‘Now there’s just a different feel’: spatiotemporal commitments & commercial racialization as markers of rural belonging

Twenty-first century rural Midwest communities are experiencing demographic shifts and industrialization in ways that challenge assumptions about rural social cohesion. Urban spatial segregation, surveillance of immigrants and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of colour) city dwellers, and community organizing to resist these processes is well represented in social science literature. Rural contexts feature less prominently in such explorations. I draw on ethnographic research in a Midwest community to make visible the racialization of rural spaces and to illustrate how such racialization frames belonging as contingent on assimilation to white investments in rural space. I draw on the examples of homeownership, commercial space, and public gathering spaces to illustrate the prevalence of white, Euro-American spatiotemporal commitments at work in rural communities as well as how this hegemonic framework can be challenged. By laying bare the social processes enacted through the geographies of everyday life, I hope to point towards more capacious and inclusive possibilities of rural belonging.