known native speakers, and many individuals of Ainu descent have no knowledge of their ancestry or tradition. To state it quite starkly, the Ainu are disappearing.

My Grandfather and I in Hakodate, Hokkaido, 2025

Photo Credit: Veija Kusama

Good for breathing 

My grandfather is now 82 and his tone regarding our Ainu heritage has shifted in recent years. What was once coated in a glaze of indignity has come to be considered with a degree of quiet contentment. Now, when he regards the nose his genes placed upon my face, he adds a simple but emblematic qualifier. “広い鼻” (broad nose), “呼吸に良い” (good for breathing). Perhaps, the repatriation movement is not only about reclaiming the skulls of our ancestors, but rather about reclaiming the faces they gave us.

Back-to-the-land has come...back?

Barn in Benton County, AR.© Lisa R. Pruitt (2011)

If you're a young woman on TikTok, the algorithm likely feeds you some flavor of "tradwife" content. Names like Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman have become household names among twenty-somethings in the last few years. These women use their online platforms to play out a fictional reality of subservience to their husbands on gorgeous rural acreages, all while raking in millions from sponsorships and $70 bone broth powders. They espouse live simple, pared-down lives, cooking everything from scratch for a big, happy family, while finding time to spend their afternoons barefoot in the grass. They want you to believe that their life is good, and that more young women should aspire to be homemakers and homesteaders. 

These young women are the most visible group of young people promoting a modern "back-to-the-land" movement. They often root their desire in religion and "traditional" roles of men and women. Many scholars and commentators criticize the tradwife movement, saying it is regressive and uninformed. You can read excerpts of a New York Times article about modern "rural" aesthetics centered in patriarchy here. While some of the criticism rings true, this practice isn't new. Americans have demonized processed foods and dreamt of homesteading for decades. Back-to-the-land movements have drawn people's attention since their inception, inspiring families with traditional values as well as environmentalists and counterculturalists. 

The origins of back-to-the-land

America began its foray into the homesteading movement with the Homestead Act of 1862, which offered full title to government lands taken from Indigenous tribes to any settler who lived on and improved the land for five years. The back-to-the-land movement, however, originated in the 1900s. 

Many scholars cite Bolton Hall, an American lawyer and activist, as the origin of the movement. In the early 1900s, he formed the Little Land League, which wanted to make land ownership and homegrown food a reality for low-income New Yorkers. This organization existed to "assist in the acquisition of land and show how to make the best use of it." He allegedly planned a $70,000 endowment for a program that would teach people how to farm and help them purchase the land. His book, A Little Land and Living, extolled the virtues of rural living and explained how to begin to make a living for yourself off the land. 

John Korvola's Homestead in Valley County, ID from the early 1900s. Credit: Jerrye & Roy Klotz, MD under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

A group of reformists picked up Bolton Hall's work, arguing that subsistence farming could help white Americans survive during the Great Depression and avoid the dangers of urbanization. Their writings sparked a the "third wave" of back-to-the-land in the 1960s and 70s. The third wave originated from the protest movements of that era, and grew into a "rural antimodern counterculture". As Jinny A. Turman-Deal's article We Were an Oddity: A Look at the Back to the Land Movement in Appalachia identifies, many third-wave participants were driven by non-economic factors: a desire to "leave the rat race" or political and social turmoil in the city. Their migration created a 4.5% increase in West Virginia's population. 

A New York Times article from 1975 posits that these new, young farmers desired hard work and an escape from American capitalism. They generally eschewed tractors and other "labor-saving devices." This movement reached across the country, with people from Maine to Oregon allegedly growing up to 75% of their food in their backyard. While this article states that most farmers relied on their families' middle-class incomes to make this a reality, a 1991 article states that only about 48% of participants came from a middle-class background. 

Modern takes on back-to-the-land

Homesteading, a popular part of the back-to-the-land movement, has picked up considerable steam in the last 10 years. A November 2024 report from Fannie Mae shows that interest in rural mortgages has increased almost 80% since the start of COVID-19. Homesteaders of America, a conservative, Christian-adjacent homesteading advocacy group, conducted a poll in 2022 to assess the state of homesteading in America. They found that approximately 50% of their respondents were under 40 years old, and about 50% identified as conservative. Most were employed full-time, making at least 50,000 a year. Over 80% were married.

These findings align with the prevailing modern conception of homesteading. Conservative, young families with enough capital to secure property are the ones moving out to a subsistence farm. While I used the example of tradwives as the group most visible in mainstream media, queer and trans homesteaders utilize social media to share their experiences of living off the land, too. A recent CNN article highlighted some of these influencers, who stated they didn't see homesteading as a "conservative, separatist" movement, but rather a community-centered endeavor to build something they're proud of. 

Regardless of politics, many young aspiring farmers and homesteaders take up homesteading for similar reasons: increased health and well-being, an escape from tumultuous politics, and a desire to be more in touch with nature. These groups face a common challenge: a daunting rural real estate market. A 2022 Study from the National Young Farmers Coalition, however, found that 59% of young farmers stated that finding the land to farm was their biggest hurdle. Young farmers are being outbid by more established farmers, as well as large agricultural corporations. This statistic has been true for decades (as this 2012 blog post explains in an analysis between the United States and Greece). In some communities, leasing from community members or land trusts makes homesteading more accessible. In major cities, organizations exist to help low-income residents urban homestead in community co-ops. 

Despite the obstacles, homesteading and back-to-the-land movements draw new converts every day. While the media continues to criticize the tradwives from a feminist perspective, we should recognize that their lives resonate with so many young people. So many of the political pressures of the late 60s and 70s exist today: high inflation, declining trust in politics, and foreign wars impacting oil.

Back-to-the-land has come and gone as a desirable life path for over a century. It seems as if proponents, for decades, have thought it is the cure for societies' ills. Interestingly, the draws are the same, regardless of politics, though each group seems to try and fit their politics to their reasons. At the end of the day, tradwife or drag queen, some people want to put their hands in the dirt.

Rastafari roots of plant-based eating

An Ital meal of rice, ackee, callaloo, and veggie chunks.

Source: Wikimedia Commons (2009)

In considering a vegan diet, I imagine a young, progressive urban consumer motivated by environmental or animal welfare concerns. In other words, someone who likely shops at a Whole Foods. In the West, veganism is packaged as something performed through individual consumer choices. That framing obscures the structural conditions shaping diets, and reinforces the mistaken belief that veganism is a modern invention. The “Ital” tradition complicates the popular narrative of modern veganism. Long before plant-based eating carried a price premium in Los Angeles, it was ordinary in the hills of rural Jamaica. 

