How can the oppressed act against their oppression in contexts of extreme inequality and injustice? Can an existing power regime be effectively transformed from within, by those subjected to its operations? This book by Paul Apostodolis offers a provocative, bold response to these questions of perennial concern to political and social scientists. It focuses on Mexican immigrants' life stories of border crossing, work, and political activism in combating the practices of a meat-packing plant in eastern Washington State. Such an engagement could not be more timely: As recent state legislative efforts in Mississippi and Alabama attest, an anti-immigrant climate targeted primarily at Latino undocumented workers shows no signs of abatement. Meanwhile, contemporary debates continue to be dominated by concerns over what to do about the “immigrant problem.” Against these silencing tendencies, Apostolidis examines what immigrant workers themselves say about their lives and struggles and subsequently sheds important light on the operations of neoliberalism and the ways in which transformative action may be possible.

The focal point of Breaks in the Chain is the case of a historic wildcat (illegal) strike staged by Mexican immigrant workers at the Iowa Beef Processing (IBP) plant in 1999. As described by Apostolidis, individuals previously accustomed to working in abhorrent conditions broke the chain of meat production and brought the company to a standstill in one of the largest strikes in the meat-packing industry in more than a quarter century. To understand how this was possible, he contends, we need to look at the links between their stories of factory work and union organization and those they told about their lives in Mexico and experiences as illegals crossing the border. The author's interviews yield surprising results that reveal tensions within the workers' narratives: between self-characterizations as individuals caught by forces that rendered them helpless and assertions of self-determination and action against these very forces.

In these tensions, Apostolidis finds novel insights into the operations of neoliberal hegemony. The workers tell stories of border-crossing dangers, techniques for appearing to be legal migrants, methods of concealment, and ways to train their bodies to endure the pain of the journey. For him, these stories reveal that state power against these populations works in less institutionalized, overt, disciplinary, and individuating ways, and is reinforced through immigrants' own development of methods for navigating border crossings. In a later chapter on experiences at the plant, he describes how workers sought to exercise some control over an otherwise seemingly uncontrollable environment governed by intimidation from managers, the inhuman speeds of the meat-production chain, bodily injury, and humiliation. The company's power is here maintained not only by force but by means of these very techniques for survival, techniques that “complemented macro-level corporate strategies [and] thereby helped to ensure the overall continuity and functionality of the system” (p. 117).

What is compelling in this interpretive account is the author's evaluation: that these stories do not disclose the absoluteness of hegemony but, on the contrary, suggest the grounds for subsequent resistance. Departing from Gramscian concepts and insights, he proposes that we understand hegemony as dependent upon its active construction through ordinary people's narratives of self and world, with the implication that “ordinary people are not simply the passive victims or dupes of dominant forces” (p. 5). As Apostolidis highlights, this agential role in relation to hegemony means that individuals not only reproduce their subordination but also can act against it if they are able to engage in self-criticism of this hegemonic order. He makes this insight fruitful in two innovative ways. First, augmenting Wendy Brown's conception of the genealogical quality of narrative, he situates the roots of resistance within antecedent “breaks in the chain of narrated experience” (p. xvii, emphasis in original) that reveal an alternative understanding of the self and world. Second, he connects these individual breaks to collective political organization and posits their activation by movements capable of sorting through narrative strains and translating them into collective counterhegemonic actions.

This framework for analyzing immigrant narratives is an important contribution of the book. Immigrant workers, as Apostolidis describes, often face the most dangerous and unjust conditions imaginable. His framework yields a sensitive and textured account that exposes these conditions without rendering those within them to victimhood by attending to their own depictions and claims of agency within and against dominant forces in their lives. The author's framework likewise trains us not only to better appreciate these moments but also to see in them the roots of resistance, thus providing the individual epistemological grounds for world-transformative action. Massive challenges to contexts of domination do not happen overnight. They are also not strictly the result of movements that convince individuals to act against their oppression, but of individuals themselves who come to act upon it, on the basis of their own experiences and for their own unique yet shared reasons.

Although Apostolidis does not view the origins of resistance in movements alone, his views on the importance of political organization and, in particular, his conception of political organization as a process of collective action centered on self-determination are insightful. In a chapter on union activism, he observes that through their strike, workers were able to break the chains of company domination because of the highly participatory process they engaged in to democratize their union and organize themselves as “a self-determining movement” (p. 165). These efforts linked activism with individuals' experiences on the meat-production floor, and presented activism not just as the organization of collective action for the sake of attaining material ends but also as an educative process of the self for developing a critical ethos. This view is compelling for developing methods to sustain movement action in ways that guard against producing the very structures individuals are combating. At the same time, it rightly underscores the importance of collective organization for vulnerable populations such as immigrants, for whom lone acts of resistance are neither sustainable nor desirable.

The relationship among individual narrative power, movements, and the generation of world-transformative action outlined in the book, however, also raises questions. Individual narratives that reveal desires for or retrospective claims of agency, Apostolidis proposes, lay the groundwork for later counterhegemonic action. But what are the necessary conditions and critical factors that impact the work of translating individual narratives into an efficacious movement and set of transformative collective actions? At times, he points to the role of leadership, in particular leadership styles that emphasize popular participation over state intervention and elite activism. The work of translation of individual narratives into collective action is thus more likely facilitated by leaders attuned to activism as a process of critical political education than it is by those pursuing elite-driven approaches of acting on behalf of followers. Is the work of translation, then, dependent upon leadership style primarily? At other times, Apostolidis seems to emphasize the cultivation of “organizational spaces” for sharing individual stories (p. 219). The work of translation thus appears not to be primarily facilitated by leaders' activism but by the process in these spaces, as carried out by workers themselves. Further clarification here would greatly strengthen the argument.

Additionally, the interviewees were Mexican workers who by the time they worked at IBP had gained legalization (p. 111). This status is relevant, but it is underplayed by the analysis. As such, the role of legalization in these workers' lives and their subsequent capacities for political organization is evaded. For Apostolidis, legalization may represent the hegemonic stamp of the state on individuals. But how did interviewees themselves view this process? And conversely, what would the process of translating individual narrative power into collective resistance look like if these workers had remained undocumented ones?

Irrespective of these preoccupations, Breaks in the Chain is a brilliant work of engaged political theory. The book is theoretically innovative and empirically rich, and it contains myriad provocative insights into the contemporary operations of neoliberal power. By capturing the complexity of immigrant's power within this context, Apostolidis provides a compelling and inspiring account of resistance, situated in a theoretical framework that may be applied by researchers to other contexts of domination and injustice under neoliberalism. Without a doubt, this is a book that stands ready to push current debates and guide research in important new directions.