Hardworking Newcomers and Generations of Poverty: Poverty Discourse in Central Washington State Jennifer Devine London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Geography and the Environment, London, UK; j.a.devine@lse.ac.uk This research is part of a project that aims to reinterpret geographies of poverty in the American Northwest by focusing on the intersections of cultural and political–economic processes that produce poverty differences. This paper contributes to this aim by unpacking poverty beliefs by race at the local county level. This qualitative analysis is grounded in a brief discussion of the political economy of Kittitas County in Central Washington State, which provides space to analyze the theoretical linkages between structural and cultural constructions of poverty differ- ences. Specifically, this paper argues that first generation “hardworking” Hispanic immigrants embody the “working poor”, while individual explanations of poverty are articulated as the “intergenerational poor”, who are racialized as white and choose poverty as a lifestyle. In this vein, many local residents use the marker of “generation” to distinguish between white, lower class individuals who choose to be poor from a group of Hispanic newcomers whose poverty stems from structural forces such as non-living-wage jobs and discrimination. This forms one part of a larger strategy to “blame the individual” for the existence of white poverty. This analy- sis poses new theoretical insights into the intersection between difference markers such as race, class, and generation and contributes to the literature on racial differences in poverty expla- nations. The geographical specificity of poverty discourse argues for further grounding of the poverty literature in material conditions, which will allow for more nuanced understanding of the creation and persistence of poverty in poor communities. This paper is part of a larger research project that reinterprets geographies of poverty in the American Northwest (Lawson et al 2004; Lawson et al forthcoming). The project examines the dynamic landscapes of region- alized poverty and inequality in the context of economic restructuring in the American Northwest since 1980. In addition to structural forces, the project explores how poverty is socially constructed along markers of difference, such as race, class, gender and generation. I unpack these ar- ticulations using discourse analysis stemming from in-depth interviews at the local level in Kittitas County in Central Washington State (see Figure 1). I focus on discourses of white and Hispanic poverty because together the two racial groups comprise 96.8% of the county population (US Census Bureau 2000). C  2006 Editorial Board of Antipode. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA