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

By Leon Fink

For Professors: Free E-Exam Copies

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Oct 11, 2024
• ISBN: 9781469679532

Leon Fink

Leon Fink is senior research associate and adjunct professor of history at Georgetown University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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THE MAYA OF MORGANTON

THE MAYA OF

MORGANTON

WORK AND COMMUNITY IN THE NUEVO NEW SOUTH

Revised and Expanded Edition

LEON FINK

with research assistance

from Alvis E. Dunn

The Univerasity of North Carolina Press

CHAPEL HILL

First edition © 2003 The University of North Carolina Press

Revised and expanded edition © 2024 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Charis by codeMantra

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fink, Leon, 1948–author. | Dunn, Alvis E., researcher.

Title: The Maya of Morganton : work and community in the nuevo new south / Leon Fink, with research assistance from Alvis E. Dunn.

Description: Revised and expanded edition. | Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024022953 | ISBN 9781469682112 (paper ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469679532 (epub) | ISBN 9781469682129 (pdf) | ISBN 9781469682136 (ebook other)

Subjects: LCSH: Poultry plants—North Carolina—Morganton—Employees. | Mayas—North Carolina—Morganton. | Foreign workers, Guatemalan—North Carolina—Morganton. | Labor disputes—North Carolina—Morganton. | Poultry plants—Employees—Labor unions—North Carolina—Morganton. | Poultry plants—Employees—Labor unions—North Carolina. | BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE / Labor & Industrial Relations | BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Labor / Unions

Classification: LCC HD8039.P842 U55 2024 | DDC 331.6/27281075685—dc23/eng/20240612

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024022953

To Sharon Mújica, Alma Yolanda Guerrero Miller, Alejandra Garcia Quintanilla, Michael Pratt, Violeta and Flor de Leon, Miguel Bautista, Eduardo Elias Cortez, and the Proyecto Lingüístico Quetzalteco for helping me open a door to the Spanish-speaking world

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface to the Revised and Expanded Edition

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. The Way It Is in Morganton

2. Flight of the Happy Farmers

3. How the Dead Helped to Organize the Living

4. No One Leader

5. The Workers Are Ready

6. Changing Places

7. Sticking Together

8. Revisiting the Maya of Morganton

Glossary of Spanish Terms

Notes

Index

Illustrations

Guatemalan migration to Morganton, North Carolina (map)

Downtown Morganton, looking down Union Street

Case Farms poultry plant

Inside Case Farms: whole-bird processing operation

Father Ken Whittington with Ana Sebastién José

Village of Lajcholaj, Guatemala

Pancho José with wife María and son Pascual in Morganton

Inside Diego de Diego’s two-room home in Lajcholaj

Matías Tomás in Morganton

Awakateka and Chalchiteka women in Aguacatán, Guatemala

Courtyard of Aguacatán’s Catholic church

Parents of Francisco and Oscar Fuentes in Aguacatán

José Samuel Solís López and Mario Ailón in Morganton

Returning home: gravestone in San Rafael la Independencia, Guatemala

Strike leader Oscar Fuentes, interpreter Daniel Gutiérrez, and Morganton police chief Robby Williams

Former Case Farms union leader Nacho Montes in Valdese, North Carolina

National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice mobilizes outside support for Case Farms workers

Case Farms–LIUNA hunger strikers Beto Gonzalez and Félix Rodríguez

Tránsita Gutiérrez Solís Lux and daughter Ixchel in Morganton

Marimba players at graduation ceremony for leadership training class at Morganton’s Consejo Maya

New home construction based on Yankee remission dollars under way in Aguacatán

New morral showing emigrant influence on native Aguacatán crafts

Union organization across borders—as measured on the back of a T-shirt in Aguacatán

Chalchiteko community protest meeting

Political poster for Aguacatán mayoral candidate Pablo Escobar Méndez hanging on Morganton living room wall of Víctor Hernández

