This article appears in the August 2022 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
On a sweltering June Sunday earlier this summer, under the shade of a pavilion in Springdale, Arkansas’s Luther George Park, Alice Gachuzo-Colin launched her campaign for city council. The first Black woman ever to run for office in Springdale, Gachuzo-Colin wants to move from what she calls “old Springdale”—long dominated by white bankers, farmers, and businessmen—to “new Springdale,” a place more representative of the town’s current demographics and culture.
“Old Springdale was very much a good old boy town. Old Springdale had no sense of culture, no sense of wanting to move forward, no desire to move forward,” she told me. Old Springdale—like most of Springdale’s current city council, which is all white except one member—is more likely to be found at Rodeo of the Ozarks than at the city’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade, which Gachuzo-Colin founded, or at any event celebrating the large immigrant communities who make up most of the workers in the city’s poultry processing plants, she said.
Springdale is the heart of Arkansas’s poultry industry, and a center of the nation’s meat industry. Tyson Foods, the second-largest meatpacker in the world and the country’s largest poultry producer, was founded and headquartered here. Tyson is the largest employer in Springdale and the third-largest in the state.
Tyson and the rest of the poultry industry have shaped Springdale’s economy and population, as well as the rural economy in the surrounding hills, over the last eight decades. Feed mills and processing plants line the highway; workers cluster in neighborhoods near the plants. The names of the poultry industry’s local entrepreneurs—Tyson, George, Parsons, and more—are attached to streets, parks, and facilities around the city, from John Tyson Elementary to Parsons Stadium, where the rodeo is held. Springdale is an industry town through and through.
Walmart and Tyson play an outsized role in this small metropolitan area’s economic and political affairs.
One reason the poultry industry’s monopolization of Springdale flies under the radar as much as it does is because of another, flashier “company town” less than half an hour north. Bentonville, Arkansas, is home to the corporate headquarters of Walmart, and to several members of the company’s founding family, one of the richest families in the world.
In recent years, several of the Waltons, their family foundation, the local regional economic development council, and a web of interconnected investment and real estate firms have exerted massive amounts of influence over the northwest Arkansas region, which in addition to Springdale and Bentonville includes the cities of Rogers and Fayetteville, home to the state’s flagship university.
“Each city is owned by a company. Springdale is Tyson, Bentonville is Walmart,” said Rumba Yambú, the founder of the organization inTRANSitive, which advocates for the rights of trans immigrants in the state. “Because they have such power, it’s been easy for folks to subscribe to or obey the rules that they have unwittingly put out for northwest Arkansas.”
Yambú, now in Little Rock, immigrated to Springdale from El Salvador with their mother, who, like other immigrants, came to work in the poultry industry.
Walmart and Tyson—two of the world’s largest companies—play an outsized role in this small metropolitan area’s economic and political affairs. In fact, northwest Arkansas could be considered a critical locus of what some refer to as “neoliberalism”—the marketization and privatization of governing, championed in part by President Bill Clinton, who was governor of Arkansas during Tyson and Walmart’s surge to power and friendly with both companies and families. (Hillary Clinton sat for six years on Walmart’s board of directors.) Neither is a “company town” in the traditional mining or cotton mill sense. But with weak local governments and a severe lack of alternative capital, they’re company towns for the public-private age, that can live and die on markets far beyond their control.
The success of Tyson and Walmart resulted in a windfall for many people in northwest Arkansas, most notably in the form of stock options, corporate jobs, and the ability to remain on otherwise unprofitable farmland. The companies provided jobs, and the families’ philanthropic arms provided funds for infrastructure, development, and education.
But the flip side is apparent in the region, too: workers stuck in cycles of poverty because of the companies’ low pay and lack of benefits, a culture of silence around criticisms or dissatisfaction with the corporations because of how much power they wield, the emptying out and pricing up of the rural hinterlands in service of regional urbanization driven by corporate investment. The infrastructure and development initiatives cater largely to upper-middle-class lifestyles, not to those working in factories, in warehouses, or on the retail floor. These contradictions are fundamental to company towns—amenities on the one hand, exploitation and undemocratic institutions on the other.
