Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
tity as a ''true son'' of Honduras potentially obscures the fact that women
also migrated to export banana zones. For example, sometime around
1927, Ángela Coto-Moreno's mother decided to leave her home in south-
ern Honduras and head for the North Coast in the hope of finding some
of her children. Accompanied by only seven-year-old Ángela, she made
thedi
cultjourneythroughthemountainouscentralregionof Honduras
before reaching the Sula valley, where she found both her children and a
job as a labor camp cook. Ángela eventually married and left the banana
camps to establish a small farm with her husband.
2
The experiences of Víctor and Ángela were not unique: thousands
of men and women migrated to the North Coast in the first half of the
twentieth century. They came from all over Honduras in addition to El
Salvador, Jamaica, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Belize, and Mexico. Immigrant
life in export banana zones was highlydynamic: people moved from farm
tofarmandfromjobtojob,blurringtheboundariesbetweencampesino/a
andobrero/a.Hundreds of small-scale growers produced Gros Michel ba-
nanas for export and/or grew a variety of grains, fruits, and vegetables for
local markets. Although farming afforded freedoms unavailable to plan-
tation workers, it also held many risks linked toweather, volatile markets,
and the fruit companies' monopoly power over railroads and shipping.
Panama disease added another destabilizing element to everyday life: the
fruit companies' practice of shifting production left residents of aban-
donedcommunitiestoconfrontthevexingtaskofforgingnewlivelihoods
in altered environments. For squatters, an already tenuous situation was
compoundedbythethreatofeviction,or,asMedina'sclosingremarksug-
gested, an inability to market one's produce.
In struggles for control over resources, working people frequently
employed rhetorics of place that appropriated elite discourses about na-
tion building for their own needs. Working-class visions of the North
CoasttendedtobeascontradictoryastheprocessbywhichtheHonduran
state attempted to incorporate the region into an imagined mestizo na-
tion. Spanish-speaking migrants such asVíctor Medina and Ángela Coto-
Moreno forged collective identities in opposition to both the hegemony
of the U.S. fruit companies and the presence of ''black'' and ''foreign''
laborers. The North Coast was a contested contact zone that gave rise to
both anti-immigrant campaigns and utopian land colonization projects
in places that lay beyond the shadows of the banana plantations.