The Rastafari movement began in the 1930s in Jamaica among the working poor who had been devastated by the global financial crash of 1929 and prolonged colonial mismanagement. These forces created mass unemployment and rural-to-urban migration into the slums of west Kingston. Rastas fled to the rural mountains where they could access land and practice self-governance without persecution.  

Leonard P. Howell, an early Rastafari leader, drew on the practices of Hindu indentured laborers in Jamaica to promote what became known as Ital living. The word “Ital” comes from “vital,” dropping the first letter to emphasize the pronoun “I”. This linguistic practice signals unity with the speaker, the listener, and Jah (God). Ital eating is an expression of “livity,” a Rastafari concept that the individual can embody and express spirituality through the practices of daily life.  For Rastafarians, Jah exists in all of creation, including plants, animals, and people. As such there is a divine force or energy in everything. 

What one puts in one’s body either enhances or degrades this life force. Food that has been processed or chemically altered is considered corrupted and further from Jah’s creation. Life force does not begin at the moment of consumption. Powell’s research participants described farming, cultivation, and conservation as the literal pouring of one’s energy and emotion into the earth. The sincerity of this effort determines how the earth responds and reciprocates that energy. 

Rural Rastafari food is shaped by what the land yields. Coconuts are naturally abundant across Jamaica. They are cracked, drained, grated, and squeezed into milk that forms the base of most dishes. Vegetables and aromatics are sautéed in coconut oil. The food typically contains beans, spices, chili peppers, and the coconut milk, stewed for hours over low heat and eaten communally. A strict Ital diet rejects salt as “a needless adulteration” of what Jah placed on the earth, so herbs and dry seasonings are key. Scotch bonnet peppers, thyme, lemongrass, allspice, and nutmeg build complex flavor without salt. 

The one-pot stew is a practical response to the rural conditions of Rastafari life. Land access is limited, so the range of available produce is narrow. A single pot stretches what is on hand to feed the community. Cooking takes place outside in clay pots often balanced over a wood fire by three stones. Metal cookware is avoided on the belief that it harms the body. 

In Saint Lucia, a young Rasta farmer described conversing with plants throughout their life cycle to transfer positive energy to them. He explained that during planting one must ensure a positive heart is present because this very energy will be transmitted to the earth. The same is true of cooking. Ital food involves preparing food with a clean heart to transfer life force into the food. Food must be cooked slowly, with intention and gratitude. This preserves and transmits the life energy that began in the soil. Food is not just physically nourishing; it is also spiritually nourishing.

Food that is rushed or processed severs the energy force and transmits a lower form. It follows too that food grown under corporate conditions is spiritually degraded. Jahson Peat, who runs a vegan restaurant in London called Zionly Manna, presents Ital as a process of relearning that strips away the method of eating brought about by colonialism. This is inseparable from a rejection of capitalism itself. Commitment to Ital eating is tightly linked to a broader turn away from the imported industrial and materialist ways of life, which are all combined under the Rastafari concept of “Babylon.” 

By contrast, mainstream veganism operates according to market logic. It converts diet choices into an ethical identity. For some, it is an exercise in personal branding, where what you eat signals who you are. This channels genuine ethical concerns for animals and the environment into demand for plant-based products. In this sense, the market-based vegan movement can be seen not as a challenge to the current food system, but a force that risks expanding it further, as seen through the IPO of Beyond Meat. The growth of this plant-based segment does not depend on replacing meat consumption, only on expanding overall consumer demand. The Ital diet is not a consumer identity. It seeks to reject the economic system and the very notion of consumerism upon which it relies. 

However, Ital does not operate entirely independent of market forces. Jaffe’s concept of “Ital chic” describes the convergence of middle-class consumerism and the Ital diet. In Kingston, Rasta symbols have been used to market artisanal soap lines and premium vegetable products. When a brand sells coconut-milk products with Rasta packaging, it co-opts a tradition built on self-sufficiency and places it inside the very market that tradition was designed to reject. This dynamic is similar to that explored in a blog post from this semester about rural tourism. It noted that rural culture is often packaged to meet consumer expectations, with authenticity operating as a selling point. 

Plant-based eating did not begin with a farmer’s market or with a marketing campaign. It owes some of its roots to rural Jamaica, where people grew what the earth offered based on a theological conviction. That story deserves to be remembered before it is repackaged.

Spain's rural de-population . . . and maybe repopulation

In 2019, I went studied abroad in Salamanca, Spain. I am part Spanish, but my great-grandmother's birth records have since been lost to us. My mother often told us stories of the days when the Spanish and Native American part of the family had a small farm in Texas. They were always juxtaposed with how things went horribly wrong in my grandmother's marriage, which led to the relocation of my mother's family to Mexico. My great-grandmother, born Josephine de la Garza in 1898, had thirteen children and lived the rural life you would imagine in the run up to the Great Depression. She, her husband, and her children, including my grandmother, milked cows, kept chickens, and made ends meet by picking cotton for other people. Because of this, I always associated rurality with Hispanidad or Spanish-ness. 

I learned many things when I went to Spain. My brother who went before me, Ian, was right that we get many of our cultural cues from Spain. The type of dry, morbid, blunt, and sometimes insensitive humor I got from my family was ubiquitous in the part of Spain where I studied. Unlike in America, no Spaniards stopped being friends with me because a joke landed the wrong way. 

In some ways, Spain's politics felt less divided than in America, even in the midst of the Catalan separatist referendum on the other side of Spain. Spaniards on the left seemed more socially conservative than their American counterparts, with one self-described feminist Spanish language professor calling the term "Latinx" grammatically incorrect. Spaniards on the right were far more economically progressive than their American counterparts. I recall that my conservative friends from the local fencing club were immensely proud of Spain's socialized healthcare system. If you've seen my previous posts, this should ring a bell. Rural Americans tend to poll as more socially conservative and fiscally progressive than their metropolitan counterparts. 

Among other things I learned, I quickly became aware that Salamanca was a culturally rural place, with many of the people I interacted with either growing up rural or whose families moved to the city in the past few generations. 

Spain's population dilemma

With a population of around 47 million people, Spain also has some of the most densely populated cities of Western Europe and least densely populated countryside. The rapid industrialization of the 1950s and 1960s brought the vast majority of Spain's rural population away from the villages and into its cities. Exacerbating the issue is Spain's low birth rate, the average number of children per woman fell to 1.10 in 2024. 

