Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
The life histories of twenty-four individuals who worked on the fruit
companies' plantations between roughly 1930 and 1950 resonate force-
fully with Amaya Amador's portrait of demanding work regimes, insa-
lubrious living conditions, and material impoverishment. However, they
also reveal the limitations of the author's bipolar vision that unambigu-
ously located characters either inside oroutside of the prison.The memo-
ries of former laborers offer a much more dynamic and morally complex
viewof life on banana plantations than the one portrayed inPrisiónverde.
They temper Amaya Amador's rigid structuralism by revealing some of
the strategies devised by campeños to endure the hardships and uncer-
tainties associated with living in a world where civil liberties were few, job
security minimal, and daily life was shaped by distant marketplace struc-
tures and regional agroecologies. Sketches of individual life histories also
help to bring women into view as important actors in plantation econo-
mies.Duringthefirsthalfofthetwentiethcentury,womenseldom,ifever,
worked on the banana farms of the U.S. fruit companies. Instead, they
forged livelihoods on the plantation peripheries that were both vital to
daily life and an important source of cash income for themselves and their
families. Far removed from the main stage of national politics, working-
class men and women used the intimate spaces of the fields and barracks
to negotiate—with varying degrees of success—the terms under which
they worked and lived.
figure 5.1.UnitedFruitworkerhousingafterafloodintheAguánvalley(1924).
UnitedFruitCompanyPhotographCollection.BakerLibrary,HarvardBusinessSchool.
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