The Following is an excerpt from Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class by Aimee Loiselle, which is available now wherever books are sold. In the late 1970s, Hollywood producers took the published biography of Crystal Lee Sutton, a white southern textile worker, and transformed it into a blockbuster 1979 film, Norma Rae, featuring Sally Field in the title role. In Beyond Norma Rae, Aimee Loiselle draws on an impressive range of sources—union records, industry reports, film scripts, and oral histories—to show that while Norma...