The birthrares among each Autonomous Community ("Comunidades Autonomas" are Spain's rough equivalent to states) vary. Some communities like Madrid are very urbanized while others like Asturias are rural and mountainous. The Instituto Nacional de Estadistica records birth rates, infant mortality rates, life expectancy at birth, and the proportion of people over certain ages by province. The site also differentiates between total births, births from exclusively Spanish mothers, and births from foreign-born mothers. The last delineation is helpful in assessing one proposed solution for Spain's depopulation, which is the encouragement of immigration to Spain from the Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America. 

In 2024, the provinces scoring the highest birth rates to mothers of Spanish origin are Ceuta and Melilla, two of Spain's remaining urban port enclaves in North Africa. The two cities are also undocumented immigration hotspots for Spain. Ceuta had a rate of 7.17 births per 1,000 inhabitants, and Melilla had 7.54 births per 1,000 inhabitants. Counting Spanish and foreign mothers, the rate rose moderately to 8.22 and 9.19 births per 1,000 inhabitants. Just across the Strait of Gibraltar, Andalucia and Murcia boasted higher numbers of children born to Spanish mothers than in Spain's northern regions, with 6.45 live births per 1,000 people and 6.81 live births per 1,000 people respectively. Calculations including foreign mothers yielded a very mild increase to 6.95 in Andalucia and a moderate increase to 7.93 in Murcia. 

According to the Spanish Ministerio de Agricultura, Pesca, y Alimentacion (Agriculture, Fish, and Food), Andalucia, Murcia, Melilla, and Ceuta appeared to host significantly more urban communities when compared to autonomous communities in the interior of Spain. The most rural autonomous communities were Extremadura, Castilla La Mancha, Castilla y Leon, and Aragon. According to the Instituto Nacional de Estadistica's 2024 data, Aragon, Castilla La Mancha, Castilla y Leon, and Extremadura had birth rates of 5.27, 5.76, 4.57, and 5.82 per 1,000 inhabitants respectively. Counting foreign mothers, the rates increased to 6.33, 6.71, 5.23, and 6.20 per 1,000 inhabitants. Today's immigration may prove to be a long-term solution to Spain's rural depopulation crisis.

Credit: Ministerio de Agricultura, Pesca, y Alimentacion.

While the comparatively lessened birth rates in rural Spain might seem like a cause for alarm, it is important to consider that the median age in rural Spain is much higher. In many cases, however, young people whose families left Spain's rural villages have been the ones trying to revive Spain's countryside. 

Immigration in Spain

Anecdotally speaking, I made friends with many immigrants in Spain: a Venezuelan family that owned a bar in the middle of my 35 minute walk to religious studies class at the Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca; an Ecuadorian churchgoer; an Argentinian fencer; a Chinese fencer; and a Black American Navy veteran who found work as an English professor. I never heard anything negative about Spain from any of them. Most Spaniards I met welcomed me, although they often mistook me for an Italian or Central American from my accent. Most never guessed me to be an American due to my obvious lack of North European features or (thankfully) fashion sense. 

Spain is an immigration hotspot in two ways: it is the bridge between Africa and Europe, and it has a long-standing policy of giving immigrants from its former colonies an expedited path to citizenship in the hopes that such immigrants remain in Spain. Most preferred immigrants come from Latin America, but the Philippines and Equatorial Guinea are also on the list. Even dual Latin American-United States citizens are eligible for the two-year fast track. Conversely, Spain generally does not have birthright citizenship for being born on Spanish soil. The contrast in treatment creates a strong preference for immigrants from the former Spanish viceroyalties in Latin America. 

The Instituto Nacional de Estadistica traces both immigration and emigration data for Spain, among other demographic data. South American immigrants, not even including Central and North Americans, outnumbered all African immigrants by a ratio of 335,185 to 128,527. Despite its preferred status, the Philippines only contributed 3,305 immigrants. With over 600,000 residents emigrating annually, most of whom are foreign-born, Spain has issues retaining immigrants. Nonetheless, with a total immigration of 1,288,562 in 2024, Spain still has a positive balance of net immigration. Furthermore, for both male and female immigrants, the single largest age cohort of immigrants is between 23 years of age and 33 years of age. In other words, Spain receives statistically prime working age immigrants.

Spain's most anti-immigration party, VOX, is split on the issue of immigration from Latin America, with younger party members opposing all immigration. Establishment party members believe that Latin Americans share a cultural and linguistic heritage with Spaniards that prime them for citizenship. Partido Popular (PP), the center-right party, outlined its 2026 immigration platform calling for tougher enforcement of immigration laws and stressing the meteoric rise of the population born overseas by 1.5 million people over four years. Reading between the lines of its five principles, "Order & Legality," "Contribution Should Be A Condition For Remaining," "Integration With Demands," and "Zero Tolerance For Crime," it is clear that Partido Popular does not share concerns about immigrants competing with Spaniards for employment opportunities. Explicitly under their 2nd proposal prong "employment as a port of entry," Partido Popular says that Hispanidad, understood as a shared space of language, history, and values, will be a positive factor in the evaluation of visas. 

 Unlike with VOX's split, PP does not appear to be advocating for a change in Spain's immigration structure, but rather stricter enforcement of existing law. With a mere half of Spain's extreme right turning against immigration from Latin America, it looks like Spain's incentives for Latin American immigration will remain in place.

For reasons likely dating back to long-standing historical grievances, VOX and Partido Popular, the center-right party, oppose North African immigration. In Moorish Blood: Islamophobia, Racism, and the Struggle for Identity in Modern Spain, Fernando Bravo Lopez acknowledges that the long Moorish occupation of Spain resulted in various reactions to that part of Spanish history. Modern Spanish reactions range from an attempt from Spaniards to erase marks of the occupation to an embrace of the past occupation as a part of Spanish history. 

The currently governing PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol) on the left appears conciliatory toward irregular migrants, most recently granting amnesty to 500,000 undocumented immigrants and allowing immigrants without legal residency access to Spain's public health services. It goes without saying that PSOE is also perfectly fine with immigration from Latin America. In any case, the proportion of Latin American migrants has eclipsed migration from North Africa, and given the political landscape, will likely continue to do so.

