New gallery centers resilience, and rootedness, of Mississippi’s Latino communities

Dozens of people are gathered in the main gallery space greeting friends, fixing plates of food and painting small, vivid scenes of home. 

Behind them, spread across a long, white gallery wall, are dozens of portraits -- some of individuals, and some of entire families -- who form the bedrock of Mississippi's Latino communities. On another wall, those in the portraits come to life on a projector as they talk about their experiences living in the state. 

It’s all part of a photographic and oral history project titled Nuestro Mississippi, or Our Mississippi, hosted at the Museum until mid-October and co-sponsored by the Mississippi Humanities Council and Immigrants Alliance for Justice and Equity, or IAJE. 

Stuart Rockoff, executive director of the Humanities Council, says it’s been in the works for more than a year. 

“The Humanities Council has long been interested in the history of ethnic groups and immigrants in Mississippi, and frankly, after the ICE raids almost exactly five years ago and as someone who was on the outside watching it from afar, I was struck by how rooted this community is and how little other Mississippians know about it,” he said. 

“And so I had this idea in the back of my head to support a project that will help document Mississippi's Latino community.”

Rockoff is referring to immigration raids that targeted several chicken processing plants and communities across central Mississippi in 2019, where nearly 700 workers were arrested on suspicion of working without proper authorization. 

Although many of those arrested were later released without charges nor deportation orders, the impacts of the raids on communities like Morton, Forrest, Carthage and Pelahatchie were both pernicious and widely felt. 

But Rockoff decided it wasn’t the Council’s job to tell those stories – so instead, he asked Lorena Quiroz, executive director of IAJE, if she might know of a photographer to hire for the project. 

A few weeks later, she was pitching the idea to Roj Rodriguez, a photographer and filmmaker of Mexican-descent based in Austin, Texas.

“We’d been thinking, ‘Well, what do we call this project?’ And I had just had a conversation with someone that asked me, 'why are you in Mississippi? Why are immigrants in Mississippi? There's no resources in Spanish, there's very little health care, there's no driver's license if you don't have a Social Security number. They stop you every time you go from one town to the next, whether you have papers or not.' 

"And what I heard was, 'Mississippi is ours. It's mine,'” Quiroz told MPB News. 

Quiroz founded IAJE as a direct response to the 2019 raids, which still represents the largest single-state immigration raid in U.S. history. 

They also took place on the first day of school for many districts across the state, and in some cases, children returned home to find both of their parents gone, without any idea where they might be. 

Many consider the far-reaching effects of that day to be so bad that, in large part, they led to the Department of Homeland Security officially ending the practice of mass worksite immigration raids in October, 2021.

Most of IAJE’s work then was volunteer-based; filling gaps left behind by housing families, providing food and clothing and sometimes driving hours to bring those who were arrested back home.

Now nearly five years to the day, Quiroz sees many of those same faces adorning the gallery walls. 

But, she says the gallery isn’t necessarily just to commemorate that time and the unsung heroes who banded together, sometimes for complete strangers. Instead, it’s also about the joy that persists into today.  

“The raids were definitely a turning point for me. I'm an immigrant myself -- I arrived when I was six years old, and my mom and dad did all the hard work that I saw during the raids: parents in pain, families being separated, and I know that it was thanks to the sacrifice that my parents made that I'm sitting here before you, and it's only because of that. 

"And so watching these families being separated, but yet still be able to have Quinceaneras, to still be able to celebrate, it's a story worth telling.”

To tell those stories, Roj Rodriguez traveled across Mississippi for weeks in every direction. 

For the most part, the magnolia state’s Latino population is concentrated in central Mississippi, where chicken processing plants and poultry companies are the region’s largest employer by a considerable margin. 

That’s because, as Black Mississippians began to demand better pay or improved legal and labor protections in the decades following the Civil Rights movement, those companies began to shift recruitment efforts to Latin America. 

There, in billboard or radio campaigns in countries like Mexico, Cuba and across Central America, potential workers were promised higher relative pay, guaranteed housing and workplace protections under the United States’ legal system. 

And while essentially forcing Black residents to find jobs outside of the poultry economy – a tough ask in its own right in a region structured around large poultry interests – hundreds of positions were now open for those willing to take them, so long as they agreed to the comparatively low pay. 

By the mid-1990’s, that plan seemed to have come to fruition. 

In Scott County, the de facto capital of Mississippi poultry, Census data show the Latino population grew by over 1,000 percent between 1990 and 2000, and has only continued.

But as Rodriguez’s work shows, those communities are not contained solely to central Mississippi. 

See CT Salazar, an archivist at Delta State University in Cleveland, or the Zepedas, a family of ranchers in Como, in northern Mississippi, or Hector Boldo, co-owner of the state’s first Latino art gallery, recently opened in Hattiesburg. 

“The majority of the people that I encountered, they all had to leave their countries for either economic reasons, political reasons, or other things of that nature to move here. Those are the hopes. Some of the fears is, of course, the rhetoric on immigration and on immigrants here in the states. The rhetoric on, 'if you don't look like me, you're not welcome here,’” Rodriguez told MPB News. 

“These individuals are working hard and they're doing jobs that others don't want to do. These are very tight knit communities for me to come from the outside to be welcomed in. It was very personal, but I also think it was important because I look like them, I sound like them, and we have shared and lived experiences. So I was welcomed, and I’m glad I was able to put a face to the voice.” 

The final product, which may soon be printed as an accompanying photobook, is an encompassing view of those very communities; some, like Manuela Castro, an organizer among Canton’s poultry workers, are posed on their front porch, surrounded by family. 

Others pose in cotton fields, university offices or in front of their businesses. 

For Lorena Quiroz, it’s all home – and despite the lasting legacy of immigration raids or the messaging of election year politics, she knows that community is still worth celebrating. 

“It’s a big piece of my heart because I’m not only an immigrant, but the daughter of an immigrant – a woman who migrated and left her entire family for years. To think that my mom sacrificed all of that so I could be talking to you… it’s incredible to think that’s the work they’re doing for their children,” said Quiroz. 

“And that’s why we’re here. It’s our Mississippi too.”