Bacilio Castro in his Western North Carolina Workers’ Center office

The Burke County Confederate Monument, in front of the county courthouse in Morganton

Morganton mayor Ronnie Thompson in his Valdese, North Carolina, insurance office

New Hispanic businesses and a church in Morganton

Immigrant working-class housing, old and new

The Opportunity Threads production floor

Homecoming queen Ashley Vicente with her sister Kimberly

The Industrial Commons (TIC), a former furniture warehouse repurposed as a mixed-manufacturing facility

Sara Chester and Molly Hemstreet, TIC co–executive directors

Sharley Mendoza, TIC director of operations

Doña Francisca, Francisca Mendez Rodriguez, weaving outside her Morganton home

Christian and Erica Ramazzini and their children at the Little Guatemala coffee shop

PREFACE TO THE REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION

THE NEW MILLENNIUM did not start well for the Maya of Morganton. That’s at least the sober note on which the first edition of this book concluded. Several hundred workers and their families, overwhelmingly Guatemalans of Mayan background, at the Case Farms poultry plant in this old Piedmont industrial town in North Carolina had put up a valiant fight. Twice striking for union representation, higher wages, and basic dignity on the job (including the right to bathroom breaks), their decade-long efforts had been continually defied by a company and an industry notable for hard-nosed resistance to any challenge to its managerial authority. Even victory in an official National Labor Relations Board recognition election, followed by another year’s legal mandate to bargain in good faith, had failed to extract a viable contract offer in a state that competed with its South Carolina neighbor for the distinction of least unionized state in the country. Mass meetings, a hunger strike, and even several arrests did not move the needle. Frustrated, and without any other base in town, the organizers from the Laborers’ International Union finally pulled up stakes in 2001, leaving behind only a monetary subsidy for the Western North Carolina Workers’ Center (WNCWC), a more skeletal group advocating for workers’ rights.¹ Only serious reforms of both federal labor law and immigration policy, I concluded then, could give working people like those struggling at Case Farms the opportunity they needed to stand up to their employers and offer hopes for the larger community’s future. The welfare of new immigrant labor forces will likely tell us as much about our own dreams as about theirs, was the plea on which the book ended.

Despite its downbeat finale, however, the book was also a celebration of community making under duress. In multiple visits to Morganton and, with vital assistance from then-PhD student Alvis Dunn, to the home villages of the Mayan workforce, I was struck by both the tenacity and ingenuity of these immigrant laborers and would-be American citizens.² Communication among the working-class families (and especially the women) initially conducted entirely in Mayan languages gradually moved to Spanish (partly to mix with more veteran Mexican transplants) and then, slowly, by the next generation, to English. Overall, the new transplants seemed a uniquely resilient lot. They had survived a brutal civil war, grinding poverty, and the rigors of a transcontinental trip across hostile borders in both Mexico and the United States, ultimately to lay down new roots in Morganton. They took jobs, joined churches, and sent their kids to school, all while maintaining contact with—and sending remittance payments to—family members back home. Exemplifying the resiliency of transnational ties, one of the largest sender communities, in the onion-and-garlic-growing valley of Aguacatán, established a tight-knit committee, or directiva, to send the bodies of the migrant deceased (including those who succumbed midjourney) back to Guatemala for burial. The directiva leaders, including laborer Paulino Lopez, son Felipe, and nephew José Samuel Solís Lopez, as we learned, proved mainstays not only of the transplanted Aguacatecan community but of the incipient union movement.³ The efforts to build a worker community in Morganton also became concerted attempts to keep older cultural ties alive. Choral groups at the Catholic church, for example, were initially organized according to distinct Mayan language groups, and a few pan-Mayan activists like Justo Lux and his wife Transita Gutierrez Solís organized leadership-training sessions while also exploring connections to a rising transnational Indigenous peoples’ movement.

