Books at Duke University Press

Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas
Steve Striffler, Mark Moberg

360 pages (November 2003)
8 illustrations, 16 tables, 11 figures

Cloth - $89.95	0-8223-3159-4
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-3159-9]

Paperback - $24.95	0-8223-3196-9
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-3196-4]

Over the past century, the banana industry has radically transformed Latin America and the Caribbean and become a major site of United States–Latin American interaction. Banana Wars is a history of the Americas told through the cultural, political, economic, and agricultural processes that brought bananas from the forests of Latin America and the Caribbean to the breakfast tables of the United States and Europe. The first book to examine these processes in all the western hemisphere regions where bananas are grown for sale abroad, Banana Wars advances the growing body of scholarship focusing on export commodities from historical and social scientific perspectives.

Bringing together the work of anthropologists, sociologists, economists, historians, and geographers, this collection reveals how the banana industry marshaled workers of differing nationalities, ethnicities, and languages and, in so doing, created unprecedented potential for conflict throughout Latin American and the Caribbean. The frequently abusive conditions that banana workers experienced, the contributors point out, gave rise to one of Latin America’s earliest and most militant labor movements. Responding to both the demands of workers’ organizations and the power of U.S. capital, Latin American governments were inevitably affected by banana production. Banana Wars explores how these governments sometimes asserted their sovereignty over foreign fruit companies, but more often became their willing accomplices. With several essays focusing on the operations of the extraordinarily powerful United Fruit Company, the collection also examines the strategies and reactions of the American and European corporations seeking to profit from the sale of bananas grown by people of different cultures working in varied agricultural and economic environments.

Contributors
Philippe Bourgois
Marcelo Bucheli
Dario Euraque
Cindy Forster
Lawrence Grossman
Mark Moberg
Laura T. Raynolds
Karla Slocum
John Soluri
Steve Striffler
Allen Wells

“As the first tropical fruit to fit into both a middle-class U.S. breakfast and a workingman’s lunchbox, bananas—yellow, soft, and innocent—were a slightly comical, faintly suspect, always welcome by-product of the Yankee imperial reach. These essays illuminate some of the geopolitical, environmental, and human costs of the banana’s enormous everyday popularity.”—Sidney Mintz, author of Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past

“This innovative, stimulating collection brings together the best of the new work on the social, political, and cultural impact of banana exports in the Caribbean and Central and South America. The essays provide insight into the evolution of trade regimes, popular forms of contention, and the banana in the American imagination from the early twentieth century to the present. They signal new paths for comparative work on tropical commodities, corporate strategies, the interaction of multinational companies with local governments, labor movements, contract farming, growers associations, race, immigration, nationalism, dependency, globalization, and economic development.”—Catherine LeGrand, McGill University

Steve Striffler is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Latin American Studies at the University of Arkansas and the author of In the Shadows of State and Capital: The United Fruit Company, Popular Struggle, and Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 1900–1995 (Duke University Press), winner of the Labor Section of the Latin American Studies Association’s 2003 award for Best Book. Mark Moberg is Professor of Anthropology at the University of South Alabama. He is the author of Myths of Ethnicity and Nation: Immigration, Work, and Identity in the Belize Banana Industry and Citrus, Strategy, and Class: The Politics of Development in Southern Belize.

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Acknowledgments vii
Introduction, Mark Moberg and Steve Striffler 1

1 A Global Fruit
The Global Banana Trade, Laura T. Raynolds 23
Banana Cultures: Linking the Production and Consumption of Export Bananas, 1800-1980, John Soluri 48
United Fruit Company in Latin America, Marcelo Bucheli 80

2 Central and South America
One Hundred Years of United Fruit Company Letters, Philippe Bourgois 103
Responsible Men and Sharp Yankees: The United Fruit Company, Resident Elites, and Colonial State in British Honduras, Mark Moberg 145
The Logic of the Enclave: United Fruit, Popular Struggle, and Capitalist Transformation in Ecuador, Steve Striffler 171
“The Macondo of Guatemala”: Banana Workers and National Revolutions in Tiquisate, 1944-1954, Cindy Forster 191
The Threat of Blackness to the Mestizo Nation: Race and Ethnicity in the Honduran Banana Economy, 1920s and 1930s, Dario A. Euraque 229

3 The Caribbean
Discourses and Counterdiscourses on Globalization and the St. Lucian Banana Industry, Karla Slocum 253
The St. Vincent Banana Grower’s Association, Contract Farming, and the Peasantry, Lawrence S. Grossman
Conclusions: Dialectical Bananas, Allen Wells 316

Bibliography 335
Contributors 361
Index 363