PLAN VIAL URBANO 135

The color line has always been a global problem, and its transnational scale has inspired numerous histories that have emphasized connections across the American Mediterranean between the U.S. South and the Caribbean. Historian Natalie Ring, tackling the turn-of-the- twentieth century “Problem South,” shows how attempts to eradicate diseases, address racial “problems” and engineer the “uplift” of poor and “backward” peoples in the U.S. South shaped and were shaped U.S. colonial policies in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.64 _{Focusing on}

insular and isthmian colonies and protectorates, her study leaves connections between the U.S. South and Central American enclaves of United Fruit comparatively under-examined.

Social scientists and historians have emphasized the complexities of racial and class identities. In his study of Black West Indian and Hispanic banana workers in Bocas del Toro, Panama, anthropologist Philippe Bourgeois identifies ethnicity as an integral rather than exogenous variable that can be isolated from class.65 _{As an anthropologist, Bourgeois captures}

the divides of daily life among banana plantation workers in powerful prose. His study offers fewer insights into historical changes in the evolution of banana plantations as institutions. Aviva

63_{-Stuart B. Schwartz, Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Great Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina}

(Princeton, NJ and London: Princeton University Press, 2015), 226-260

64_{-Natalie Ring, The Problem South: Region, Empire and the New Liberal State, 1880-1930 (Athens GA: University}

of Georgia Press, 2012), 87, 107, 206, 265

65_{-Philippe Bourgeois, Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation (Baltimore:}

19

Chomsky rectifies these shortcomings by offering a social history of West Indian banana zone workers in Costa Rica that examines evolutions of land ownership and labor relations.66

Chomsky’s analysis is both enhanced and constrained by Marxist materialism. She describes Afro-Caribbean religious practices while simplifying them as labor resistance, and the Black Nationalism espoused by onetime Limón, Costa Rica resident Marcus Garvey while overlooking the Garveyite movement’s emphasis on the leadership of the Black middle-class.67 _Lara

Putnam’s The Company They Kept brings gender and sexuality into focus, describing the experiences of women in Caribbean Costa Rica, an overwhelmingly male enclave.68 _Putnam

dismisses United Fruit’s self-proclaimed civilizing mission as empty rhetoric, noting indifference of company officials to the lack of monogamous family life and high rates of sexually

transmitted diseases. 69 _{Focusing on neglected gender dynamics of banana plantations, Putnam’s}

dismissal of civilizing rhetoric based on the companies’ indifference to out of wedlock unions and sexually transmitted diseases among workers elides how public health campaigns against malaria and hookworm served as forms of biopower.

Historians have used commodity chains to connect Latin American banana plantation zones with U.S. consumers. Aviva Chomsky’s Linked Labor Histories ties together the histories of banana plantations and workers in Caribbean Colombia with the textile-mill towns and workers of New England, the most important early consumers of the bananas imported by Boston-based United Fruit.70 _{John Soluri’s Banana Cultures connects the culture of banana}

66_{-Aviva Chomsky, West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica (Baton Rouge, LA:}

Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1996)

67_{-Aviva Chomsky, West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 202-06}

68_{-Lara Putnam, The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica 1870-1960}

(Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)

69_{-Lara Putnam, The Company They Kept, 9}

70_{-Aviva Chomsky, Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia and the Making of a Global Working Class}

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consumption in the U.S. with the effects on workers and the environment in Honduras, breaking down barriers between social and environmental history.71 _{His final chapter offers a comparative}

analysis of the banana industry and California agribusiness, opening up new terrain for transnational study.72

The transnational dimensions of race and labor have inspired historians to analyze the relationship between United Fruit’s plantation empire and the racialization of labor in the United States. Jason Colby, in a 2006 article, describes United Fruit’s Guatemala enclave during its earliest years, with a workforce of Jamaican immigrants, as “Jim Crow Colonialism.”73 _African

American historian Frederick Douglass Opie describes direct connections to the Jim Crow South in the migrations of African-American railroad workers to Guatemala.74 _{In Business of Empire}

(2011) Jason Colby refines his argument, drawing on the analysis of labor segmentation by Philippe Bourgeois, emphasizing United Fruit’s strategies of divide and conquer, which was on display when the company responded to unrest among West Indian workers by hiring Hispanics. He identifies these practices as rooted in the labor segmentation of factories in the Northern U.S.75 _{In its first decades United Fruit Co. was a New England firm, and the majority of its}

employees came from the Northeastern U.S. Largely immigrant working-class and middle-class families in Northern cities were the primary consumers of bananas. Accounts of labor division are somewhat overstated, since United Fruit’s hiring practices were driven by demand for cheap labor more than deliberate efforts to weaken labor organizing. Colby’s comparisons of United

71_{-John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United}

States (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005)

72_{-John Soluri, Banana Cultures, 216-245}

73_{-Jason M. Colby, “‘Banana Growing and Negro Management’: Race, Labor and Jim Crow Colonialism in}

Guatemala, 1884-1930,” Diplomatic History Vol. 30 Issue 4 2006: 595-621

74_{-Frederick Douglass Opie, Black Labor Migration in Caribbean Guatemala, 1882-1923 (Gainesville and}

Tallahassee: University Press of Florida, 2009)

75_{-Jason M. Colby, The Business of Empire: United Fruit, Race and U.S. Expansion in Central America (Ithaca, NY:}

21

Fruit banana plantations with Northern industries provide valuable insights but overlook

important differences between agricultural and industrial enterprises, as well as discursive ideas about differences between the temperate and tropical zones and white and non-white peoples.