Both the workplace movement and Mayan community-building project, moreover, had been advanced not only by exceptional individuals within the community but also by a series of key allies. Among the latter were the local Mexican American labor activist Juan Ignacio Nacho Montes, Father Ken Whittington at St. Charles Catholic Church, Legal Aid attorney Phyllis Palmieri, and a young local couple, Francisco Risso (of Chilean émigré parents) and Duke University graduate Molly Hemstreet, who together hosted a Catholic Worker home before actively aligning themselves with the Case Farms union and later served as organizers of the Western North Carolina Workers’ Center. Together the center and its dedicated allies had provided a beleaguered but tangible corridor of comfort and solidarity within the host society.

Having professionally decamped from North Carolina to Chicago in the fall of 2000, I found that my intermittent attempts to keep up with the book’s subjects were slowed not only by the practical challenges of communication at a distance but also by a sense that the main plotline I had charted had come to an unhappy end. And alas, for the decade following the book’s publication, the news generally bore out my pessimism and cut against the hopes and dreams of the labor and community activists, both native and foreign-born, who had set down roots in the Morganton region.

History, however, rarely follows a predictable script. Checking back in on Morganton after a long break occasioned by my retirement from teaching and my move to Washington, D.C., and then by sharply curtailed travel during the COVID-19 pandemic, I discovered a new perspective on the place. In late summer 2022, a report from my daughter Anna (who had also contributed to research in the original project) alerted me to news about an expanded local cooperative initiative, which drew me back to Morganton for the beginning of a series of interviews and visits. My reflections on what changed for the Maya of Morganton and their allies in the intervening years forms the basis of the new, and in many ways surprising, final chapter.

Neither the sting of organized labor’s defeat nor continued immigrant marginalization were the dominant impressions from my renewed visits. Rather than discouragement and defeat, what I found most salient was a spirit of hope, confidence, and new possibilities. People are innovating on myriad paths to improve their lives in incremental ways. Among the disparate roots of this sense of renewal was an economic experiment conducted on radically different lines from the union campaign, albeit with some strong crossover of individuals and progressive political will. In addition, I encountered a far-flung church-based community—both Catholic and evangelical Protestant—determined to surround individual families with the succor of faith and helping services. Add to this, finally, the energetic, if more anarchic, trajectories of a new generation of Guatemalan American youth. In short, in the absence of transformational, systemic change, the Maya of Morganton were not only persevering but advancing along an arc, however slow and often interrupted, of socioeconomic progress.

One impression dawned on me early in this renewed encounter. This was not the same community of new arrivals I had encountered in the 1990s. Rather, the variety of jobs, businesses, homes, and schools defining the trajectories of the Guatemalans suggested the opposite of the legendary, mobile birds of passage caught between two worlds. This was a still-young, maturing, and increasingly very American immigrant community. The impression turns out to be borne out by statistics. The community had experienced steady but modest growth, reaching an estimated 3,200 people, or nearly 20 percent of the Morganton city population, in 2020.⁴ As telling as the absolute numbers, however, was an indication from the 2020 census of the relative stability of the Guatemalan population in Morganton over the previous two decades. Of 1,024 people identified by their Guatemalan birth, fully 85 percent had arrived in town at least ten years earlier.⁵ The émigrés, in short, had had time to make a life for themselves. But what kind of lives had they lived? And with what intentions, ideals, and challenges? Together, those questions demanded an updated picture of the Maya of Morganton.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS PROJECT DREW SUPPORT from numerous quarters. My entry to the people and events unfolding in Morganton was facilitated from the beginning by the cooperation of attorney Phyllis Palmieri and Rev. Kenneth J. Whittington. Father Whittington’s St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church became my main base of interviewing—and refreshment—across several years of research.

