Jim Crow Colonialism in Guatemala

j a s o n m.
c o l b y
Banana Growing and Negro Management: Race,
Labor, and Jim Crow Colonialism in Guatemala,
18841930
In the spring of 1912, twenty-six-year-old Hugh Wilson learned of his appoint-
ment as U.S. charg daffaires in Guatemala City. A former Yale classmate of
Secretary of State Philander C. Knoxs son, Wilson welcomed the news and
promptly boarded a New Orleans steamer for Puerto Barrios, Guatemalas busy
banana port. There he was met by the United Fruit Companys superintendent,
Dartmouth-educated Victor M. Cutter. With a broad grin on a rugged clean-
shaved face, Wilson recalled, the immaculately dressed Cutter was pictur-
esque, a huge gure in tropic white that O. Henry would have cherished.
As the young diplomat followed Cutter down the gangway, he caught his rst
glimpse of United Fruits workforce. In the black moist night, a line of
negroes stripped to the waist and bare-footed, each bent under the load of a
huge bunch [of bananas] strode up the wharf, where they passed their burden
into the hold through a chain gang of handlers. At the head of the gang plank,
the blackest and biggest buck of all smoked a cigarette and whirled a machete,
chopping off excess banana stems as they passed. The two Americans left the
pier and walked to the rail depot, where Wilson boarded the dawn train for the
capital. Only then did he grasp the scope of United Fruits empire. The train
ran through jungle for a while, he recalled, then pushed out into the banana
lands, a sea of them. They seemed to reach the horizon.
1
Over the following months, Wilsons workload proved light, and he visited
the banana enclave often. In the process, he became close friends with Cutter,
only four years his senior. Cutter had joined United Fruit in 1904 and appren-
ticed under the legendary railroad builder and banana pioneer Minor C. Keith.
His rst overseas assignment had taken him to Costa Rica, where, according to
Wilson, he learned the business of banana growing and negro management.
He applied both to the companys new Guatemala division. During Wilsons
visits, Cutter schooled his friend in the racial etiquette of United Fruits enclave,
where company ofcials not only maintained the strict racial segregation asso-
ciated with the Jim Crow South but also emphasized the performance of racial
1. Hugh Wilson, The Education of a Diplomat (London, 1938), 819, 3638.
Diplomatic History, Vol. 30, No. 4 (September 2006). 2006 The Society for Historians of
American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published by Blackwell Publishing, Inc., 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.
595
superiority common to colonial settings. Displays of white skill and courage
proved just as important as enforced nonwhite deference. Cutters handling
of negroes was remarkable, Wilson noted: He excelled in everything they
admired. He could ght the wildest of them, he could outshoot them, his
endurance was unlimited and his occasional ash of ferocious temper kept them
cowed. Such qualities were necessary, he explained. These negroes from
Jamaica were cheerful and reasonably industrious, but full of liquor they became
dangerous. Cutter would face them down in their worst moments.
2
The tenuous nature of this negro management was revealed on a trip
Wilson and Cutter took to Puerto Barrios. Three negroes loaded a hand-car
onto the track. Cutter and I sat on the front bench with our guns, and the
negroes set the gasoline engine in movement, Wilson recalled. Suddenly a
great black turkey-cock soared across the track. Simultaneously we raised our
guns and red. The turkey dropped on the track so close the negroes nearly
threw us out of the car by the violence with which they jammed on the brake.
When another turkey appeared, Wilson again took aim, but Cutter stopped
him, savagely whispering, Dont shoot! In a hushed tone he explained to the
startled Wilson, Didnt you see those niggers eyes bulge at the rst shot? They
2. Ibid., 3637.
Figure 1: The north coast of Guatemala (adapted from the Perry-Castaeda Map Collection,
University of Texas Libraries).
596 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y
never before saw anyone hit a bird on the wing when moving along a railroad.
We would probably miss the second shot and spoil the whole thing. I didnt
re another shot from the car, Wilson noted, and our prestige was saved.
Such constraints on action were familiar to whites throughout the imperial
world, and they hinted at both the Jim Crow culture of the U.S. Caribbean
empire and nonwhite resistance to that racial order.
3
In recent years, scholars such as Thomas Borstelmann, Mary Dudziak, and
Brenda Gayle Plummer have explored the intersection of domestic race rela-
tions and U.S. foreign policy. As strong as much of this scholarship is, however,
it focuses on rhetoric and policy formulation during the Cold War era. The
impact of American racial practices abroad during an earlier era of U.S. expan-
sion and foreign peoples complex responses to them remain largely unexam-
ined.
4
Equally important, diplomatic historys cultural turn has given little
3. Ibid., 7172. This conscious performance of white prowess, and its constricting effects
on alternative courses of action, echoes European colonial recollections such as George
Orwells Shooting an Elephant. See George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays
(London, 1950).
4. Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the
Global Arena (Cambridge, MA, 2001); Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the
Figure 2: Victor M. Cutter, left, and fellow United Fruit manager G. M. Shaw, 1914 (Cutter
papers, courtesy of Dartmouth College Library).
Banana Growing and Negro Management : 597
attention to the Caribbean Basin. Such neglect is ironic, for no region has had
a longer or more intimate connection to the U.S. racial economy. Scholars such
as Kristin Hoganson, Mary Renda, and Eileen Surez Findlay have begun to ll
this void by examining the gendered aspects of the American empire, and recent
surveys of U.S.-Latin American relations by Lars Schoultz and Kyle Longley
acknowledge the role of race in U.S. policy toward the region. Others have
begun to analyze U.S. corporate culture, which played such a central role in
American expansion. In his study of the U.S. Caribbean sugar industry, for
example, Csar J. Ayala describes the Spanish Caribbean as a colonial region
dominated by the decisions of U.S. capitalists. In an even more ambitious study,
though limited to American sources, Thomas OBrien asserts that U.S. expan-
sion in Latin America hinged upon the spread of corporate and consumer values.
