Syracuse University SURFACE Dissertations - ALL SURFACE August 2016 New Destinations of Empire: Imperial Migration from the Marshall Islands to Northwest Arkansas Emily Mitchell-Eaton Syracuse University Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/etd Part of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Mitchell-Eaton, Emily, "New Destinations of Empire: Imperial Migration from the Marshall Islands to Northwest Arkansas" (2016). Dissertations - ALL. 645. https://surface.syr.edu/etd/645 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the SURFACE at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations - ALL by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. ABSTRACT This dissertation examines Marshall Islander migration to Arkansas as an outcome of an international agreement, the Compact of Free Association, between the U.S. and the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), a former U.S. territory. While the Compact marked the formal end of U.S. colonial administration over the islands, it also re-entrenched imperial power relations between the two countries, at once consolidating U.S. military access to the islands and creating a Marshallese diaspora whose largest resettlement site is now Springdale, Arkansas. As a result, Springdale, an “all- white town” for much of the 20th century, has recently been remade by Marshallese and also Latino immigration, nearly tripling in size in the past three decades. I examine U.S. empire through three interrelated lenses: through an imperial policy, the Compact of Free Association (COFA); through an imperial diaspora, the Marshallese diaspora; and through the town of Springdale, Arkansas, a new immigrant destination for Marshall Islanders, which I argue has become a new destination of empire.