“Northwest Arkansas is our home and by investing in our own backyard and recognizing the potential of our people, we’ve helped elevate the region to a global stage and built a place we’re proud to call home,” Tyson said in a statement provided to the Prospect. Walmart did not respond to a request for comment.
APRIL L. BROWN/AP PHOTO
Tyson runs processing plants, feed mills, hatcheries, and contracts with poultry growers in the northwest Arkansas region.
THE NORTHWEST ARKANSAS METRO REGION is tiny by almost any measure—the 131st-largest metropolitan statistical region in the country with just over half a million residents. The largest city, Fayetteville, has a population of 95,230 as of the most recent census. Arkansas is one of the poorest states in one of the poorest regions in the country, and until the 1970s northwest Arkansas was one of the poorest parts of the state.
Walmart was founded in Bentonville in 1962; today, the city plays host to Walmart’s corporate headquarters, a slew of schools, art museums, and public parks, and hundreds if not thousands of offices of Walmart suppliers. Its residents are largely white-collar businesspeople; the median income is over $80,000 and the poverty rate just 7.6 percent. The city is over 70 percent white.
Tyson was initially founded as a chicken-hauling company in Springdale in 1935; it eventually expanded into the other areas of the poultry industry and by the 1960s was a vertically integrated production company. Located about 20 miles down the highway from Bentonville, Springdale is home to Tyson’s corporate headquarters and two of its flagship processing plants (several other poultry producers, including George’s, another local company, and Cargill also operate plants in the city). The city’s median income is $50,343, and it has a poverty rate of 17.6 percent.
When large-scale poultry farming came on the scene in the 1940s, many farmers viewed it as a lifeline for the regional economy, allowing generations of Arkansans to stay on their land rather than moving to cities. Walmart also catered to the type of small towns that dot northwest Arkansas. Its first store opened in Rogers in 1962, with others opening across the rural South soon after.
The incalculable wealth of these two companies and their founding families has been extracted from other places, including their own rural hinterlands. It’s been well documented how the arrival of a Walmart impacts small businesses and the local economy in a given town, lowering wages and driving competitors out of business. The company also takes advantage of federal and state tax breaks, grants, and abatements, receiving at least $241,531,675 in overall subsidies, several million of that in Arkansas, according to Good Jobs First.
With an economy reliant on the continued success of Walmart and Tyson, there is no meaningful check on their power.
Tyson’s business model, especially in rural markets where it can exert near-monopsony control over chicken farmers, is similarly exploitative: The company traps chicken farmers in contracts over which they have very little say, a practice for which it has come under scrutiny for years. The working conditions in its processing plants are notoriously poor, and workers notoriously underpaid and overworked, a condition that came to a head during the COVID-19 pandemic when the company worked directly with the Trump administration to draft the executive order used as justification to keep meatpacking plants open even as workers inside were infected and died. Managers at one Tyson plant in Waterloo, Iowa, notoriously bet on how many of their workers would get infected with COVID, according to a November 2020 lawsuit. Hundreds of workers in Tyson’s Springdale plants contracted COVID, yet they remained open. Tyson has received roughly $63,948,020 in subsidies from the state and localities in Arkansas, per Good Jobs First.
While Bentonville is mostly white and relatively wealthy, Springdale is segregated, with higher-income white residents living in different neighborhoods and attending different schools than the working-class immigrants who provide labor for the city’s poultry plants. The Har-Ber Meadows neighborhood was founded in 1990 as a New Urbanist community, and census tracts in the vicinity of Har-Ber High School are more than 85 percent white in a town that’s one of the most diverse in the state. Meanwhile, the area around Springdale High School, on the east side of town, is majority-Hispanic.
Most of the Latino immigrants working at Tyson plants come from Mexico or El Salvador. A substantial population also hails from the Marshall Islands. Due to radioactive contamination from when the United States conducted dozens of nuclear tests in the 1940s and 1950s, Marshallese people have the ability to live and work in the United States without visas, and many have come to Springdale.
