On Loretta Lynn's country politics--from gender to the presidency

Two pieces by NPR commentators have, in recent days, discussed Loretta Lynn's politics--as generally Republican and "not feminist."  Lynn has been in the news, of course, because she died earlier this week, an event covered here.  

First, Amanda Marie Martinez writes for NPR under the headline, "Personifying a country ideal, Loretta Lynn tackled sexism through a complicated lens."  Here's a salient excerpt:  

After Lynn died earlier last week, reports often identified her as the template for strong, even progressive, women in the genre. Many stories have fixated on the impact of the artist's most notorious song, "The Pill," using it to define her as a feminist, albeit a reluctant one. Upon news of her death Reuters described the singer as a "leading feminist," while Vulture referenced her "feminist country songs." These assertions are being made even as Lynn made continuous strides to distance herself from the term, as she did in her 1976 book Coal Miner's Daughter, where she explained: "I'm not a big fan of Women's Liberation." The singer's long-established support for far-right politicians, from the infamous segregationist George Wallace (whom she described as a friend in one interview in 1975 and had even recorded a radio ad in support of in 1968), to the presidency of Donald Trump, further detach her from the feminist label.

What separated Lynn from others, however, was that she documented women's troubles while leaning in to her rural Kentucky roots. As Lynn sang "You're Lookin' at Country" and "Coal Miner's Daughter" in long prairie dresses, peers like Riley or Gentry were seen as sex symbols in miniskirts and hot pants. Lynn didn't just sound like country, she looked the part more than anyone. That she sang about women's struggles while masterfully projecting the image of an uncorrupted country girl made her all the more convincing as an artist.

Not only is it a common refrain to credit Lynn with feminist ideals, but she is also championed for voicing the concerns of rural, Appalachian Southern women's struggles. While there is no denying many of Lynn's listeners found this vocalization powerful, one should also remember how Lynn fit the stereotype of what a Southern woman signified in the minds of many both then and now.

Ron Elving's piece for WAMU is more oriented to Lynn's presidential politics than to her gender politics.  It's titled, "How Loretta Lynn, country music and a rural Republican tide changed U.S. politics."  The story features a photo of Lynn with George W. Bush campaigning in Little Rock in 2000.  An excerpt follows: 

At the peak of her fame in the 1960s and 1970s, Lynn was part of a key change in the politics of country music — a change akin to the shifting partisan leanings of the music’s most loyal fans.

That change made a big difference in American politics when it happened, helping to elect Republican presidents such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and both Presidents Bush.

And it continues to make a big difference today.

Some of Lynn’s fans were surprised this week to learn she had supported former President Donald Trump

She once told an interviewer she had gone with Trump in part because her audiences would have booed her if she had endorsed Hillary Clinton. (The 2016 Democratic nominee had alienated some country music fans with what seemed a slighting reference to the phrase “Stand By Your Man,” the title of Tammy Wynette’s ethos-defining song about marriage.

Surprise at Lynn’s alignment with Trump was a reprise of the reaction some of her fans had when she appeared on stage in 1988 with the Republican nominee for president, George H.W. Bush.

On that occasion, referring to one of her own signature songs (“You’re Looking at Country”), Lynn told the crowd and the cameras that looking at Bush was “looking at country.” And in case there was any doubt, she leaned into the microphone and proclaimed: “I know George Bush, and he is country.“

That provoked a few smiles and much head scratching at the time. Bush had been born in New England and raised in Washington, D.C., as the son of a senator from Connecticut, Bush went from a super-elite private prep school to Yale.

Don't miss the rest of Elving's column.  It's a humdinger, with further analysis of the rural vote in relation to country music, including this:  

If Bush Sr. was an unlikely hero of the countryside, Trump was even more so. Trump did not have even ephemeral connections to country life or country music, but he forged a bond of affinity with those who did.

He was, of course, from a wealthy family in New York. But he had created a tough businessman character on a reality TV show and was able to translate that into a “tell it like it is” political persona as a candidate. He also made a show of embracing the pop culture tastes and social attitudes of blue-collar America, especially those of rural working-class whites.

Trump was able to tap the feisty, often defensive spirit that has long informed the Appalachian region (broadly defined) that spawned much of what Americans came to call “country western.” It is akin to the fiercely defiant spirit that animates J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy and that attracted Trump’s endorsement of Vance’s Senate candidacy in Ohio.

On Trump's attractiveness to rural America, don't miss this and this.  And on J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, don't miss this and this.  

All of this linking of country music and politics reminds me of Dolly Parton's efforts to be non-partisan, some of which were featured in this excellent podcast, especially the episode called "Dixie Disappearance" from December 2019.  

How refusing to expand Medicaid has hurt folks in east Texas, and the quest of three men to meet the need

Kim Krisberg and David Leffler reported last month from Gun Barrel City, Texas, population 6,190, in Henderson County, on the years-long effort to establish a Federally Qualified Healthcare Center (FQHC) to meet the needs of low-income folks in the region.  The clinic, known as the East Texas Community Clinci (ETCC), is now up and running, serving some of the nearly 30% of Gun Barrel City's residents who don't have health insurance.  That's considerably higher than the 18% of Texans without health insurance, which is the highest state average in the nation.  Yet the clinic, which now has two locations, still does not have its FQHC status.  

Here's more on the two physicians and one administrator behind the ETCC, detailing their efforts:

Doug Curran and Ted Mettetal have practiced medicine for 80-plus years combined, most of it in a thriving private practice in the town of Athens, about 20 miles east of Gun Barrel City. In 2019, at an age when most physicians are ready to retire, the longtime friends set out on a new venture: opening a safety-net clinic that would treat anyone, regardless of their ability to pay.

* * * 

The Gun Barrel City clinic opened at 8 a.m. on May 20, 2020. As Curran waited for the first patients to arrive, he wondered — for a moment — what he had gotten himself into.

“Here I am, 70 years old, starting a new adventure,” he said. “You kind of ask yourself, what in God’s name am I doing?”

His friend Mettetal was 69. And Robison, then 45, had left a steady job and taken a pay cut to join them. The plan may have seemed crazily ambitious to an outsider, but the three men had seen firsthand the consequences of people having to forgo care because they couldn’t afford it. They felt compelled to help.

Retirement didn’t suit the doctors, anyway. They relished the joys and pace of small-town medicine: delivering a baby in the morning, stitching up a wound in the afternoon, making a house call after work.

“When you’re used to going 90 miles an hour, you kind of go stir crazy,” Mettetal said.

* * * 

Curran has tried for years to persuade the Republican-dominated state Legislature to address these problems. When he served as president of the Texas Medical Association from 2018 to 2019, he made it his mission to get Gov. Greg Abbott’s signature on a bill to expand Medicaid coverage, a position 69% of Texans now support, according to a 2020 poll by the Episcopal Health Foundation. But Texas remains among 12 states that have refused expansion, even though the federal government would pay at least 90% of the cost.

“I basically spent a year of my life trying to convince Texas legislators that they really ought to value our people more, they ought to provide better access for all our people, especially our working poor,” said Curran, who leans conservative but has grown increasingly progressive. “But our state has not had the wisdom of engaging that.” 

* * * 

The idea was to build a network of safety-net clinics to serve a mostly rural area east of Dallas, beginning with the clinic in Gun Barrel City. They’d combine the clinics with a medical residency program to bring desperately needed new doctors into the region.

To launch the East Texas Community Clinic, or ETCC, they persuaded two local organizations to put up $200,000 in seed money. For long-term funding they set out to apply to a federal agency, the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration, which offers millions of dollars in grants and enhanced Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements to qualified clinics in poorly served areas.

The doctors have repeatedly gone back to these two organizations, along with a third funder more recently, for more money as they await approval of their FQHC status.  It's a story chock full of details and personality and well worth a read.  

And here's an October 6, 2022 follow-up story in Public Health Watch with some good news in the aftermath of the late September story--and attributable to that reporting. 

In the two weeks since its publication, the story has caught the attention of policymakers and audiences around the country. It has been shared on social media by Texas lawmakers of both parties, including U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican, and U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat. It has been published by The Texas Tribune, The Daily Yonder and the Forney (Texas) Messenger. It has also inspired follow-up stories, including this broadcast from an ABC affiliate in Tyler, Texas. People from around the country sent words of support and small donations.

The story’s impacts went beyond shares, likes and page views.

