Case Study 2: Latino Communities in the Appalachian Poultry and Meatpacking Industry

The Arrival

In the early 1990s, the town of Morganton, North Carolina — a community of about 17,000 people in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, in Burke County — was a quiet, overwhelmingly white Appalachian town whose economy depended on furniture manufacturing and textiles. By 2020, more than 20 percent of Burke County's population was Hispanic or Latino, the town had a thriving network of Mexican and Guatemalan restaurants and grocery stores, and the local elementary schools were teaching students who spoke Spanish, Q'anjob'al (a Mayan language), and Hmong. The transformation was driven by a single industry: the Case Farms poultry processing plant.

Case Farms — and companies like it across the Appalachian region — needed workers for jobs that were among the most dangerous and least desirable in the American economy. Poultry processing involves standing for eight to twelve hours on a production line in a refrigerated plant, cutting, trimming, and deboning chickens at a rate of dozens per minute, using sharp knives in wet, slippery conditions. The injury rate in poultry processing is among the highest of any industry in the United States. Repetitive motion injuries, lacerations, respiratory problems from the ammonia and chlorine used in cleaning, and musculoskeletal disorders are endemic.

American-born workers increasingly refused these jobs — not because Americans are unwilling to work hard, but because the combination of danger, discomfort, and low wages made the jobs rational to refuse when other options existed. The companies needed a workforce that had fewer options, and they found it in Latin America.

The Recruitment Pipeline

The recruitment of Latino workers to Appalachian poultry and meatpacking plants was not spontaneous. It was systematic. Companies and their labor contractors established recruitment networks that extended into specific communities in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and other Central American countries. Workers who arrived at the plants and proved reliable would send word back to their home communities, and others would follow — a process called chain migration that echoes the patterns of earlier immigration to Appalachia described in Chapter 19.

The Guatemalan community in Morganton illustrates this pattern. The earliest Guatemalan workers at Case Farms came from a small number of villages in the department of Huehuetenango — indigenous Maya communities where subsistence agriculture could no longer support growing populations, and where the violence and displacement of Guatemala's civil war (1960-1996) had shattered the social fabric. Workers from these villages found jobs at Case Farms and sent money home. Their relatives followed. Within a decade, a community of several thousand Guatemalans — many of them indigenous Maya who spoke Q'anjob'al as their first language, Spanish as their second, and English as a distant third — had established itself in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The historian Leon Fink, in his book The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South (2003), documented this process in meticulous detail — tracing the connections between specific villages in Guatemala and specific poultry plants in North Carolina, and showing how the global economy linked one of the poorest regions of Central America to one of the poorest regions of the United States through the medium of cheap labor.

Working Conditions and Exploitation

The working conditions in the plants were brutal, and the vulnerability of the workforce — many of whom were undocumented — made exploitation easy and accountability difficult.

Workers reported being pressured to work through injuries. Line speeds — the rate at which the production line moved, determining how many chickens each worker had to process per minute — were set at levels that made injuries almost inevitable. Workers who complained were threatened with termination. Workers who were injured were sometimes denied workers' compensation benefits, either because their employers contested the claims or because the workers, afraid that filing a claim would expose their immigration status, did not file.

The companies benefited from a workforce that was simultaneously indispensable and disposable. The workers did the jobs that kept the plants running and the profits flowing. But because many of them lacked legal immigration status, they had no leverage to demand better conditions, higher wages, or basic workplace safety. The power imbalance was absolute — and it was structural, built into the immigration system that criminalized the workers' presence while tolerating the employers' dependence on their labor.

The parallels to the company towns described in Chapter 16 are striking. In the coalfields of 1910, immigrant workers — Italians, Hungarians, Poles — worked dangerous jobs for wages that were paid in scrip at company stores, in housing that the company could revoke at any time, under conditions that the workers had no power to change. In the poultry plants of 2010, immigrant workers — Guatemalans, Mexicans, Hondurans — worked dangerous jobs for wages that barely covered their rent, in housing that was often substandard and overpriced, under conditions that their immigration status prevented them from challenging. The industries were different. The power dynamics were the same.

Community Building

Despite the exploitation, the Latino communities that formed around the poultry and meatpacking plants built rich, complex community lives. They opened businesses — not just the restaurants and tiendas that were visible to the broader community, but also construction companies, landscaping services, cleaning businesses, and auto repair shops. They established churches — both Catholic parishes that incorporated Spanish-language services and evangelical Protestant congregations that conducted services entirely in Spanish. They formed soccer leagues, organized cultural festivals, and created mutual aid networks that helped newcomers navigate the challenges of life in an unfamiliar country.

