The Maya of Morganton

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.

"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