Ethnicity at Work Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation
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Ethnicity at Work Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation Philippe I. Bourgois The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore and London Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History and Culture Richard Price, Series Editor r e c e n t a n d r e l a t e d t it l e s in t h e s e r ie s Main Currents in Caribbean Thought: The Historical Evolution of Caribbean Society in Its Ideological Aspects, 1492-1900 Gordon K. Lewis The Man-of-Words in the West Indies: Performance and the Emergence of Creole Culture Roger D. Abrahams First-Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People Richard Price Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807-1834 B. W. Higman Between Slavery and Free Labor: The Spanish-Speaking Caribbean in the Nineteenth Century edited by Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Frank Moya Pons, and Stanley Engerman Caribbean Contours edited by Sidney W. Mintz and Sally Price Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua, with Implications for Colonial British America David Barry Gaspar The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa: Class, Nationalism, and the State in Twentieth-Century Natal Shula Marks Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy Michel-Rolph Trouillot Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World, /560-/S00 Nicolas Canny This book has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation ©1989 The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America The Johns Hopkins University Press, 701 West 40th Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21211 The Johns Hopkins Press Ltd., London The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, a n s i Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bourgois, Philippe I., 1956- Ethnicity at work : divided labor on a Central American banana planta tion/Philippe I. Bourgois. p. cm.— (Johns Hopkins studies in Atlantic history and culture) Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-8018-3693-x (alk. paper) 1. Banana trade—Costa Rica—Employees—Case studies. 2. Banana trade—Panama—Employees—Case studies. 3. Discrimination in employment—Costa Rica—Case studies. 4. Discrimination in employment—Panama—Case studies. 5. Racism—Costa Rica—Case studies. 6. Racism—Panama—Case studies. 7. United Fruit Company— Employees—Case studies. I. Title. II. Series. HD8039.B23C83 1989 331 .*>'097286—dci9 88-11778 CIP Para Charo Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xvii I / The Logistics of Production 3 2 / Monopoly Power 14 3 / Unequal Confrontation: The Appropriation of Bribri Territory, 1908-1931 24 4 / The Bribri and the Cash Economy: From Subsistence Agriculturalists to Small Farmers 34 5 / West Indian Immigration and the Origins of the Banana Industry 45 6 / Black Upward Mobility 66 7 / Ideological Framework of the Black Experience 85 8 / The Guaymi Become Banana Workers h i 9 / Guaymi ConJugated Oppression: Race and Class 120 10 / Political Implications of Guaymi ConJugated Oppression 145 11 / Kuna Banana Workers: “ Tradition” and Monopoly Capital 160 12 / Hispanics in the Labor Force 179 13 / Hispanic Political Mobilization and Labor Control 194 vii 14 / Conclusion: How Important Is Ethnicity.' Appendix: Maps and Figures 229 Notes 239 Bibliography 279 Index 303 i viii Preface Ethnicity imposed itself as the central theme of this book almost against my will. When I began my fieldwork on a United Fruit Com pany banana plantation spanning the borders of Costa Rica and Panama on the Atlantic Coast of Central America in mid-1982,' I had originally planned to collect data on the productive process and the noneconomic forms of coercion practiced by management on its labor force. Almost immediately, however, I was forced to recognize—at least on the phe nomenological level—the salience of ethnicity on the plantation. Even as I exited the bus that brought me to the banana farms for the first time, I was accosted by a Kuna Amerindian woman in full traditional dress hawking lottery tickets. Suddenly an apelike howling filled the air. A group of Hispanic men and women who worked in the shanty shack stores by the side of the road were Jeering at young Guaymf Amerindian men who were returning in an open flatbed transport cart from a day’s work spreading potassium fertilizer. The cart stopped and the shanty shack hawkers swarmed around the Guaymf Jeering and taunting them. Stony faced, the Amerindian workers approached the very same peddlers and bought soft drinks and candy. After the Guaymf left, the shanty keepers bragged and laughed with one another over how PREFACE much they had short-changed or overcharged the “ cholitos” 2 Several other Guaymi browsing in the surrounding shops overheard them. For the next sixteen months (July 1982 to January 1984) I found myself engulfed on the plantation and in its periphery by a whirlpool