According to the most recently available census data, over 70 percent of the more than 14,200 noncitizen immigrants in Springdale make less than $35,000 a year. Immigrant workers at Tyson’s plants made as little as $12.50 an hour until a recent boost to a $15.20 minimum last year. Its corporate workforce is much whiter and makes much more money.
In addition to processing plants, Tyson also owns feed mills and hatcheries in the city, and contracts with poultry farmers (called “growers”) in rural Ozarks counties, including Benton and Washington, who “grow” the birds from chick to full-grown and ship them back into town to be processed. With its processing workforce concentrated in the city’s core, and many of its contract poultry-growing operations in the rural reaches, Tyson’s economic reach is powerful, and its power over policymaking on the local, state, and federal levels gives it a unique place in a small metro economy.
IT CAN BE HARD TO CLEANLY SEPARATE the impact that the Tyson and Walton families, and their respective companies, have had on the cities they occupy. The Waltons and the Tysons’ interests in regional development go back to the founding of the Northwest Arkansas Council by Walton, Tyson, and local trucking and transportation magnate J.B. Hunt in 1990. Their growth has been intertwined with each other, and their political and social spheres of influence are similar.
One distinction might be that Tyson’s economic impact has been felt by a broader swath of the regional population for much longer than Walmart’s. The poultry industry reshaped the regional economy before Walmart’s arrival on the scene reshaped national retailing. In contrast, Walmart’s impact on northwest Arkansas as a region exists on two vectors. First, there’s the company’s corporate footprint, including its implicit requirement that its suppliers and vendors have offices in the area, and a new 350-acre campus in Bentonville set to open in 2025; second, there are the family’s philanthropic and development activities.
The Waltons, whose family net worth of roughly $212 billion vastly outstrips the Tysons’ roughly $3 billion, have been steering the ship through their family philanthropy, the Walton Family Foundation, which makes more than $55 million worth of grants annually through its “Home Region” program, and invests many millions more into special projects, which include many efforts in northwest Arkansas. Bentonville’s ruling family has built a city—and increasingly, a region—with the kinds of amenities you need to attract a top-tier corporate workforce: museums, private schools and well-funded charters, hotels, upscale restaurants, mountain biking trails, and private clubs.
For example, the foundation and Alice Walton, daughter of Walmart founder Sam, financed the construction of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, a world-class art museum in Bentonville that opened in 2011. Exempt from state sales and use taxes by legislative fiat, Crystal Bridges holds in its collection paintings like Trumbull’s Alexander Hamilton, Warhol’s Dolly Parton, and Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter. A satellite campus for contemporary art, The Momentary, opened a few years ago in an old Kraft Cheese factory. Over the years, the entire project has cost the Waltons well over $1.3 billion.
The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in Bentonville in 2011, with grants from the Walton family and foundation.
The Waltons, and increasingly the Tysons, have seeded and funded other public art organizations like CACHE, which operates two art hubs, one in Springdale and one in Bentonville. The Waltons’ involvement in art, which some local artists feel has gentrified the local scene, is not purely philanthropic; the Runway Group, the two grandsons’ investment group, puts money toward public art as well through OZ Art. When either family foundation funds organizations that impact the region’s immigrant or low-income populations, it is often through grants for cultural programming, entrepreneurship, or direct service—not bad things to fund, but also not things that will change a regional economy constructed around haves and have-nots.
Many regional economic development, research, and planning functions are undertaken by the Northwest Arkansas Council, which has 100 members, most of them companies. The council has been instrumental in projects like extending Interstate 49 into Missouri, incubating and supporting nonprofits, and helping to shape downtowns and “cultural destinations” including a regional greenway, the University of Arkansas, and local museums and theaters.
The bulk of the council’s funding comes from the Walton Family Foundation, according to my review of Walton Foundation tax filings and the Northwest Arkansas Council’s income reports (as a 501(c)(3), the NWA Council Foundation is not required to disclose its donors, but it does disclose the amount of contributions it received in total). According to my analysis, the foundation provided 47 percent of the council foundation’s total contributions in 2020, 82 percent of the total in 2019, and 53 percent of the total in 2018.