Still, both he and Ayala provide little analysis of the role of race in corporate
culture and labor practices. With the important exception of Thomas
Schoonover, who offered a short but seminal essay on race relations on Guate-
malas north coast, even scholars who have analyzed United Fruits racial prac-
tices, such as Paul Dosal and Philippe Bourgois, have not examined the ties to
domestic U.S. race relations.
5
Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ, 2000); Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black
Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 19351960 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996). Other important
studies that analyze this connection include George M. Fredrickson, Black Liberation: A Com-
parative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa (New York, 1995); and
Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 19371957
(Ithaca, NY, 1997). Earlier works that helped lay the groundwork for this scholarship include
Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion,
18901945 (New York, 1982); Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of
Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA, 1982); Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics
of Indian Hating and Empire Building (New York, 1980); Walter L. Williams, United States
Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of
American Imperialism, Journal of American History 66, no. 4 (March 1980): 81031; Michael
H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT, 1987); and Alexander DeConde,
Ethnicity, Race, and American Foreign Policy (Boston, 1992).
5. Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the
Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT, 1998); Mary Renda, Taking
Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 19151940 (Chapel Hill, NC,
2001); Eileen J. Surez Findlay, Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico,
18701920 (Durham, NC, 1999); Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S.
Policy toward Latin America (Cambridge, MA, 1998); Kyle Longley, In the Eagles Shadow: The
United States and Latin America (Wheeling, IL, 2002); Csar J. Ayala, American Sugar Kingdom:
The Plantation Economy of the Spanish Caribbean, 18981934 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999); Thomas
F. OBrien, The Revolutionary Mission: American Enterprise in Latin America, 19001945 (Cam-
bridge, England, 1996); Thomas Schoonover, The United States in Central America, 18601911:
Episodes of Social Imperialism and Imperial Rivalry in the World System (Durham, NC, 1991), chap.
7; Paul J. Dosal, Doing Business with the Dictators: A Political History of the United Fruit Company
in Guatemala, 18991944 (Wilmington, DE, 1993), especially chap. 7; and Philippe I. Bourgois,
Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation (Baltimore, 1989).
Bourgois, in particular, offers an extensive analysis of United Fruits policies of labor segmen-
tation in Costa Rica and Panama, arguing that such practices were central to workers lives and
identities. Examples of excellent studies of U.S. Caribbean policy that place little emphasis on
race include David Healy, Drive to Hegemony: The United States and the Caribbean, 18981917
Although historians of Latin America and the Caribbean have likewise
placed little emphasis on these connections, there are several exceptions. Louis
A. Prez and Ada Ferrer, for example, both place race at the center of U.S.-
Cuban relations. Even more important in terms of colonial race and labor
relations is Michael Conniff s Black Labor on a White Canal (1985), which
explores the linkage between U.S. Jim Crow practices and the third-country
labor system of white American employers and migrant West Indians that
characterized the construction of the Panama Canal. Yet despite his many
insights, Conniff concludes that the Panama Canal Zone was a unique Ameri-
can creation for a unique enterprise. In reality, the Canal Zone was only the
most visible example of an expansive U.S. empire that was transplanting its
domestic racial and labor practices throughout the Caribbean Basin, including
the north coast of Guatemala.
6
This article draws upon American, British, and Guatemalan sources to
explore the interaction between the racial culture of U.S. corporate colonialism
and the internal dynamics of Guatemalan society. For this purpose, it adopts a
denition of colonialism that embraces not only annexation and direct rule but
the informal and corporate models that characterized much of late nineteenth
and early twentieth-century colonialism, particularly in the U.S. Caribbean
empire. Throughout this period, American corporations joined Washington in
exerting inuence over Caribbean nations and carving out enclaves of direct
control. U.S. government-held territories such as Puerto Rico and the Canal
Zone were the most prominent examples, but private enterprises such as United
Fruit also sought to remake Caribbean landscapes and labor systems. Indeed,
United Fruit was virtually an empire unto itself. In the early decades of the
twentieth century, the corporation was the largest agricultural enterprise in the
world and the dominant economic force in the Caribbean Basin. Within this
framework, then, colonialism does not necessarily require the existence of a
colonial state, but rather direct foreign control over production and labor in a
host society, which leads inevitably to engagement with local hierarchies and
notions of identity.
7
As in Panama, the domestic U.S. culture of white supremacy
(Madison, WI, 1988); Lester Langley, The United States and the Caribbean in the Twentieth
Century (Athens, GA, 1989); and Lester Langley, The Banana Wars: United States Intervention in
the Caribbean, 18981934 (Wilmington, DE, 2003).
6. Michael Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 19041981 (Pittsburgh, 1985),
79, 3444. Scholars of Costa Rica have followed Conniffs lead by examining the West Indian
experience on that nations Caribbean coast. See, for example, Aviva Chomsky, West Indian
Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 18701940 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1996);
Ronald N. Harpelle, The West Indians of Costa Rica: Race, Class, and the Integration of an Ethnic
Minority (Kingston, Jamaica, 2001); and Lara Putnam, The Company They Kept: Migrants and the
Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 18701960 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002).
7. This denition of colonialism differs from more common versions. J. A. Hobson, for
example, described colonialism as the emigration to relatively unpopulated areas and the
establishment of a culture attempting to reproduce that of the home country (e.g., Australia,
New Zealand, Canada). In contrast, he viewed imperialism as occurring when the settlers
forma ruling caste among an overwhelmingly native population. See J. A. Hobson, Imperialism
played a central role in shaping labor control and race relations on Guatemalas
north coast. But as in all colonial encounters, the internal dynamics of the host
society powerfully inuenced interactions on the ground.
8
Deep social divisions had marked Guatemalan society since the colonial era.
Unique among the nations of the Caribbean Basin, Guatemalas Indian popu-
lation remained a majority. The existence of this Mayan majority, concentrated
largely in the western highlands, helped cultivate a siege mentality among the
nations Spanish-descended elites, who considered themselves uniquely cursed.
