The Caribbean coast of Central America has long been known as a ‘frontier zone’ where contact between indigenous, mestizo and Afro-Caribbean populations has often resulted in arduous competition and conflict. The initial motivating forces for these interactions were British mercantile and colonial interests, which sought access to the region's profitable timber resources. Afro-Caribbean slaves provided most of the timber industry's labour force in its early years, and were joined at the end of the eighteenth century by the Garifuna, a defiant maroon population that Britain exiled from the Eastern Caribbean. The 1850 Clayton–Bulwer Treaty forced Britain to formally withdraw from the coast in favour of the United States, yet a change in the region's dominant colonial power did not stem the migration of Caribbean people to Central America. The demands of railroad construction, banana plantations and the Panama Canal – all of them directed by US interests – swept up tens of thousands of labourers from Britain's desperately poor West Indian colonies. At the same time, these sectors generated employment opportunities that drew mestizos into the tropical lowlands, setting the stage for a volatile ethnic cauldron in which workers' economic interests varied in close correlation with their colour, nationality and language.
Previous scholars have examined closely these ethnic interactions in the lowland regions of Costa Rica, Nicaragua, the Canal Zone and Belize. Studies of Honduran Afro-Caribbean communities have focused largely on the Garifuna, to the exclusion of the country's English-speaking blacks. As the first book-length study of its type, Glenn Chambers' work is a welcome contribution to the expanding literature on race, class and ethnicity in the tropical lowlands. Whereas previous studies (including the work of this reviewer) have tended to examine ethnic antagonism in the region as a reflex of labour control and hierarchies in a segmented workforce, Chambers moves beyond such treatments to consider West Indian identity in a more dialectical fashion. Although the insatiable labour demands of banana production stimulated West Indian migration to Honduras, ‘the communities that emerged were not simply accessories to that industry’ (p. 142). Rather, Chambers argues that ever-increasing pressure on the part of Spanish-speaking Hondurans to exclude West Indians from the country produced a corresponding resistance among West Indians to assimilation in matters of language or marriage.
To a greater extent than studies of Afro-Caribbean populations elsewhere in Central America, Chambers situates his analysis outside of the realm of plantation labour and within the discourses of Honduran national identity and immigration policy in the early twentieth century. Relatively well-skilled, English-speaking and often deferential to white North American managers, West Indians occupied a comparatively privileged position in the plantation labour force. They comprised the bulk of field supervisors, railway engineers and mechanics, and enjoyed higher wages than their Spanish-speaking counterparts. Yet the ire expressed by Spanish-speaking workers towards the West Indian presence was not simply borne of envy, as the companies repeatedly used blacks as strike-breakers when Hondurans struck for higher wages. A series of ever more restrictive immigration policies culminated in a 1934 law expressly forbidding immigration from the West Indies and targeting West Indian residents for deportation. Such laws were championed not only by Spanish-speaking workers but also by the country's intelligentsia and political elites, which subscribed to the discourses of eugenics then prevalent in Europe and North America. Chambers demonstrates that such laws were racist rather than nationalistic, observing that large numbers of Salvadoreans and other Central Americans were employed in Honduras but were never targeted with the animosity directed toward blacks. Conversely, the Garifuna, who were Spanish-speaking, Catholic Hondurans, found themselves, like other blacks, the objects of rising persecution during this time. Centring on the colonial-era indigenous hero Lempira and Hondurans of Spanish descent, the national identity that emerged during this time embraced mestizaje and refused to accord English-speaking blacks legitimate membership in the body politic.
Enjoying few legal rights and often targeted for persecution, West Indians ironically found that their only protectors were the fruit companies for which they worked. The reach of Honduran law into banana company compounds and living quarters was negligible, providing a simultaneous source of protection for West Indians and indignation for Honduran nationalists. While many West Indians prided themselves on their nominal British citizenship, British diplomatic authorities mounted few protests on their behalf when they were mistreated or falsely accused of crimes; indeed, to the extent that the British authorities intervened at all, it was only out of a self-serving fear that Hondurans might otherwise perceive them as weak and ineffectual. While the forces arrayed against West Indians drew them into a closer embrace with their employers, they were ultimately betrayed by the US fruit companies. As the banana industry was ravaged by the global Depression and widening Panama disease in the early 1930s, the companies were forced to lay off workers. Rather than risk the anger of their Spanish-speaking workforces, the companies presided over the firing and deportation of the West Indians they had earlier recruited from the islands.
Chambers does raise some questions that I wish had been better answered, among them that of the lack of support among West Indians in Honduras for the Garveyite Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) relative to other West Indian enclaves in Central America. The author attributes this to the fact that West Indians in Honduras were more likely to be of a middle-class background than those in Costa Rica or Panama, but I would be sceptical that there were significant differences between these various migrant streams. Certainly United Fruit had a history of relocating migrant workers among its Central American divisions as labour demands varied, which induced a great deal of mixing among West Indians by island of origin and class. This, however, is a very slight reservation indeed. In all, this is a nicely argued, thoroughly researched and lucidly written book that throws new light on a long-neglected aspect of Honduran history. Glenn Chambers has made a valuable contribution to studies of a region where the contours of ethnicity and race remain complex and conflicted to this day.
