Ozarks under a microscope: Marjorie Rosen’s Boom Town digs deep into NWA culture | OU Review
Banner, Review — By Christopher Spencer on October 27, 2009 at 12:32 am
Title: Boom Town: How Wal-Mart Transformed an All-American Town Into an International Community
Author: Marjorie Rosen, a journalist, freelance writer and associate professor of journalism at City University of New York
Publisher: Chicago Review Press, published October 2009
Price: $24.95 (or less on online bookseller sites)
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 Bentonville Vendors
First, a disclosure.
I asked for and received a free press copy of Boom Town in order to do this review.
I’d like to give that book to one Ozarks Unbound reader. Just leave a comment below this story telling me that you’re interested. I’ll do a random drawing and mail the book to you.
The drawing ends Thursday so you’ll have plenty of time to get it before Rosen speaks at the Fayetteville Public Library at 6 p.m. Nov. 3.
Now, on to the review.
Marjorie Rosen’s book explores Bentonville’s transformation from a sleepy village to a bustling company town. She tackles what that influx of people of differing religions, cultures and skin colors means to the largely white, largely Christian natives of Northwest Arkansas.
She hammers home to the point of repetition this difference between the white, Christian natives and the new arrivals – educated blacks, Muslims and Hindus working for Wal-Mart, and the Marshallese and Hispanic immigrants who’ve found work in lower-paying positions.
Her stated goal is that Bentonville and NWA can serve as both model and cautionary tale to other small towns in the nation about what massive societal transformation means.
Rosen digs into the subject matter in a manner less reminiscent of de Tocqueville’s meditation on American democracy than Gossip Girl’s insider skinny on who likes who, who did what to who and why. But there is substance here.
Names are named. The perceived or actual rift between Fayetteville’s more academic Jewish community and Benton County’s more business-oriented Jewish community is mentioned. Rogers Mayor Steve Womack comes off as xenophobic and the beef between Hispanic leader Papa Rap and Springdale Police Chief Kathy O’Kelly over the city’s implementation of 287(g) is explored in depth.
Rosen isn’t a detached observer. She freely uses first person and editorializes her own views extensively in the book through rhetorical questions directed at the reader. By the second part of the three-section book, she’s clearly become a character in her own work, complete with a mission to root out and expose racism in Northwest Arkansas anywhere she can find it.
Does she succeed? Yes, but the book reads more like an anthropological case study with an agenda than an objective and deep history of the land and its people. She captures many rich, interesting voices that paint a diverse and sometimes desperate picture of this area, far behind the comfy confines of a Chamber of Commerce.
Her book is very focused on the here and now. She talks about being in NWA as late as spring 2009 and most of her interviews are within the past three years. Older history is used sparingly, and mostly at the beginning, to establish the black-white dichotomy in the area to bolster later claims of less overt racism.
Here are three interesting notes about the book that stood out to me.
One, Fayetteville receives very little ink. Bentonville, Rogers and Springdale are all explored in depth, but Rosen passes over Fayetteville for some reason except for a mention in the chapter on Palestinian-born Faydil Bayyari’s and his effort to help Fayetteville’s Jews build a synagogue.
It struck me as odd.
Two, there are a few mistakes in the book. They are small mistakes and certainly don’t undermine her book’s message, but they do bear at least mentioning.
- Page 194, she discusses the case of Adriana Torres-Flores, a Mexican woman who was accidently left in a holding cell in the Washington County Courthouse for four days without food and water. Rosen says she is still fighting deportation in the book, but in January 2009, Torres-Flores was allowed to stay in this country (I know because I wrote the story).
- Page 272, she says Rogers is in Washington County.
Minor errors really, but those were two that struck me upon a casual read.
Three, she uses subheads often throughout the book. It plays well with the vignette-style interviews she employs throughout and makes it easier for a reviewer to go back and find a detail he might have forgotten. I applaud her for this.
The first section of the book, titled “Diversity Comes to Northwest Arkansas,” talks about Wal-Mart’s internal transformation to actively seek out the best and the brightest internationally. The book begins with the story of Coleman Peterson, a black man who moved to Bentonville with his family and reformed the company’s human relations and recruiting departments.
The family’s arrival in 1994 coincides closely with a Klu Klux Klan rally in Bentonville. Peterson’s wife, Peaches, attends the rally and watches as residents are shame-faced when the men pretending to be the ghosts of dead Confederacy soldiers march around the city square. Peaches is a strong, likeable woman and Rosen interviewed her extensively.
Rosen traces the turn-of-the-century Bad Old Days when cities like Harrison launched pogroms against the black population, forcing them to flee the area. It’s a time when cities like Rogers and Springdale became known as “Sundown Towns” where black people were told to finish all their city business before the sun went down or risk violence against them, she writes.
