The nation’s rural identity, formed during the colonial and early republic periods, has been supplemented by urban sensibilities over time, but it has never been replaced. Even rural people themselves view their own communities, to some extent, through the lens of myth, and they certainly view them through the preconceptions beamed to them from urban media. For a clearer perspective, it is helpful to identify the enduring archetypes that define the nation’s concept of rural.
Myth: There is a single rural America.
Though in considering rural issues we may think of rural America as if it were of a whole cloth, it more closely resembles a patchwork. Important differences exist in economic structures, race and ethnicity, and cultures.
The sheer size of rural America argues against a dominant type of rural experience. The United States is the fourth largest nation in land area, and most of its territory is rural. It covers seven time zones from east to west and reaches latitudes north of Sweden and south of Egypt. If rural America were a separate nation, its population would comprise the world’s 23rd largest country, following the United Kingdom, France, and Italy.
The myth of the countryside as uniformly idyllic may stem in part from our natural tendency to extrapolate from what we know. And most of us (both urban and rural) have firsthand experience. Metropolitan and nonmetropolitan residents alike take vacations in rural areas. Policymakers such as business leaders and directors of large public institutions frequent parts of rural America that have been shaped to accommodate the recreational choices of the elite: winter sports in places like Aspen, Jackson Hole, or Park City; oceanfront hideaways like those along the coast of Maine or the Pacific Northwest; and inland getaway destinations such as Palm Springs, the Sierras, or the Adirondacks. Imagining a serene rural existence is easier to do if you are summering on Cape Cod and wintering in Vail than if you are spending August in the Mississippi Delta and February in the northern Great Plains.
Economic categories
Different factors also drive the economics of rural places. The Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture identifies six unique dominant economic activities and five overlapping policy types of rural areas.
Race and ethnicity
Another important fact about rural America is that there is more racial and cultural diversity than is often supposed. Although rural areas have greater racial homogeneity than metropolitan ones, the myth of rural homogeneity masks underlying diversity among the people who have historically lived in the American countryside. Significant cultural traditions of diverse American populations have their roots in the rural experience. The music, food, visual arts, folk tales, crafts, and other cultural manifestations of distinct rural groups have contributed profoundly to the larger American culture. The absence of these influences would not just have left a hole in American culture but would have resulted in an entirely different culture altogether.
The rural roots of various American ethnic and cultural groups are still reflected in the population patterns of the rural landscape. Nearly half the nonwhite population that lives in rural America is clustered in areas where minorities make up one-third or more of a county’s population. 2 These population clusters continue to reflect the unique historical circumstances each group faced as they established themselves in the United States or found themselves there by force or annexation.
Rural Native American population clusters are located in the Four Corners region, Oklahoma, the Northern Great Plains, and most of Alaska. Except in Alaska, these clusters are linked to the reservation system. 3
The rural counties in which African Americans make up one-third or more of the population are located in the lowland South: the traditional plantation areas of the Mississippi Delta, Deep South, and Mid-Atlantic states. 4
Hispanic population clusters are located in or adjacent to the Rio Grande Valley from southern Colorado to the Gulf of Mexico, California's Imperial and Central valleys, and the southern High Plains of Texas and New Mexico. 5
People of color constituted about 17 percent of the rural population in 1997, compared with about 25 percent of the overall U.S. population. A disproportionately large number of Native Americans—nearly half of the overall Native American population—live in rural areas. (Rural Americans comprise approximately 20 percent of the U.S. population; therefore, a group would be proportionately represented in the rural population if 20 percent of that group’s population were rural.) The rural white population is roughly proportional, with 23 percent of whites living in rural areas. The remaining major ethnic and racial groups are underrepresented in rural areas. Fifteen percent of African Americans, 9 percent of Hispanics, and 5 percent of Asians and Pacific Islanders are rural. 6
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2: John B. Cromartie. "Minority Counties Are Geographically Clustered." Rural Conditions and Trends. Vol. 9. No. 2. U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service. 1999. 14-19.
3: Cromartie. 16.
4: Cromartie. 15.
5: Cromartie. 17.
6: "Rural by the Numbers: Demographics." Rural Policy Research Institute. World Wide Web: http://www.rupri.org/policyres/rnumbers/demopop/index.html
