The Maya of Morganton

302 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 39 halftones, 1 map, notes, index

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-8211-2
Published: October 2024
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8078-5447-1
Published: April 2003
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-0-8078-6241-4
Published: November 2003
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-7687-4
Published: November 2003

Paperback Available October 2024, but pre-order your copy today!

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In 2003, Leon Fink published his oral history of Guatemalan and Mexican migrants in Morganton, North Carolina, and their fight for unionization in a poultry processing plant. In the following years, Fink remained in touch with many of the people he profiled in the book, and in 2022 he returned to Morganton to interview them and talk with their children, new migrants in the area, and community leaders, particularly women. Their conversations covered a wide range of topics, including labor struggles and victories, grassroots and electoral political organizing, social activism (especially on issues affecting undocumented migrants), class mobility for second-generation migrants, and new cooperative worker-owned institutions, including a bookstore, a textile factory, and a preschool.

This revised and expanded edition of The Maya of Morganton reveals what Fink found on his return to Morganton, documenting two decades of continuity and change in a new preface and chapter. Together, the new and original material present a comprehensive yet intimate examination of the migrant experience in western North Carolina.

About the Author

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.
For more information about Leon Fink, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"This updated edition of The Maya of Morganton is a gift to anyone who cares about one of the great human dramas of our times: the uprooting of Third World people by the twin forces of violence and global capitalism. Drawing on intimate interviews conducted in the Highlands of Guatemala and in a small town in the North Carolina foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Fink documents an unlikely, decade-long struggle for workers’ rights. In so doing, he drives home the courage and ingenuity of emigrants who, against the odds, built new, close-knit transnational communities in the US. Two decades later he does something that historians almost never do. He revisits the site of this struggle, which ended on a downward arc, only to discover an ongoing and even more nuanced and inspiring story of solidarity, organizing, and human striving. Bravo to one of the best labor historians of his generation."

— Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, author of Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America

"A dream project that is as valuable as it is timely: the question of how to best seek justice for immigrant workers (and what 'justice' even looks like) is more relevant now than ever."

—Julie M. Weise, author of Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910

"The Maya of Morganton is one of the books that I most consistently recommend to students, colleagues, and friends. It tells a story about migration, capitalism, and activism that continues to matter today—urgently so. This new edition returns us to Morganton twenty years later and puts into relief how influential Fink's book has been." —David Sartorius, editor of Social Text