Both Bentonville and Springdale have been beneficiaries of Walton family largesse. The city of Bentonville has received $12.9 million, going to projects like the regional greenway and park design, as well as funding for “complete street” infrastructure and a bike and pedestrian master plan for the city. Over the years, the Walton Family Foundation has given more than $10.15 million to the city of Springdale, the vast majority of that in the last decade. That includes millions of dollars for the construction of bike trails and a greenway, and $2.8 million for a new municipal campus in the city, the brainchild of the foundation’s Design Excellence Program.
The municipal campus will occupy several city blocks near the newly revitalized downtown, home to mixed-use developments spearheaded in part by a real estate and development group affiliated with Tom and Steuart Walton, Sam’s grandsons.
Unlike its Walton counterpart, the Tyson Family Foundation flies under the radar. It does not have a web presence or a readily apparent grantmaking process. Until recently, the Tyson Foundation’s relatively small grants were primarily used to support hospitals, colleges, and scholarship funds. That has changed in recent years with the appointment of Olivia Tyson, the millennial daughter of corporate chair John H. Tyson, as the foundation’s president.
A self-identified philanthropist, Olivia Tyson has reoriented her family foundation’s giving strategy around education, culture, and arts organizations in Springdale. The company still maintains a more traditional presence in the community, donating chicken to local schools and food banks. But the foundation has spent more than $1 million to fund “reimaginings” of two Arkansas arts organizations, one of them Arts One (formerly the Arts Center of the Ozarks), as well as several art “activations” at a former hardware store downtown. The foundation has also put money toward downtown Springdale’s revitalization work and towards CACHE, the Northwest Arkansas Council’s local art hub.
The sense in parts of the local nonprofit world is that a new generation of Tysons is trying, in some sense, to play catch-up to the new generation of Waltons, tagging along on the coattails of the family that cemented itself more than a decade ago as the patrons of Arkansas culture and community. A grant contract I reviewed requires grantees to hashtag #tysonfamilyfoundation whenever they post about their projects on social media, an indication that the family is interested in burnishing its image, much like the Waltons have burnished theirs.
ONE OF THE MOST OBVIOUS IRONIES of Walton and Tyson corporate and foundation funding is the amount of money that has been poured into support for local small businesses and small-scale agriculture by the two companies perhaps most responsible for the decline of small businesses and the rise of industrialized agriculture nationwide. They are insufficiently patching part of a huge hole that they created with their price-slashing, wage-cutting, local economy–destroying activities, and patting themselves on the back for it.
Yet with an economy reliant on the continued success of Walmart and Tyson, and with regional economic development initiatives dependent on their founding families’ wealth, there is no meaningful check on the power wielded by these billionaires and their Fortune 100 companies. It’s not just the Walton and Tyson family foundations that are dependent on the well-being of the companies; other local foundations and lots of local wealth have been created on the back of Walmart and Tyson’s jobs and stocks. The companies’ growth is directly tied to the amount of capital in the area.
The Waltons are laser-focused on creating an environment that caters to the kind of people they want working at their corporate headquarters, rather than for a competitor. Springdale is comparatively underresourced, if you measure in terms of how much a city looks like a place upper-middle-class people would want to come to. Their development efforts and amenities have been much more spare and less heavy-handed, at least until recently.
This is a big difference in the way that Bentonville and Springdale treat their company-town employees. Springdale’s processing workforce is much more interchangeable than Bentonville’s middle managers. A processing line worker is disposable; high turnover is a reality and even an expectation. Springdale did not invest heavily in its downtown until Tyson announced it was moving parts of its corporate workforce there.
Gachuzo-Colin, the Springdale city council candidate, is frustrated with the lack of attention paid to the side of town where working-class people live, who benefit less from the economic development and revitalization plans, the park projects, and the arts investments than the wealthy side. “You’re not talking to the folks in your city when you’re building this shit. You’re talking to the new folks in the city. Why?” she said. “Those Tyson workers, those George’s workers, those Cargill workers. Those are the people y’all should be trying to talk to. Those are the people who have busted their ass.”