Bentonville resisted this Sundown Town status, Rosen says. She discovered at Shiloh Museum pictures of a black baseball team in Bentonville from around 1912 that she holds as proof of the town’s more progressive attitude. She also traces out how Rogers was formed mostly as a slight to Bentonville when the new train system was built around rather than through the county seat.
The book then talks about Fadil Bayyari of Fayetteville and his efforts on behalf of Fayetteville’s Jewish community. She then talks about Bentonville’s Jewish community and, after following the rise and cocaine-induced fall and redemption of Sheldon Hirsch, Rosen discusses the community’s efforts to get the first small town shul built in the South in 50 years.
Some Hindu families are interviewed and Rosen talks with a Marshallese security guard at The Jones Center in Springdale. The man offers a fascinating window into his own life and that of the largest population of Marshallese outside of the islands themselves.
That section concludes by exploring the “company town” aspects of Bentonville, how closely they are aligned with Wal-Mart and how much the community anticipates the arrival of the new Crystal Bridges Museum. Bentonville Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Ed Clifford does a nice spin for both the community and the company, Rosen writes.
The second section, “Towns and Townies, Then and Now” is especially interesting because she interviews many people who’ve been here most of their lives. She gives them a chance to express their thoughts on the radical changes in the area.
Springdale’s “Chickendale” reputation is explored and explained and Rogers Mayor Steve Womack talks about how residents want him to fight back against illegal immigrants even with crime statistics that might be massaged, she writes.
Her conversations with Womack lead right into the final section of the book, called “The Hispanic Explosion.” She stays close to the numbers reported by the Urban Institute that show Arkansas had the fastest-growing Hispanic population in the country not long ago.
The people she interviews in these chapters are mostly immigrants and they all sound genuine and tell revelatory stories, especially the rags-to-riches tale of Peruvian-born Cesar Vargas who built small a paint and remodeling empire during the construction boom in the area.
Rosen ends her book with an almost too coincidental occurence on her last night in Bentonville. She is pulled over on Central Avenue for driving too slow at night and is questioned aggressively by someone in law enforcement.
“He regards me as though I were an alien – the kind who descended from outer space – and asks if I have been drinking. No, I reply. But I have just arrived from an alternative universe called New York City, where I do not have a car and do not drive and do not know such a pokey pace on an empty street might land me in the clink,” she writes in her book’s epilogue.
As you might guess, she’s not arrested, but she does use the event to raise questions about those who drive those roads and might not be so able to produce the needed documentation.
I think Rosen’s books raises some strong issues. It’s refreshing to read her outsider perspective as she tries to make sense of undercurrents that native Arkansans understand intuitively.
It’s not a definitive picture of Ozarks’ culture, but it’s a nice immediate snapshot of what’s happening right now even if Rosen’s own voice may be the loudest of all in the book.
See our ongoing coverage: Book Review
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11 Comments
I would love the opportunity to read this book, and would love to be entered for the drawing! Great review, by the way. . .I think we would be her most discriminating audience for sure.
I think you’re absolutely right, Brooke. We are bound to be her most critical, but perhaps most engaged, audience. I certainly am looking forward to hearing her talk about it.
Well, I hate to cut Brooke’s chances in half, but I’d like to read this as well. Maybe we could share! She can have full custody…
The police will stop you for any bogus reason. It’s a vestige of the old south, I think. My car is crummy so the inference is I might be lower-class. I was pulled over for allegedly “not signaling a turn” but I think it was really because the officer was fishing for a DUI and couldn’t pull me over for erratic driving. I’m definitely a very good driver.
Sorry… tangent.
I’ve been hearing about Rosen’s book in some of my classes and I’m interested in this opportunity to read it for free! (The “college kids are poor” thing is not a fallacy–it’s fact.)
ok, I read too, I love checking OU everyday, read all the twitters, devoted follower…
Since I am from California, I would really enjoy learning about the locals from Rosen’s point of view…fair and balanced right?
Christopher, glad you included some of her errors. What I understand from reading excerpts provided by some of the book’s subjects, there are many more errors and mistakes, and the book is more a look at the hicks and how they can’t handle change bash job than a real look at how Walmart changed the area and what it means. I am no big Walmart fan, but I am a fan of objective research and writing. I’d love to read the book and see more. By the way, a really good and well researched objective book is Charles Fishman’s The Wal-Mart effect (written several years ago before the company performed a squigglyectomy).
I used to work for WM. Then I realized that there are some things in life that are just more important than money. Like living your life…
Sounds like an interesting read. I’ve always been intrigued by the corporate giant and the radically different views people have of it.
I would be very interested in having this book.
Sorry, Guy. Brian won the book. Next time, I hope you throw your name in the hat.