West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870-1940

West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870-1940 PDF Author: Aviva Chomsky
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780807119792
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
In the late nineteenth century, several U.S.-based companies, which merged into the United Fruit Company in 1899, began to build railroads and cultivate bananas in Costa Rica's Atlantic Coast province of Limon, recruiting mainly Jamaican workers. The society that developed in Limon was an English-speaking enclave of white North American managers and black West Indian workers, with a culture and history distinct from that of the rest of Costa Rica. This detailed and informative study of the banana industry on Costa Rica's Atlantic Coast, focusing on the lives of the industry's workers, explains why the United Fruit Company was never able to maintain the kind of social and economic control it sought over its workers and how the workers managed to create a vibrant alternative social and economic system around the plantation. West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870-1940 is among the first studies of the social history of multinational corporations and makes a significant contribution to current scholarship on plantation societies and labor systems, the history of medicine, the social and labor history of Central America, and Afro-Caribbean history.

West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870-1940

West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870-1940 PDF Author: Aviva Chomsky
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780807119792
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
In the late nineteenth century, several U.S.-based companies, which merged into the United Fruit Company in 1899, began to build railroads and cultivate bananas in Costa Rica's Atlantic Coast province of Limon, recruiting mainly Jamaican workers. The society that developed in Limon was an English-speaking enclave of white North American managers and black West Indian workers, with a culture and history distinct from that of the rest of Costa Rica. This detailed and informative study of the banana industry on Costa Rica's Atlantic Coast, focusing on the lives of the industry's workers, explains why the United Fruit Company was never able to maintain the kind of social and economic control it sought over its workers and how the workers managed to create a vibrant alternative social and economic system around the plantation. West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870-1940 is among the first studies of the social history of multinational corporations and makes a significant contribution to current scholarship on plantation societies and labor systems, the history of medicine, the social and labor history of Central America, and Afro-Caribbean history.

Humanities

Humanities PDF Author: Lawrence Boudon
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9780292709102
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 978

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Book Description
Beginning with volume 41 (1979), the University of Texas Press became the publisher of the Handbook of Latin American Studies, the most comprehensive annual bibliography in the field. Compiled by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress and annotated by a corps of more than 130 specialists in various disciplines, the Handbook alternates from year to year between social sciences and humanities. The Handbook annotates works on Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and the Guianas, Spanish South America, and Brazil, as well as materials covering Latin America as a whole. Most of the subsections are preceded by introductory essays that serve as biannual evaluations of the literature and research under way in specialized areas. The Handbook of Latin American Studies is the oldest continuing reference work in the field. Lawrence Boudon became the editor in 2000. The subject categories for Volume 58 are as follows: Electronic Resources for the Humanities Art History (including ethnohistory) Literature (including translations from the Spanish and Portuguese) Philosophy: Latin American Thought Music

West Indians of Costa Rica

West Indians of Costa Rica PDF Author: Ronald N. Harpelle
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773521623
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Harpelle (history, Lakehead U.) examines the migration of Caribbean people of African descent to the Hispanic-dominated, "white-settler" society of Costa Rica from 1900 to 1950, and the gradual ethnic transformation of this group into Afro-Costa Ricans. Coverage includes the expansion of the Costa Rican banana industry and the rise of the West Indian labor force; the emergence of the young Jamaican activist, Marcus Garvey; the post-WWI period of heightened unrest; attempts by Costa Rican governments, organizations and individuals to destroy the West Indian community; the eventual integration of West Indians into Costa Rican society in the 1940s and early-1950s; and the eventual formation of the Afro-Costa Rican identity. Distributed in the US by Cornell University Services. c. Book News Inc.

West Indians of Costa Rica

West Indians of Costa Rica PDF Author: Ronald N. Harpelle
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773569057
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Harpelle focuses on Caribbean migrants and their adaptation to life in a Hispanic society, particularly in Limón, where cultures and economies often clashed. Dealing with such issues as Garveyism, Afro-Christian religious beliefs, and class divisions within the West Indian community, The West Indians of Costa Rica sheds light on a community that has been ignored by most historians and on events that define the parameters of the modern Afro-Costa Rican identity, revealing the complexity of a community in transition. Harpelle shows that the men and women who ventured to Costa Rica in search of opportunities in the banana industry arrived as West Indian sojourners but became Afro-Costa Ricans. The West Indians of Costa Rica is a story about choices: who made them, when, how, and what the consequences were.

The Business of Empire

The Business of Empire PDF Author: Jason M. Colby
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 080146272X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
The link between private corporations and U.S. world power has a much longer history than most people realize. Transnational firms such as the United Fruit Company represent an earlier stage of the economic and cultural globalization now taking place throughout the world. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources in the United States, Great Britain, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, Colby combines "top-down" and "bottom-up" approaches to provide new insight into the role of transnational capital, labor migration, and racial nationalism in shaping U.S. expansion into Central America and the greater Caribbean. The Business of Empire places corporate power and local context at the heart of U.S. imperial history. In the early twentieth century, U.S. influence in Central America came primarily in the form of private enterprise, above all United Fruit. Founded amid the U.S. leap into overseas empire, the company initially depended upon British West Indian laborers. When its black workforce resisted white American authority, the firm adopted a strategy of labor division by recruiting Hispanic migrants. This labor system drew the company into increased conflict with its host nations, as Central American nationalists denounced not only U.S. military interventions in the region but also American employment of black immigrants. By the 1930s, just as Washington renounced military intervention in Latin America, United Fruit pursued its own Good Neighbor Policy, which brought a reduction in its corporate colonial power and a ban on the hiring of black immigrants. The end of the company's system of labor division in turn pointed the way to the transformation of United Fruit as well as the broader U.S. empire.