Where Gachuzo-Colin lives, children walk to the local elementary school in the street because there are no sidewalks. She compares their experience to the experience of kids on the white side of town, where the sidewalks, she says, are big enough for golf carts. “Those are beautiful streets, ain’t got no potholes, got none of that,” she told me. “I am going to make it my business to make sure that just like you can allocate the tax money over there, you should be able to allocate the tax money on the other side of town. What’s the sense in thriving so that people outside of the city can see all this great stuff, when the people who are in the city are not impacted by all this great stuff?”
Indeed, one of the few benefits for poorer residents in Springdale and Bentonville involves an ideological approach to education. The Walton Foundation’s early roots were in the school choice and charter school movement, and it has not left that goal behind. Much of northwest Arkansas’s vast and growing public, charter, and private school network is supported by Walton Foundation donations—including nearly $8 million to the Thaden School, a private school near downtown Bentonville established in the mold of Andover and Exeter, as well as nearly $4 million to the Arkansas Arts Academy, and grants for local organizations that help parents (including low-income parents) decide where, out of this smorgasbord of options, to send their children.
Magaly Licolli, the co-founder of workers’ justice organization Venceremos, which organizes poultry workers in the state, explained that the immigrant workforce in Springdale’s poultry plants lives in almost perpetual precarity, while the dangers of the industry make it nearly impossible for them to get ahead. “We have this gap of workers who don’t know where to go, what to do if they can’t find other jobs. They have to rely on charity, or whatever access they have to health care or food stamps,” Licolli said. “It keeps them in that status forever, in these cycles of poverty. And it’s just sad that these immigrants came for a better life, and at a certain point they felt they had a better life, and then everything gets lost immediately as soon as they get injured or lose their jobs.”
Downtown Bentonville has been transformed into a tourist’s version of what a small-town square might look like.
THE DOWNTOWN SPRINGDALE ALLIANCE and Downtown Bentonville, Inc., which function as public-private partnerships that work in coordination with local government, indicate just how far corporate capture has gone. Both have received substantial funding from the Tysons and the Waltons in recent years.
Tyson has played a major role in downtown Springdale’s revitalization plans, kicking off with a $1 million donation in 2015, and announcing the move of hundreds of its corporate workforce to a downtown campus located on the site of the company’s original hatchery. That was a centerpiece of the eventual downtown master plan, which devotes an entire section of downtown to the “Tyson District,” and a streetscape “designed to support the new office and retail uses of Tyson Foods Inc.’s new Downtown Springdale facility.” Since 2015, Tyson has opened two more facilities in downtown Springdale: an automation and robotics research center and a second corporate office.
Both cities’ plans highlight community engagement and stakeholder listening sessions, but the scope of possibility in downtown Springdale was limited by the overarching point of the revitalization: attracting professional-class millennials and explicitly urbanizing the region on the model of Austin, Raleigh-Durham, and other growing metro regions around the country.
The 13-person steering committee for the Bentonville Community Plan adopted in 2018 included five people with direct Walmart and Walton connections, as well as a “resident-at-large” appointment who had spent 15 years working for Walmart, the executive of a retail software company, and the director of Visit Bentonville, the city’s advertising and promotion department, which has received more than $620,000 in Walton Foundation funding over the last several years.
The Downtown Springdale Revitalization plan was similarly stacked. The steering committee’s chair is a Tyson Foods executive, and Carl George of the George’s, Inc., poultry family was on the committee as well, representing his family’s company and the Downtown Springdale Alliance, another public-private partnership heavily funded with Walton and Tyson funds. George was once president of the Downtown Springdale Alliance.
The organization’s board is also filled with poultry and retail representation, including the president of Arvest Bank (which is chaired by Walton family member Jim Walton), a vice president of Tyson Foods, a representative from the Tyson Family Foundation, and the secretary of Blue Crane Development, a Walton project that has properties around northwest Arkansas. The Tyson Family Foundation has invested just over $30,000 in the Downtown Springdale Alliance; the Walton Foundation has given about $1.6 million.
