The Guatemalan Presence in Burke County
Before the formal establishment of Burke County in 1777, the area that was originally populated by Indigenous Native Americans was settled by Europeans of Scots-Irish, French and German ancestry. Within less than a decade of their arrival, enslaved African-Americans were also present. In the late 1800s another set of European (Italian) settlers, the Waldenses, colonized eastern Burke County. With that, the county’s population consisted mainly of Black and white citizens until the late 1970s when Asians who were ethnic Hmong established a significant settlement in the area.
The most recent ethnic group to establish a very large presence in Burke County is the Guatemalan population, whose settlement here began in the 1990s. Dr. Leon Fink, who currently serves as Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Illinois and was formerly professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, authored the book The Maya of Morganton. According to Fink, of twenty-one ethnically and linguistically distinct Indigenous Mayan groups, three primary groups followed the Guatemalan diaspora to Morganton to escape a deadly thirty-six year civil war and post-war economic oppression.
Many events led up to the war, one of which was a 1954 U.S. Central Intelligence Agency-backed coup that overthrew Guatemala’s democratically elected government, considering it a communist threat. An autocratic government replaced the democracy and most of the land laws that it had established to benefit poor farmers were repealed. Voting rights were taken away from illiterate citizens.
The Guatemalan Civil War began in 1960 when left-wing guerilla groups revolted against the government over unfair land distribution laws that privileged wealthy Guatemalans, most of whom were of European descent, and gave hefty business advantages to large foreign companies including America’s United Fruit Company. The war was marked by brutality and violence with many people executed and missing due to both governmental and guerilla military actions. By the time of the signing of the 1996 peace accord that ended the war more than 200,000 people had been killed, 83% of whom were Mayan. Ending the fighting, however, did not end the economic oppression of indigenous Guatemalans.
Many of the first Mayans in Burke County came to Morganton from Florida, where they had fled to escape the war and ongoing economic oppression. The seasonal citrus harvesting work that originally brought them to Florida became less available and less reliable, so in the 1990s refugees began to migrate from Florida to Morganton and others immigrated directly from Guatemala, many working at the local chicken processing plant, Case Farms.
The new Morgantonians were also attracted to this area by its proximity to the mountains and its topographical similarity to Guatemala. Sending for their families to join them, the Guatemalan community became the largest Hispanic ethnic group in Burke County over the next two decades, increasing their presence in the community by more than 800%.
