Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
All Here, in which Carmen Miranda sang ''The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti
Hat'' while a chorus of women straddled oversized strawberries and ba-
nanas. Miranda infused her performances with a humor that undercut the
sexual tension created by her performances and ensured that neither she
nor the banana would threaten the moral standards of the era. The light-
skinned Miranda brought a nonthreatening form of tropical exoticism to
the North American stage and screen through her costumes (including
her signature headwear based loosely on styles worn by Bahian market
women), her music (samba rhythms performed by Brazilian musicians),
and her often amusing (and calculated) mix of Portuguese and English.
Both Carmen Miranda and the banana became popular culture icons of
the sexy and the comic, a combination that does much to explain their
broad popularity.
The commercial success enjoyed by Carmen Miranda was also linked
to changes in U.S. policy toward Latin America. Seeking both to neu-
tralize German influence in the region and to ensure access to strategic
raw materials, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt promoted a ''Good
Neighbor'' policy toward Latin America. The United States pledged to
end military interventions and to strengthen economic and cultural ties
in the hemisphere. As part of itsWorld War II propaganda campaign, the
U.S. government enlisted prominent Hollywood motion picture studios
to produce movies that depicted the people of the Americas united in
the struggle against Nazi Germany.
4
Carmen Miranda's films, including
TheGang'sAllHere,DownArgentineWay,WeekendinHavana,and That
NightinRio,becamethevehiclesthroughwhichFoxStudiosimaginedthe
hemisphere's harmonious relations. In the opening scene of The Gang's
All Here, Miranda appears alongside a ship, the S.S. Brazil, performing
the ''Uncle Sam-ba'' while stevedores unload Latin America's quintessen-
tial agroexport products: coffee, fruit, and sugar.
5
How audiences in the
United States received such less-than-subtle messages is hard to say, but
Miranda's extremely popular movies (the opening of WeekendinHavana
outsoldCitizenKane) attempted to present a Latin America that was both
sensuous and a ''good neighbor.''
6
These were the cultural and geopolitical contexts in which United
Fruit registered ''Chiquita Banana'' as a trademark in 1947. Shortly there-
after, some U.S. wholesalers sought to capitalize on the logo's high profile
by placing colored bands with the name ''Chiquita'' around consumer-
sized units of bananas in retail outlets.
7
United Fruit ocials noted that
banded fruit was well suited for self-service supermarkets, but they were
slowtoexploitChiquita'spotentialmarketingvalue.Forthemostpart,the
