“You know what the midwest is?” Kanye West asked in 2004’s “Jesus Walks.”
This may in fact be true. I have no idea, since I’ve never been to a small town in Iowa and haven’t set foot in South Dakota since Michael Jordan was playing for the Bulls. I’ve spent over two decades living in the midwest, in two different states, and have family in two more—and yet somehow managed to have zero experience with the cultural touchstones that supposedly define my region.
Of course, the midwest is home to plenty of heartland-type communities as Vox describes them. But you might argue that what is really distinctively midwestern is the friction between them and our industrial cities. Unlike the east coast, our urban centers sit in a vast ocean of land; unlike the western half of the country, that land is relatively well populated with farmers and small towns. The south, for its part, has the vast yet populated rural areas, but had no analogue to the midwest’s cities until well after World War II.
