Hard Luck and Heavy Rain: The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas

by Joseph C. Russo

In Hard Luck and Heavy Rain Joseph C. Russo takes readers into the everyday lives of the rural residents of Southeast Texas. He encounters the region as a kind of world enveloped in on itself, existing under a pall of poverty, illness, and oil refinery smoke. His informants’ stories cover a wide swath of experiences, from histories of LGBTQ+ life and the local petrochemical industries to religiosity among health food store employees and the suffering of cancer patients living in the Refinery Belt. Russo frames their hard-luck stories as forms of verbal art and poetic narrative that render the region a mythopoetic landscape that epitomizes the impasse of American late capitalism. He shows that in this severe world, questions of politics and history are not cut and dry, and its denizens are not simply backward victims of circumstances. Russo demonstrates that by challenging classist stereotypes of rural Americans as passive, ignorant, and uneducated, his interlocutors offer significant insight into the contemporary United States.

152 pages, Hardcover

Published January 3, 2023

Reviews

[Io Perl-Strahan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Subtle and thoughtful, the human is not lost along the way. Valuable to me as an example of ethnography that does not take itself too seriously but does takes its subjects seriously.

[Melos Han-Tani · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great collection of stories/research on communities in SE Texas, diving into peoples' relation to the government, health, religion, queerness, living in a place with a lot of pollution.