Heartland community: Economic restructuring and the management of small town identity in the central U.S.

Abstract

The representation of small‐town United States as a heartland of traditional values is a perennial image in national political rhetoric, bearing a dynamic relation to locally generated ways of portraying rural life. This paper examines transformations in the ways small‐town solidarity and local identity were promoted and represented by chambers of commerce in North Dakota communities undergoing rapid industrial expansion. Prior to boom development, “boosters” represented small‐town communities in locally significant terms, but as economic restructuring reconfigured the character of community life, identity politics were relocated within an insider/outsider conflict that reshaped the significance of localness and rurality. Portrayals of community reinvented for a new audience invoked elements of the nationally familar heartland myth, but lost much of their integrative function. This account of the processes of social change and changes in social representations reveals linkages between local and national l...