The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South

by Leon Fink

"The arrival of several hundred Guatemalan-born workers in a Morganton, North Carolina, poultry plant sets the stage for this dramatic story of human struggle in an age of globalization. Virtually overnight, a once quiet industrial center nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains finds itself the new home to one of the hemisphere's oldest cultures - and to a protracted struggle for social justice." "When workers' concerns about safety and fairness spark a strike during the early 1990s and, ultimately, a unionizing campaign at Case Farms, the resulting decade-long stand-off pits a classically recalcitrant New South employer - in a state with a burgeoning immigrant population and the nation's lowest rate of unionization - against an unlikely coalition of antagonists. Mayan refugees from war-torn Guatemala, Mexican workers, and a diverse group of local allies join forces with the Laborers union, an organization determined to shake off an unsavory reputation. The ensuing clash becomes a testing ground for "new labor" workplace and legal strategies." A story set at the intersection of globalization and community, two words not often linked, The Maya of Morganton addresses fundamental questions about the changing face of labor in the United States.

Genres: History, Labor, Race, School, Nonfiction, Latin American History

302 pages, Paperback

First published April 21, 2003

Reviews

[Christa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fink illustrates how Indians from Guatemala and the community of North Carolina faced drastic changes, more negative than positive. Forced into the label of Hispanic because it fit Americans best, the Mayan Indians divided in tribes back home, now learned to to adapt and form common ground with other ethnic groups in the area.

[Dorothea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Morganton is a small town in the North Carolina mountains, about a three hour drive west of me (and of author Leon Fink when he was at the UNC history department) on the highway.

The Mayas -- the ones in question -- are single men and families from the mountains of Guatemala. They don't always call themselves Mayan but Q'anjob'al, Awakateko, or sometimes Chalchiteko (speakers of these indigenous Mayan languages rather than Spanish). Many of them were political or economic refugees from the Guatemalan civil war (at its worst from 1978 to 1983).

The Mayas began coming to Morganton in 1989, when the management of Case Farms, a chicken processing plant, discovered how well they could fill the plant's labor shortage.

North Carolina has one of the lowest rates of union participation in the United States. It has become legally and culturally hostile to labor organization, and the management of Case Farms was no exception. Despite the physically miserable and low-paid nature of the chicken-processing work, management expected that the new Guatemalan workers would be hard working and, because of their newness to the area, language barriers (many didn't even speak Spanish, let alone English), and lack of U.S. citizenship, not inclined to trouble-making. They were correct about the first.

Following a walkout in 1991 and a work stoppage in 1993, the Case Farms workers -- led by the Mayas -- went on strike in 1995 and soon elected to be represented by an international union, LIUNA. They persisted in trying to bring Case Farms to negotiate with them until 2002. Although their attempts never succeeded, because Case Farms did absolutely everything it could to delay complying with labor laws, to use loopholes of said laws, and to discourage workers from continuing with the union, the workers' efforts were extraordinary in the U.S. South and attracted much attention.

Leon Fink (himself rather an anomaly as a historian of labor at a Southern university) was well situated to study this situation. This book comes from his interviews with people in Morganton and also in the immigrants' home villages in Guatemala. It addresses the question of why these Mayas, in contrast to most Southern workers and against so many expectations, persisted in uniting for their rights as workers.

The answer has many parts: not only the situation in Morganton and the characters of the labor leaders there, but their Guatemalan history and ongoing relationships with their places of origin. Religion plays as important a role as the Guatemalan civil war; Fink also explores changing gender roles, village and union politics, the flow of people and money between the U.S. and Guatemala, Pan-Mayan activism, and many other factors. It's the sort of history one knows is real because it's so complicated, irreducible to a simple outline.

I suspect I enjoyed this book in part because its subjects in some minor ways are close to me -- it's about events in my home state, and (which has never before been true of a book about my home state, or any book I've read) it contains several unrelated people who have the same (Hispanic) last name as me! But I think it's enjoyable more generally, too. It is very well written, with a great deal of human interest and even funny bits although the subject as a whole is a somber one. And even though it's a history of a very small incident in labor history -- a few years of ultimately unsuccessful organization among a few hundred workers and their families -- Fink makes good arguments that the story of the Mayas, LIUNA, and Case Farms contains important lessons for students of immigration and the South, and especially for those who are trying to figure out how to adapt the labor movement in the U.S. to a society and economy so different from that of the 1950s.

[Maggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating look at the intersection of immigration, labor, economies, and place.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

must have for anyone living in the south.