When she finished eating dinner at the party, Lenora Bruce Bailey sat for a spell on a little wood porch facing Main Street. Two years ago, she had one of the best jobs around, boxing scraps of hog meat at the nearby packing plant. Then she got sick. "They terminated me," she said. "Took away my health insurance."

In a nearby room, Raphael Abrego held up his purple, swollen right hand and wondered whether the same might happen to him. He was one of the better cutters on the fast-moving butcher line, but he slipped one day and injured his hand. "I can't close it," he said in Spanish, trying to clench bloated fingers.

 Bailey is a black, native-born American. Abrego is a Latino immigrant. At Smithfield Packing Co., the largest meat-processing facility in the world, the two think of themselves as being in the same boat.

 Recently, they attended a potluck to try to do something that is rare for African-Americans and Latino immigrants: come together to fight for workers' rights.

Union officials hope their combined forces will be a power in North Carolina's Cape Fear region, where tens of thousands of illegal Central American immigrants seeking meatpacking jobs have joined hundreds of thousands of poor and working-class black people who struggle to get by.

But the United Food and Commercial Workers union is finding it hard to overcome the deep wariness and suspicion between the groups in its quest to unite them.

The union's difficulties are part of a larger story of distrust between black and Latino workers, a vast cultural divide between immigrants who illegally enter the country seeking work and African-Americans who worry that immigrants will take over their jobs, communities and local political power.

 "The tension is as old as the hills," said Marshall Ganz, a lecturer at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "Who were the most violently anti-Chinese in San Francisco? The Irish. They felt their jobs were threatened."

Ganz said it is no surprise that workers complained of Smithfield playing blacks and Latinos against each other.

Smithfield is a formidable adversary for labor organizers. North Carolina, a right-to-work state, has the second-lowest union membership rate in the nation at 2.9 percent of workers. And the company stirs the economy in a region with high unemployment, employing 5,000 and paying out $120 million a year. Its taxes amount to 10 percent of Bladen County's budget.

Smithfield has aggressively thwarted two union elections since 1994, according to the National Labor Relations Board, an administrative law judge, federal court documents and congressional testimony by its workers.

 Company executives denied that they treat workers poorly and said there is no need for a union.

Smithfield Packing's president, Joseph W. Luter IV, said the union is waging a smear campaign.