Scholarship on the United Fruit Company (UFC) in Latin America is somewhat of a cottage industry. The wide reach of the Boston-based company's operations endowed it with great economic and political power. Scholars have documented the UFC's presence in Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Honduras, and Jamaica, focusing primarily on its labor regimes and its diplomatic relations. James W. Martin's tidy monograph gives us a cultural history of the company's imperial presence in the region, from its founding in 1899 to its apogee in the 1920s.
The UFC combined vertical integration with horizontal expansion to an unprecedented extent, eating up large swaths of fertile land. Control of vast territories reduced the company's investment risk, which could come in the form of climate disasters, crop infestation, or an unstable political environment. The extensive reach of its operations required a large labor force. While the company recruited rank-and-file workers among black West Indian (and later, local) populations, it recruited white men from the United States to serve as white-collar employees. It is this group—the banana cowboys—that carried out the company's corporate colonizing mission. They managed black and Hispanic employees while taming the Caribbean wilderness by altering the landscape with houses, roads, and offices.
Two decades ago, Gilbert Joseph, Catherine LeGrand, and Ricardo Salvatore published Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the History of U.S.-Latin American Relations (Duke, 1998). Essays in the volume illustrated the editors’ understanding that empire could be enacted by non-state entities, from cinema production companies to American mining concerns. Martin's study follows this line of inquiry, detailing how the white workforce recruited by the UFC went on to see themselves as pioneers in a banana frontier. These white workers went on to imagine themselves conquering a tropical wilderness, a phenomenon that the author describes as a “close encounter of empire” (3).
Martin isolates a few key encounters of empire. To recruit a white-collar workforce, the UFC first had to counter the belief that white people could not endure tropical climates, where malaria, typhoid, and other diseases felled white explorers. Advances in public health that unfolded precisely at the time that the UFC sought white workers (1910s) resulted in the company becoming “a rich testing ground for the belief that the disease resided within the body, and that the tropics could be made salubrious in and around white colonies” (46).
This medical opinion led company doctors to conclude that white employees could endure the tropics so long as they practiced “moral hygiene,” which Martin explores in chapter 4, “Wandering Foci of Infection.” Through a careful study of the UFC's medical discourse, Martin demonstrates how the company used the technology of medicine to prescribe behaviors and habits that it deemed moral. These habits were racialized, with UFC doctors advising white employees to stay away from black and Hispanic workers. Medical discourse gave a scientific veneer to corporate paternalism and racism. UFC facilitated segregation by building houses, hospitals, and sports facilities to recruit white employees and at the same time to shield them from non-white populations.
The company's racialized hierarchy came to be reflected in how workers viewed themselves and in how they were depicted in popular culture, the theme of chapter 5. Many of UFCs white employees left company grounds to explore the interior of Latin America. They were compelled to prove their manliness by trekking into the interior, often alone. These adventures conferred upon them moral and physical regeneration, rescuing them from the soft, feminized life of modern Western man. Banana cowboys found their manhood on the Latin America's frontiers.
Although the overall impression is that each chapter needs to be more fully developed, Martin's study offers a number of intriguing anecdotes and observations. Its focus on white employees stands out as a distinctive contribution to the literature on the United Fruit Company.
