highlights: • Examines Black return migration as a spatial negotiation within racial capitalism. • Shows how urban tempo and rural survivability shape Delta return pathways. • Identifies rural subsidy as kin networks absorbing displaced care costs. • Challenges economistic models by centering care, tempo, and place attachment. abstract: This article examines return migration to the Mississippi Delta, a region marked by long-term population loss, disinvestment, and racialized poverty. Drawing on life-history interviews with ninety-eight Black heads of household in Sunflower, Leflore, and Humphreys counties, I identify three recurrent pathways shaping movement back home: exhaustion with the speed, precarity, and cost of urban life; the need to provide unpaid care for aging or ill kin where formal services are thin; and enduring calls to home grounded in memory, obligation, and belonging. Across these pathways, respondents rarely frame return as an employment strategy. Instead, their accounts show how urban and rural inequalities are produced relationally: labor and life are worn down in urban economies, while rural homeplaces absorb social, bodily, and care-related costs through kin networks and informal support. Read through Black geographic and political-economic perspectives, return is less a regression than a negotiation, one through which Black households work to sustain themselves and imagine other futures in the rural South. These findings challenge economistic migration models and recenter rural Black homeplaces as infrastructures of care and meaning within contemporary regional inequality.
Lyme disease is the most prevalent vector-borne disease in the United States, with over 89,000 reported cases and an additional estimated 476,000 unreported cases annually. There has been minimal research on the expansion of Lyme disease’s main epicenters over the past two decades, including into and within Central and Southern Appalachia, a region with an array of existing health concerns. This retrospective ecological study uses county-level case data (n=576,406) reported between 2000 and 2019 across the US to examine the diffusion of Lyme disease, including a regional analysis in 423 Appalachian counties. The analysis uses spatial a scan statistic to detect areas with low and high rates of Lyme disease, while delineating geographical areas with elevated relative risk. We identified five statistically significant clusters (a primary [most-likely] high-rate cluster, a secondary high-rate cluster, and three secondary low-rate clusters) of Lyme disease, indicating the disease’s diffusion over the study period. The number of counties at elevated risk for Lyme disease has more than tripled across the US and increased more than eightfold in Appalachia, with geographic spread southwards into and within Appalachia. These findings are important in understanding the current and potential future disease range to support continued education of both the public and healthcare providers to minimize misdiagnosis of Lyme disease and inform public health action to reduce vulnerability.
