The Mahoning Valley, popularly known as Ohio's Steel Valley, lies at the easternmost edge of the U.S. Midwest. Its residents are torn between multiple identities. Superficially, they perceive themselves as having more in common with places such as Buffalo, New York, or Pittsburgh than they do with the communities that occupy the western portions of their own state. Although those living east of the Appalachian Mountains imagine the Mahoning Valley as being littered with cornfields and dairy cows, the reality is fixed in industrialization and labor movements at the turn of the last century and its concurrent flood of immigration. The area, derisively referred to as belonging to the Rust Belt because of deindustrialization, appears to have greater parallels to Scranton and Bethlehem in Pennsylvania than to the more rural regions of southern and western Ohio. As for the residents of Steel Valley, they envision themselves as part of a...
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