Foreign-Born Population of Spain by Region of Birth, 1998 and 2022

Source: Claudia Finotelli and Sebastian Rinken, Migration Policy Institute

In particular, rural communities came to rely upon Latin American immigrants who work in the agricultural and hospitality sectors of the economy. South American immigration has revived some rural villages in Teruel, Leon, and Palencia, proving that the system can work at scale. A 2023 article Is Spanish depopulation irreversible? Recent demographic and spatial changes in small municipalities by Fernando Gil-Alonso, Jordi Bayona-i-Carrasco, and Isabel Pujadas-Rubies noted factors aiding or hindering the recovery of rural Spanish communities from depopulation. The researchers concluded that while immigration has historically benefitted Spain's rural communities, migration patterns depend upon the health of the economy. Migration growth was also mostly able to compensate for negative natural growth in most cases.

Credit: Fernando Gil-Alonso, Jordi Bayona-i-Carrasco, Isabel Pujadas-Rubies. Charts derived from the Instituto Nacional de Estadistica (INE)

Infrastructure and grassroots efforts

While helpful to the recovery of Spain's villages, immigration can only go so far. Infrastructure is needed to keep rural communities livable, connected, and economically viable in the 21st century.

As illustrated by this video from early 2026, the resettlement of Spain's villages carry different challenges. One isolated Aragonese village named La Estrella in the mountains, until very recently inhabited only by an elderly couple, is less likely to be repopulated than the long-abandoned village of Sarnago in the Castilian plains. Aside from access, one key ingredient to the revival of Sarnago is the fondness that the descendants of former residents still hold for the village. 

Once a week, the relatively young descendants of Sarnago's villagers converge upon the village to repair its buildings in the hopes that the site one day can again be livable. The group even created a museum out of an old schoolhouse, potentially attracting some small measure of tourism. Illustrating further the difference between Sarnago and La Estrella is the 2023 piece by Fernando Gil-Alonso, Jordi Bayona-i-Carrasco, and Isabel Pujadas-Rubies addressing whether Spanish depopulation is irreversible. The researchers ultimately concluded that while rural communities may survive through bonds with larger municipalities, rural communities that are distant from metro areas will likely never recover.  

Villages in Western Castilla y Leon experienced the greatest population loss in the twenty years preceding the 2020 pandemic, followed by small municipalities in Aragon, Castilla La Mancha, and Extremadura. Some "villages situated far from the coast in Galicia, Catalonia, and Andalusia" also suffered heavy population losses. In total, the researchers concluded that 40% of Spain's municipalities face "a bleak demographic future." Nonetheless, efforts against rural depopulation continue on the activist level, the national level, and even at the level of the EU. The President of the EU, Ursula von der Leyen, "created a Vice-Presidency for Democracy and Demography." The office will be responsible for assessing the link between rural demographic changes and access to services. EU efforts on rural depopulation will need to be covered in a different blog post. 

Local passion met institutional support as early as March of 2021 when the Spanish government introduced a $11.9 million plan to improve internet infrastructure in the countryside. The plan came as part of a greater effort to bring digital nomads to Spain during the pandemic years. Sarnago was among the villages attempting to attract digital nomads. By late 2024, Spain continued efforts to extend 5G internet service to rural areas with the collaboration of private companies like Vodafone and Telefonica. As of 2025, Spain's fiber optic internet connectivity coverage reaches 46% of the rural population. According to the Spanish Ministerio del Economia, Comercio, y Empresa (Economy, Commerce, and Business), rural internet coverage exceeds the coverage available to rural French, German, and British communities. 

In spite of the federal and grass-roots support for the restoration of Spain's villages, some efforts find themselves halted by local governments. In 2023, the Autonomous Community of Castilla La Mancha threatened to fine or imprison a group of young Spaniards seeking to revitalize the village of Fraguas because the village site now lies within a natural park.

Tourism: a problem in the cities; a solution in the country

Spain is a major tourist destination for both international and internal Spanish tourists. The site of a confluence of Celtiberian, Carthaginian, Roman, Visigothic, and Moorish civilizations, in addition to the native Spanish Catholic peoples in Spain, the nation hosts fifty UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Four of the World Heritage Sites are national parks. 

Recently, however, urban Spaniards have protested against the tourism industry because of the rising cost of living in Spain's cities. In a seeming contradiction from Spain's earlier efforts to attract digital nomads to its countryside, Spain's government recently proposed a 100% tax on property purchases by non-EU citizens. While tourism may strangle the budget of locals in already saturated cities, it may at the same time provide a lifeline to rural communities. 

I specifically recall during trips from Salamanca to Valladolid, Madrid, Toledo, Avila, and Zamora that the train or bus would pass by old medieval watchtowers and beautiful scenery. There is little doubt that Spain's countryside holds untapped potential for tourism. 

The Camino de Santiago, a set of pilgrimage routes, stretches across Spain and ends at Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. Each of the routes necessarily pass through stretches of rural lands and communities which could use the business more than cities like Barcelona, Seville, and Madrid. 

Credit: https://www.pilgrim.es/en/routes/

The pilgrimage is traditionally completed on foot. Most of the routes run through the rural regions of Extremadura and Castilla y Leon before ending in the comparatively urbanized Galicia. The two most urbanized routes appear to be the Portuguese route and the Ruta Norte (Northern Route), which runs through the Cantabrian Mountains on Spain's northern coast. 

Portuguese Route on the Camino de Santiago 

Credit: Lisa R. Pruitt (2019)

Pilgrims stop along the route in hostels specifically for pilgrims or "albergues." Most albergues are located in urban centers, but it is conceivable that some pilgrims need to stop between cities due to lengthy distances. Furthermore, the albergues are relatively inexpensive, and in many cases, managed by the public specifically to host pilgrims rather than general tourists. For example, between Caceres and Salamanca are numerous smaller cities and villages whose economies could be bolstered by the presence of publicly funded albergues. While urban Spaniards rail against the tourism industry for raising the cost of living, rural Spaniards could preserve their communities with the aid of rest stops for weary and hungry pilgrims. 

Credit: Google Maps

Conclusion

Spain's rural depopulation crisis may seem insurmountable. Gil-Alonso, Bayona-i-Carrasco, and Pujadas-Rubies were not optimistic in their article Is Spanish depopulation irreversible? Recent demographic and spatial changes in small municipalities. However, a number of unique solutions are available to Spain. Furthermore, strong institutional support from the Spanish government and the EU may extend the services and internet connectivity needed for geographically distant villages to survive and perhaps flourish. Finally, if Spain could come back from an even worse episode of depopulation during the Reconquista, it can surely come back from this. 