of distinct ethnic groups, each one constantly referring to one an other’s phenotypical and cultural characteristics in a deprecating man ner. They included Bribri, Guaymi, and Kuna Amerindians, blacks of West Indian descent, white Anglo-Saxon Americans, and several differ ent Hispanic peoples. What follows is an attempt to explicate these confrontations. Although I focuscd my data collection on ethnicity, my initial re search interest, the politics of labor control, continued to provide the framework for my analysis. My research experience has forced me to reassess theories of ethnicity and to grapple with their relationship to class. I am interested in ethnicity insofar as it is an ideological phe nomenon: a set of symbolic markers that have been created—or have escalated—into a means of structuring power relations. Based on my experience on the plantation, however, I would go even further and ar gue that the most useful way to understand ethnicity is in the context of unequal power relations in the production process both within and across classes. I suspect that the reverse is also largely true: most analy ses of the labor process, or of social inequalities in general, are incom plete without a careful examination of how ethnicity—or an ideological dimension comparable to ethnicity, such as gender—structures conflict and power.’ The United Fruit Company’s Bocas del Toro plantation (hereafter re ferred to as the Bocas Division or the Bocas del Toro Division)4 offers privileged insight into processes of ethnic discrimination and economic exploitation because its complex division of labor has meshed over the past century with successive waves of immigrant laborers. The remark able ethnic diversity of plantation society is hierarchically structured by a complicated productive process subdivided into dozens of Job catego ries involving different degrees of technological skill, as well as physical and mental stress. The region’s dual hierarchies—occupational and eth nic—feed upon and mutually define each other. The almost six thou sand day laborers and seven hundred management employees on the plantation segment into what one could call a de facto apartheid occupa tional hierarchy. The local population have “ essentialized” the “ obJec tive” characteristics of the various cohorts of workers in a racial idiom. For example, I frequently heard non-Amerindians insisting that the Guaymf spread corrosive fertilizers and dangerous pesticides because “ their skin is thicker and they don’t get sick.” They were not paid the PREFACE full wage for strenuous fieldwork because, according to a foreman, “ the Indian has low physiological needs. Because of his physical constitu tion, he can bear to do tasks that the Hispanic Just can’t perform. The Indian only thinks of food; he has no other aspirations. He works to eat.” * Blacks, on the other hand, predominated in the Maintenance Department’s repair shops and electrical division because, as I was re peatedly assured, they were “ crafty and don’t like to sweat.” Recently arrived Nicaraguan Hispanic immigrants were said to work almost as hard as the Guaymf because they “ are tough, have leathery skin [cueron] and aren’t afraid of sweating under the hot sun.” Finally, white North Americans were the top managers because “ they are the smartest race on earth.” For the past century the plantation region has been a sort of pressure cooker producing charged belief systems (ideologies) around ethnicity. All the necessary structural ingredients and catalysts are present: con- flictive management labor relations, a hierarchical system of produc tion, a boom and bust economy, waves of immigration, and remarkable ethnic diversity. In order to delimit more clearly my central theoretical concern—to transcend the ideology versus material reality debate—I have intro duced a logistical tension to the narrative by organizing the chapters around specific ethnic groups rather than by proceeding with a chrono logical account of labor immigration and the process of immigration and banana production over the past century in Bocas del Toro. Each ethnic group in the plantation social formation, consequently, is ac corded one or more chapters except for the various Hispanic groups, who are somewhat arbitrarily lumped together into two chapters. I begin the discussion of each ethnic group with an analysis of the group’s initial incorporation into the plantation labor force and its location in the local occupational hierarchy. I then analyze the group’s resistance to exploita tion, as well as management’s strategies for augmenting labor control. The second half of each discussion focuses on ideology: ethnic discrimi nation, and patterns of political and organizational mobilization. The most pervasive methodological problem I faced in my field re search is the extreme subJectivity of ethnicity as an obJect of study. As there are no defined indices for measuring or even for describing eth nicity, one by necessity relies on impressionistic observations.