> On Oct 11, 2009, at 6:59 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>> My mother
>> was a Michigan fruit farmer's daugher. Before the war their main labor
>> force was white migrant southerners (always called "Arkies"). In a
>> conversation with her once I discovered she believed that she could tell
>> "southerners" by their appearance. She had in fact "racialized" white
>> southerners.
>
> What's specifically capitalist about this? Haven't yokels always been
> suspicious of the folks from over the hill?
Fernand Braudel, _The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II_, pp. 44-46:
> MOUNTAIN DWELLERS IN THE TOWNS. The history of the mountains is
> chequered and difficult to trace. Not because of lack of documents; if
> anything there are too many. Coming down from the mountain regions,
> where history is lost in the mist, man enters in the plains and towns
> the domain of classified archives. Whether a new arrival or a seasoned
> visitor, the mountain dweller inevitably meets someone down below who
> will leave a description of him, a more or less mocking sketch.
> Stendhal saw the peasants from the Sabine hills at Rome on Ascension
> Day. "They come down from their mountains to celebrate the feast day
> at St. Peter's, and to attend la funzione. They wear ragged cloth
> cloaks, their legs are wrapped in strips of material held in place
> with string cross-gartered; their wild eyes peer from behind
> disordered black hair; they hold to their chests hats made of felt,
> which the sun and ram have left a reddish black colour; these peasants
> are accompanied by their families, of equally wild aspect.... The
> inhabitants of the mountains between Rome, Lake Turano, Aquila, and
> Ascoli, represent fairly well, to my way of thinking," Stendhal adds,
> "the moral condition of Italy in about the year 1400." ...
>
> ...In fact, no Mediterranean region is without large numbers of
> mountain dwellers who are indispensable to the life of town and
> plains, striking people whose costume is often unusual and whose ways
> are always strange. Spoleto, whose high plain Montaigne passed through
> in 1581 on the way to Loreto, was the centre for a special kind of
> immigrant: pedlars and small traders who specialized in all the
> reselling and intermediary activities that call for middlemen, flair,
> and not too many scruples. Bandello describes them in one of his
> novellas as talkative, lively and self-assured. never short of
> arguments and persuasive whenever they want to be....
>
> ...The picture, as we see, quickly turns to caricature. The mountain
> dweller is apt to be the laughing stock of the superior inhabitants of
> the towns and plains. He is suspected, feared, and mocked. In the
> Ardeche, as late as 1850, the people from the montagne would come down
> to the plain for special occasions. They would arrive riding on
> harnessed mules, wearing grand ceremonial costumes, the women bedecked
> with jangling gold chains. The costumes themselves differed from those
> of the plain, although both were regional, and their archaic stiffness
> provoked the mirth of the village coquettes. The lowland peasant had
> nothing but sarcasm for the rude fellow from the highlands, and
> marriages between the families were rare.