The ronda and the rope: Parallel justice systems and the dangers of legal abandonment in rural Latin America

Peruvian President Ollanta Humala delivers a speech in rural Puno.
© Presidency of Peru, 2015 

Much has been written about the lack of access to legal services and the reduced capacity of state and legal actors in rural areas of the United States of America. Savvy writers usually stay clear of making worst-case-scenario predictions. This is understandable, as nobody wants to be the person who says the sky will fall. I shall not make such calamitous predictions either. What this article contains is instead a view into a place in which legal systems have failed and given way to other forms of "justice."

This article is a small survey of parallel systems of justice in rural and remote areas of Peru, a country with which I am intimately familiar. Over the course of this post I will go through the circumstances that led to the formation of such systems, their current status, and some of their worst excesses. Peru is not the United States. Its geography, history, and demographics are radically different. The underlying conditions that produced these parallel systems are not, however, unique to Peru. It is worth asking what fills a vacuum when the courts do not play a role. Some particular responses have emerged in Peru. Whether such responses might ever emerge in rural America is for the reader to imagine.

The geographical roots of legal absence

A lone truck challenges the curves of the Pasamayo Serpentine.
© Santiago Stucchi, 2008.

Peru's geography represents a major obstacle to the nation's political integration and by extension, to its legal system. Peru is vertically split in half by the Andes Mountain. The Andes are flanked on the east by the Amazon rainforest and on the west by the Pacific Ocean. Peru's capital, Lima, is home to one-third of the nation's population. This results in an extremely centralized nation, dominated by its political and economic coastal elites. Its mountainous terrain makes transportation quite difficult as well, with some highways like the infamous Serpentine of Pasamayo--an extremely narrow 14-mile stretch of highway which has mountain on one side and abyss on the other--being the only way between different regions of the country.

In many remote areas, especially in the Andes, there is very little formal policing. Courts are a distant, nonoperative institution. Language barriers do not help either, as about 15% of Peru's population speaks Quechua as their main language. But many Peruvians--especially those working in government--do not speak Quechua at all. Historically, communities in such areas have governed themselves with little involvement from the central or even regional government. They often handled disputes through informal assemblies or through respected community leaders. The first rondas campesinas (meaning "peasant patrols") were established in the northern Andean region of Cajamarca in the late 1970s. These early rondas were primarily created to deal with property crimes, the main one being cattle theft.

Sendero Luminoso and the militarization of the rondas

A painting displayed on the First Military School of Sendero Luminoso.
On the left, the students. On the right, Sendero's leader, Abimael Guzman. Above him the figures of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong.

In May 1980, the Maoist terrorist group Sendero Luminoso (literally "Shining Path"), a primarily rural Andean movement, declared war on the Peruvian government. It was led by Abimael Guzman, a professor of philosophy at a university in Ayacucho (a region in the southern Andes). Part of Sendero's strategy was what they called "batir el campo" (meaning "scouring the countryside," destroying all non-Sendero authority in such regions). Initially, many rural communities sided with Sendero, agreeing with their message of discontent against the ways in which the government had neglected the people of the Andes.

When confronted with the violent revolts happening in the Andes, President Fernando Belaunde dismissed them, assessing the threat as nothing more than small issues with cattle rustlers. Sendero held "people's trials" against those it considered "antirevolutionary elements." The subjects of these trials were often community leaders, and the price of resistance was massacre. The most notorious of these was the Lucanamarca massacre of 1983, in which over 60 people (ranging from ages of 6 months to 70 years of age) were killed with machetes and axes, in retaliation for the killing of one of Sendero's commanders. What followed were years of massacres in the Andes, with most of the human cost falling on the rural communities who lived there.

Eventually, in the early 1990s, the Peruvian government found its footing in the fight against Sendero, and the war started to turn. Under the leadership of President Alberto Fujimori, the rondas started being armed and supported by the government. This cooperation proved instrumental to defeating Sendero in rural regions and displacing them into other areas where the government had an easier time fighting them. On September 12, 1992, Sendero's leader Abimael Guzman was captured in a safehouse in an upper-class neighborhood in Lima, where he was being hosted by a wealthy classical dancer. That was game over.

Constitutional recognition

Guzman's capture was an inflection point from which Fujimori moved forward with a series of reforms. Chief among them was the Peruvian Constitution of 1993. In its Article 149, the constitution recognizes the authority of the rondas campesinas within their jurisdictions, as long as they "respect the fundamental rights of people." The same article calls for the cooperation of the "traditional" judicial power and these parallel systems of justice going forward.

How the project of cooperation and respect for the fundamental rights of people is going is difficult to assess with precision. But, where statistics are scarce, it is always good to tell a story.

A Canadian in Ucayali

The village of Nuevo Jerusalen in the Ucayali Region of Peru.
© Vratislav S, 2012

Imagine you are a young (ish) Canadian man. Like many of your peers, you seek enlightenment. You doubt Western medicine and respect indigenous cultures. So, you decide to look into the real stuff. You travel south, to Peru, perhaps farther south, to the Ucayali Region of the Amazon rainforest. You do ayahuasca. It changes your life, so you seek to go further down the rabbit hole. You seek a teacher, Olivia Arevalo Lomas, a well-known elder, healer and community leader. You dedicate ten years of your life to this. Then one day, a bang, and your teacher is dead, three gunshot wounds.

The police eventually show up (it takes them some time), and everyone is really angry. Even worse, they think it is your fault. Oh no. Facebook posts start to be circulated. "WANTED" they say, then a picture of you, then a plea for clues on your whereabouts. People in the comments express their wishes that you are brought to justice; others propose rewards for hunting you down. Things are looking really bad for you.

But actually, these latest developments are not that bad, since you are already dead. Police soon find a phone which contains a video recording of your last moments. A mob got to you, quickly, well before the police ever got there, since you are conspicuously foreign. There was no trial, no evidence, no attorneys. You have been lynched, and your manner of death was strangulation.

Your family says you were really nice, hated guns, and just loved ayahuasca. The locals will remain convinced it was you who killed Arevalo Lomas. The rest of the world will never know. This story is not a thought experiment. This happened to Sebastian Woodruffe, a Canadian tourist. His death drew international attention in 2018 before disappearing from the news cycle within days.

Gerardo's choice

If you are in any way like me, you may have heard the story and said to yourself, "only one way to avoid a similar fate, stay as far away as possible from that region if you are not a local."

