Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
executives when trying to monitor the actions of widely dispersed farm
managers.
If the autonomy vested in overseers and foremen enabled chief ex-
ecutives to deflect criticisms of company policies, it also provided farm
managers with opportunities to subvert the rule of central managers who
largely isolated themselves from fieldworkers. During the 1950s, the Tela
Railroad Company rotated its farm managers every year or two in order
to discourage patronage.
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The authority vested in foremen, the fact that
they seldom performed physical labor, and the fringe benefits that they
enjoyed unquestionably set them apart from field hands, but theydid not
uniformly reconstruct themselves as ''company men.'' Many foremen had
started in the fruit companies as field hands and shared common back-
grounds and language with the people that they supervised. The memo-
ries of ex-campeños suggest that the plantation environment provided
workers and foremen with room for confrontation, collusion, and an un-
easy co-existence.
living environments
Thephysicaldistancethatseparatedtheplacesinhabitedbyfruitcom-
panyexecutivessuchasWilliamTurnbull,andcapatacesandcampeñosdid
not exist byaccident. High-level U.S. employees and their families resided
in zonas americanas that were physically demarcated from other neigh-
borhoods by fences and gated entry points. The architecture and land-
scaping—including golf courses and swimming pools—reflected the aes-
thetic sensibilities and cultural practices of its predominantly white U.S.
residents. Foremen and fieldhands inhabited a world apart, eating, rest-
ing, and sleeping in company-owned camps that usually lay in very close
proximity to the farms.
During the first half of the twentieth century, United Fruit's Hon-
duran subsidiaries housed workers in six-unit wooden barracks; separate
kitchens lay behind the sleeping quarters. The structures lacked indoor
plumbing and electricity. In 1925, a public o
cial in Trujillo reported
that he had met with Truxillo Railroad Company management to dis-
cuss worker housing that did not ''meet the necessary standards of hy-
giene...themajorityoftheworkersarevictimsofaterribleplague of
mosquitoes.''
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That same year, Dr. William Deeks, a United Fruit Com-
pany physician, published a pamphlet on malaria that stressed the need
for''mosquito-proof''housinginordertopreventthedisease.But,United
Fruit's Medical Department reported that screening was impossible be-
