Focusing on the menhaden fishermen of the southern coastal regions, The Fish Factory is an engaging and insightful exploration of what work means to different social groups employed within the same industry.
Since the nineteenth century, the menhaden industry in the South has been traditionally split between black crews and white captains. Using life histories, historical research, and anthropological fieldwork in Reedville, Virginia, and Beaufort, North Carolina, Barbara Garrity-Blake examines the relationship between these two groups and how the members of each have defined themselves in terms of their work. The author finds that for the captains and other white officers of the menhaden vessels—men “born and bred” for a life on the water—work is a key source of identity. Black crewmen, however, have insisted on a separation between work and self; they view their work primarily as a means of support rather than an end in itself.
In probing the implications of this contrast, Garrity-Blake describes captain/crew relations within both an occupational context and the context of race relations in the South. She shows how those at the bottom of the shipboard hierarchy have exercised a measure of influence in a relationship at once asymmetrical and mutually dependent. She also explores how each group has reacted to the advent of technology in their industry and, most recently, to the challenges posed by those proclaiming a conservationist ethic.
Southwest Book Award, Border Regional Library Association, 2008
Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists Book Award, 2009
Established in 1659 as Misión de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de los Mansos del Paso del Norte, Ciudad Juárez is the oldest colonial settlement on the U.S.-Mexico border-and one of the largest industrialized border cities in the world. Since the days of its founding, Juárez has been marked by different forms of conquest and the quest for wealth as an elaborate matrix of gender, class, and ethnic hierarchies struggled for dominance. Juxtaposing the early Spanish invasions of the region with the arrival of late-twentieth-century industrial "conquistadors," Fragmented Lives, Assembled Parts documents the consequences of imperial history through in-depth ethnographic studies of working-class factory life.
By comparing the social and human consequences of recent globalism with the region's pioneer era, Alejandro Lugo demonstrates the ways in which class mobilization is itself constantly being "unmade" at both the international and personal levels for border workers. Both an inside account of maquiladora practices and a rich social history, this is an interdisciplinary survey of the legacies, tropes, economic systems, and gender-based inequalities reflected in a unique cultural landscape. Through a framework of theoretical conceptualizations applied to a range of facets—from multiracial "mestizo" populations to the notions of border "crossings" and "inspections," as well as the recent brutal killings of working-class women in Ciudad Juárez—Fragmented Lives, Assembled Parts provides a critical understanding of the effect of transnational corporations on contemporary Mexico, calling for official recognition of the desperate need for improved working and living conditions within this community.
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