To make the connection to the Case Farms workers, I needed not only to strengthen my fledgling Spanish—which serendipitously I had been casually augmenting over the previous few years—but also to travel to Guatemala to learn more about the lives of the emigrants. My most important early acquisition was Alvis E. Dunn for his stellar research assistance. Alvis, whose own academic specialty is colonial Guatemalan history, effectively served as my cultural interpreter across four summer stints of joint research and travel in the villages of Huehuetenango as well as helping me ease my way into Spanish-language interviews in Morganton. For my travels to Guatemala, I benefited from several generous conduits at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC–Chapel Hill): a Department of Education Title VI Faculty Research Award from the University Center for International Studies, a faculty research stipend from the Institute for Research in Social Science, a summer research award from the Institute of Latin American Studies, and a small grant from the University Research Council. My entrée to Guatemala was considerably enriched by study at the Proyecto Lingüístico Quetzalteco, a wonderful language school and social center in Quetzaltenango. In 1998–99 a Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History fellowship at Harvard University provided valuable writing time, as did a research and study leave proffered by department chair Peter Coclanis at UNC–Chapel Hill. A UNC–Chapel Hill freshman seminar course on Mayan history, History 06J Five Hundred Years without Solitude, also helped me refine my ideas. As I gathered my research materials, the staff and resources at UNC’s Davis Library once again continued its standing as my favorite place on campus. Once I moved to Chicago (fall 2000), the Newberry Library proved the perfect place to finish my writing.

Besides Alvis—who was completing his doctorate when I first connected with him—I benefited from student research assistance both in North Carolina (Gregory Kaliss, David Sartorius, Anna Fink) and in Guatemala (Amy Morris, Anna Fink). For summary transcriptions of my interviews, I am indebted to the Robert Conrad Fund of the Southern Oral History Program at UNC–Chapel Hill, directed by Jacquelyn Hall. I had the benefit of excellent transcriber-interpreters in Kristofer Ray, Mariola Espinosa, Elizabeth Pauk, and Anna Fink.

Along the path of this work, I have turned to several others—that is, besides the one hundred–odd enumerated interviewees and many published authorities cited in the book—for crucial bits of information and insight. On North Carolina and southern matters, I especially thank Michael Okun, John Inscoe, Gary Mormino, and Peter Coclanis. On Guatemalan, Latin American, and immigration issues, I am particularly indebted to the intellectual generosity of Paul Hans Kobrak, James Loucky, Marion Traub-Werner, Bruce Calder, Gilbert M. Joseph, Mae Ngai, Christopher Boyer, June Erlick, and Dorrie Budet. As a ready reference on contemporary labor issues, I also thank Nelson Lichtenstein.

As the manuscript gradually took shape, I received encouragement and helpful criticism from audiences and panels at meetings of the Organization of American Historians, Oral History Association, Missouri Valley History Conference, North American Labor History Conference, Newberry Library Labor History Seminar, and Chicago Historical Society Urban History Seminar. Both Margaret Rose and Miriam Cohen offered useful comments at an early conference presentation. At a more pointed and exacting level, a few friends and colleagues labored over all or parts of the manuscript: for this, I owe John French, Bruce Calder, and Julie Greene big-time. In addition, Rosa Tock checked the manuscript for Guatemalan misspellings, and Ray Brod created a rough draft of the map. In preparing the final draft for publication—whether checking the consistency of references or weeding out double negatives and other infelicitous expressions—I enjoyed invaluable editorial assistance from Stevie Champion. I also pay tribute to Paula Wald and David Perry for their encouragement and editorial support.

I always have been lucky to count on Susan Levine as first and last reader on my manuscripts. This time, she also put up most graciously with my frequent journeys to western North Carolina and beyond. As suggested more than once above, the family contribution was augmented by our daughter Anna’s linguistic skills and general knowledge of the world of immigrant workers, for which I am both proud and grateful. Even as the efforts of all those listed above have improved the manuscript enormously, the blame for errors that remain is mine alone.

Acknowledgments for the Revised and Expanded Edition

This is the second time in my career as a historian that I have depended on both the intelligence and cooperation of the people of Morganton, North Carolina, and again I have been most handsomely rewarded. My debt to many sources is evident in the footnotes, but I want to single out Father Ken Whittington and Bacilio Castro for keeping me posted through intermittent visits and many telephone calls since publication of the original edition. Then too, Molly Hemstreet, Kathryn Ervin, and the entire team at The Industrial Commons and TOSS proved most gracious and forthcoming hosts in making this second research exploration worthwhile.

