Boom, Bust, Exodus (Oxford UP, 2015) traces the ripple effects of a single factory closing in Galesburg, Illinois, and its reopening in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, a border city in Mexico. Chad Broughton uses a transnational and longitudinal approach to tell a human and humane story of the NAFTA era from the point of view of those most caught up in its dislocation—former industrial workers and their families in the Rust Belt; assemblers and activists in the borderland maquiladoras; and migrant laborers from the Mexican countryside.

Boom, Bust, Exodus is the winner of the 2016 WOLA-Duke Human Rights Book Award, sponsored by the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) and Duke University. The award honors the best current fiction and non-fiction book published in English on human rights, democracy and social justice in contemporary Latin America. Books are evaluated by a panel of expert judges drawn from academia, journalism and public policy circles.

Location: Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall, Smith Warehouse, Bay 4

Sponsored by the Human Rights Archive in the Rubenstein Library, Duke Human Rights Center@the Franklin Humanities Institute, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

More about the book:

• Human Rights Award Goes to Study of Boom and Bust in U.S. Rust Belt and Mexican Factories Towns (DukeToday)
• Review: 'Boom, Bust, Exodus,' by Chad Broughton (Chicago Tribune)
• Inside the Migration of the Maytag factory (NPR, Marketplace)

For more information, contact:

Patrick Stawski, Human Rights Archivist