Over several decades, the influx of wealthy, white "lifestyle" migrants has transformed the economic, social, and ecological fabric of many rural communities across the United States—from alpine towns of the Rockies to forest and lake communities of the Southeast—in a process akin to urban gentrification. Illegality and the Production of Affluence explores an underappreciated dimension of this process: its dependence on low-wage Latine immigrant workers, many undocumented, who build and maintain gentrified landscapes and lifestyles. Drawing on fine-grained qualitative data, Lise Nelson explores how employers recruited an unfamiliar workforce to places "off the map" of immigrant settlement. The book also reveals insights into how business practices and profitability shifted through the use of racialized, "illegal," and highly precarious labor. Finally, the book investigates the disjuncture between Latine immigrants' vital role in rural gentrifying economies and their social, civic, and racialized exclusion in the spaces of everyday life.
Lise Nelson is Professor in the School of Geography, Development, and Environment at the University of Arizona.
"Lise Nelson's work makes novel contributions to existing conversations on rural gentrification and illegalization while generating fresh insights into how wealth and impoverishment are produced simultaneously by the same process."—Ruth Gomberg, Professor of Anthropology, Loyola University Chicago
"Illegality and the Production of Affluence deftly lays out the economic, cultural, and political shifts that link the lives of wealthy white newcomers, white 'locals,' and Latinx men and women in rural America. Through rich ethnographic detail, Nelson convincingly makes the case for examining international migration as part of rural gentrification and for approaching rural affluence as deeply entangled with questions of race and illegality."—Jamie Winders, Professor of Geography, Syracuse University
"Nelson's original and needed scholarship captures the lived experience of migrants in a deep and genuine way. Illegality and the Production of Affluence shows that if scholars recognize emplacement and cultural displacement, they must see the centrality of immigrants to the study of rural gentrification."—Leah Schmalzbauer, author of Meanings of Mobility: Family, Education, and Immigration in the Lives of Latino Youth
"Empirically rich and cogently written, Illegality and the Production of Affluence offers a timely analysis of how rural gentrification unfolds through the exploitation of undocumented migrant labor. By taking seriously the emplacement of Latine migrants and their geographies of social reproduction, Nelson powerfully expands prevailing conceptualizations of gentrification and counters racialized narratives surrounding Latine migrants, exposing how the production of illegality makes possible landscapes of affluence in the United States."—Madelaine C. Cahuas, Assistant Professor of Geography, Environment, and Society, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and Cofounder of the Latinx Geographies Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers
"Much has been written about urban gentrification and the related displacement of poor and working-class residents. In Illegality and the Production of Affluence, Nelson introduces us to a phenomenon that is less understood: rural gentrification—the arrival of wealthy, predominantly white populations to amenity destinations—and its inextricable connection to the emplacement of a racialized, low-wage, and illegalized immigrant workforce. This book will be of interest to anyone wanting to better understand the changing geographies of immigration in the United States and the root causes of those changes."—Monica Varsanyi, migration scholar and Vice Provost, University of California
248 pp.6 x 9Illus: 7 b/w illustrations, 2 maps, 2 charts
9780520416383$29.95|£25.00Paper
Sep 2025