Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
cook. The hours were long, but at times she made more money than her
husband,especiallyonpaydays,whenworkerseagerlyboughthertamales
and enchiladas. After eating, Juan headed off with his felling crew to con-
tinue clearing trees and brush. On the way to the work site, he thought
about moving to an established farm where he could work as a harvester
or ditch digger. The other day he had narrowly avoided being struck by a
felled tree. Mosquitoes were a constant annoyance around the makeshift
camp. And then there were the snakes; he hadn't seen a barba amarilla
in a while, but one never knew—the foreman's shout jarred Juan from
his thoughts. Drawing his machete, Juan sighed and began hacking at the
underbrush of the receding forest.
This imagined scene never happened, but similar ones took place
nearly every day in banana camps along the North Coast during the first
half of the twentieth century.
1
The transformation of the North Coast's
landscape resulted from the labor of thousands of people (mostly men)
who cleared forests, dug drainage ditches, planted and tended the fields,
and harvested mature fruit. Thousands of other people (mostly women)
workedinandaroundthecamps,preparingmeals,washingclothes,fetch-
ing water and firewood, and raising children. This multitude of migrant,
poor, and largely illiterate farmworkers inspired Ramón Amaya Amador
to write Prisión verde, a novel that revolved around the lives of a group
of campeños, or plantation workers. Amaya Amador was born and raised
in Olanchito, Yoro, in 1916. In an adulthood spent working as a teacher,
banana plantation worker, and political organizer, he witnessed firsthand
the social and ecological transformations wrought byexport banana pro-
duction following the arrival of first the Truxillo Railroad Company and
later the Standard Fruit Company to his hometown. He also experienced
the political repression of the Carías regime (1933-1948), fleeing the North
Coast in 1947 for Guatemala, where he wrote novels about working-class
lives in Honduras and helped to create a clandestine communist party.
2
By depicting banana plantations as sites of exploitation and misery, he
challenged fruit company and government discourses that portrayed the
North Coast as a beacon of modernity in an otherwise backward country.
Amaya Amador's narrative problematized images of campeños as drunks
and gamblers prone to violence by constructing a world in which profit-
driven U.S. corporations and their Honduran cronies trapped workers in
a cycle of grinding poverty from which fewescaped.The prison metaphor
conveyed the physical and psychological degradation of workers wrought
byaproductionsystemrootedinsocialandeconomicinequities.
