No Man's Land

No Man's Land by Cindy Hahamovitch is a historical account of the American H2 guestworker program, which recruited temporary labor from different countries to do the United States' most dangerous agricultural jobs. Unrepresented in either their home country or the U.S., guestworkers were unable to become citizens and had fewer rights than the Americans around them.  Hahamovitch uses sources from Jamaica, the U.S., interviews, and archives to tell the story of the H2 program that first began during World War II. Princeton University Press published the first edition of the book in 2011.

In the text, Hahamovitch explores the rise of guestworker programs beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing through the Great Depression. She traces the origins of guestworker programs to when mineworkers were shipped in from South Africa and farm workers from Australia and Prussia. She gives the history of guestworker programs from around the world, but primarily focuses on Caribbean guestworkers, mostly Jamaicans, who were employed by the Florida sugar industry in the United States.

Hahamovitch outlines the first phase in the global history of guestworker programs. The programs were created with the rise of immigration restrictions when employers realized that the cheap, immigrant labor that they were used to would no longer be available, as fewer immigrants were allowed into the country. The solution was a guestworker program which would enable low-skilled laborers from other countries a temporary visa while they performed their duties, send them back to their native countries, and then replace them with new laborers.



The programs dwindled during the Great Depression when foreign workers were sent out of the country in favor of supporting the struggling local workers.

The second phase of the guestworker programs began with the start of World War II. As war preparations began, there arose a labor shortage and wages rose. Employers were in need of cheap labor, and they found it in nonimmigrant guestworkers. This need caused an upward trend in the intake of guestworkers that remained steady for more than thirty years.

Jamaicans joined Bahamians in the guestworker program in early 1943. The Jamaicans were to stay North of the Mason Dixon Line as British Colonial Secretary Oliver Stanley reasoned that the Bahamians were more accustomed to the racial segregation they would encounter in the American South.
Initially, finding that their employers treated them well in the North, Jamaicans later arrived in Florida to terrible working conditions. Barracks were built to house the workers, and they were meant to sleep on bare mattresses without any bedclothes or pillows. The Jamaicans weren't considered workers at all, but another kind of slave that could fill in the void left when African Americans gained more rights and were empowered.



Despite having lent their work to the war effort, Jamaicans were not offered permanent residency when the war ended.

In 1968, when the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative offered two crews of workers a poor price for an "extra long and bad" row of sugar cane, the men demanded more money, to which the "white bosses" replied "no." The problem for the workers was if they were to go on strike, they didn't have the rights of citizens and could be shipped back to the Caribbean and replaced by a new shipment of guestworkers in a short period of time.

In 1942, a series of agreements between U.S. and Mexican officials resulted in the Bracero Program. The agreement allowed for imported contract laborers from Guam and guaranteed shelter, food, and hygienic conditions to all guestworkers. This agreement resulted in meager pay, inadequate food, and many abuses of the agreement's standards. The program lasted until 1964 and was ended by organized labor programs.



Hahamovitch covers the role of Manuel Chavez and the dissolution of the Bracero program, as well as the beginning of the United Farm Workers and the produce collective bargaining agreements with California grape farmers. She dedicates her last chapter to union organizers and legal services that began representing the Jamaican guestworkers despite the obstructionist efforts by big agricultural businesses.

Cindy Hahamovitch is a professor of History at the College of William and Mary. She is a Fulbright Fellow as well as an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer.

No Man's Land won the 2012 Merle Curtie Award and the James A Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians. It also won the Philip Taft Labor History Award from the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and was labeled One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2012. A review from Choice called the book a "fascinating, engaging study of one of the lesser-known guestworker programs in the U.S.," and Kathleen Mapes of the Journal of Southern History wrote that it "deserves the widespread praise that it has received."