The relationship between the Catholic Church and the growing importance of Latino workers in the United States is the theme of this book by Father George E. Schultze, S.J. The book is not an in-depth study of this subject, but is intended more as a short survey for non-specialists. The thesis is set within the context of the American Catholic Church's historic relationship with United States workers, especially immigrants. This mostly supportive relationship was buttressed by the development of Catholic Social Doctrine as initially expressed by Pope Leo XIII's classic Rerum Novarum (1891). At the same time, Fr. Schultze notes that Church/worker relations were not without tensions, especially with the rise of the militant Congress of Industrial Organizations labor unions in the 1930s and the significant role played by Communists in this movement. Hence, through World War II and into the Cold War era, the Church as an institution played a balancing act with respect to supporting workers' rights and, at the same time, being leery of Marxist influences on workers. This history consumes a good deal of Fr. Schultze's study to the extent that he loses sight (at different points in the book) of the specific relationship between the Church and Latino workers.

Fr. Schultze develops more fully this Church/Latino connection when he discusses the role the Church — as well as individual Catholic clerics — played in support of César Chávez and the farm workers' movement of the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, by covering this more familiar story, Fr. Schultze neglects a longer history of the Church's relationship with Latino workers, especially beginning in the early 20th Century, when mass immigration from Mexico to the United States commenced. Throughout the Southwestern United States, where most Mexican immigrant workers settled, Catholic parishes ministered to them. This is still a fairly undeveloped history, yet existing studies reveal a complex relationship as the Church attempted to help build a sense of Mexican Catholic community. At the same time, some non-Mexican clerics exhibited prejudice and discrimination toward Mexicans, including in smaller rural areas, segregating Mexicans in the Church. However, by the 1940s, a movement led by progressive Church leaders such as Archbishop Robert Lucey of San Antonio was afoot in the Church. As an institution and at the national level, the Church began more formally to support and lobby on behalf of Mexican American and Mexican immigrant workers, including the many Bracero contract workers introduced during World War II and extending to 1964. In this effort, the Church combined the rubric of workers' rights with its broader support for civil rights. This effort, of course, would be expanded in the Church's subsequent support of the farm workers' movement. Fr. Schultze could have done much more to fill in this earlier but significant period of Church/Latino relations.

To his credit, Fr. Schultze does pick-up this relationship a bit more in covering the past four decades of United States history. Here he correctly notes that while industrial unionization has suffered greatly as a result of globalization and the outsourcing of industrial jobs to cheaper labor markets in the developing world, unionization simultaneously has increased in the American service sector, including those who work in restaurants, hotels, hospitals, and the like, since these jobs cannot be outsourced. Latino workers hold many service-sector jobs, and Fr. Schultze notes the significant work of the Church among these workers especially in support of immigrant rights. However, he also warns and indeed castigates key service unions in arguing that despite the successes they have had in organizing Latino workers, the unions stand to lose many of these workers if they pay too much attention to other interests, which he terms the “cultural Left,” promoting issues such as abortion rights. Fr. Schultze at this point begins to editorialize more than he analyzes. While his point may have merit, it is not clear that Latino workers pay much attention to what their service unions do at the national level in supporting a range of other issues and groups.

As a survey, Strangers in a Foreign Land serves a valuable purpose, although too much time is spent covering better-known and better-documented accounts of Church/worker relations in general. Focus on Latino subjects is lost in some portions of the book, but should have remained the focus from beginning to end.