This is not, however, a solution. In 2007, in the village of Patascachi (near the border with Bolivia, population around 1000), a mob descended upon the house of Gerardo Parisuana, a farmer. Nearly the entire town was there. The occasion? Gerardo's son Gary was accused of being a cattle rustler, and the mob had had enough of him. The evidence against him? A gang of cattle rustlers, upon capture, had accused Gary of being their leader. The police arrested Gary, but found insufficient evidence to hold him and soon released him. For the rondas, however, the "trial" had already happened. The verdict was in. There was no room for appeals. Gerardo now had a choice: to lynch his own son, or to have the rest of his family share his son's fate. Gerardo made his choice. According to witnesses, the crowd tortured Gary before Gerardo hanged him.

The mayor on trial

A sign near the city of Ilave, in the Puno Region.
© TeshTesh, 2015

Not even money and power are enough to protect one from such a fate. In 2004, in the city of Ilave (elevation 12,000 feet, in the Puno Region, near Lake Titicaca in the heart of the Andes), the mayor of the city, Cirilo Robles, was lynched by a mob. It all started with a protest sparked by allegations of corruption and embezzlement. Aymara-speaking peasants made camp in front of the municipality's doors, protesting that the mayor had promised to pave the Ilave-Mazocruz highway, a promise yet to be fulfilled. The mayor left the city as soon as the protests started, returning only weeks later. When he finally came back, he held a meeting with his council at his private residence, in which he resolved to resign.

The mob found out about the mayor's return, and they soon descended upon his home. They breached the house and dragged the mayor out after giving him a beating. He was tortured for hours before being hanged in the city's square. His lifeless body was found under a bridge. Later that year, Peru's Government Accountability Office investigated the allegations against him. They found no evidence of embezzlement and exonerated him. The Supreme Court of Peru sentenced two members of the mob to 30 years in prison. Mayor Robles' successor, Miguel Flores, closed this somber chapter with a comment that could be considered the most Peruvian aphorism, "Everything remains the same for us."

Conclusion

The rondas campesinas are not just a series of horror stories. They emerged from genuine necessity and fulfilled a role that nothing else could. They even have constitutional recognition. But the results they tend to generate speak for themselves. Formal policing and legal institutions are not perfect, but they tend to produce less shocking and violent results. 

Peru is not the United States. The Andes are not Appalachia. The Amazon is not the Ozarks. But legal vacuums do not know borders, and the dynamics that fill them may follow recognizable patterns. Whether those patterns may ever extend to the United States is, as said in the introduction, for the reader to imagine.

Rural voters and presidential policy packages

In 21st century politics, there has been the sense that rural populations are to blame for the election of figures such as Donald Trump. A full two election cycles before Donald Trump ran for president, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama attempted to explain small town Americans' frustration while attending a San Francisco fundraiser. 

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Hillary Clinton, the former First Lady of Arkansas, called then-Senator Obama "divisive and elitist" over his comments, prompting a row about Clinton's authenticity in courting rural voters. A mere eight years later, Hillary Clinton commented that half of then-candidate Trump's supporters fit into a "basket of deplorables" while the other half felt the "government let them down" and were "desperate for change." In light of her defense of small-town America eight years prior, it's not unreasonable to think Hillary Clinton put rural voters in the latter category. Nonetheless, rural voters felt maligned, even in spite of sympathetic voices from the left. Rural voters did not defect to the Republican Party overnight in 2016. Rather, a prolonged process of vote defection occurred as the New Deal and Great Society coalition of the Democratic Party inevitably broke up. 

I. Rural Populism in the Gilded Age

The rapid urbanization which made rural communities their own distinct sub-class in spatial terms occurred in the first part of the 20th Century, accompanied by the industrial revolution and the type of populist social consciousness not yet seen in Western countries. The period between the American Civil War and World War One was marked by explosive economic growth, the benefits of which were not distributed equally among the socio-economic classes of America. It is now known as the Gilded Age. Likewise, one look at the current stock market's all-time highs and another look at median wages will say something similar about the present moment. With many calling the present moment marked by extreme wealth inequality a new Gilded Age, it's important to look at the first one.

Emblematic of rural people's interests in the Gilded Age was William Jennings Bryan, who ran in 1896 against William McKinley. While McKinley ran on a platform of high tariffs and maintaining the gold standard, Bryan delivered his Cross of Gold speech, outlining a platform of shifting to a more inflationary silver standard to aid indebted people, support for the descendants of "those hardy pioneers who braved all the dangers of the wilderness" away from the Atlantic Coast, and against government favoritism toward business interests. A populist, Bryan insisted that the "attorney in a country town," the farmer, the miner, and the "merchant at the crossroads store" are just as much businessmen as their urban counterparts. The topic of Bryan's speech included calls for inflation, praise for laborers, and denunciation of idle capital holders.

From an economic perspective, modern audiences would equivocate William Jennings Bryan with left-wing political views. However, he was also a Fundamentalist Christian who promoted the criminal prosecution of the teaching of evolution even as late as 1925. Bryan also held complex, seemingly contradictory views on race and religion, extending religious pluralism to Catholics, Jews, and Native Americans while at the same time advocating for the exclusion of East Asian immigrants and Black Americans. 

Ultimately, William Jennings Bryan lost his election, the nation split on then-traditionally partisan lines with the industrialized Northeast, Upper Midwest, and Pacific Coast voting Republican. The South, frontier prairie states settled in the late 1800s, and Washington State voting Democrat. William Jennings Bryan attempted to run again "in 1900 and 1908, before serving as secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson." He would be the last presidential candidate of either the Democratic Party or Republican Party to run on an explicitly pro-rural platform, although many candidates have since made overtures to rural communities as a mere part of their election coalitions rather than the mainstay of their coalitions. 

Credit: 270towin.com

1896 candidate William Jennings Bryan may seem like ancient history, but some parallels may be drawn from his appeals for the sake of rural populations to modern-day political appeals to rural populations in political coalition-building. 

II. The Great Party Switch

In the years succeeding the start of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt built a New Deal Coalition of working-class voters that secured a steady flow of Democratic presidents from 1932 to 1980. While Southerners and rural voters were included in the coalition and benefitted from the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Rural Electrification Administration, Roosevelt's "prototypical coalition member was a white worker in a unionized factory. " Rural voters were a part of the Democratic Party's big tent rather than being the center that William Jennings Bryan envisioned thirty-six years prior. 