I am most grateful to UNC Press and editors Debbie Gershenowitz, Alexis Dumain, and Erin Granville for encouraging my return engagement with the Maya of Morganton and surrounding me with all the technical and intellectual expertise of a first-class university press. Throughout the period of this renewed effort, I have been fortunate to rely on the resources of Georgetown University, particularly the outstanding staff at Lauinger Library and the political as well as intellectual sustenance of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

When it came to framing new questions for the transplanted Guatemalan community, I benefited from serious discussion with my old research partner Alvis Dunn. For vital background information on Morganton’s educational and health-care institutions, I thank Adriana Morris, Lannie Simpson, and Danny Scalise, and for general bonhomie, Robert Gage. Comments on an early draft of the manuscript by historians Julie Weise and David Sartorius steered me in needed amplification and redirection. Finally, for general encouragement and harsh but necessary literary correction, I threw myself on the tender mercies of my loving wife, Susan Levine.

ABBREVIATIONS

ACTWU Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union AFL-CIO American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations CEH Historical Clarification Commission CFCTF Case Farms Contract Task Force EGP Guerrilla Army of the Poor ESL English as a Second Language FMCN Martí National Liberation Front FRG Frente Republicano Guatemalteco FUNCEDE Fundación Centroamericana de Desarrollo IIRIRA Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act INS Immigration and Naturalization Service IRCA Immigration Reform and Control Act IUF International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco, and Allied Workers Associations KFC Kentucky Fried Chicken LIUNA Laborers’ International Union of North America NICWJ National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice NLRB National Labor Relations Board OSHA Occupational Safety and Health Administration PAC Civil Self-Defense Patrol PAN National Advance Party REMHI Recuperation of Historical Memory (Catholic Church of Guatemala) RUIDA La Raza Unida Indigena de America SEIU Service Employees International Union UFCW United Food and Commercial Workers UNC–Chapel Hill University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill UNITE Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees US/GLEP U.S./Guatemala Labor Education Project

THE MAYA OF MORGANTON

INTRODUCTION

IT WAS SOMETIME IN EARLY SPRING 1997 when I first heard about a labor conflict in Morganton, North Carolina, a usually quiet industrial center of sixteen thousand people perched at the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains. I would soon learn that this was no isolated incident or temporary labor relations breakdown that I had stumbled upon but a decade-long war of position between determined and well-organized workers on the one hand and a classically recalcitrant employer on the other. It began with an overnight walkout in 1991, erupting into a mass work stoppage and multiple arrests in May 1993 and climaxing in a four-day strike and successful union election campaign in 1995. Confronting the company with a weeklong walkout and hunger strike in 1996 and subsequently standing firm for six years in the face of the company’s absolute refusal to sign a collective bargaining contract, the workers at Case Farms poultry plant etched a profile of uncommon (if still frustrated) courage in demanding a voice and degree of respect at the workplace.

From the start of my inquiries, news from the Case Farms battle posed a threefold fascination for a North American labor historian living (until the fall of 2000) three hours from Morganton by car in the university town of Chapel Hill. First, the events in Morganton were remarkable enough in themselves. For over twenty years I had watched organized labor virtually disappear off the map in North Carolina, losing battle after battle in campaigns among textile, furniture, and meat-processing workers. Indeed, when I had arrived in Chapel Hill in 1977 as the university’s first designated labor historian, one joke went that only a Fink could get such a job at a southern school. I laughed but did think twice when I discovered that my closest labor history colleague was Gary Fink at Georgia State University! Throughout my tenure at UNC, the state was locked in a seesaw battle with its South Carolina neighbor for the dubious honor of being the least unionized state in the country, a country that as a whole was experiencing a severe slippage of union representation in the private-sector workforce. What is more, the food-processing industry—especially meat products, of which poultry was a part—had earned a reputation as the most determined of union foes. In meatpacking, for example, where a set of new-breed packers based on corporate mergers and buyouts set the pace, both unionization and wages had fallen by half in the 1980s alone.¹

