Labor from Brazil to Canada

Labor Day may be the symbolic end of summer, but it's also a time to reflect on the contributions that workers, laborers, and unions have made to the social and economic well-being of the communities in which they work. Below are books from our backlist that tell the stories of workers from Latin America to Canada and everywhere in between. Happy Labor Day!

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From the Mines to the Streets

A Bolivian Activist's Life

By Benjamin Kohl and Linda C. Farthing, with Félix Muruchi
with Félix Muruchi

An extraordinary portrait of Bolivia's turbulent rise from military rule during the last half century, told through the eyes of a miner, union activist, and political prisoner.

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The Chicano Worker

By Vernon M. Briggs, Jr., Walter Fogel, and Fred H. Schmidt

The Chicano Worker is an incisive analysis of the labor-market experiences of Mexican American workers in the late twentieth century.

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The Informal and Underground Economy of the South Texas Border

By Chad Richardson and Michael J. Pisani

This first comprehensive, multidisciplinary, longitudinal study of the “off-the-books” economic systems that fuel the Laredo-to-Brownsville corridor examines the complex repercussions of these legal and illegal forms of border commerce.

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Organized Agriculture and the Labor Movement before the UFW
Puerto Rico, Hawaii, California

By Dionicio Nodín Valdés

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This pioneering comparative study investigates how agricultural workers in Puerto Rico, Hawai'i, and California struggled to organize and create a place for themselves in the institutional life of the United States.

Mexican Women in American Factories

Free Trade and Exploitation on the Border

By Carolyn Tuttle

Drawing on a rich data set of interviews with over 600 women maquila workers, this pathfinding book offers the first rigorous economic and sociological analysis of the impact of NAFTA and its implications for free trade around the world.

Tomorrow We're All Going to the Harvest

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Temporary Foreign Worker Programs and Neoliberal Political Economy

By Leigh Binford

This exceptional study examines the experience of Mexican workers in the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), widely considered a model program by the World Bank and other international institutions despite the significant violations of labor and human rights inherent in the terms of employment.

Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950

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Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists

By Gerald Horne

This engrossing book probes the motives and actions of all the players to reveal the full story of the Conference of Studio Unions strike and the resulting lockout of 1946.

Walking the Forest with Chico Mendes

Struggle for Justice in the Amazon

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By Gomercindo Rodrigues
Edited and translated by Linda Rabben

The inspiring story of courageous labor and environmental activist Chico Mendes, who led Brazil’s rubber tappers until his assassination in 1988.

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Apple Pie and Enchiladas

Latino Newcomers in the Rural Midwest

By Ann V. Millard and Jorge Chapa

The authors look at how Latinos fit into an already fractured social landscape with tensions among townspeople, farmers, and others.

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Labor Day recipes to complete your BBQ odyssey

Labor Day weekend isn’t the last weekend Americans barbecue meat outdoors, but it can certainly feel like the ‘last hurrah’ of summer. For this final installment of the Barbecue Crossroads road trip map, we follow the work of James Beard Award-winning author Robb Walsh and acclaimed documentary photographer O. Rufus Lovett on the final leg of their seven state barbecue pilgrimage. In Barbecue Crossroads, they profile the history, diverse approaches, and the people behind American barbecue businesses and traditions from Texas to the Carolinas. You can recreate their journey with the Google map below, but if you’ll be barbecuing this weekend to celebrate Labor Day (and the first weekend of college football!) you’ll also want to take note of the recipes.

Continuing from our previous installment across Tennesse and Alabama, we pick up Walsh and Lovett’s journey in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and head east and north to South Carolina and North Carolina. Disclaimer: The route linked below maps the odyssey Robb and Rufus traveled in the process of writing Barbecue Crossroads. To get the most out of this journey, we recommend buying and reading the book in full before embarking. Enjoy!

Access the Google map here: http://goo.gl/maps/U0IU0

From the book:

At around five in the afternoon, Rufus and I pulled up to Scott’s Variety in Hemingway, South Carolina, a rural convenience store that sells barbecue. On the front porch were containers of okra and rows of watermelons. A sign advertised fresh field peas by the pint or quart—the peas were kept in the cooler inside, along with the Pepsi. In the winter, bushels of sweet potatoes and huge heads of freshly harvested cabbage are available. 

Rufus and I wanted to look around and buy some barbecue for dinner and then come back before dawn to watch the whole hogs being cooked. The shelves were stocked with Sunbeam King Thin White Bread and staples like Dixie Crystals sugar. According to the hand-lettered sign over Scott’s kitchen window, the store will cook your hog for $110. You can buy a medium-sized barbecued whole hog for $400—half a medium hog is $200. That’s quite a bargain—depending on the size of the hog, it comes out to somewhere between $2.65 and $3 a pound. Barbecue sauce is $22 a gallon.

“Who buys a whole hog?” I asked the young pitmaster, Rodney Scott, when he came inside the store.

“Tailgaters buy them on Saturday mornings during football season,” he told me. “They pull up and load a pig on the back of their pickup truck on the way to the game so they can say to their buddies, ‘Look what I’ve been doing all night!’”