Unlike the United States or Costa Rica, they complained, Guatemala could
never enjoy the stability and progress of a white nation. More than the other
States of Central America, observed an elite Guatemalan in 1867, the nation
had to contend with . . . an Indian population, forming about two-thirds at
least of the entire bulk of its inhabitants. These Indians, he explained,
divided into or belonging to different tribes, and speaking different dialects, are
peaceful, docile, and generally inclined to work, but strongly addicted to their
own habits, ways and customs. Only through white immigration and the lead-
ership of a light-skinned elite, such men argued, could the nation overcome its
backward Indian majority.
9
Guatemalan elites voiced similar concerns toward the nations Caribbean
north coast, which they considered a region of tropical disease and degenerate
peoples. In addition to small numbers of poor Hispanicsknown throughout
Guatemala as ladinosthe region was home to most of the nations residents
(London, 1902), 98. Conversely, Edward Said characterizes imperialism as the practice, the
theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory and
colonialismas the implanting of settlements on distant territory. See Edward W. Said, Culture
and Imperialism (New York, 1994), 9. Both denitions are useful but too restrictive, for impe-
rialism hardly requires great distance and often applies to contiguous territories. Likewise, the
colonial encounter entails more than simply the foundation of settlements. Diplomatic histo-
rian William Appleman Williams offers a more pertinent framework by distinguishing between
settler and administrative colonialism. According to him, the crucial distinction lay in the
function of administrative colonists, who, rather than seeking to settle and populate an area, are
dispatched to rule an indigenous society by setting limits on the choices the native can
consider. See William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life (New York, 1980), 7. When
modern scholars use the term colonialism, they generally refer to the administrative variety,
characterized by a colonial state and the rule of a foreign minority over a native majority, usually
justied in terms of race and civilization. Yet this division is also misleading, for colonial spheres
such as South Africa combined both settler and administrative models. By requiring the
existence of a colonial state, moreover, scholars eliminate numerous encounters that were
undeniably colonial, such as British rule over Egypt or U.S. control of Panama. The minority-
rule framework likewise falls short by implying that colonialism ceases, or shifts from the
administrative to the settler variety, the moment settlers outnumber indigenous peoples.
8. In addition to Dosal, Doing Business with the Dictators, other studies of Guatemalas north
coast include Stephen S. Gillick, Life and Labor in a Banana Enclave: Bananeros, the United
Fruit Company, and the Limits of Trade Unionism in Guatemala, 19061931 (Ph.D. diss.,
Tulane University, 1994); and Frederick Douglass Opie, Adios Jim Crow: Afro-North Ameri-
can Workers and the Guatemalan Railroad Workers League, 18841921 (Ph.D. diss.,
Syracuse University, 1999).
9. Don Francisco Gavarrete, printed in Star and Herald (Panama), 1867, box 9, scrapbook,
John M. Dow papers, Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
of African descent. Escaped slaves had resided in the Izabal and Petn provinces
since the colonial era, and the north coast also held a sizeable population of
Garfuna. Often called black Caribs, the Garfuna were descendants of African
slaves deposited on the Central American coast by the British in 1797. Most
resided in Livingston, at the mouth of Guatemalas Dulce River, where they
ercely resisted the central states efforts to assimilate them.
10
Throughout the nineteenth century, Guatemalan ofcials sought to promote
development of the north coast, including several schemes to settle European
immigrants in the region. But their hospitality did not extend to blacks. In 1861,
Conservative President Rafael Carrera, himself a dark-skinned ladino, rejected
Abraham Lincolns wartime efforts to settle African-American freedmen on the
north coast. According to U.S. Minister E. O. Crosby, Carrera and his advisers
worried that English speaking negroes thus introduced could not be assimilated
with their already mixed population. Instead, black immigrants would threaten
the Spanish forms and customs of the Guatemalan government by gradually
introducing a neworder of things that would eventually lead to an open rupture
between them and the native races. This concern for friction between ladinos
and black immigrants would prove prophetic.
11
While Guatemalan elites supported Carreras rejection of African-American
immigration, many so-called Liberals grew impatient with his tepid support of
economic development. By the late 1860s, these would-be modernizers had
identied coffee exports as the engine of national progress, and they called on
the government to force the highland Maya into laboring on coffee plantations.
In 1871, Liberal rebels led by wealthy coffee planter Justo Runo Barrios
overthrew the Conservative government and ushered in a new era of Guatema-
lan history. The ensuing Barrios dictatorship (18731885) passed taxes and labor
laws designed to force Mayan Indians into agricultural labor and trap them in a
10. Most ex-slaves and their descendents hailed from neighboring British Honduras, but
many came fromthe large Dominican-owned San Germino sugar hacienda in the neighboring
Verapaz province, which had more than seven hundred black slaves at the time of indepen-
dence. See David McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 17601940 (Stanford, CA, 1994), 90, 4546.
The standard study of Garfuna history is Nancie L. Gonzalez, Sojourners in the Caribbean:
Ethnogenesis and Ethnohistory of the Garfuna (Urbana, IL, 1988). American visitors to the north
coast often found the regions racial mixtures discomforting. In the late 1830s, U.S. diplomat
John Lloyd Stephens reported that Livingstons population consisted of about fteen hundred
Indians, negroes, mulattoes, Mestitzoes [sic], and mixed blood of every degree, with a few
Spaniards. He even met a runaway slave from Maryland named Philip, who had lived in
Livingston for eight years and had become a man of considerable standing, earning $23 a
month as a reman aboard a river steamboat and additional income as a carpenter. See John
Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan (New York, 1969
[1841]), I: 3738. Almost sixty years later, famed New York journalist Richard Harding Davis
was even less impressed, declaring that Livingston was like a village on the coast of East Africa
in comparison with Belize. See Richard Harding Davis, Three Gringos in Venezuela and Central
America (New York, 1896), 19.