One of the problems Curran and Mettetal face is getting the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration to approve East Texas Community Clinic as a [FQHC]. That designation allows safety-net clinics to receive enhanced Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements and gives them access to millions of dollars in federal grants. The doctors had expected to receive the designation by the end of 2021. But when our story was published, the crucial last step in that process — a site visit by federal inspectors — wasn’t scheduled until March 2023. That meant the clinic would have to continue relying on donations to stay afloat.

After reading the story, staff from Cornyn’s office contacted Curran, who had been trying to secure the senator’s help in moving up the visit. Just days after publication, Glen Robison, the clinic’s operations manager, got an email from the Health Resources and Services Administration saying it would reschedule the visit for mid-December.

That means Robison should be able to meet the end-of-year deadline to apply for $3 million in federal funds to support the clinic’s medical residency program.

Both stories are part of the Public Health Watch series, "The Holdouts" on what has happened in the dozen states that refused federal funding available under Obamacare to expand Medicaid.  

How rural Arizona students treat a Filipina teacher who came to help

 Eli Saslow reports for the Washington Post out of Bullhead City, Arizona, under the headline, "An American education."  The subhead is, "Amid a historic U.S. teacher shortage, a ‘Most Outstanding Teacher’ from the Philippines tries to help save a struggling school in rural Arizona."  The alternative headline is, "Teachers from Philippines Help Struggling U.S. Schools."  And the essence is that an award-winning teacher in the Philippines came to help a rural school district experiencing a teacher shortage, and then had to endure awful behavior by the students.  Here are some excerpts, first about the teacher, Rose Jean Obreque, who, in order to get to the U.S., took out "$8,000 in high-interest loans to pay for the agency fees, a plane ticket, two new teaching outfits and the first month’s rent on a two-bedroom apartment she planned to share with five other foreign teachers."

Here's how the students in her home country are described: 

Her seventh-grade students there were the children of fishermen and sugar cane farmers. They arrived for school early, even if they had to walk more than a mile to get there. They called her “ma’am.” They brought her homemade lunches. They wrote thank-you notes at the end of each week. They aspired to become engineers or doctors or teachers like her, and they volunteered to stay after school for extra lessons rather than returning home to work in the sugar cane fields. Obreque started an after-school program for struggling readers. She led the school’s innovations club to a regional first-place finish. She recorded daily video lessons during the pandemic and hiked to remote villages to make home visits, until her ambition landed her at the top of the teacher rankings and she began to hear from recruitment agencies around the world.

Then there are her students in America, whose behavioral issues Eli describes in considerable detail, including: 

Another [student] had dropped his paper on the floor and was stabbing his pencil into the side of his desk.

“Is everything all right?” Obreque asked. “Why aren’t you participating?”

“’Cause my pencil’s broken,” he said, banging it harder against the desk until it snapped. He picked up the two broken pieces and held them out to her as proof. “What do you want me to do?” he asked, smiling at her, and Obreque looked at him for a moment and then decided that his behavior was her fault. Maybe she hadn’t communicated the assignment properly. Maybe, instead of beginning the class by making name tags, she should have started with the rules so they knew how to behave. She walked back to the front of the room. “Eyes up here,” she said, as several of the students continued to talk. “Five, four, three …” she said, as the students shouted over her, until finally the PE teacher blew his whistle. “Hey! Try doing that to me and see what happens,” he said. “Be quiet and listen to your teacher.”

Obreque nodded at him and then continued. “I want this class to be systematic,” she said. “We are not animals. We are not in the jungle. We should be guided by rules, or we will not be successful in our learning, right?”

“Yeah, guys. We’re not animals,” one student said, and then a few boys began to make jungle noises until the PE teacher blew his whistle again.

“If you want to be respected, show me respect,” Obreque said. “Human beings are supposed to be able to follow simple instructions. You come to school to learn, right?”

“Nah, I come because my parents make me,” one student said, turning to smile at his seatmate.

“Yeah, and because somehow you haven’t gotten expelled yet,” his seatmate responded, shoving his friend in the shoulder.

“And ’cause the girls here are fine as hell,” the student said, punching his friend back in the arm.

“Enough!” Obreque shouted, using a voice louder than she’d ever used in seven years of teaching in the Philippines. “What is an example of behaving with dignity and respect? Please, answer and raise your hand.”

