The Lives and Time of Miss Chiquita - Banana Cultures - page 171

tions in packing plants through fathers and stepfathers. 109 This was noth-
ing new; male field hands historically landed jobs by exploiting personal
contacts. In fact, kin networks may have become even more important by
the late 1960s, when the companies were reducing the size of their union-
ized work forces.
Womenworkedselecting,weighing,stickering,andpackingbananas.
Theworkpaceinempacadorasfollowedarhythmsetbyharvestingopera-
tions: the larger the cortes, the longer and more frenetic the shifts for
packers. Days could be particularly strenuous for women like Esperanza,
who had three children when she began working in theempacadoraat the
age of twenty-three:
We got up at 4:00 in the morning and ate breakfast on the way to
work, because sometimes there wasn't time to eat at work. The day was
stressful. We started at 6:30 and we didn't finish working until 6:30 in
the evening. Twelve-hour shifts. We had one half-hour break at 11 in the
morning and that was it.
When a woman leaves her family to work it's a struggle because
one has obligations to her children and also to her job. Sometimes I got
up at 3:00 in the morning to wash clothes. 110
Other women who began working in packing plants in the mid-1960s re-
called a similar routine of rising early and working long days (up to 16
hours)withfewbreaks.Longshiftsintheempacadorawerepunctuatedby
dayswhentheplantsoperatedatlessthanfullcapacityorshutdowncom-
pletely in the absence of harvesting activities. For women like Olivia Zal-
dívar, periodic lulls in packing activity provided an opportunity to catch
upondomesticwork:''Thedaysthattheempacadoradidnotoperatewere
spent washing clothes.'' 111
Olivia worked for six months in a Tela Railroad Company packing
plantin1964duringwhichtimeshemetamanwithwhomshehada
child who died in infancy. Two years later, Olivia had a second child with
anotherman,butwhenthefatherrefusedtoprovideanyfinancialoremo-
tional support, she returned to the empacadora, ''motivated'' by the need
totakecareof herchild.Olivia'sstatusasamadresoltera,orsinglemother,
was a common one for women in the boxing plants. Indeed, somewomen
suggested that single mothers formed a majorityof the female employees.
According to Olivia, the empacadoras not only attracted single mothers,
theyalso helped to create them: ''There arewomen who are married when
they start working, but you know that when a woman works she frees her-