Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Abbreviations ix
Introduction 1
Part I. New England
1. The Draper Company: From Hopedale to Medellín and Back 15
2. The Naumkeag Steam Cotton Company: Labor-Management Collaboration and Its Discontents 48
3. Guns, Butter, and the New (Old) International Division of Labor 93
4. Invisible Workers in a Dying Industry: Latino Immigrants in New England Textile Towns 142
Part II. Colombia
5. The Cutting Edge of Globalization: Neoliberalism and Violence in Colombia's Banana Zone 181
6. Taking Care of Business in Colombia: U.S. Multinationals, the U.S. Government, and the AFL-CIO 222
7. Mining the Connections: Where Does Your Coal Come From? 264
Conclusion 294
Notes 305
Bibliography 357
Index 373

Promotional Information

The surprising connections between New England, Latin America (especially Colombia), and globalization over the past 200 years

About the Author

Aviva Chomsky is Professor of History and Coordinator of Latin American Studies at Salem State College in Salem, Massachusetts. She is the author of “They Take Our Jobs!”: And 20 Other Myths about Immigration and West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870–1940; editor of The People behind Colombian Coal; and a coeditor of The Cuba Reader and Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State, both also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

"By looking at globalization from the perspective of labor history, and labor history through the lens of globalization, Aviva Chomsky transforms our understanding of both. In Chomsky's hands, global labor history becomes a compelling tool for understanding and challenging the social inequalities that capitalism creates and depends on. The result is not only a wonderfully rich and detailed look at particular places and times, but a pathbreaking study that forces us to rethink how we understand the Americas as a whole. Students, scholars, labor leaders, and activists should all read this magnificent book."--Steve Striffler, author of In the Shadows of State and Capital: The United Fruit Company, Popular Struggle, and Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 1900-1995 "The early-twentieth-century export of Draper looms from Hopedale, Massachusetts, to Medellin's domestic textile industry sets the stage for a remarkably creative transnational study, documenting the eerie connection between the fates of both American and Colombian working people. Aviva Chomsky jumps skillfully across time and space to link capital flight and the early globalization of the New England textile industry to patterns of low-wage international immigration, even as she dissects the role of the United States (at times aided by American trade unions) in the suppression of Colombian labor radicalism."--Leon Fink, author of The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South