Strangers in a Foreign Land is the first book-length study of the Catholic Church and labor organizing among Latinas and Latinos in the United States. Drawing on the author's expertise as a social ethicist and extensive experience with the labor movement, the volume sets contemporary labor organizing among Catholic Latinos in the broad contexts of U.S. labor history and Catholic social teaching. The author intends to persuade “organizers, union leaders, political staffers, and Catholic policymakers” (xi) that progressive stances on issues like abortion and gay marriage distance them from Latino workers and diminish the success of their organizing efforts.

Schultze begins with a helpful demographic profile of the U.S. Latino population. A flaw in the presentation, which is reflected in the book's title, is the almost exclusive focus on immigrants. Media and public perceptions notwithstanding, Spanish-speaking Catholics have been in what is now the United States for nearly twice as long as the nation has existed, and most Latinos—60 percent of them according to the 2000 census—are not immigrants. Reflective of this immigrant perspective, Schultze cites the immigration history of U.S. Catholicism and the U.S. bishops' 1986 pastoral letter on immigration (9), but he fails to treat the bishops' 1983 pastoral letter on Hispanic ministry (though he mentions it later in the volume) and their 1987 National Pastoral Plan for Hispanic Ministry.

Next Schultze outlines church teaching on work life in the Scriptures, the early church, the medieval period, and the modern era. His retrieval of this evolving theological tradition encompasses valuable insights like the core conviction that through labor humans participate in the divine work of creation. But there is no systematic treatment of the pertinent papal social encyclicals or the U.S. Catholic bishops' statements on labor. Though in later chapters Pope Leo XIII's landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) and Pius XI's Quadragesimo Anno (1931) receive some explication, more recent church documents like John Paul II's Laborem Exercens (1981) and Centesimus Annus (1991) are not mentioned at all.

The middle three chapters of the book set out in greater detail the history of the Catholic Church and labor organizing in the United States. This is a story with familiar highlights, such as Terence Powderly's leadership in the Knights of Labor, the unparalleled influence of Monsignor John Ryan, and the Catholic labor schools and the priests who organized them. But Schultze's presentation of Catholic involvement will no doubt inform many readers about less widely known episodes and figures, such as Father Peter Dietz and the Militia of Christ for Social Service (later renamed the American Conference of Catholic Trade Unionists), an early twentieth-century group Father Dietz founded to promote Catholic ethics in the labor movement.

Schultze weaves Latinos into this narrative through an examination of César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and the United Farm Workers (UFW), along with some mention of recent organizing efforts among Latinos, largely in service-oriented occupations. Missing from the presentation is earlier Latino participation in labor activism such as miners in Arizona, pecan shellers in Texas, cannery workers in California, and Cuban cigar makes in Florida, among others. Schultze's major focus on the UFW in California, while certainly the most widely recognized union effort that Latinos led in U.S. history, is not accompanied by a significant analysis of organizing campaigns in other regions such as the Texas Farm Workers and the Farm Labor Organizing Committee in the Midwest. Nor does Schultze explore the internal UFW debates and (for a time) their decision not to organize immigrant workers, a curious omission given his depiction of Latinos as immigrants.

Schultze goes on to offer his prognosis of the current organizing situation among Latino workers. In his words, “The attack on the family in U.S. society has done more to destroy the labor movement than any weakening of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). When labor unions, primarily the leaders, advisors and staff, begin to link themselves with pro-abortion and pro-homosexuality groups, they contribute to the demise of the family which is society's building block” (140). Schultze recognizes that other factors contribute to the decreasing effectiveness of labor activism, such as internal struggles within unions, state and federal legislation that hampers unions' effectiveness, and globalization with its consequence of exportable jobs. He even observes that today successful organizing efforts tend to occur among employees like construction workers and hotel service providers, whose jobs cannot be done overseas. But his diagnosis accentuates union leaders' political alliances with advocates of abortion and gay rights, even as he admits that not all Catholics defend church teachings on these issues, such as his citation of a 2002 poll in which 42 percent of registered Hispanic voters “favored access to abortion” (121). Schultze is correct that, like the Catholic hierarchy, Latinos tend to be more progressive on social issues and more conservative on sexual and life issues. But his contention that unions would progress significantly if they but mirrored these moral stances does not account for the full range of explanatory data he himself proposes vis-à-vis the current struggles with labor organizing.

The final chapter presents Schultze's plan to remedy the ills of organized labor. He continues his appeal for union leaders to diminish their affiliations with abortion and gay rights activists, summarizes recent legislative debates about immigration reform but without stating how he thinks unions should become involved (if at all), and ends the volume with an exposition of the celebrated Mondragón Cooperative Corporation in the Basque region of Spain, which for over half a century has transformed a local area through a worker-owned set of cooperatives. Schultze calls on U.S. Catholics and their institutions to transform workers' lives through the initiation of a similar worker-based movement for social transformation, but unfortunately he presents this appeal in less than a single page of text and with little elaboration of how to implant the Mondragón model on U.S. soil. In the final analysis, this is a book with vital but only partially fulfilled promise that this reviewer hopes the author will continue to develop in his future work.