Blue Crane’s properties include a Springdale development called 202 Railside, near Tyson’s new corporate complex in downtown Springdale, billed as an “eclectic, premium” community for those looking for “urban sophistication.” 202 Railside is adjacent to one of the lowest-income census tracts in Springdale, and it offers a “workforce housing” program for people under certain incomes (for one person, the income limit is $61,824; for a family of six, $102,451—still well above average incomes for many Springdale residents). Would-be residents must pass credit and criminal background checks to qualify.
Downtown Bentonville, once a sleepy town square with a Confederate statue at its center (removed in 2020 after police tear-gassed racial justice demonstrators in the square; the statue is being transferred to a different park), has been completely remade in the last 15 years, transformed into a tourist’s version of what a small-town square might look like. Crafted in Walmart’s folksy, down-home image, downtown Bentonville tries to invite you in to its charm—come try an ice cream cone from the Walmart Spark Café, or shop at the original Walton’s 5 & 10, with Sam Walton’s old red Ford F-150 parked out front. The manufactured small-town atmosphere in Bentonville comes at the expense of its authentic manifestations across the country.
One of the few benefits for poorer residents in Springdale and Bentonville involves an ideological approach to education.
Unsurprisingly, the Walton Foundation has invested handsomely in Downtown Bentonville, Inc., giving $1.12 million since 2015, to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands granted to Visit Bentonville’s publicity operations. Through a maze of dozens of shell companies identifiable by their usage of two P.O. boxes connected to the Waltons, various members of the Walton family, and Walton Enterprises (the family’s corporate arm), the family owns chunks of land in downtown Bentonville and beyond—much of it near mountain biking trails and greenways developed with Walton money, through millions in grants to the nonprofit NWA Trailblazers. The grandsons’ real estate development group has had a hand in BlakeSt., a private downtown Bentonville club, and high-end local restaurants, hotels, and event spaces in Bentonville.
Family members continue to buy land throughout the region, including in rural reaches of the Ozarks near the Buffalo National River and the Kings River, two major outdoor recreation destinations, where there are also landing strips for a recreational aviation organization piloted by the Runway Group named Fly OZ. Though the Waltons aren’t the only ones shaping the future of northwest Arkansas, the amount of money at their disposal often ensures that if they want something, it will get done.
The family doesn’t necessarily see it that way, though they implicitly recognize the power imbalance. “We by no means are pulling puppet strings or telling people what to do,” Steuart Walton told Downtown Bentonville’s media arm when asked about the perception that the Waltons control Bentonville. “I’m a little bit reminded of church night supper … Some people would bring a freaking salad bowl this big, and it was great, and even with everybody digging in they couldn’t eat it all. And some people would bring a 12-piece KFC, and that’s great too. Everybody’s pulling in the same direction.”
The dominance goes beyond economic development. As I reported for Facing South, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the state of Arkansas’s Economic Recovery Task Force was led by Steuart Walton and staffed by several people deep in the Walton family’s web of organizations, including three people who then worked at the Runway Group and two others collectively referred to in meeting minutes as the “Walton Team.” As I also reported for Facing South, when COVID-19 was ripping through Tyson plants in Springdale in the spring and summer of 2020, a fact consistently downplayed by the company, it involved Springdale’s mayor, Doug Sprouse, in its PR campaigns.
The crisis PR team drafted comments that were eventually attributed to Sprouse in Tyson press releases. In a promotional video filmed by and released for the company, Sprouse said, “What we’re finding out is that much more often than not [COVID-19] is being spread when they’re not at work, when employees are not at work.” A CDC team assessing COVID-19 outbreaks in the area at the time found that it was in fact “very difficult to attempt to disentangle” workplace spread from community spread, and that 40 percent of the first cases in household-wide outbreaks in northwest Arkansas’s Hispanic population and 28 percent in its Marshallese population were people who worked in poultry processing plants.
