Abstract
By degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition … To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself (Pope Leo XIII 1891).
Highlights
The Maya constitute one of the largest and most historically accomplished Indigenous groups in the Americas
As Burns (2000, 158) explains: When the 1986 Immigration and Reform Control Act allowed for the legalization of undocumented immigrants who had either been in the United States for over five years or had performed agricultural work in the years prior to the law, the Guatemalan Maya of Florida quickly applied for status as residents in addition to continuing their claims for political asylum as refugees
Chishti‘s words capture with great candor the ambivalent attitudes toward the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) that continue to pour forth from scholars‘ pens to this day
Summary
The Maya constitute one of the largest and most historically accomplished Indigenous groups in the Americas. The intention is rather to synthesise the research on three emblematic Mayan communities in the US during the historical period throughout the 1980s—Indiantown, Florida; Morganton, North Carolina; and Los Angeles, California—in an attempt to elucidate the IRCA‘s effects on them. This trinity has been selected, firstly, for the relative accessibility of information on these communities, but secondly, and most importantly, because of their symbolic value as three disparate yet miraculous instances of Mayan cultural survival in the US. The author concurs in the belief that the IRCA‘s benefits may have remained, on the whole, less accessible to the Guatemalan Maya than to their non-Indigenous compatriots or fellow Latin American sojourners
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