11. Robert A. Naylor, Penny Ante Imperialism: The Mosquito Shore and the Bay of Honduras,
16001914 (London, 1989), 11011; E. O. Crosby, Memoirs and Reminiscences, 99111,
Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
cycle of debt peonage. To bolster this forced-labor regime, Liberals promoted
a racialized conception of national identity that sharply divided ladinos from
Indians. In the process, ladino lost its mixed-race colonial caste stigma and
came simply to signify non-Indian. It applied to all, whether light skinned or
dark, who spoke the Spanish language, wore non-Indian clothing, and lived
outside of Indian villages. In this manner, Liberal policymakers encouraged
ladinos to identify with the state and set themselves apart from the Indian
majority. This stance held an economic incentive as well, for the states coercive
labor laws applied only to Indians. Within this system, ladinos served primarily
as merchants, labor recruiters, and the arms of state authority. Nowhere was this
more apparent than in the expanding police and military forces, which remained
entirely ladino.
12
In addition to promoting this racial economy, Liberals sought out foreign
investment, and like their counterparts throughout Latin America, they
embraced railroads as the key to progress. By the mid-1880s, U.S. contractors
had completed rail lines from Guatemalas western coffee lands to its Pacic
coast. But the Pacic ports were too shallow for efcient commerce, and
steamship service remained unreliable. Still worse, soon after the railroads
completion, California capitalist Collis P. Huntington acquired control of it,
along with the Pacic Mail Steamship Company, which provided the only
service to the Pacic coast. This commercial monopoly enabled Huntington
to skim off Guatemalas export revenue, leading one U.S. diplomat to describe
12. For a thoughtful reevaluation of the Carrera regime, see Ralph Lee Woodward, Rafael
Carrera and the Emergence of the Republic of Guatemala, 18211871 (Athens, GA, 1993). Although
marred by abuses, the Liberal labor regime provided the cheap labor necessary to develop
the Guatemalan coffee industry. For Liberal labor policies and planter practices, see David
McCreery, Debt Servitude in Rural Guatemala, 18761936, Hispanic American Historical
Review 63, no. 4 (November 1983): 73559; and David McCreery, An Odious Feudalism:
Mandamiento Labor and Commercial Agriculture in Guatemala, 18581920, Latin American
Perspectives 13, no. 1 (Winter 1986): 99117. Over the following decades, the meaning of
ladino proved uid, carrying both ethnic and racial connotations, but the linkage between
ladino and Guatemalan identity remained. See Carol A. Smith, ed., Guatemalan Indians and the
State, 15401988 (Austin, TX, 1990), 7492; and McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 79. A useful
concise treatment of Liberal Guatemala is Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr., Central America: A Nation
Divided (New York, 1999), especially 15272. Perhaps the best examples of this state-sponsored
racial nationalism were the ofcial censuses of the Liberal period. From the late nineteenth
century until the 1920s, the government census category of raza (race) required either indio
or ladino in response. This was also true of other government documents used to collect
information on the population, such as monthly Movimiento de Poblacin reports that appeared
in the 1900s. Not only did this consciously divide a complex society into two distinct racial
groups but it ignored the growing black population. On the latter issue, see Opie, Adios Jim
Crow, 19. During crises, the state pressed Indians into military service, but their role remained
limited. Immediately following an 1890 conict with El Salvador, for example, the government
ordered the demobilization of all the Indians who have become part of the military, who by
their conditions of unskillfulness and ineptitude lack the capacity to understand what it is to be
a soldier and the very important mission he has to fulll in the defense of the country and in the
maintenance of internal order. Because the army and militias were, above all, arms of ladino
supremacy and labor control, their inclusion of Indians was unthinkable. See McCreery, Rural
Guatemala, 181.
the rail line as the most remunerative piece of railroad in the world, of its
length.
13
This dependence on foreign capital frustrated Liberal leaders, who increas-
ingly viewed the north coast as the key to Guatemalas economic autonomy. In
1882, Barrios declared Livingston a free port and opened surrounding public
lands for settlement. He also reached an agreement with U.S. railroad contrac-
tors for construction of a Northern Railroad, which would connect the
western coffee lands to the Atlantic shipping lanes through the new Caribbean
port of Puerto Barrios, thereby circumventing Huntingtons monopoly. Ironi-
cally, the projects labor needs spurred the large-scale black immigration that
elites had previously rejected. Yet unlike Keiths Costa Rican railroad, then
under construction with West Indian workers, the Northern Railroad relied on
black American labor. The rst African Americans arrived in August 1884, and
over the following three decades, as many as twenty thousand came to the north
coast. Hailing mostly from Louisiana and neighboring states, these men wel-
comed the opportunity to escape the rising unemployment and racial violence of
the U.S. South.
14
Unfortunately, the life awaiting them proved all too familiar. Labor contrac-
tors misled black workers about wages and living conditions, and white overseers
transplanted Jim Crow practices to Guatemala, conning black workers to
menial positions and demanding they address all whites as mister. As at home,
whites used violence to enforce the color line. In April 1896, for example, a
white mob removed an African-American man named Harper from a prison and
lynched him. Railroad contractors also called on the Guatemalan state to hunt
down runaway workers and break strikes, encouraging local ladino ofcials to
engage in antiblack violence. Such practices helped set the patterns of black-
ladino relations on the north coast.
15
Poor conditions and racial abuse spurred African-American workers to ee
work camps by the hundreds. When possible, they returned home, but many
escaped inland. The ladino culture they encountered in the Guatemalan interior
contained racist sentiments, to be sure, but antiblack discrimination was rarely
institutionalized to the same degree as in the U.S. South. In the railroad hub of
Zacapa, for example, black men could stroll arm-in-arm with white or ladino
women, and black residents suffered no legal segregation. Not surprisingly,
13. Opie, Adios Jim Crow, 2728; U.S. diplomat quoted in Dosal, Doing Business with the
Dictators, 31. In the mid-1880s, New Englander William Brigham found that the main sources
of commerce of the Pacic port of San Jos were exports of coffee, sugar, and hides to San
Francisco and imports of our and wheat from California and timber from Oregon. See
William T. Brigham, Guatemala, Land of the Quetzal (New York, 1887), 166, 310.
14. For a detailed study of this little-known African-American migration, see Opie, Adios
Jim Crow, especially 113. Opie estimates that New Orleans labor contractor William T.