But there were two additional reasons to be intrigued by the Morganton story. The five-hundred-person Case Farms plant, estimated in 1995 as 80 percent Spanish-speaking—of whom 80 to 90 percent were Guatemalan and the rest Mexican—highlighted a demographic transformation of the U.S. labor force, nowhere more startling than in what one commentator has called the "nuevo New South" and, within the region, nowhere more so than in North Carolina, where the growth of the Hispanic population reached a whopping 394 percent in the decade 1990–2000.² Even more remarkably, the fact that the Guatemalans were nearly all Highland Maya—people who trace their bloodline and their languages back to the ancient corn people—suggested a most dramatic confrontation between what Joseph Schumpeter called the creative destruction of market capitalism and the social organization of one of the hemisphere’s oldest cultures. How was it, then, that in a state with not a single organized chicken-processing factory, a group of Central American refugees bucked the tide of history? Who were these people, where did they come from, and why did they act the way they did? Were they crazy and disoriented or did they know something about social struggles of which others were ignorant? In thinking about the uphill task that the immigrant poultry workers had assumed, I could not help but remember the comment reportedly uttered by slave rebel Nat Turner before his execution: Was not Christ crucified?

Guatemalan migration to Morganton, North Carolina

These are the issues I have sought to address in the following pages. In doing so, I have inevitably encountered other questions that have drawn my attention. Apart from the labor struggle itself, the perception and reception of the modern-day Maya in North Carolina became a crucial part of my story. How did an established community of whites and Blacks react to the new émigrés? Who were the workers’ local allies? And how did the union that came to represent them—the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA)—fit the Morganton revolt into its own organizational strategies? A final arena of concern focuses on the nature of cultural adjustment among the new migrant workers. With what capacity and vision but also at what cost did the Guatemalan Maya transplant themselves to a new North American setting? How did the act of migration and, for some, permanent immigration affect their community’s welfare, both in the United States and back home in Guatemala?

The story of the Maya in Morganton effectively joins one of the newest buzzwords of social science, globalization, with one of the oldest, community. Juxtaposing the two concepts, in fact, permits us to cover a great deal of interpretive ground. The entry of Guatemalan war refugees and later those we might well consider economic refugees into the poultry plants of North Carolina reflects the increasing fluidity of both world investments and labor markets. In ways that recall the experience of their nineteenth-century immigrant predecessors, the émigré Mayan workers use community at once to defend themselves against employer exploitation and to advance the interests of family and friends across international borders. These new immigrant carriers of a rural, communal culture may indeed offer instructive lessons to a more metropolitan labor movement in the United States. Even as contemporary sociologists inveigh against the decline of a broad-based civic culture in today’s consumer society, more and more of the hard work of the country is actually in the hands of people with a quite sturdy family and community structure—if little else. The combination of group ties and the necessity of relying on those ties in an alien environment creates an opening for worker mobilization. This is not to deny the obstacles that confront today’s bottom-rung labor force. Both modern-day power and money are stacked against them as never before. Nor is it to suggest that members of the Mayan diaspora are not themselves undergoing profound cultural displacement and acting in ways different from their revered ancestors. All of the above are true. The very richness of the mix, however, creates one of the more dramatic trials of the human spirit provoked by the faceless forces of globalization. This book is one testimony to those trials.