The History of Costa Rica

The History of Costa Rica PDF Author: Monica A. Rankin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
Concise yet thorough, this engaging book provides an overview of the unique history of an increasingly important Central American nation. The History of Costa Rica provides a thorough, straightforward narrative of a Central American country that has become increasingly more visible since the end of the 20th century. Written for students and the general reader, this book covers the nation from its pre-Colombian origins to the present day. This chronologically organized volume documents the area's earliest inhabitants, then moves on through the colonial period, the process of nation-state formation in the 19th century, the volatile period of liberal reform, and the era of civil war and its aftermath. More recent times are also explored, including the role of Costa Rica in the Cold War, the peace process of the 1980s, and the development of the strong tourism industry that flourishes today. Among the prominent themes running through the book are the unique historical development of the country, the importance of its democratic tradition, and Costa Rica's role in a global context.

The Oxford Handbook of Central American History

The Oxford Handbook of Central American History PDF Author: Robert Holden
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190928360
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 705

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Book Description
Interpreting the History of a Region in Crisis / Robert H. Holden -- Land and Climate: Natural Constraints and Socio-Environmental Transformations / Anthony Goebel McDermott -- Regaining Ground: Indigenous Populations and Territories / Peter H. Herlihy, Matthew L. Fahrenbruch, Taylor A. Tappan -- The Ancient Civilizations / William R. Fowler -- Marginalization, Assimilation, and Resurgence: The Indigenous Peoples since Independence / Wolfgang Gabbert -- The Spanish Conquest? / Laura E. Matthew -- Spanish Colonial Rule / Stephen Webre -- The Kingdom of Guatemala as a Cultural Crossroads / Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara -- From Kingdom to Republics, 1808-1840 / Aaron Pollack -- The Political Economy / Robert G. Williams -- State Making and Nation Building / David Díaz Arias -- Central America and the United States / Michel Gobat -- The Cold War: Authoritarianism, Empire, and Social Revolution / Joaquín M. Chávez -- Central America since the 1990s: Crime, Violence, and the Pursuit of Democracy / Christine J. Wade -- The Rise and Retreat of the Armed Forces / Orlando J. Pérez and Randy Pestana -- Religion, Politics, and the State / Bonar L. Hernández Sandoval -- Women and Citizenship: Feminist and Suffragist Movements, 1880-1957 / Eugenia Rodríguez Sáenz -- Literature, Society, and Politics / Werner Mackenbach -- Guatemala / David Carey Jr. -- Honduras / Dario A. Euraque -- El Salvador / Erik Ching -- Nicaragua / Julie A. Charlip -- Costa Rica / Iván Molina -- Panama / Michael E. Donoghue -- Belize / Mark Moberg.

Problematizing Blackness

Problematizing Blackness PDF Author: Jean Muteba Rahier
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135316872
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
This cutting-edge piece of scholarship studies the invisibility of the black migrants in popular consciousness and intellectual discourse in the United States through the interrogation of actual members of this community.

The Silver Women

The Silver Women PDF Author: Joan Flores-Villalobos
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512823643
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
The construction of the Panama Canal is typically viewed as a marvel of American ingenuity. What is less visible, and less understood, is the project’s dependence on the labor of Black migrant women. The Silver Women shifts the focus of this monumental endeavor to the West Indian women who travelled to Panama, inviting readers to place women’s intimate lives, choices, grief, and ambition at the center of the economic and geopolitical transformation created by the construction of the Panama Canal and U.S. imperial expansion. Joan Flores-Villalobos argues that Black West Indian women made the canal construction possible by providing the indispensable everyday labor of social reproduction. West Indian women built a provisioning economy that fed, housed, and cared for the segregated Black West Indian labor force, in effect subsidizing the construction effort and the racial calculus that separated pay in silver for Black workers and gold for white Americans. But while also subject to racial discrimination and segregation, West Indian women mostly worked outside the umbrella of U.S. canal authorities. They did not hold contracts, had little access to official services and wages, and received pay in both silver and gold. From this position, they found ways to skirt, and at times subvert, the legal, moral, and economic parameters imperial authorities sought to impose on the migrant workforce. West Indian women developed important strategies of claims-making, kinship, community building, and market adaptation that helped them navigate the contradictions and violence of U.S. empire. In the meantime, these strategies of social reproduction nurtured further West Indian migrations, linking Panama to places like Harlem and Santiago de Cuba. The Silver Women is thus a history of Black women’s labor of social reproduction as integral to U.S. imperial infrastructure, the global Caribbean diaspora, and women’s own survival.

Banana Wars

Banana Wars PDF Author: Steve Striffler
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822385287
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
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