“When we organize an action, we know that Tyson already knows ahead of the game what our plans are because there is this connection” between the company and local officials, said Licolli of workers’ justice group Venceremos, which led organizing around outbreaks at Springdale poultry plants during COVID.
Emails I obtained in a 2020 FOIA request bear this out. A senior vice president of Arvest Bank emailed the city in June 2020 ahead of a planned protest for poultry workers’ rights, saying, “We have to be careful that I don’t have a drive-up ATM anywhere nearby that has lots of cash in it that protestors could try to attack or have any of our employees in or around the area, move any bank vehicles, etc. This is just crazy!!” Sprouse, the mayor, forwarded her email to Jeff Wood, Tyson’s director of state and local government relations and a member of the board of directors of the city’s Chamber of Commerce. He also forwarded Wood the eventual permit Venceremos obtained for their protest.
IN JULY, THE CRYSTAL BRIDGES MUSEUM opened an exhibit called “We the People: The Radical Notion of Democracy.” Featuring an original copy of the Constitution, one of 11 known to exist, the exhibit puts the Constitution in conversation with other pieces of art that “provide diverse American perspectives on the nation’s founding principles,” according to the museum’s press release.
The museum includes art celebrating labor activists, a form of democratic organizing to which Walmart and Tyson are both actively hostile, and abortion rights organizers, in a state with a strict trigger law that now bans abortions, after Roe was overturned. It’s jarring to have the notion of people’s rule uplifted in a museum supported by funds from multinational corporations that have run roughshod over state and local policymaking, development, and labor rights. Various Waltons and Tysons (and the companies’ PACs) have donated handsomely to politicians of both parties in Arkansas, but the majority of their donations in recent cycles are to Republicans, many of the same ones involved in anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ legislation, attacks on public schools, and tax cuts for the wealthy—in the state legislature and in Congress.
Democracy is a radical notion, and one that has been undermined by corporate and billionaire activities in the northwest Arkansas region.
APRIL L. BROWN/AP PHOTO
Tyson’s corporate headquarters has spurred Springdale’s downtown revitalization to attract a professional-class workforce.
Many people in northwest Arkansas, including those involved with local community organizations and nonprofits, feel deeply indebted to the Waltons and Tysons, and are thus unable or unwilling to voice criticisms of them, even when they believe it’s deserved. A story I wrote about Walton-motivated economic development’s impact on affordable housing in June resulted in a slew of off-the-record emails and DMs from people formerly or currently affiliated with organizations that receive funding from them. People are afraid that criticizing the powers that be will jeopardize their or their family members’ ability to get a job in the area.
This culture of silence extends to the media. For many years, Jim Walton was the primary owner of the two largest daily papers in northwest Arkansas, and the new Axios Local newsletter, launched last year (disclosure: I was recruited for a reporter role early in the process and ultimately chose not to pursue it) hired a former Tyson spokesperson, Worth Sparkman, as one of its two reporters. Its daily newsletters are frequently sponsored by Walmart, the Walton Foundation, Ropeswing Hospitality (another group run by Tom and Steuart Walton), or the Northwest Arkansas Council.
In these two company towns, the amenities on offer are targeted toward the middle and upper-middle-class professionals like those Walmart, Tyson, and their families’ affiliated ventures hope to attract to the area. When the families and the corporations fund or draw attention to working-class and immigrant communities, it is through grants to direct-service or cultural organizations. Systemic critiques of why working-class and immigrant communities struggle—critiques that would indict the companies on whose back the region’s growth is built—are much less welcome. That’s one reason Yambú moved inTRANSitive to Little Rock, they told me.
“The corporations create this way you should be as the perfect queer person. You can work for Walmart and be part of Walmart Pride, and go to the pride parades, but you’ve got to behave in the way that an ideal queer person would,” Yambú said. “They’re the ones that will go and have drinks with them and talk nicely and laugh and wave a flag, but they won’t pressure them or try to get them to speak up when it comes to our rights being taken away.”