Starting in 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson released another policy package to rival The New Deal: The Great Society. The overarching goal of the Great Society was to combat poverty and inequality in the United States. Among the package were provisions that specifically extended aid to rural areas of the United States. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 sought to mobilize volunteer workers through the Job Corps to both urban and rural areas. The act's Title III provisions also eased the issuance of loans to those living in rural communities. The Food Stamp Act of 1964 served the dual purpose of giving aid to Americans living under food insecurity and bolstering the agricultural economy. The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965's Title X provisions extended insured rural housing loans, an interest rate capped at 5%, an extension of housing authorizations, and provided an expanded statutory definition of both under "2,500 inhabitants" or under "5,500 if it is rural in character."  The act also extended financial assistance to nonprofits constructing water distribution and treatment facilities in "smaller municipality or rural areas."

Historical data compiled by a 2014 article by Drew DeSilver at the Pew Research Center from the Census Bureau indicated marked success in reducing poverty rates among children and the elderly. From a regional perspective, anti-poverty measures yielded the greatest percentage decrease in the American South, although the region still outpaces the West, Midwest, and Northeast in terms of poverty. The continuing disparity may be indicative of why American Southerners continue to feel left behind going into the 2010s.

Delineating further from a regional view to a population density view, the US Department of Agriculture compiled data on the decline of poverty rates in metro and nonmetro populations from 1959 to 2019. The data indicated a sharp decline from 1959 to 1974, followed by stagnation, an increase going into the 1980s, and then an unsteady decline before rising again in the mid-2000s. Although the decline in poverty clearly begins at least starting in 1959, during Eisenhower's penultimate year in the White House, it is a reasonable presumption that the Great Society's economic measures were not counter to the material interests of rural populations. The Great Society being a continuation of the New Deal makes more sense of the chart.

Despite its focus on urban renewal, the Great Society's economic package hardly abandoned rural communities. Government support and economic liberalism won over white working-class voters, many of whom called rural communities their home. However, the social revolution of the late 1960s made it difficult for the Democrats to hold their coalition together. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 resulted in another split between the Democrat Party and its Southern constituents during the 1964 election. Although predominantly rural states in the Midwest and Great Plains rallied for Johnson in 1964, the Democratic Party lost the Deep South to Barry Goldwater. 

Credit: 270towin.com

In the 1964 election, the particular history of segregation in the Deep South resulted in a defection from the Democratic Party while every other characteristically rural state remained with the Democratic Coalition.  

Now would be an important time to mention, although it is beyond the scope of this paper, that rural communities have their own regional and cultural traits. The predominant religious denomination of a community will also influence the political leanings of that community. The traditionally English-American Calvinist (i.e. Reformed Church, Baptist, Methodist, etc.) rural South will carry their own political beliefs separate from rural German-Americans in the Lutheran Upper Midwest. The presence of Catholic communities not usually associated with the rural United States adds its own political flavor. The difference in local cultures is one explanation for why distinctive regions of the United States associated with rurality may vote for comprehensively different candidates in the same election cycle. 

The Democratic embrace of social movements "such as feminism, the anti-war movement, environmentalism, and social libertarianism" caused a rift between the party and their socially conservative and economically progressive white working-class constituents.

On the dimension of economic sustainability, Lyndon Baines Johnson's Great Society policy package lifted an enormous amount of Americans out of poverty. However, it contributed heavily to deficit spending. The fiscal costs of the ongoing Vietnam War added even more to the budget deficit. 

Republicans interrupted the Democratic winning streak in the 1952, 1956, 1968, and 1972 victories of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Although victorious in their respective elections, Eisenhower and Nixon both operated under the overarching social welfare economic paradigm set by the New Deal and Great Society policy packages. However, as more Southern Americans began defecting from the Democratic Party in the late 1960s, President Nixon was able to exploit the growing social rift among the Democratic Party and working-class white Americans. Among Nixon's supporters were a geographically diverse array of Manhattan construction workers frustrated with college-educated protesters, Native Americans seeking self-determination, and white Southerners disillusioned with the Democratic Party. Among his other seemingly contradictory acts, Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in spite of his private disdain for counterculture environmentalists. Like William Jennings Bryan, the social conservatism of Richard Nixon was complex and difficult to caricature. 

By the time President Gerald Ford succeeded Richard Nixon following the latter's resignation, concerns about economic stagnation and inflation forced both parties to shift toward fiscal austerity. The types of policy aid packages delivered to the working poor under the New Deal and the Great Society became increasingly rare. Both the social and fiscal aspects of the Great Society's policy package fell out of popularity. President Ford was the first to attempt to address inflation with his "Whip Inflation Now" plan, amounting to a call to American households to limit spending in an effort to keep prices down. Unsurprisingly, the plan was unpopular and was likely a contributing factor to Gerald Ford's defeat at the hands of Georgia peanut farmer Jimmy Carter. An observation gleaned from the 1976 election map is that America's Southern states had not irreversibly defected to the Republican Party. When presented with a Democratic candidate from Southern agrarian roots, Deep South Americans were willing to vote Democrat; this pattern would later be repeated in 1992 and 1996 with the election of Bill Clinton. Jimmy Carter continued Ford's efforts to halt inflation, appointing Paul Volcker to be the chair of the Federal Reserve. Although at the price of high interest rates and the resulting double-dip recession of 1981 and 1982, the Carter appointee finally defeated the inflation scare by the early 1980s. 

Credit: 270towin.com

In December of 1979, after over two years of preparations, Jimmy Carter announced his Small Community and Rural Development Policy, an effort aimed at reducing the type of rural material deprivation he experienced as a young man and establishing local councils to inform state decisions on agriculture and rural development. Unfortunately, the nature of the short four-year term of the presidency makes long-term projects difficult to manage. In 1980, Carter polled unusually well in the rural South, carrying the vast majority of rural black voters. Reagan carried only 60% of the most rural 90% white majority counties in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Nonetheless, Carter lost the election in an electoral landslide. The Reagan Revolution put an end to Jimmy Carter's designs in the next year. 

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III. The Reagan Revolution

Where rural Americans benefitted from the New Deal and Great Society's left-leaning economic package, they felt alienated by the increasing social liberalism of the Democratic Party. The Reagan Revolution offered the opposite: fiscal conservatism and social conservatism. The government would begin investing in financial institutions and businesses rather than directly into communities. Factors from within and without the United States in the 1970s culminated in the 1980s Farm Crisis. Reagan's Food Security Act of 1985 attempted to mitigate the effects of the farm crisis by temporarily reducing interest rates to 1988, expanded the list of eligible rural utility borrowers, set price supports for particular crops, expanded the eligible use of food stamps, and set government purchase quantities for many of those same crops. Two years later, Congress and Reagan passed the Agricultural Credit Act of 1987, which sought to extend financial aid to agricultural financial institutions. Although Reagan is criticized for failing to stop the continued loss of small farms, it is worth mentioning that farm centralization held a steep trend starting in the 1930s with that trend tapering off only by the mid-1970s. 

