| Abstract | In his classic article "The Oven Bird's Song," David Engel (1984) concludes with the observation that ordinary residents of a small town denounce newcomers by "participating in a more broadly based ceremony of regret that the realities of contemporary American society could no longer be averted from their community if it were to survive." In this paper, I draw on Engel's important linking of nostalgia to the maintenance of community hegemony to explain recent events in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, a city that, in recent years, have been a flashpoint in the national media's focus on local backlash against recent surges in Latino immigration. Drawing on a variety of ethnographic data, I demonstrate that as the winds of globalization swept through this predominately white, former coal-mining city, distraught local residents struggled initially to formulate a means for making sense of these dramatic changes to their community. However, following a high profile murder of a Hazleton local that was allegedly committed by two undocumented Latino immigrants, local political elites were able to "illegalize" the new Latino population by hyper-focusing on a conception of citizenship predicated on a formalistic legal rhetoric (i.e., citizen or non-citizen). This new legalistic narrative led to the proposal of a punitive local ordinance, the Illegal Immigration Relief Act (IIRA), and provided local residents with a useful commonsense for understanding the sweeping changes that their city was experiencing. As such, the presence of Latinos in Hazleton became a catalyst for defending a collective memory of Hazleton as an "All American" city. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript
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