Mixing narrative with commentary, each chapter of the book is organized around a specific theme of its own. Chapter 1 (The Way It Is in Morganton) prepares us for the arrival of the Maya by concentrating on the previously settled population—whites, Blacks, and Hmong refugees—of the town. In the midst of fears and some resentment of the newcomers’ demands on local services, a progressive, church-based group of professionals offered a crucial welcome. Chapter 2 (Flight of the Happy Farmers) focuses on the initial Guatemalan migrants—Q’anjob’al-speaking Maya from the mountain villages of the northwestern province of Huehuetenango—framing the first worker protest at the poultry plant against a longer background of Guatemalan civil war, terror, and escape. Even as a climate of coercion in Guatemala and the bias of U.S. immigration policy shrouded effective identification of the immigrants’ past political experience, a hint of transnational peasant wisdom in dealing with authority emerged among the raw factory recruits. Chapter 3 (How the Dead Helped to Organize the Living) looks behind the pivotal strike of 1995 to the wellsprings of solidarity among the single largest group of Case Farms workers—Awakatekos and Chalchitekos from the commercial agricultural valley of Aguacatán. An exploration of selective, family-level migration strategies reveals both the source of communal solidarity across borders and new grounds for divisions among a conflict-ridden people. Chapter 4 (No One Leader) examines the process of local union building with emphasis on the fragility of leadership. The alliance between a Salvadoran woman union organizer with young male workers from both Guatemala and Mexico survived continuous challenges from without and within. Chapter 5 (The Workers Are Ready) sets the Morganton union struggle within a context of national labor and political forces attempting to jump-start a larger workers’ movement for social justice. In particular, the Laborers union, fresh from federal indictment for corruption, tried to save its soul as well as its economic welfare by backing an exotic underdog.

By way of conclusion, the book takes two different analytic approaches. Chapter 6 (Changing Places) steps back from the workplace to inquire into the individual struggles of adaptation and identity among the global laborers and their families. Three different patterns of migration—birds of passage, assimilation, and transnational citizenship—it is argued, mix uneasily within the contemporary global marketplace. Chapter 7 (Sticking Together) connects the Morganton union story at once to prior immigrant history and to contemporary struggles for solidarity at both ends of the global migrant stream. Remarkably, and perhaps counterintuitively, we watch as migrant Mayan workers in the United States grope for a broader solidarity, while potentially fratricidal conflicts over identity politics and interethnic rivalries threaten their home communities.

Here, then, is the common thread of The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South. To understand the motives and behavior of Third World workers—either on their home turf or as immigrant recruits to more developed metropoles—we need to fit them into a global political economy of competitive markets, changing technology, and a managerial logic of labor control. Yet, we must also recognize them as agents who continue to draw on local wisdom in advancing the interests of family, friendships, and community even in a faraway land.

Finally, I would like to add a brief word on the oral history sources for this work. Unlike studies in sociology, anthropology, or other social sciences, this book, as the reader will immediately notice, identifies its subjects by their real names. This is, in part, a disciplinary distinction. History generally takes the individual as its primary unit of analysis and insists that individuals, in their very peculiarity, count. It is all the more important, then, that those who—like immigrant poultry workers—have heretofore been left out of public awareness as well as the scholarly record should make their properly identified mark.

Yet, I am not ignorant of the special risks involved in writing about today’s new immigrant workforce. No doubt, Case Farms—like virtually every other low-wage manufacturing firm across the country—employs a significant number of illegal (i.e., undocumented or improperly documented) workers. But when I raised the issue of confidentiality with workers themselves, they regularly waved it off. Many with whom I talked arrived in the United States early enough to apply for naturalization. In a few instances, they told me that they had given me their Case Farms name, not their given name, and I investigated no further.³ Moreover, the overwhelming majority of those consulted for the book no longer work at Case Farms and in some cases are no longer in the country. I received explicit permission to quote all those cited in the text. For anyone who hesitated, I offered the option of anonymity or off-the-record comments. As it happened, the only respondents who took up either of these options were former company executives or their legal counsel.