Then there is the model provided by Ann Cuevas, a teacher who has been in Bullhead City for four years and survived:

She gradually moved beyond her Filipino instinct for classroom formality and began asking her students about their lives, and they introduced her to a version of America much different from what she’d first expected: abusive families, homelessness, surging drug overdose deaths, conspiratorial ideologies, loneliness, suicide, alcoholism and poverty every bit as bad as anything she’d encountered in the Philippines.

Don't miss the rest of the story.  

On the nonmetro mortality penalty in deaths of despair

Thomas Edsall's guest column in the New York Times a few days ago was titled, "There Are Two Americas Now: One With a B.A. and One Without.’" It is a follow up on the widely discussed work of Mary Ann Case and Angus Deaton, Princeton economists who are well known for their scholarship on deaths of despair.  Some of the focus here is on the upward trajectory and optimism of Black folks and the downward trajectory and pessimism of white folks.  They also note the recently rising mortality rate among Black men, quoting Carol Graham of Brookings: 

Over the past three years, however, there has been a sharp increase in drug overdose deaths among Black men, Graham noted in an email:

The “new” Black despair is less understood and perhaps more complex. A big factor is simply Fentanyl for urban Black men. Plain and simple. But other candidates are Covid and the hit the African American communities took; Trump and the increase of “acceptance” for blatant and open racism; and, for some, George Floyd and continued police violence against blacks.

Near the end of the piece, Edsall also turns to the rural-urban axis, quoting the work of rural sociologist Shannon Monnat of Syracuse University's Lerner Center:  

Monnat described these differences as a “nonmetro mortality penalty.”

For rural and exurban men 25 to 44 over the same 28 years, she continued, “the mortality rate increased by 70.1 deaths per 100,000 population compared to an increase of only 9.6 among metro males ages 25 to 44, and 81 percent of the nonmetro increase was due to increases in drugs, alcohol, suicide, and mental/behavioral disorders (the deaths of despair).”

The divergence between urban and rural men pales, however, in comparison with women. “Mortality increases among nonmetro females have been startling. The mortality growth among nonmetro females was much larger than among nonmetro males,” especially for women 45 to 64, Monnat writes. Urban white men 45 to 64 saw death rate per 100,000 fall from 850 to 711.1 between 1990 and 2018, while death rates for rural white men of the same age barely changed, 894.8 to 896.6. In contrast, urban white women 45 to 64 saw their death rate decline from 490.4 to 437.6, while rural white women of that age saw their mortality rate grow from 492.6 to 571.9.

I wrote about these issues in my 2018 law review article, The Women Feminism Forgot:  Rural and Working-Class White Women in the Era of Trump.  

The Edsall column continues:

In an email, Monnat emphasized the fact that Trump has benefited from a bifurcated coalition:

The Trump electorate comprises groups that on the surface appear to have very different interests. On the one hand, a large share of Trump supporters are working-class, live in working-class communities, have borne the brunt of economic dislocation and decline due to economic restructuring. On the other hand, Trump has benefited from major corporate donors who have interests in maintaining large tax breaks for the wealthy, deregulation of environmental and labor laws, and from an economic environment that makes it easy to exploit workers. In 2016 at least, Trump’s victory relied not just on rural and small-city working-class voters, but also on more affluent voters. Exit polls suggested that a majority of people who earned more than $50,000 per year voted for Trump.

In a separate 2017 paper, “More Than a Rural Revolt: Landscapes of Despair and the 2016 Presidential Election,” Monnat and David L. Brown, a sociologist at Cornell, argue:

Work has historically been about more than a paycheck in the U.S. American identities are wrapped up in our jobs. But the U.S. working-class (people without a college degree, people who work in blue-collar jobs) regularly receive the message that their work is not important and that they are irrelevant and disposable. That message is delivered through stagnant wages, declining health and retirement benefits, government safety-net programs for which they do not qualify but for which they pay taxes, and the seemingly ubiquitous message (mostly from Democrats) that success means graduating from college.

Cross-posted to Working-Class Whites and the Law.  

Coronavirus in rural America (Part CXXXIV): How rural California schools fared during the pandemic

Last week, I wrote about this feature by Hailey Branson-Potts of the Los Angeles Times, featuring tiny Kneeland, California, in far northern Humboldt County.   Here's a more quantitative look at how California's rural schools fared during the pandemic, by Niu Gao, for Zocalo.  

