UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Lise Nelson, professor in the School of Geography, Development and Environment at the University of Arizona, will deliver a talk titled “Amenity Migration, Gentrification and Illegality in Rural America” at 3:30 p.m. on Friday, April 17, in 112 Walker Building on the Penn State University Park campus. The talk also will be accessible via Zoom.
Nelson will examine how rural gentrification across the United States has reshaped local economies and communities over the past three decades, shifting landscapes from production to consumption. Drawing on qualitative research in rural Colorado and Georgia, she will explore how employers in gentrifying rural areas recruited Latine immigrant workers, many of them undocumented, to meet labor demands tied to new lifestyles and amenities.
Her talk will consider how these short-term labor strategies led to long-term changes in local labor regimes and social reproduction, reinforcing and reshaping hierarchies of race, legality and class in rural America. Nelson will discuss how these dynamics underpin the production of affluence in gentrifying regions while rendering essential workers increasingly vulnerable.
Nelson’s research focuses on migration, labor, rural change and political economy in the United States and Mexico. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Program and the National Science Foundation. She is the author of “Illegality and the Production of Affluence: Undocumented Labor and Gentrification in Rural America," published by the University of California Press in 2025. Earlier in her career, she held tenured faculty appointments at Penn State and the University of Oregon.
Nelson’s lecture is part of the spring 2026 Coffee Hour seminar series hosted by Penn State’s Department of Geography. To learn more and access Zoom information, visit the Coffee Hour event webpage.