No Man's Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor

Cindy Hahamovitch offers a meticulous narrative of the recruitment and struggles of Jamaican workers in the Florida sugar industry from the 1930s to the 1990s and, in doing so, makes some stellar arguments: (1) the H-2A agricultural guest worker program was initially developed in the Florida sugar industry but has grown to span multiple industries employing urban and rural low-paid workers across the United States; (2) the usefulness of the program for employers lies entirely in the legal possibility of deporting workers; and (3) unions, lawyers, and activists have not been able to break the power of the migrant-labor scheme despite decades of litigation and organizing. The details, at times, overwhelm the arguments but are also indicative of the depth of research. Hahamovitch details abusive conditions, labor struggles, and administrative debates. She describes how, in the post–World War II period, the United States came to leave the industry in the hands of the growers, who were bolstered in their ranks by Cuban émigrés following the revolution in that country. The Jamaican political elite was always grateful for the possibility of exporting thousands of unemployed men.