| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South. By Leon Fink. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. xviii, 254 pp. Cloth, $34.95, ISBN 0-8078-2774-6. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-8078-5447-6.)
Leon Fink's study of the struggle for justice by Mayan workers in Morganton, North Carolina, in the 1990s is one of the most engaging labor history studies that I have read in a long time. Making extensive use of rich oral histories, Fink examines the campaign by these workers, along with several Mexican workers and a few community allies and social justice organizations, to unionize a poultry plant owned by Case Farms in a small industrial town in one of the least unionized industries and states in the nation. In fact, not a single chicken-processing plant in North Carolina was unionized at the time this campaign began. The fact that the organizing drive was conducted primarily by political and economic refugees, most of whom were Highland Maya from Guatemala, makes the story even more fascinating.	1
Fink begins his study by describing the local political and cultural environment that greeted Guatemala immigrants in Morganton and the forces that prompted them to flee their community villages, migrate through Mexico, and eventually accept employment at the Case Farms plant. In the context of growing guerrilla warfare against a series of United States–backed military dictatorships, a flood of such refugees from Guatemala had reached the United States by the mid-1980s—a testimony to the devastating political and economic impact of the counterinsurgency programs and scorched-earth policies by the Guatemalan military against indigenous communities.	. . .

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