Join us as Dr. Leon Fink, professor emeritus of history at the University of Illinois Chicago, gives an author talk about his book The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South. His work focuses on a large community of indigenous Mayan peoples who immigrated to Morganton, NC from Guatemala during their country's civil war in the 1980s. Beginning as farm and factory workers in NC, unsafe conditions on their jobsites led to a workplace organizing eff­ort and one of the most significant labor struggles for US agricultural workers in the 1990s. Through a series of interviews Fink's research paints a picture of a resilient community and their unlikely allies in this important, but little known, story of North Carolina and Southern history.

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