Geographies of Social Repair: Black Return Migration and the Infrastructure of Care in the Mississippi Delta

highlights: • Examines Black return migration as a spatial negotiation within racial capitalism. • Shows how urban tempo and rural survivability shape Delta return pathways. • Identifies rural subsidy as kin networks absorbing displaced care costs. • Challenges economistic models by centering care, tempo, and place attachment. abstract: This article examines return migration to the Mississippi Delta, a region marked by long-term population loss, disinvestment, and racialized poverty. Drawing on life-history interviews with ninety-eight Black heads of household in Sunflower, Leflore, and Humphreys counties, I identify three recurrent pathways shaping movement back home: exhaustion with the speed, precarity, and cost of urban life; the need to provide unpaid care for aging or ill kin where formal services are thin; and enduring calls to home grounded in memory, obligation, and belonging. Across these pathways, respondents rarely frame return as an employment strategy. Instead, their accounts show how urban and rural inequalities are produced relationally: labor and life are worn down in urban economies, while rural homeplaces absorb social, bodily, and care-related costs through kin networks and informal support. Read through Black geographic and political-economic perspectives, return is less a regression than a negotiation, one through which Black households work to sustain themselves and imagine other futures in the rural South. These findings challenge economistic migration models and recenter rural Black homeplaces as infrastructures of care and meaning within contemporary regional inequality.