Introduction

Lives on The Line: Carving Out A New South

It is Friday morning and there are seven of us working a rib trimming line: Cristina, Thomas, Rosa, Linda, Vincent, Claudia, and me. These workers — some Latina migrants, others native-born African Americans — would be some of my closest coworkers, my good friends, and my key confidants, and their experiences in the plant and in North Carolina and beyond more generally guide the narratives of this book.

On this particular Friday morning, with knife in hand, Cristina draws the rationale behind her decision to migrate on the table in hog blood. In Honduras, she can hope to make around 700 lempiras per week sewing garments at a maquiladora. As Thomas, Linda, Rosa, and I look on, she scrawls the exchange rate in diluted red numbers: 18 lempiras to 1 dollar. Cristina never imagined she'd end up here in this countryside breaking her back working a knife job. If anything, she tells me with a chuckle, having worked at a Korean-owned garment factory outside San Pedro Sula for seven years from the age of fifteen, she had entertained fantasies of running off to Korea. Her husband, Ernesto, arrived in North Carolina in 1998, right before Hurricane Mitch devastated Honduras, leaving the mines, cattle ranches, and dense forests of Olancho to follow his brothers to work in the pork, turkey, and chicken processing plants, livestock farms, and agricultural fields that dot the landscape and are the backbone of this Southern economy. Cristina joined him seven years later, in 2005.

At thirty-three, she has worked at Swine's deboning small hams and trimming ribs for two years without missing a day of work, and before this she worked on the knife for two years at Fresh Birds, a large poultry processing plant in Linden. She works without authorization, and has borne and shed three identities other than her own while eking out a living in North Carolina. Today, Cristina and Ernesto are part of a large Honduran community that lives in the multicounty catchment area of the plant, proportionally among the greatest in the country. Cristina prides herself on the quality of her work, relishing the praise of Quality Assurance staff and deriding other workers' knife skills — like those of Thomas and Rosa — from sharpening the knife to actually using it. Cristina left behind a four-year-old son and a five-year-old daughter with her in-laws in Olancho, whom she had lived with after Ernesto left, in what she depicts as conditions of servitude. Her daughter made the dangerous journey with another of her husband's brothers several years later, and now, at twelve years old, she says without a hint of irony, but much to her parents' amusement, that she wants to be an FBI agent when she grows up. Cristina's youngest daughter was born in North Carolina, so her children span the spectrum of migration statuses. Outside the plant, she lives in fear of police checkpoints and deportation, which would mean permanent separation from her husband and children, topics we regularly discuss at the table where I bag or box the ribs she trims.

Working alongside Cristina at the ribs station this Friday morning is Thomas, who like many coworkers respects Cristina's knife skills, often depending on her to sharpen his knives. Thomas is a fifty-three-year-old African American man who grew up in a nearby rural North Carolina town. In the 1990s, he worked for Hansen Farms with a night crew loading turkeys from farms across North and South Carolina. At that time, the loading crews were composed mostly of local Black men and the poultry farm labor was heavily Latino/a. The pay was by the load, and Thomas says it averaged out to a good wage. In a very matter-of-fact tone, Thomas attributes shifts in the composition of labor across animal farming and processing industries to increased competition for jobs due to the influx of Hispanics and their growing share of the applicant pool in the context of regular turnover in these jobs, in almost exactly those words. After a brief move to Virginia, where he followed his substance-abusing partner and worked at a large distribution center as a forklift operator, Thomas returned to North Carolina and started to work at Swine's in 2001.

Sometimes Thomas works with the knife, trimming ribs. Other times, he is able to escape knife work and instead bags ribs, which is considered a lighter task. But there are also times when he has to lead in producing huge orders of "curlies" — a rib that is skinned on the backside using a small handheld hook, and that Cristina says is for rich people. The work is grueling, un trabajo perro (dog's work, hard work), as Salvadoran fellow rib trimmer and skinner Hernán calls it, but Thomas is the fastest at this work. His form, efficiency, and speed are impressive to watch, as he skins ribs and fills giant combos at twice the rate of the next-fastest worker. No matter what type of work he is doing — whether trimming, bagging, or skinning — Thomas's laboring has a distinctive rhythm to it, a certain swaying or rocking of his tall, lanky body to the cacophonous melody of machinery. On lunch break, he hurries out to the parking lot across from the factory, immersing himself in the quiet solitude of his pickup truck. Aisha, a young Black packing worker, insists she has smelled liquor on his breath, but it never does waft my way. On short breaks, Thomas leans into the chain-link fence outside the factory while smoking his cigarette, staring through the links at the outside world, rebuilding his momentum, lost in thought, forlorn.

Just as she is this Friday morning, Rosa usually works alongside Cristina either at the ribs station or on the ham-end boning line. Rail-thin and slightly hunchbacked, Rosa has receding gums that give her mouth a concave appearance, like she is missing all her teeth, not just the bottom set. She is a forty-five-year-old Salvadoran who migrated first to Los Angeles from Santa Ana, living there for ten years before returning to El Salvador in order to regularize her status through her then-husband. She returned in 2006, later bringing her three American-born but Salvadoran-raised daughters to live in North Carolina, and they remind Rosa how much they resent her for having left them in El Salvador every chance they get....