Latin Americans and African Americans in the U.S. Slaughterhouse Industry

How do high levels of immigration affect U.S. workers? Could the arrival of newcomers reduce racial conflict by buffering relations between Whites and Blacks? Or will new demographic configurations make racial discrimination more intractable? In the contemporary United States, concerns about jobs and race frequently converge in how immigration from Latin America affects Black America. What happens when Latin Americans join African Americans in the country’s agricultural fields, hotels, construction sites, meatpacking plants, and other places of work? Some distressing answers to this question are offered in two new ethnographies of slaughterhouses in the southern United States. Each examines how Latinos and Blacks interact in an industry known for low wages and bad conditions. Even though meatpacking is one of the most dangerous industries in the United States, the federal government’s Occupational Safety and Health Agency (OSHA) has been conspicuously absent in exercising its regulatory authority. Unchecked by regulators, employers have relentlessly sped up production lines, which leads to ever higher rates of repetitive-motion injuries. The majority of workers spend only a few months or years before quitting. To keep a plant organized, given this reality, a labor union must regularly incorporate the new arrivals. Yet what if this new labor force does not speak the same language as those workers already in the union? Angela Steusse—a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Texas—spent four years trying to organize Latin American poultry workers in central Mississippi. She was part of a desperate effort by several unions, including the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA), to help Blackmajority locals sign up new Spanish-speaking workers who had previously shown little interest in joining. Steusse refers to the newcomers as Latinos, but they tend to identify themselves in national terms, as Mexicans or Guatemalans. When they reach for a collective term, it is Hispanos, thus emphasizing the language they share as opposed to a common regional origin in Latin America. Steusse served as an English–Spanish translator, helped to start a workers’ center, organized consciousness-raising sessions, and, to develop her research, conducted focus groups and personal interviews. In language alone she found an almost insurmountable barrier to meaningful communication between Latin Americans and African Americans. The fundamental difficulty, Steusse emphasizes, is a long history of racial suspicion and antagonism. Mississippi poultry plants are located in small towns where Blacks and Whites have long lived in separate social worlds. Until the 1960s, poultry plants excluded Black workers. Soon after the first Blacks joined production lines, many of the Whites left. Once the labor force was predominantly Black and began to unionize in the 1970s, Whites sometimes played the role of strike-breakers. It was at this point that poultry companies began facilitating the migration of Spanish-speakers to Mississippi, although large numbers did not arrive until the 1990s. Recruitment strategies included the following: