ATRIBUTO SUELO Suelo Urbano

Soldiers arrested forty to fifty West Indians, jailed in Zacapa. British consul Alban Young expressed concern, informing officials “the Jamaican is accustomed to more daily nourishment than the Guatemalan needs.”481 _{He criticized the governor and his soldiers for}

invading “United Fruit property, “shooting indiscriminately at the negroes and their houses. Authorities were fully aware of the foreign nationality of the individuals against whom they were proceeding and that the facts show a regrettable absence of that careful regard for law and justice entailed by international organizations when directing police measures against foreign

subjects.”482 _{He protested the arrest of the chief foreman of Finca Quichè, James Brown. A}

captain from the Los Amates garrison described Brown as a “rouge, known thief and murder,” who had “attacked the escort of Lieutenant Estrada.”483 _{Young insisted Brown was “one of the}

best overseers in the employ of the Fruit Company,” and according to “white officials in charge,” was in the office when the mob killed Francisco Cisneros and José Ángel Ramirez.484 _Privately,

British diplomats insisted on the value of state violence in keeping Black workers in their place.

481_{-Alban Young to Sr. Dr. Luis Toledo Herrate, Minister of Foreign Relations, May 19, 1914, ‘Las Desordenes en}

Quiché y Tehuana, Distritos de Quiriguá,’ Leg. 8567, AGCA

482_{- Alban Young to Sr. Sr. Luis Toledo Herrarte MRE, June 1, 1914; Legación de S.M.B., Memorandum, 29 de}

mayo de 1914, ‘Las Desordenes en Quiche y Tehuana, Distritos de Quiriguá,’ Leg. 8567 AGCA

483_{-Cpt. Manuel Cordón to Estrada Cabrera, May 14, 1914, Leg. 8567, AGCA} 484_{- Alban Young to Sr. Sr. Luis Toledo Herrarte MRE, June 1, 1914}

149

Vice consul Godfrey Haggard conceded, “The general sentiment was that these events, though deplorable, would teach the Jamaican labourer a much needed lesson.”485

Concern with British imperial citizenship in a small Central American republic ended with the outbreak of World War I in Europe and Britain’s entry into the war in August 1914. The closing of saw mills in the logging center of Belize Town, British Honduras “which threw

numbers of Jamaica negroes out of employment,” prompted fears in Guatemala of a new influx of Black immigrants.486 _{In September 1914 the Guatemalan National Assembly introduced a law}

requiring immigrants of “la raza de color” to deposit $100 American gold at the customs house of their port of entry, returned upon their departure, reduced to $50 by a decree from Estrada Cabrera.487 _{Revealing the ambiguity of the color line across the Americas, the first victim was}

the nephew of the Minister that proposed the law, whose uncle was forced to make the deposit before he could purchase a return ticker on a United Fruit ship from New Orleans to Puerto Barrios.488 _{As United Fruit scaled-back operation and laid off workers, Guatemalan officers}

harassed West Indians, especially those living with Ladinas. In May 1916 the commandante of Quiriguá abducted María Rivera, wife of James White, a thirty-six-year-old Jamaican; after White intervened, she was “torn to pieces” in a rail collision, and he was thrown in jail.489

485_{-Haggard report, Young to Grey, 1 June 1914, Foreign Office 371/1921 (27762) quoted in Jason Colby, The}

Business of Empire, 119

486_{-Stuart Lupton to Secretary of State, September 14, 1914 M-655 roll 29 RG 59, USNACP}

487_{-“Con el objeto de restringir hasta donde sea posible la inmigración de individuos de la raza de color, el Gobierno}

guatemalteco ha expedido un decreto disponiendo que no podrán desembarcar éstos en los puertos de la República si no hacen un depósito de $50 oro americano por cada uno, el cual será devuelto a los que se reembarcan.” Boletín de la Unión Panamericano, Vol. 40 (Washington, D.C. 1915), 377; For debate over amount, Ingrid Castaneda, Dismantling the Enclave: Land, Labor and National Belonging on Guatemala’s Caribbean Coast, 1904-1954, 46; Jason Colby, The Business of Empire, 138

488_{- Stuart Lupton to Secretary of State, September 14, 1914 M-655 roll 29 RG 59, USNACP}

489_{-“Criminal: Cornelio Ortega por Abuso de Autoridad Rf. No. 854-d paquete #3 (1916), JPI, Jason Colby, The}

150

West Indians left Central American banana zones to harvest sugarcane in Cuba, build U.S. Army forts in Panama, and serve in the British Army, where racism led many to question loyalties. In 1917, Marcus Garvey founded the New York division of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.490 _{In January 1917 Gen. Federico Tinoco, Costa Rica’s Minister of}

War, a banana planter in debt to United Fruit, overthrew President Alfredo González Flores, who had refused to evict squatters from company lands and granted land to West Indian fishermen in Cahuita. Tinoco enacted a law requiring all immigrants to register with the Costa Rican

government.491 _{In December 1917, the radical rhetoric of the Garveyite movement combined}

with racist harassment, spiking costs of living and stagnating pay to lead to a strike by West Indian workers in Sixaola, Costa Rica and Bocas del Toro, Panama.492 _{Hispanics from}

Guanacaste, Costa Rica and Rivas, Nicaragua were imported.493 _{Company officials evicted}

striking workers from housing. One Mr. Bettle, a 114-year old worker interviewed by Philippe Bourgeois, recalled seeing men dying of hunger while “hiding in the bush.”494 _{United Fruit broke}

the strike, but Tinoco fell from power in Costa Rica in August 1919. Francisco Aguilar Barquero, a member of González’s cabinet, led a return to civilian democracy, as restored relations with United Fruit reflected an increasingly Hispanic workforce.

490_{-Edmund David Cronon, Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association: A Study of Negro}

Nationalism (University of Wisconsin, 1949), 52 The first of many articles critical of Garvey, W.E.B. DuBois wrote “The District Court of New York County has ordered Marcus Garvey, of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and of the African Communities League to cease and desist collecting funds for the “Black Star Line” The Crisis (Crisis Publishing Co.) Vol. 17-18 Nov. 1917, 207

491_{-Ronald Harpelle, West Indians in Costa Rica, 44}

492_{-Philippe Bourgeois, Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation, 55-56} 493_{-G. Verschoor, Intervenors Intervened: Organizational Predicament and Institutional Contradiction in the}

Production of Export Plantains in the Atlantic Zone of Costa Rica (Bib. Orton IICE/CATIE, 1992), 4-5

151 4.1.8 Conclusion

“The Jamaican negro is the workman who has made possible the wonders which the United Fruit Company has achieved in Central America,” noted Frederick Adams, who pointed out that, with the exception of Colombia, West Indian immigrants formed the largest group in all of the banana zones. “With a steady and well-paid job, a house and a garden, chickens and other fowl, the Jamaican negro is as happy and contented and much better off than on his native island.”495 _{Like Afro-Americans migrating north in the Great Migration, Jamaicans and other}

West Indians fleeing overcrowded islands left declining plantation economies in search of economic opportunities. Reproducing U.S.-style racial segregation, Limón, Costa Rica and Central American banana zones had more than a superficial resemblance to Jim Crow, but offered abundant land and relatively high wages. In the pioneering decades of the banana

industry, in which a managerial class of white overseers depended upon the agricultural skills of mostly Jamaican, Afro-West Indian immigrants, United Fruit’s banana zones developed in isolation, with minimal presence of national governments. Labor unrest led United Fruit to increase hiring of Hispanics. United Fruit tightened its monopolistic grip on railroads, ports and shipping in the face of a potential competitor, the Atlantic Fruit Co., revealing the limits of the independence enjoyed by West Indian smallholders.

Shifting strategies of labor control were shaped by shifting plantation agriculture, in response to Panama disease, and the demands of the extremely high-volume, low-margin banana trade, where profits rested on the exploitation of free or cheap lands and low-wage labor. A new division Guatemala epitomized the future of the banana industry, dependent upon large,

company-owned plantations and a growing stream of migrant Hispanic laborers, who worked

152

under and were paid less than English-speaking Afro-American railway workers and Afro-West Indian banana workers. In a nation based on a rigid racial caste system that elevated Hispanic Ladinos above indigenous Mayans, racial tensions between “native” Hispanic Ladinos and Blacks grew, exacerbated by economic competition and neo-colonial domination. Among a largely single male workforce with access to alcohol, guns and machetes, ethnic and racial tensions spilled over into episodes of violence, leading to military interventions and restrictions on West Indian immigration.