Penny personally consigned over sixteen thousand African-American workers to Puerto Barrios
between 1899 and 1913.
15. Ibid., 86, 11112; Dosal, Doing Business with the Dictators, 122.
by the late 1900s, Zacapa had become an important center for Guatemalas
African-American residents, several of whom opened businesses.
16
Despite this lack of overt racism, Guatemalan resentment toward black
immigrants rose steadily. These tensions had complex roots. While Liberal
leaders considered African-American laborers necessary for the railroad con-
struction, they viewed them as alien sojourners. Like elites throughout the
hemisphere, they equated progress with whiteness, and the inux of thousands
of black immigrants unnerved them. When black workers threatened Liberal
goals, these anxieties rose quickly to the surface. African Americans who struck
or ed their labor camps risked repression from a Guatemalan state determined
to have its railroad. This was particularly evident during a three-year strike by
railroad workers from1898 to 1901, which heightened antiblack hostility among
Guatemalan elites and ofcials. By 1903, Guatemalan judges were applying
vagrancy laws to force African-American strikers back to work. In many ways,
this response was rooted in Guatemalan culture and traditions. The state had
long practiced institutionalized racism and labor coercion toward the Mayan
population, and it was only a short step toward using state power to assist foreign
interests in disciplining black workersparticularly when American railroad
contractors demanded such action.
17
Still worse, ladino ofcials quickly discovered that abuses of African Ameri-
cans were far less likely to draw diplomatic censure from Washington than
similar offenses against whites. In September 1907, for example, provincial
governor Enrique Arias entered a Zacapa saloon owned by black American
Simon Shine, and, after demanding to see his business license, pistol-whipped
him nearly to death. In response, Shine and several other black residents sent a
plea directly to President Theodore Roosevelt asking him to protect us poor
niggers from being beaten to death, we have no one to look to but you. As
Thomas Schoonover has noted, U.S. diplomats generally protested such abuses
in an effort to build Guatemalan respect for American citizenship. Yet antiblack
violence placed them in an awkward position. Not only were Guatemalan abuses
of black immigrants often instigated by white Americans but U.S. ofcials
generally shared the prejudices of their countrymen. Just as many white North-
erners were accepting virulent white supremacy in the Jim Crow South, Ameri-
can diplomats often hesitated to protest Guatemalan violence against blacks.
When they did lodge complaints, they often couched them in racist terms. In
response to a 1908 beating of an African American, for example, U.S. Consul
Edward Reed declared that such an exhibition of brutality . . . even though the
victim be a degraded American negro, should not be passed unnoticed, lest it
16. Opie, Adios Jim Crow, 147. As late as 1909, U.S. travel writer Nevin Winter noted the
presence of hundreds of southern negroes on the north coast. A party of twenty-two had just
come over on the boat that took me away and a more dejected lot of cullud gemmen I never
saw, he observed. Nevin O. Winter, Guatemala and Her People of Today (Boston, 1909), 144.
17. Opie, Adios Jim Crow, 6566, 20117.
weaken the respect of Guatemalan ofcials for American citizenship, and later
bear fruit in the beating of some worthy American. By the mid-1910s, however,
ofcial harassment of black Americans was declining. Due to immigration
restrictions and the racial exclusion of the ladino Railroad Workers League,
African Americans found themselves pushed out of employment on the railroad
they had built. By that time, moreover, United Fruits expanding banana enclave
had made British West Indians the predominant group on the north coast.
18
United Fruits domination of the north coast grew directly out of the con-
struction of the Northern Railroad. Guatemalan Liberals had initially hoped to
maintain national ownership of the rail line, but when world coffee prices
collapsed in 1897, they were forced to abandon those plans. The following year
Manuel Estrada Cabrera seized power. A prototypical Liberal dictator, Estrada
Cabrera dedicated himself to the completion of the railroad and concluded that
only generous foreign concessions could achieve this goal. He soon turned to
Keith, then vice president of United Fruit, and in 1904 the two men signed a
contract that would shape much of Guatemalan history. In return for complet-
ing the Northern Railroad, Keith would receive a ninety-nine-year lease on the
line and 168,000 acres of land concessions along its route through the north
coasts Motagua River valley. Four years later, Keiths workers nished the line,
nally connecting Guatemala City and the western coffee lands to Puerto
Barrios on the Caribbean.
19
The completion of the railroad in 1908 hastened an economic and demo-
graphic transformation that was already underway on the north coast. That
same year, Keith transferred his land concessions to United Fruit while main-
18. Incidents such as Shines beating highlighted the tension between U.S. domestic racism
and imperial presumptions abroad. At the time of Shines appeal, Roosevelt was courting the
white South and defending Jim Crow practices in the Panama Canal Zone. Yet Guatemalan
abuses of U.S. blacks implicitly threatened American privileges abroad. Like other imperial
powers, the U.S. government sought to establish legal protection for its citizens in weaker
nations. As in contemporary colonial settings such as China and India, this amounted to
extraterritorial status for foreign residents, which U.S. policymakers considered crucial
to protecting investment. In response to U.S. protests, Guatemalan ofcials often pointed to
domestic American practices. After the U.S. minister complained about Shines beating, for
example, the Guatemalan foreign minister reminded him of the problem with coloreds, who
unfortunately under the inuence of alcohol, were accustomed to lose control over them-
selves. In July 1910, the Guatemalan embassy in Washington, DC sent to Sands American
press clippings reporting lynchings in the U.S. South in order to remind him of practices in his
native land. See Schoonover, United States in Central America, 11426. On Shines case and the
exclusion of black workers by the ladino union, see Opie, Adios Jim Crow, 7081, 24346.
19. Paul Dosal has argued that Guatemalan dictatorships, and particularly that of Estrada
Cabrera, provided the strong rule and generous concessions desired by American interests such
as the United Fruit Company. See Dosal, Doing Business with the Dictators, 27, 4250. Although
U.S. capital and black labor had built the railroad, Estrada Cabrera celebrated his achieve-
ment. Upon the rst anniversary of its completion, for example, his government praised that
eminent citizen who carried to happy completion that enterprise of Progress and Civilization.