During the second phase of COVID, in fall 2020, fluctuating enrollments destabilized rural schools. In California, K–12 enrollment statewide declined by nearly 3 percent between the 2019–2020 and 2020–2021 school years. Some rural counties experienced an exaggerated version of this trend; enrollment fell 10 percent in Humboldt, Mono, and Inyo Counties. But other rural counties gained students, bucking the statewide trend and placing greater demands on district resources. Alpine, Amador, Calaveras, El Dorado, Sierra, and Sutter counties experienced double digit growth, with enrollment increasing 17 percent, for example, in El Dorado.

Statewide enrollment dropped another 1.8 percent in 2021–2022 but counties like El Dorado, Calaveras, and Tuolumne continued to experience growth—1.7 percent, 4.5 percent and 3.3 percent, respectively. Because state funding is linked to student enrollment, declines pose significant challenges for districts—but increases create problems too. Rural districts, which have long struggled to recruit and retain quality teachers, had trouble keeping up with growing enrollment. About a quarter of rural schools nationwide were understaffed prior to the start of the pandemic, and 70 percent said there were too few candidates applying for open teaching positions for the 2022–2023 school year.

And in the third phase of COVID, as caseloads declined and California started to emerge from the pandemic in spring 2021, rural schools brought students back for in-person instruction earlier than schools in other parts of the state, in large part because providing online instruction had been so difficult. Nationwide, 63 percent of rural schools offered in-person instruction to all students in January 2021, compared to only 35 percent of urban schools; some rural schools reopened in Fall 2020. Rural districts in California reopened to all grades in early February 2021, while urban districts fully reopened in early May.

As we worked with rural schools during COVID, we also saw hints of progress.

Loretta Lynn, symbol of "rural resilience," dies at 90

That's part of the headline for her New York Times obituary yesterday, "Loretta Lynn, Country Music Star and Symbol of Rural Resilience, Dies at 90."  She was, of course, famously, a coal miner's daughter.  Here's an excerpt from the obituary with a focus on rurality: 

Ms. Lynn built her stardom not only on her music, but also on her image as a symbol of rural pride and determination. Her story was carved out of Kentucky coal country, from hardscrabble beginnings in Butcher Hollow (which her songs made famous as Butcher Holler).

She became a wife at 15, a mother at 16 and a grandmother in her early 30s, married to a womanizing sometime bootlegger who managed her to stardom. That story made her autobiography, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” a best seller and the grist for an Oscar-winning movie adaptation of the same name.

* * *

In “Hey Loretta,” a wry 1973 hit about walking out on rural drudgery written by the cartoonist Shel Silverstein, she sang, “You can feed the chickens and you can milk the cow/This woman’s liberation, honey, is gonna start right now.” Silverstein also wrote the beleaguered housewife’s lament “One’s on the Way,” a No. 1 country hit for Ms. Lynn in 1971.

* * * 

Jack White, the singer and guitarist of the White Stripes, said in an interview with The New York Times in 2004, the year he produced Ms. Lynn’s Grammy-winning album “Van Lear Rose,” that she “was breaking down barriers for women at the right time.” Her songs, Mr. White said, had a message: “This is how women live. This is what women are thinking.” And Ms. Lynn, he added, was taking these strides “in the country realm, where a lot of women weren’t able to do what they wanted.”

Not to suggest that women everywhere could "do what they wanted," but this line reminds me of my own work on patriarchy in rural contexts, where I argued that it is a more intense phenomenon, aided and abetted by rural spatiality.  

Postscript:  Here's a commentary from The Conversation on Loretta Lynn as a "spokeswoman for white rural, working-class women."  Here's an excerpt:  

She aimed for her music to articulate the fears, dreams and anger of women living in a patriarchal society. It railed against those who idealized women’s domestic roles and demonized outspoken feminists.

‘There’s gonna be some changes’

Specifically, for a generation of predominantly white women in the 1960s and 1970s who did not identify as urban or college-educated feminists, Lynn’s music offered candid conversations about their private lives as wives and mothers.

As Lynn stated in her autobiography, her audience recognized her as a “mother and a wife and a daughter, who had feelings just like other women.”

She did this through clever and witty songwriting and lyrical techniques that combined the vernacular of her audience with her resonant voice.