Last year, Arkansas became the first state to ban gender-affirming medical care for trans youth. Despite a sustained and targeted campaign to get the Waltons to speak out against the bill as it made its way through the state legislature, the family was quiet until after Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson vetoed the bill (his veto was overridden by the state legislature). Tom Walton, the Home Region Program Committee chair, released a statement saying the family foundation was “alarmed” by the policy and that it “sends the wrong message to those willing to invest in or visit our state.” True to the family’s market-oriented stance, the statement asked state leaders to consider the impact of the legislation on future economic growth and the state’s potential. Yet Walmart contributed $160,300 to anti-trans lawmakers in Arkansas, and Tyson gave $20,009, according to an analysis from the Center for Media and Democracy.
The lip service given to marginalized and working-class people, without meaningful action to support them, grates on some Springdale residents. “Everywhere you go you see little signs in Spanish, you see little signs in Marshallese, and that’s cute and everything. But what the fuck was that supposed to do?” said Gachuzo-Colin. “They have the ability to build a state-of-the-art park every six months. But you can’t figure out how to find a space to house people?”
The ability of businessmen to shape policy in Springdale is compounded by the inability of many residents to vote.
Springdale’s recent outward veneer of concern for and inclusion of the city’s minority communities feels like a small victory, Gachuzo-Colin said, in the face of the city’s not-so-distant past as a sundown town. But it also feels like an attempt to brush over the inequities created by the industries that support Springdale—inequities of class, of race, and of country of origin.
The ability of businessmen and wealthy white people to shape policy in Springdale is compounded by the inability of many Springdale residents to vote. Twenty-three percent of the city’s population is foreign-born, and 71 percent of those—roughly 14,240 people—are not U.S. citizens. As city council members consider new developments, new apartment complexes, and new park projects, Gachuzo-Colin says, they’re rubber-stamping projects that mostly aid the moneyed people in the city or the moneyed people whom the economic development projects are bringing in. The immigrant workers mostly have no political voice.
The wealth of funding available in northwest Arkansas creates a bubble of sorts, with a hard outside limit for how far critiques of power and money can go. Northwest Arkansas is both the best place in the state to be a nonprofit and, if you’re making a systemic critique of power, the worst. Foundations with corporate ties will fund what Yambú refers to as “ideal queers,” or charitable organizations with specific missions, but shy away from workers’ justice organizations, labor organizations, or nonprofits with more explicitly radical missions, ones that make systemic critiques of corporate influence and wealth. Licolli and Yambú both told me that they feel that the reason their organizations succeed is purely because of funders from out of state, who believe in their radical missions and are not tied to Arkansas’s business elite.
“There is a lot of need in Arkansas, but there is never this question about why there’s so much need in Arkansas,” said Licolli. “Not only the nonprofits that provide service, but also the organizations that call themselves grassroots or pro-immigrant that really don’t want to talk about the impact of these corporations, because people are afraid of losing their funding or losing their jobs.”
Others in the region’s nonprofit and community organizing spaces feel more conflicted than that—they believe their work is important, and would be impossible without funding, but are also aware of the limitations inherent in the system as it currently exists. Northwest Arkansas is not alone in this reliance on philanthropy; it is a situation nonprofits nationwide find themselves in, a creation in part of the United States tax code and America’s reticence to break up big companies and tax their wealthy profiteers.
On its face, northwest Arkansas can look like a place with thriving communities and a democratic spirit. The ad campaigns of the Walton grandsons and the Northwest Arkansas Council certainly sell it as such. But the reality is much more complex. Local governments and development policies at the behest of corporations, who also control the economic outcomes of most of their cities’ residents, are perhaps not democratic at all. When participation in community work is all but contingent on adherence to deregulatory market norms propagated by two of the country’s largest companies, the boundaries on what is possible, and what can be conceived to be possible, are remarkably narrow.
In northwest Arkansas, the bounds are a commitment to capitalism, vertical integration, and monopoly control; to the belief in entrepreneurship and market-based ideologies as the solution to all social and economic problems. The problem is that, as Springdale’s continuing inequities show, a rising tide doesn’t lift all boats—and companies, corporations, and the families that control them have little incentive to create and support cities that are equitable, democratic, and just.
