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Oyster Wars and the Public Trust: Property, Law, and Ecology in New Jersey History. Bonnie J. McCay. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998. 246 pp.

Changes taking place in the rural South create opportunities for remembering that encourage pride and power among the downtrodden and dispossessed. Comparing the cultural context of the murder of an African American schoolteacher in 1921 and the suffering that led to the murder of a Mayan farmworker in 1992, this essay explores the question of how celebrations and struggles of everyday existence fit within local histories inspired by martyrdom and death. The author argues that remembering is most effective when the form and content of memory join in the little that remains behind us.

Human victimizations‐whether taking the form of civil war, terrorism, or domestic violence‐often force those seeking refuge into neighborhoods characterized by high crime rates, poverty, and ethnic diversity, leading to culture shock and crises of identity. The author recalls such a context after describing the responses of families of murder victims to a serial killer's sentence, drawing parallels with the difficulties the Q'anjob'al Maya face while applying for political asylum.

In the past ten years, the British West Indies Temporary Alien Labor Program has received widespread judicial and legislative support and criticism. While sugar and apple producers who import West Indians argue that domestic labor is insufficient to harvest their crops, labor organizations and their supporters maintain that domestic labor is adequate. The resulting legal disputes focus primarily on the issue of whether or not West Indians are displacing U.S. workers or undermining wage rates and working conditions. This article examines the relationships among legal issues surrounding the program, the U.S. farm labor market, and the Jamaican peasantry. It argues that continued imports of foreign labor during times of high domestic unemployment, as well as the varied factors which underlie the continued willingness and ability of Jamaican peasant households to supply workers to U.S. producers, can be most clearly understood from an international and historical perspective, rather than focussing on the needs and problems of any one nation.

In advanced capitalist economies, the treatment of labor as a commodity suggests that labor's cost and availability depend on market mechanisms. Although neoclassical economic thought recognizes the influence of collective bargaining and labor legislation on the cost and availability of labor, economists generally pay scant attention to the ways informal and formal relations of power, along with myths of sexuality, ethnicity, and nationality, combine within labor processes in advanced capitalist economies to influence the cost and availability of labor. This article presents data on the labor processes in the North Carolina seafood processing industry and compares them to the labor processes accompanying the annual, seasonal importation of legal alien farm labor by U.S. agricultural producers. The labor processes of the former rest on kinship and informal social relations while those of the latter rest on formal political authority. The analysis suggests that, even in advanced capitalist economies, employers faced with labor supply problems do not rely on market mechanisms but instead tap formal and informal systems of authority to assure supplies of labor, and support their behaviors with myths of sexuality, ethnicity, and nationality. The article concludes with a discussion of these behaviors in the context of post‐World War II international divisions of labor.

IRCA's impact on the U.S. poultry industry has been uneven across industry sectors and regions. In California, where undocumented immigrants have been present for some decades, IRCA strengthened unions in the processing sector without constricting labor supplies. In other areas of depressed local economies and high unemployment, IRCA has had little impact. Where low‐wage industrial recruitment has increased competition for unskilled workers, however, plants have been relying on documented and undocumented new immigrants for labor. Although new immigrants stabilize industry work forces in the short run, over time these immigrant inflows reinforce high labor turnover and fuel the tendency for technological changes to accommodate an unskilkd labor force.