Luis Molina, Secretario de Estado, to Jefe Poltico, Izabal, 19 January 1909, Telegrafos del
Ministerio de Gobernacin, 1909, paquete 1, Jefatura Poltica de Izabal, Archivo General de
Centro Amrica, Guatemala City (hereafter JPI-AGCA).
taining control over the railway. As in Costa Rica, this combination of railroad
monopoly and vast landholdings laid the foundation for United Fruits colonial
enclave. Over the following decade, the company would construct a new world
on the north coast dedicated to the large-scale cultivation and exportation of
bananas. U.S. merchant ships had regularly purchased bananas from ladinos and
Garfuna decades before United Fruits appearance, and when the corporation
began its Guatemalan operations, local farmers welcomed the expanded access
to the U.S. market. But production would not long remain in local hands. In
autumn 1904, United Fruits board of directors approved large-scale banana
plantations in Guatemala. Serious efforts at development began in 1906, when
the company appointed twenty-ve-year-old Victor Cutter to direct its Guate-
mala division.
20
Like its counterparts throughout the imperial world, United Fruit trans-
planted domestic conceptions of race, labor, and civilization to its colonial
sphere in Guatemala. Cutter and his subordinates, many of them drawn from
the U.S. Northeast, sought to carve out an orderly and familiar world from the
densely forested, disease-ridden north coast. At rst, their efforts focused on
expanding the rail network, constructing modern port facilities, and improving
health and sanitation. This included redesigning the town of Puerto Barrios
on a grid layout and constructing a modern sewage system. By the late 1900s,
however, they focused increasingly on the banana plantations themselves.
They dubbed their division headquarters Virginia, locating it in the large land
concession of Quirigu. Soon farms sprang up along the Northern Railroad and
its feeder lines.
21
Of course, these banana pioneers did not themselves clear and cultivate their
plantations. Indeed, Cutters most important responsibility was the procurement
and control of an adequate workforce. Labor was scarce on the north coast, which
20. In 1887, Brigham observed, The prots of this [banana] business go, as usual, not to
the producer, but to the middle-man or the steamer-companies. It was not uncommon for the
prots of a single round trip of two weeks to exceed $40,000, he noted. Half this shared with
the planter would make him rich. Brigham, Guatemala, 351. One indication of this spreading
banana cultivation was the rising denunciation of public lands by ladinos in the Department
of Izabal. A land law passed in December 1886 had streamlined the process for claiming unused
public land, or baldos, and with the growing market for bananas in the 1900s, land claims in
Izabal rose greatly. In 1905, they occupied the bulk of the business of the Jefatura Poltica, based
in Livingston. In a March 1905 questionnaire, the political chief of Izabal reported bananas
as the departments preferred crop, estimating that approximately sixty farms currently grew
bananas as their principal crop. J. J. Ordoez, 30 March 1905, 1905, Cuestionario, paquete
1, JPI-AGCA.
21. Frederick Upham Adams, Conquest of the Tropics: The Story of the Creative Enterprises
Conducted by the United Fruit Company (Garden City, NY, 1914), 2047. The Quirigu area, near
the Motagua River, included not only some of the richest potential banana lands in Guatemala
but also one of the most important archeological sites of the ancient Maya. By the 1920s and
1930s, the site would become one of the principal tourist attractions in Guatemala. For its part,
United Fruit heavily publicized the site, both to increase tourist volume and to connect itself to
the glories and splendors of the ancient Mayan empire. See, for example, Sylvanus G. Morley,
Excavations at Quirigua, National Geographic Magazine 24, no. 3 (March 1913): 341.
remained sparsely populated despite decades of railroad construction. As it had in
Costa Rica, United Fruit turned to British West Indians. Beginning in 1906,
Puerto Barrios began receiving hundreds of these skilled and highly mobile black
workers who were already proving so crucial to other U.S. enterprises in the
Caribbean. This inux of West Indians quickly drew out the ladino racism that
was previously aimed at African Americans. On 3 October 1909, for example,
Puerto Barrios resident Jos Molina Flores complained that, on his familys lands,
there have been introduced various Jamaicans with dark color and kinky hair for
the purpose of cultivating various plants and especially bananas. He demanded
that municipal authorities evict the undesirable residents.
22
United Fruit favored British West Indians for a variety of reasons. They
spoke English and often had experience in banana cultivation. They were also
available in large numbers, both on their home islands and in Panama, where
canal excavation was winding down. By the late 1900s and early 1910s, the
stream of West Indian immigration became a torrent as employment in Panama
rapidly declined. Just as U.S. ofcials in the Canal Zone pushed to evict their
black workers, the British government sought to prevent their return to their
economically depressed home islands. Both U.S. and British ofcials feared
the social tensions resulting from thousands of unemployed West Indians. In
January 1913, the governor of Barbados informed the British consul in Panama,
Claude Mallet, that the Barbadian government was very anxious that as many
Barbadians as possible should be engaged directly at the Zone for employment
in Guatemala and elsewhere, rather than that they should return to Barbados.
He concluded by asking Mallet to suggest measures that this Government
could take or authorise which would tend to divert Barbadian labourers from
returning home. This cooperation among British, U.S., and United Fruit
ofcials proved successful. By March 1914, British Consul Godfrey Haggard in
Guatemala City reported, Approximately 600 West Indians have arrived in
Guatemala since August 1st, 1913, about 30% of which were women and
children. He added that three hundred more had reembarked for the U.S.-
dominated banana ports of Puerto Cortes and Tela, Honduras and Limon, Costa
Rica. Increasingly, West Indians were migrating along the vectors of the Ameri-
can empire.
23
22. Jose Molina Flores to Juez Municipal, Puerto Barrios, 3 October 1909, no. 143, 1909,
paquete 1, JPI-AGCA. Most African Americans who remained in the region seemed to prefer
railroad or commercial employment to work on banana plantations.