* * * 

With her assertive and resonant voice, Lynn, in her 1966 track “Don’t Come Home A Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind),” warns men not to expect women to be waiting at home, sexually available for them after they’d spent the night drinking:

Well, you thought I’d be waitin’ up when you came home last night

You’d been out with all the boys and you ended up half tight

Liquor and love, they just don’t mix

Leave that bottle or me behind

And don’t come home a drinkin’ with lovin’ on your mind

* * *

A lasting legacy

Fully aware that her personalized accounts became political messages for her fan base of women, Lynn co-wrote and recorded “The Pill” in 1975. It was a rare foray into the topic of women’s reproductive rights for country music. In typical fashion, though, Lynn approached the issue from the perspective of a rural working-class woman.

"No community is too small or too remote to care about"

That's a quote form Mary Peltola, Alaska's congresswoman, speaking about her predecessor Don Young. Young served as the state's only congressperson for some five decades, until he died this spring on his way home from DC to Alaska.  Peltola says, in this latest ad, that the lesson of showing up in rural places is one she learned from watching Young in the 1980s, when he traveled to Tuntuliak to give a high school graduation speech.  It's a powerful message for rural folks and one she's been rolling out a lot since she won the special election a few months ago.  (See related posts here) 

Name checking Don Young is an interesting strategy given that Peltola is a Democrat and Young was a Republican.  But Peltola, the surprise winner of the special election to replace Young, is now campaigning for a full 2-year term, and she's not shying away from Young's legacy--well, at least some parts of it.  Here's a screenshot from her ad (for which I can't find a link on her web page, sorry): 

 

Here's a link to the 30-second ad on Twitter.  

The place she mentions where Don Young traveled to give a graduation speech, Tuntutuliak, has a population of 408. It's in what she often refers to as western Alaska.  

Yesterday, Peltola was campaigning in the state's 10th largest city, Kodiak, population 5500.  

How rurality conceals

I've written about this topic before, including in academic publications, but also on the blog here.  The basic idea is that rural spatiality conceals stuff--including crime--and sometimes people engaged in criminal activity take cover in rural places for that reason.  The bottom line is that it's harder to effectively police people who are sparsely populated across the country side--it takes more money and personnel, as well as better technology--in order to do so.  

Two recent stories, one from the Los Angeles Times and one from Politico--both about illegal pot cultivation--support my thesis.  They are also consistent with this story from several years ago out of Humboldt County, California, also about exploitation of women in the pot industry.  I wrote about it and several related stories on Legal Ruralism here.

On Spain's rural depopulation, and the movement it has inspired

Omar G. Encarnacion reported in the New York Review of Books in August under the headline, "The Revolt of Empty Spain."  Here's the lede: 

On March 31, 2019, residents of Madrid woke up to a mass demonstration of some 100,000 people in the streets decrying the problem of sangría demográfica, or demographic hemorrhaging. This arresting metaphor alludes to a depopulation crisis that has left large swaths of Spain barely inhabited. Under the banner “The Revolt of Emptied Spain,” protesters from twenty-four rural provinces complained of neglect from government agencies, poor Internet service, lack of access to transportation and healthcare, and indifference from Spanish multinationals and those who live in Spain’s thriving urban centers. Inspired by other successful demonstrations in the capital, such as those that led to the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2005, their signs invoked the rhetoric of social justice and human rights: “Equality for all,” “My choice of lifestyle does not deprive me of my rights,” and “I am a rural citizen, and I am in danger of extinction.”

Data from Spain’s National Statistics Institute (INE) paint a startling picture of the country’s shifting demographics. Some 90 percent of the population, about 42 million people, is currently clustered in 1,500 towns and cities that occupy less than a third of the land. The remaining country is inhabited by 4.6 million people, roughly the number that live in Barcelona. The INE also reports that some 80 percent of villages of less than a thousand residents are at risk of disappearing altogether as their populations age and young people leave, which explains the abundance of ghost towns familiar to travelers to the interior of Spain.

* * * 

The average rural citizen must now travel 8 miles to access basic services such as ATMs, hospitals, nursery schools, supermarkets, and libraries—compared to 3 miles in Germany, 5 in France, and 3 in Italy. The report further noted the striking disparities found within Spain itself: people living in the countryside travel an average of 12 miles more than those living in cities. Such dire conditions have propelled a political movement that calls itself “España Vaciada,” or Emptied Spain; the Spanish media generally refers to it as “España Vacía,” or Empty Spain.

