Agriculture Reference
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of rural working people forging ''place-based'' identities. These local af-
finitiesaresomewhatparadoxicalgiventhenearconstantflowofmigrants
throughtheregion,buttheverytenuousnessoftheirlivelihoodsmayhelp
to explain working peoples' desires to identify with and make claims to
local and regional places. I found little evidence that conservation of re-
sources per se was a primary concern of working people. This is not to
imply that the North Coast's inhabitants were ''too poor'' to be concerned
aboutthefatesofforests,wetlands,andrivers,butratherthattheyderived
their understandings of changes in the land largely through work, not
leisure. Environmental historians of Latin America (and beyond), there-
fore, should pay close attention to workplaces not only because they are
often crucial sites of environmental change but also because production
ultimately cannot be isolated from consumption, nor can work be sepa-
rated from leisure.
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During his distinguished career William Roseberry called for studies
of working people that went beyond typologies. Environmental histori-
ansof LatinAmericashouldsimilarlyaimtowritehistoriesofcommodity
production that convey the heterogeneity and historical dynamism of
organisms and processes that tend to get lumped together as ''resources,''
''land,''orsimply''space.''Bybreathinglifeintotheseandothercategories,
we can avoid falling into the trap of environmental determinism while
demonstrating the dynamic interplay between economies and ecologies,
landscapes and livelihoods, and cultural and biological diversity. How-
ever, I would caution against analyses that stress diverse outcomes at the
expense of comparing similar dynamics. Despite the profoundly differ-
ent experiences of Chinese cane cutters in mid-nineteenth-century Cuba,
Jamaicanbananafarmersinearly-twentieth-centuryCostaRica,andlate-
twentieth-century Mayan coffee pickers in Guatemala, their lives were
similarly caught up in commodity webs spun by agroecological, cultural,
economic, political, and social processes that in turn gave rise to a com-
mon set of production/consumption dynamics.
The export banana trade was unique in a number of important ways
includingthedegreeofverticalintegrationachievedbytheU.S.fruitcom-
panies in the early twentieth century, the long-term importance of fungal
pathogens, and the enduring yet narrow place that the fruit occupied in
U.S. foodways. At the same time, banana production/consumption dy-
namics were rather similar to those of coffee, citrus, grapes, and sugar—
cropsthatatfirstglanceappeartobeverydifferentfromoneanother.Pro-
duction processes for the commodities compared evolved in response to
tensions between the standardizing tendencies of mass markets and the