23. Governor of Barbados to Mallet, 24 January 1913, FO 371 1702/no. 12674; Godfrey
Haggard to Foreign Ofce, 8 March 1914, FO 371 2058/no. 13692, British Public Record
Ofce, Kew, England (hereafter PRO). One striking example of this exodus from the Canal
Zone to Guatemala was the 13 May 1912 voyage of United Fruits S.S. Cartago from Colon,
Panama to Puerto Barrios. Ordinarily, the ship carried between seven and ten cabin passengers
and eight to fteen deck passengers. On this voyage, the passenger manifest listed 7 cabin
passengers and 234 deckers, nearly all of whom bore English sir names. On a voyage around
the same time, United Fruits S.S. Heredia carries 33 cabin passengers and 168 deckers. United
Those West Indians who immigrated to the banana lands encountered Jim
Crow colonial enclaves strikingly similar to the Panama Canal Zone. Indeed,
it mattered little that most United Fruit managers hailed from New England.
Like their colonial European counterparts, and the vast majority of white
Americans, company ofcials held rm beliefs toward race, labor, and the
tropical world. They assumed that only black workers could withstand the
climate and diseases of the Caribbean lowlands. They also believed that racial
hierarchy and segregation were essential aspects of labor control. As a result,
United Fruit implemented Jim Crow colonialism throughout its Caribbean
enclaves, and Guatemalas north coast was no exception. Cutter and his fellow
United Fruit managers prided themselves on their ability to manage their
black workforce. Like company ofcials throughout United Fruits empire,
they used a variety of forms of domination. Perhaps most important, they
maintained strict labor segmentation along racial lines, reserving supervisory
and clerical positions for whites and conning black workers to heavy plan-
tation and stevedore work. The pay system reected this division: whites
received monthly salaries; workers of color were paid by the task, often in
scrip valid only at company commissaries. As one United Fruit publicist
explained in 1914, Only a theorist would dream of employing Jamaican
negroes and Central American Indians to work on banana or other plantations
by day wages. . . . These toilers lack that altruism which impels some men to
Fruit Steamship Service, passenger manifests, S.S. Cartago, 13 May 1912, S.S. Heredia (n.d.),
1912, paquete 2, JPI-AGCA.
Figure 3: Victor M. Cutter supervising a banana harvest, circa 1907 (Cutter papers, courtesy
of Dartmouth College Library).
work when they are not watched, and you cannot watch negroes and Indians
scattered in a wilderness of banana plants.
24
United Fruits approach to medical care was equally racialized. As in
Cuba, Panama, and Costa Rica, company engineers on Guatemalas north coast
drained swamps, poisoned mosquito breeding grounds, built sewage systems,
constructed managerial and worker housing, and built a modern hospital
complex. But United Fruits health policies revealed the racial limitations of its
corporate culture. Like imperial ofcials throughout the world, its managers
sought, above all, to make their colonial sphere safe for whites, and company
researchers focused on diseases that most threatened white immigrants, such as
malaria and yellow fever. In contrast, illnesses common among laborers, such as
tuberculosis and pneumonia, received little attention. Although such maladies
stemmed largely from the poor housing and nutrition available to West Indian
workers, United Fruit doctors ascribed them to a supposed black susceptibility
to respiratory ailments. Likewise, while white employees enjoyed easy access to
the hospital, workers of color found company doctors reluctant to admit them,
24. Adams, Conquest of the Tropics, 201. As in Panama, the tasks assigned to black workers
carried the greatest danger to life and limb. Stevedore work was particularly perilous due
to unpredictable weather and dangerous machinery. In July 1912, for example, British Vice
Consul William Agar informed Consul Godfrey Haggard that Amos Lindo, native of Jamaica
was drowned at Port Barrios on the 12th instant about 11 p.m.: he was one of the loading gang,
sliped [sic] on the wharf; only came up once, the under towtaking himaway. The night was dark
and squally. William Agar to Godfrey Haggard, 15 July 1912, FO 252 462/no. 178, PRO.
Figure 4: West Indian gardeners and domestic servants, most likely employed by Victor M.
Cutter himself (Cutter papers, courtesy of Dartmouth College Library).
and within the facility itself, white patients were segregated from blacks and
ladinos.
25
This Jim Crow framework of negro management structured all aspects of
life in the banana lands. Whites lived and socialized apart from workers of
color, who were excluded from white dining facilities, clubs, theaters, dances,
tennis courts, and baseball leagues. As in other colonial spheres, this push for
public and private segregation only grew as the company encouraged white
family life. White women, in particular, were carefully separated from workers
of color, who faced violent retribution if they transgressed the sexual color
line. Individual attitudes varied, of course, and overseers from the U.S. South
often proved more confrontational than their northern counterparts. More
apparent than regional differences, however, was the general consensus among
white Americans. Whites carefully policed workers and each other, declaring
racial hierarchy essential to the social order of the enclave. As in the United
States, they justied such policies by asserting the natural antagonism of dif-
ferent races. New Englander John L. Williams, a former United Fruit over-
seer, asserted that, in the banana lands, The big problem is the Jamaican
negro, who is a British subject and as such he feels that he is equal to any
other person in the world. This cocky attitude tended to offend American
racial sensibilities, he explained: To avoid complications, therefore, a strict
color line is drawn. All persons of color must always give the rights of way to
whites, and remove their hats while talking. A rule also forbids any laborer
from entering the front yard of any white mans residence. Yet Williams
admitted this system of racialized labor control actually encouraged violence:
As a result of this sharp color line various whites have been slain and also
many blacks have been ruthlessly made away with. I speak from absolute
knowledge, having known all the details connected with the murder . . . of a
Jamaican who had threatened to kill one of the white supervisors. This murder
was passed off as a case of self-defense.
