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This essay reviews the founding of the renowned Appalachian community media center, Appalshop, as well as one of its earliest films, Herb E. Smith's In Ya Blood (1971). In doing so, the author discusses the ways in which the media center's initial establishment reflected a middle-class idealism on the part of policymakers and an opportunity to reconstitute an Appalachian mountain subjectivity on the part of Appalshop's early participants. Ultimately, both register an inertial movement away from class as a tool for understanding poverty and toward a managerial liberalism and identity politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]