American Guestworkers

Introduction: In the State with the Prettiest Name

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pp. 3-28

Florida’s historians agree that Henry Flagler, John D. Rockefeller’s partner in Standard Oil, pioneered economic development all along the state’s east coast. His late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century construction projects and investments in agriculture converted swampy, tangled jungles of palmetto and cabbage palm into first inhabitable and later highly desirable...

1. Alleged Shortages at Home, Certain Surpluses Abroad: North American Temporary Worker Programs

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pp. 29-44

At an international migration conference in Vienna, Austria, in September 2003, one of the plenary sessions, devoted to the tensions between national identity and immigration, addressed the difficulties that governments experience when integrating immigrants during periods of intense nationalism. The panelists (all but one were white men) gave as examples the...

2. Occupations Abandoned, Workers Displaced: Seasonal Labor Before and After H-2

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pp. 45-76

With few exceptions, the labor markets that foreign workers have come to dominate once attracted domestic workers. Thus nearly every instance of an agricultural harvest or a production line where H- 2 workers work is a story of changing labor relations. Someone either left or reduced his commitment to these jobs, willingly or unwillingly, before guestworkers arrived....

3. From Beauty to Truth

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pp. 79-100

In central Jamaica, near the lip of the Yankee Valley, through a small opening in the bush, a well-worn footpath dips to a narrow creek and climbs up the opposite bank to a gravel road. The creek winds through fields of yams, red beans, and potatoes and a tropical understory of large, leafy rootcrops like cassava and dashien before emptying into the Yankee River. It...

4. Aspects of the Machete

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pp. 101-122

Women weren’t the only recipients of foreign earnings who had trouble investing them in ways that might have improved rather than reproduced their impoverished conditions. Despite the male bias of agricultural extension in central Jamaica, men returning from the United States in the 1980s, prior to the end of the sugar program, were faced with several barriers to...

5. Guests as Hosts: Jamaicans in the Tourist Industry

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pp. 123-150

According to the beautiful young desk clerk, Sonya, Black River’s Waterloo Guest House was the first establishment in Jamaica to receive electric light. Facing the Caribbean Sea across the main road entering town, on the island’s arid southern shore, the blue-gray guesthouse is a large two-story wooden structure owned by a woman named Mrs. Allen and surrounded...

Part III: Mexican Experiences, 1988–2003

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pp. 151-152

6. When Owls Die, Ellos Nos Hierieron

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pp. 153-178

People who write about guestworker programs are often invited to present research findings to audiences representing various backgrounds—mostly colleagues and students, of course, but guestworker programs also interest nongovernmental associations (NGOs), labor unions, government representatives, and employers and other businesspeople with vested interests...

7. Bodies on Hold: Gender and H-2

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pp. 179-198

A year before the season that Anna and her husband, Juan, were fired, Anna’s cousin Marta arrived in North Carolina three weeks pregnant. Marta wasn’t really Anna’s cousin but Juan’s nephew’s wife, though Anna referred to her as mi prima. Over the previous decade, Anna and Juan hadset themselves up as informal labor contractors for the thirty to forty H-2...