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As I first began to work on this project my goal was to find moments where migrants from the South travelled along Hillbilly Highway and found moments of joy and community despite desperate economic conditions. Hillbilly Highway is the term coined by Steven Earle in 1986 denoting the path Southerners and Appalachians took to Midwestern cities when looking for economic opportunities. With the mechanization of mines, hundreds of thousands of migrants came to the North to find work. 

Without thinking twice, I stated that I only wanted to look for these moments of humanity or connection, away from workspaces, factories, or fields. However, along the way, I began to realize how I was negating the true experience of a working-class, Southern migrant. I was demanding them to work and survive in adverse conditions while documenting their lives in detail. I was asking too much of the historical actors I claimed to serve. With this realization, I began to reorient myself and what it meant to uncover moments of community when individuals were working seven days a week for twelve-hour days. To start, where have previous scholars found evidence of a working-class community? What were their findings, and how did they unveil the relationship between the workplace and community building? 

I came upon Robin Kelley and his article, “We Are Not What We Seem:” Rethinking the Black Working Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South. Kelley is a Professor of American History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his work theoretically grounds my entire project. In this article, Kelley builds upon Anthropologist James C. Scott’s infrapolitics concept. Infrapolitics or the daily struggle waged by subaltern groups “should be invisible… is in large part by design — a tactical choice born in prudent awareness of the balance of power.” The theory of infrapolitics challenges the researcher to not ignore tiny moments of resistance. In stealing moments for themselves and being proud of their identity, the migrants participated in infrapolitics and influenced the political world in which they were living. Daily actions by migrants had consequences for existing power relationships and shaped the communities they were a part of. 

Rather than looking for huge parties, secret sex scandals, or migrants doubled over in laughter, I must look for the small moments.The moments where they snuck away from the production line, took a drag off a cigarette, and sang a song. These seemingly tiny moments are what I need to be looking for, and this is what I have found.