Credit: Katherine Lacy

In the election of 1988, Vice President George HW Bush capitalized on the popularity of the Reagan administration and won election to the presidency against Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. However, H.W. Bush would only enjoy one term due to the poor aging of Reagan economic policies, his reversal on his promise not to raise taxes, and his lack of popular appeal in comparison with Bill Clinton. 

One-hundred years from William Jennings Bryan's 1896 election, rural communities were once again in play. In 1992 and 1996, Bill Clinton, former Arkansas governor and expert saxophone player, won two consecutive elections against World War Two veterans George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole. The Southern States appeared split between the candidates while the Great Plains region predominantly leaned toward Bush and Dole. Like Carter before him, Clinton's Southern roots led Southerners to see in him a trustworthy candidate. Clinton accomplished his victories by capitalizing on discontent with the Republican Party's tax advantages given to the rich during the Reagan Revolution and defending against seemingly reckless spending cuts to education and Medicaid. Nonetheless, Clinton operated within the prevailing paradigm of the social and fiscal Reagan Revolution, giving concessions to Republicans in the form of police union-approved crime bills and welfare reform limiting recipients to two years before assistance would be rescinded. His relative social conservatism won him points with rural communities, although his willingness to embrace the new financial professional class and globalized economic order ultimately proved disastrous for the economies of rural communities.

Credit: 270towin.com

Credit: 270towin.com

Clinton went on to split rural voters again with the Republican Party again in 1996 before George W. Bush won predominantly rural regions of the United States in 2000 and 2004. The split between urban and rural residents for Gore and Bush was measured at 34 percentage points, only to be outstripped by "Jews and white Christians" at 40 points and "other voters and the religious right" at 36 points. Al Gore's environmentalism in particular made him appear threatening to communities dependent on coal mining and power generation. The election of 2000 proved to be a massive reversal of Clinton's gains in rural counties, and it was the final party reversal of most rural states to date. 

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In his first year of office, George W. Bush announced his opposition to the Agriculture, Conservation, and Rural Enhancement Act of 2001 due to concerns about overproduction, price depression, a regressive tax on milk consumption, subsidies going to the largest of food producers, and the risk of "subsidies exceeding limits under WTO rules." Much like Clinton and Reagan before him, George W. Bush openly embraced the bipartisan consensus around the globalization of trade. Unlike previous iterations of agricultural bills, Bush seemed to be opposed to subsidies, ultimately relying on his trust in free trade and the free market. Ultimately, the bill was not passed. In 2004, Bush went on to solidify his lead in his election against John Kerry. By 2008, years of free market and free trade principals came to a head. The 1999 Repeal of Glass-Steagall significantly deregulated the banking sector, encouraging the mingling of commercial banking and investment banking interests. The opening of international trade to developing markets allowed US employers to shut down largely rural manufacturing centers in favor of cheap labor elsewhere during the leadup to the 2008 recession. After working-class America felt the brunt of the recession, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 seemed to reward major corporate and financial institutions. Working-class Americans were left to their own devices. 

Credit: Sarah Low

The rise in income inequality due to the recession, where the upper income bracket recaptured the vast majority of the income share lost by working class families, started to fuel an increasingly loud movement of political populism. This brings us to the moment described in the introduction of this post: the 2008 landslide victory of Barack Obama without any need to appeal to rural voters. By election day 2008, rural communities were already thoroughly disillusioned with both parties. Rural turnout declined massively from 2004 in many locations. By 2012, Democratic priorities fully shifted away from the Clintonian 1996 strategy. 

IV. The End of History

While social conservatism may have been the cause of rural defection to from the New Deal Coalition starting in the 1960s, it does not fully account for the now uniform changes starting in the 2000s. 

With the fall of the Soviet Union, world leaders announced a new economic world order defined by commercial interconnectedness. The 2001 accession of China to the World Trade Organization was already met with suspicion of non-compliance from the start. The increasingly global nature of economic competition hit rural areas hard. In spite of the credit Reagan enjoyed from rural voters, his NAFTA agreement with Canada and Mexico deprived rural areas of the manufacturing appeal they previously enjoyed when compared to the previous manufacturing sites in larger cities. The trend, starting in the 1980s, only intensified with the introduction of China into the World Trade Organization in 2001. The 2000s further deprived rural areas of "about a quarter of their manufacturing jobs due both to overseas competition and increases in productivity."  Left-behind working-class communities ultimately sought out both progressive and protectionist economic policies to scrape back what their leaders gave to multinational corporations and foreign workforces. 

V. The Present Moment

The United States does not have its modern-day William Jennings Bryan. Desperate for change, rural voters swung in favor of New York reject Donald Trump.

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The 2020 election yielded similar results as far as predominantly rural states went, looking almost like a reversal of the 1896 map. Although Joe Biden won victories in the Rust Belt, states which saw their hay-day during America's industrialization, rural-coded states in the late-to-be settled Great Plains and late-to-industrialize South largely held for Trump. 

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In the absence of Scranton Joe from the end of the 2024, the Democrats lost a number of blue-collar communities in the Rust Belt.

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The subtext in the last three elections is this: rural America was not the deciding swing factor in Trump's victories and defeat. They have swung Republican in every election since 2000. Rather, the Rust Belt states in the Upper Midwest were in the balance. The rural political appetite, disillusioned with the establishment of both major parties, would have better stomached the economically left political outsider Bernie Sanders than Clintonian party establishment figures like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. 

Recent polling from the 2024 election was conducted across 1,713 interviews and ten battleground states. The poll attributes economically populist policies to rural voter preferences and attributes the unwillingness to vote for, at the time, Joe Biden to the lack of appearances and messaging directed toward rural communities. When poll answers were phrased without party attribution, responses trended toward more economically left and populist policies calling for elite and corporate accountability. Contrary to expectations, conservative social topics did not predominate the concerns of rural voters. Given more polling, Democratic Party strategists may come to understand that rural areas are not unwinnable so long as they refer to historical winning strategy of letting fiscal progressive messaging take center stage in the party platform. Although he partially got rural America into this mess, Democrats should still heed the immortalized words of Bill Clinton: "It's the economy, stupid."