Urban Appalachians - Creating A Neighborhood Culture

Creating A Neighborhood Culture

Some researchers have seen urban Appalachians as an emerging ethnic group, forming group cohesion and identity in a fashion similar to earlier "urban villagers" arriving in our nation's cities. Anthropologist Rhoda Halperin describes the culture of an urban Appalachian neighborhood in terms of a set of adaptations Appalachians have made to their circumstances. She sees no distinction between rural Appalachian and urban migrant Appalachians and their descendants. The features of community life produced by their adaptations include " . . . everyday practices - caring for children and the elderly, providing work, helping in times of crisis, granting favors, passing along information or lending support." These practices, she says, are embedded in specific neighborhood structures that are old and enduring: the extended family, the church, and the neighborhood as a place that confers working class identity. Halperin identifies the strengths of an integrated working-class neighborhood as strong intergenerational ties, informal educational processes through which adults instruct the young, intricate patterns of exchange that provide food, shelter, and care of dependents, longevity of families in the neighborhood, householding (provisioning) practices, and the gifts of oratory, storytelling, and writing skills.

A balanced view of urban Appalachians needs to include the ravages that decades of industrialization, out-migration, deindustrialization, and deterioration of core city neighborhoods have wreaked on some. But one should never stereotypically confuse the negative adaptations and pathologies that affect a minority of people from the mountains with all Appalachians. Appalachian culture does not cause poverty, crime, or school failure. Lack of good jobs, decent housing and good schools in safe neighborhoods have condemned millions of Americans of all backgrounds to lives on the margin of society in rural and urban enclaves. Urban Appalachians resent having the poverty stereotypes applied to their group, and rightly so. Every large group which has migrated to American cities has had similar experiences of facing put-downs, prejudice and outright discrimination. Through individual and collective efforts most have been able to raise their socioeconomic status over time. How long it takes the urban Appalachian poor to overcome the handicaps of poverty will depend in part on how the country responds to unemployment, underemployment, poor schooling and other urban ills. The rest depends on urban Appalachians' ability to use the strengths of their heritage and adapt once again to economic shifts such as production jobs going overseas.