Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
the merchant houses located in towns that lay many miles away from the
farms. Although railroads linked farms and towns, the fruit-company-
controlled train schedules did not always accommodate shopping trips.
Forexample, in order to travel the relatively short distance from Standard
FruitcampsnearCoyolestoOlanchito,apersonhadtoboardthetrainfor
LaCeibathatdidnotreturntoCoyolesuntilthefollowingday.Thismeant
that workers would have to find a place to spend the night in Olanchito
and potentially lose a day's wages. Nevertheless, camp residents occasion-
ally traveled by rail and by foot to outlying commercial centers including
El Progreso, La Lima, and Olanchito in order to purchase items (such as
women's clothing) not sold in company stores.
The living spaces inhabited by workers, then, were largely defined
by the control that the fruit companies exercised over the movement of
people, money, and consumer goods. Within the camps, the organiza-
tion of space served to reinforce prevailing inequalities. By separating
the private residences of farm managers from workers' dwellings with
fences, orchards, and foremen's living quarters, the camp design created
a distance that was at once physical and social between managers and
farm workers. Soccer fields and recreation halls served to channel worker
leisure time into activities deemed acceptable by company management.
What the architectural plan left unsaid—that the companyowned the en-
tire complex and therefore could evict a dismissed worker—spoke vol-
umes about the ways that work and living spaces overlapped. Of course,
the blueprint for prototype camps represented an idealized ordering of
space; in practice, camp residents periodically appropriated social spaces
for their own ends. At no time was this more evident than on paydays
(pagosgenerales) when work camps converted into boisterous (and often
violent) ferias where consumption and revelry were the orders of the day
(and night).
The pago general usually took place on the last Saturday of each
month.
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An armored rail car traveled from farm to farm disbursing pay-
ments toworkers and contractors.Workers lined up to cash in their time-
checks—aprocessthatoftenextendedwellintotheevening.Drawnbythe
infusion of cash, peddlers, prostitutes, and even tax collectors descended
on the camps. Peddlers hawked wares ranging from practical items such
as locally made work shoes (zapatos burros) to indulgent imports that
included Cuban cigars, white silk shirts, and English cashmere. Guaro-
fueled workers picked guitars and belted out folk songs, while phono-
graphs spun Mexican rancheros and Argentine tangos. Prostitutes visited
barracks and set up temporary palm huts where they performed sexual