Don't miss the rest of this fascinating report, which makes one wonder if a similar movement could rise up--and be effective--in the United States.  

A related post, focusing on Catalonia, is here.  Stories on the rural-urban divide in Europe are here and here.  

On mental health resources in rural America

This is a topic I've blogged about from time to time, but since the last time I wrote about it, the stories have been stacking up, so I'm going to briefly summarize them here.  

Two of the stories are about farmers in particular.  

One is "Suicide rates are higher among farmers. Some Midwest states are teaching communities how to help," by Iowa Public Radio. 

The other farmer-focused story is on NPR last mont, "A new mental health hotline is focusing on providing support to farmers and ranchers."

This one is by the Colorado Sun, a nonprofit news, under the headline, "Many Colorado counties have no mental health team to respond to 911 crisis calls even though the state offers funding."

Recent posts about mental health are here and here.  All posts using the tag "mental health" are here.  

NYT Magazine feature on unhoused children and youth in rural America

It'll be in the print edition this Sunday under the headline, "Young and Homeless in Rural America."  An excerpt from the story by Samantha M. Shapiro, follows.  The focus here is on a family, with children and youth, becoming unhoused in southern Ohio.  One of the teens is named Blake: 

Families like Blake’s don’t fit easily into the “homeless industrial complex,” as some advocates for homeless youth and families have taken to calling the funding mechanisms, rules and priorities that determine the fates of millions of Americans who struggle with housing insecurity every year. The system is focused largely on adults experiencing homelessness in cities, and it is not well equipped to address the types of homelessness experienced by children and families, especially in rural areas. The limited data that exists suggests that rural students face homelessness in roughly the same proportion as their urban counterparts — and with far less in the way of a support system. In this vacuum of resources, schools sometimes offer the only form of help available to homeless families.

Over the course of reporting in rural Ohio, I spoke with school officials, homeless advocates, students and their families. I met young people living in trailers that stank of sewage, mothers sexually harassed by predatory landlords, families who could not take their children to the doctor because they could not afford gas for the long trip. For all of them, the stakes of precarious housing were high. Homeless students have the worst educational outcomes of any group, the lowest attendance, the lowest scores on standardized tests, the lowest graduation rates. They all face the same cruel paradox: Students who do not have a stable place to live are unable to attend school regularly, and failing to graduate from high school is the single greatest risk factor for future homelessness.

* * *  

[T]he reporting by McKinney-Vento liaisons [required by a federal law passed in 1987], aggregated by the Department of Education, represents a crucial and rare effort to quantify the problem of student homelessness, especially in rural areas. The D.O.E. definition of homelessness is broader than the one used by, for instance, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and better able to capture what homelessness usually looks like for rural youth and families — Blake’s family living in a cramped camper on a hill or families doubled up sometimes in unsafe situations hidden from sight — as opposed to living on a street or in a shelter. In 2019, the last year of reporting before the pandemic, HUD’s annual “point in time” count on a single night found 53,692 parents and children experiencing homelessness. Over the course of the same school year, the D.O.E., using data from McKinney-Vento liaisons, counted 1.4 million school-age children as homeless.

When schools shut down during Covid, so did the primary way of identifying and assisting children experiencing homelessness.

* * *  

In rural areas, schools can be an island of resources. ... [Becky Handa of Athens County Children's Services] is able to offer a lot to families in the school — her office is crammed with food and supplies — but one problem has been especially frustrating. The sparse, often substandard housing in the county is falling apart, leaving families with few safe or affordable places to stay.

The story then writes of a phenomenon not uncommon when there is a complaint against a rural landlord due to lack of habitability:  instead of being repaired, the home is condemned and sealed, leaving one less housing unit available for a needy a family.  

The story explains that McKinney-Vento "requires public schools to ensure that children without homes have 'equal access to the same free, appropriate public education' as children with homes."

An April New York Times story on homeless youth in rural Texas is here.  A story about exurban homelessness in Maine, from the Portland Press-Herald, is here.  Prior posts on rural homelessness are here and here.  A policy brief on the rural housing crisis in California is here.