Chapter 1

THE WAY IT IS IN MORGANTON

LIKE MANY ASPIRING SOUTHERN TOWNS, Morganton, North Carolina, offers a contradictory impression to the inquiring outsider. In one reflection, it turns the face of tradition and familiarity toward an otherwise anomic and ever-changing world. In the early 1970s, for example, a refugee from New England arrived in North Carolina with her law school–teaching husband and soon set to writing about a town with a heart, a people who reflect an inner happiness. An unparalleled shift in population is under way in America, declared Marion Lieberman in a regular column, Morganton on My Mind, published in the local weekly News Herald. Like herself, she believed, many are coming back to—or discovering for the first time—the serenity and comfort of a small town.¹ And, no doubt, to an erstwhile city dweller, there is a distinct folksiness to social relations in Morganton. It is still a place where, during the summer’s heat, one can find a few older white folk gathered under a shade tree with fans, happy to treat a visitor to a lemonade and an unhurried discussion of events hither and yon. There is talk of a friend working in the nearby village, Glen Alpine, they call Glenpin; of the dangers of air-conditioning as a cause of pneumonia and an irritant to arthuritis; of the recent Fourth of July celebrated with a big kadoo uptown; and of a new local professional rasslin’ hall featuring a bunch of boys from Burke County. The down-home hospitality of the community extends to its religious institutions: on the outskirts of town, for instance, local Methodists invite passersby to join the perfect church for those who aren’t.

Yet, it is not so much old country charm but modern, urban innovation that one senses in the gleaming steeples and glistening mansions of Union Street, which initially bisects the town east and west and ultimately leads past shopping malls and a municipal greenway. With good reason, Morganton prefers to see itself as a dynamic, progressive community that has repeatedly embraced economic and social changes invading what was once an agricultural village nestled in the Catawba River Valley at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Named after Revolutionary War hero Daniel Morgan, who led a combination of regular troops and local militia to a stunning victory at the Battle of Cowpens, the town, the oldest settlement in the western part of the state, was commissioned in 1784 as the seat of Burke County. In the course of its history, Morganton was a stopping-off point for legendary frontiersmen Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett as well as the birthplace of its most famous latter-day representative, Watergate inquisitor Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr. Economically, the area initially served as both a transportation and a commercial gateway connecting the plantation South to new western markets. That enslaved people should compose more than a quarter of the Burke County population in 1860 testified to the wealth and influence of a coterie of leading local families.² By the late nineteenth century, agriculture was joined by industry, as the lumbering trade, furniture factories, and to a lesser extent textile mills increasingly absorbed the local labor force. Drexel Furniture, for example, destined to become a state and national industry leader, got its start in Morganton in 1903.

The biggest spur to economic development, however, did not arrive until after World War II with the construction in 1960–61 of an Interstate 40 link across Burke County. A local Chamber of Commerce report boasted in 1964 that since 1960, twelve new industries located in Morganton or within its environs. Included among the new, humming enterprises of that decade were several furniture firms, a shoe company, a fish hatchery, a knitting mill, a machine tool operation, and Breeden’s Poultry and Egg, Inc., which later became Case Farms. Altogether, local industry boomed in the postwar period; as late as 1995 about 47 percent of the Burke County labor force was engaged in manufacturing. Aside from industry, the local economy depended on government workers (more than in any other city outside the state capital in Raleigh) centered in the psychiatric Broughton Hospital, established in 1882 as the Western North Carolina Insane Asylum; the Western Carolina Center, which has served since 1963 as a research and diagnostic center for the severely mentally disabled; the state school for the deaf, established in 1894; Western Piedmont Community College, established in 1968; and the Western Correctional Center, a model state prison that promised private rooms for each inmate (or resident) when it opened in 1972.³

Although in the Civil War Morganton had paid dearly for its adherence to the Lost Cause—the town was ransacked by Union general George Stoneman’s raiders in 1865—local leaders (including several descendants of the older slaveholding elite) proved more nimble in dealing with latter-day race relations. Thanks to the uncommonly large local public sector, African Americans in Morganton gained access to steadier and higher-paying jobs than were commonly available elsewhere. Prior planning by local church and political leaders—including Senator Ervin’s daughter-in-law,