The schools became the primary site of integration. The children of immigrant workers entered local schools, often with limited or no English, and the schools adapted — hiring bilingual aides, establishing ESL (English as a Second Language) programs, and developing curricula that acknowledged the presence of students from radically different cultural backgrounds. The adaptation was not always smooth. Some parents and community members resented the resources devoted to immigrant children. Some teachers were overwhelmed by the challenge of teaching students who spoke languages they could not understand. But the schools, more than any other institution, became the place where the new and old communities met, interacted, and, slowly, began to build a shared identity.

The children themselves — the 1.5 generation (born in Latin America but raised in the United States) and the second generation (born in the United States to immigrant parents) — occupied a liminal space between cultures. They spoke English at school and Spanish (or Q'anjob'al or Hmong) at home. They ate hot dogs at school lunch and tortillas at dinner. They watched American television and listened to their grandparents' stories about villages in Guatemala. They were, by any meaningful definition, Appalachian — raised in the mountains, educated in mountain schools, shaped by mountain landscapes and mountain communities. But they were also Guatemalan, Mexican, Honduran — connected to distant places and cultures that remained vivid in their families' lives.

The Labor Movement

In a remarkable echo of the coalfield labor history described in Chapters 17 and 19, the Latino workers at Case Farms organized.

In 1995 and again in 2000, workers at the Morganton plant — led by Guatemalan Maya workers who drew on their own traditions of communal organizing — went on strike to demand better wages, safer working conditions, and an end to the practice of firing workers who complained about injuries. The strikes were not large by the standards of the mine wars of the 1920s (see Chapter 17), but they were courageous, given the vulnerability of the workers involved. Undocumented workers who went on strike risked not only termination but deportation.

The Laborers' International Union of North America (LIUNA) and later the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) attempted to organize the plants, and the workers voted for union representation. But the companies resisted — using the same tactics of delay, intimidation, and legal maneuvering that the coal companies had used against the UMWA a century earlier. Case Farms fought the union election results for years, and the workers who had voted for representation never received a contract.

The labor scholar Leon Fink documented these struggles in detail, showing how the Guatemalan Maya workers brought their own organizing traditions — traditions of communal decision-making and collective action rooted in indigenous governance structures — to the American workplace. The workers were not passive victims of exploitation. They were agents of their own liberation, drawing on cultural resources that the companies and their lawyers did not understand and could not easily suppress.

The Broader Pattern

The story of Latino immigration to Appalachian meatpacking communities is not unique to Morganton or to North Carolina. Similar patterns have unfolded across the region — in Harrisonburg, Virginia; Chattanooga, Tennessee; Gainesville, Georgia; and dozens of other communities where the meatpacking and agricultural industries have recruited immigrant labor.

In each community, the same dynamics are at work: an industry needs cheap, compliant labor. Immigrant workers fill the need. The community is transformed demographically. Tension and adaptation coexist. The workers are exploited and the workers build community. The children grow up bilingual and bicultural. The old Appalachian pattern of immigrant incorporation — described in Chapter 19 for the European immigrants of the coalfield era — repeats itself in new form.

The fundamental question is whether the incorporation process will succeed — whether the Latino communities now rooted in Appalachia will, over generations, become as fully Appalachian as the Italian and Hungarian communities that preceded them. The historical precedent suggests that they will. The political climate around immigration — more hostile, more polarized, and more consequential for undocumented workers than anything the European immigrants of 1910 faced — suggests that the process will be harder and slower. But the children are in the schools. The businesses are on the main streets. The churches are growing. The roots are going down.

Discussion Questions

1. The historical parallel. Compare the experience of Latino immigrants in the twenty-first-century poultry industry with the experience of European immigrants in the early twentieth-century coal industry (Chapter 19). What parallels exist in terms of recruitment, working conditions, community building, and labor organizing? What differences does immigration status create?

2. The labor question. The Case Farms strikes echo the mine wars of the 1920s. What does the persistence of labor exploitation in Appalachian industries — from coal to poultry, from 1910 to 2010 — suggest about the structural nature of the problem? Is labor exploitation in the poultry industry a consequence of immigration, or would the exploitation exist regardless of who did the work?

3. The incorporation question. The chapter argues that Latino immigrants may follow the path of earlier European immigrants in becoming "fully Appalachian" over time. What evidence supports this prediction? What obstacles could prevent it? What would full incorporation look like?

4. The cultural exchange. The arrival of Latino communities has introduced new foods, languages, music, and religious practices to Appalachian towns. How does this cultural exchange compare to the cultural exchanges that occurred in the diverse coalfield communities described in Chapter 19? Is Appalachian culture being changed or enriched by the arrival of new populations?