26
The north coasts most disruptive racial clash had direct links to domestic
U.S. race relations. In 1908, African-American boxer Jack Johnson burst onto
the public scene in the United States, defeating a white boxer to become the rst
black heavyweight champion. Johnsons victories boosted African-American
self-esteem and spurred white riots in every southern state, but they also had
transnational dimensions. Black workers throughout the U.S. Caribbean empire
25. For its part, the Guatemalan government gave United Fruit a free hand in carrying out
vaccinations and quarantines. In January 1909, for example, Guatemalan ofcials in Morales
cooperated completely with company recommendations for vaccination of workers and non-
workers in the region, despite many local complaints. Reyna Andrade to Comandante Puerto
Barrios, 5 and 17 January 1909, Telegrafos al Comandante, 1909, paquete 1, JPI-AGCA. See
also Gillick, Life and Labor in a Banana Enclave, 13339. On United Fruits medical policies
in Costa Rica, see Chomsky, West Indian Workers, chaps. 4, 5.
26. John L. Williams, The Rise of the Banana Industry and Its Inuence on Caribbean
Countries (masters thesis, Clark University, 1924), 11819.
celebrated his exploits. As Williams recalled, Johnsons career was a very
disturbing feature in the relations of blacks and whites in the banana enclave,
noting that each victory in the ring had its effect on the black race, making
them very arrogant, and exhibiting signs of superiority. In fact, Jack Johnsons
picture was, in many of the negro huts, an object of far more adoration than that
of the crucix in the huts of the Spanish.
27
The tensions surrounding Johnsons image contributed to a late 1909 upris-
ing of United Fruits black workforce. The catalyst for the clash was a wage
cut ordered by a white timekeeper named W. W. Smith that one overseer
announced by exclaiming: You [damned] niggers! Mr. Smith says you are all
getting too much pay. He says $30 a month is enough for any nigger. News of
the wage reduction and racial insults spread quickly through the West Indian
community, bringing to a boil long-simmering resentments toward United
Fruits Jim Crow practices. The spark came on 17 December, when white
employees shot a Jamaican worker named George Reid after he argued with his
foremanperhaps the very murder to which Williams referred. In response,
several hundred West Indian laborers, joined by dozens of African-American
coworkers, marched through the Dartmouth and Cayuga plantations, looting
commissaries and threatening to kill all whites. Most Americans ed, and United
Fruit demanded that President Estrada Cabrera quell the revolt. He immedi-
ately complied, sending two hundred Guatemalan soldiers to occupy the chaotic
plantations.
28
News of the uprising soon reached the U.S. South. In an article entitled
NEGROES CAUSE TROUBLE, the New Orleans Times-Picayune
reported that it had been necessary for a white American to kill one Jamaican
and wound two others when they entered the Cayuga commissary and that
the promptness and braveness of the lone American took the breath out of
the negroes. E. F. Tennison, the clerk who had killed one of the workers,
wrote directly to Secretary of State Knox, criticizing U.S. diplomats failure to
protect him. After the shooting, Tennison had ed to British Honduras, where
he complained that the U.S. consul in Belize City showed little eagerness to
defend him from the mob of angry West Indians he imagined in hot pursuit.
His letter revealed the contradictory forms of consular protection that
black and white Americans expected. African Americans hoped, usually in
vain, for protection from white and ladino violence. In contrast, white
Americans expected U.S. ofcials to uphold transplanted Jim Crow traditions
27. Ibid., 121. On Johnsons career, see Geoffrey C. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise
and Fall of Jack Johnson (New York, 2004).
28. From vacation abroad, Victor Cutter declared that the company was unable to cope
with [the] situation and urgently requested aid from dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera. The
uprising is discussed in great detail in the report of British Vice Consul Godfrey Haggard,
enclosed in Lionel Carden to Grey, 31 January 1910, FO 371/837 (6083), PRO. See also
Gillick, Life and Labor in a Banana Enclave, 19294.
on Guatemalan soil. This included not only protection from local laws but
also exemption for acts of racial violence.
29
Not surprisingly, the ensuing reprisals in the banana enclave also mimicked
the Jim Crow South. Although none of United Fruits managers had been
harmed, returning white employees murdered several West Indians, and in
January 1910, four ladino workers lynched Jamaican William Wright, a leader
of the uprising. Guatemalan ofcials imprisoned one of the lynchers, but he
was soon released and hired by United Fruit as a farm overseer. These events
revealed not only the corporations willingness to encourage and reward anti-
black violence but also the growing role of ladinos in that violence. As Williams
recalled of the years following the riot: On my plantation was a native who
would for the sum of ten dollars remove any negro from sight and no questions
asked. The only stipulation he made was that the designated man be given work
near the river. The deed was quietly done and the body slipped into the river
where the alligators removed all evidence of the crime. Nor was he exagger-
ating. In September 1916, for example, a Guatemalan comandante near the
Cayuga plantation reported, Today at 11:30 a.m. the body of an unknown
negro was removed from the Motagua River.
30
Guatemalan participation in the racial violence was hardly surprising.
Ladinos of all classes had long abused and reviled their nations Mayan majority.
Similar treatment of black immigrants came naturally, particularly in the Jim
Crow context of the banana enclave. Yet this rising violence also stemmed from
a larger demographic shift on the north coast. Throughout the 1910s, thousands
of ladinos ed rising unemployment and land scarcity elsewhere in Guatemala
for the relatively high wages of the banana enclave. Once there, however, they
found black immigrants favored by United Fruit due to their English-language
skills, high rates of literacy, and experience in the industry. This economic
competition exacerbated cultural and racial tensions between black and ladino
workers, which the company fomented by maintaining separate housing,
unequal wages, and task division along racial lines. Indeed, racial segmentation
29. The newspaper continued: With the American out of reach, the negroes took it out on
the commissary, and helped themselves to all the stores, shoes and the like that they wanted. It
is estimated that the negroes robbed the commissary of goods valued at between $1,000 and
$5,000. . . . [T]he American negro told his black army that he would lead them to this point,
where they could clean out the white people and help themselves to all the stores they wanted.
However, the white men on Virginia lost no time in getting into shape for an attack. The
negroes never carried out their threat but if they had they would have received a warm
reception. New Orleans Times-Picayune, NEGROES CAUSE TROUBLE: Clash with
American and Jamaican Blacks in Guatemala, 24 December 1909; E. H. Tennison to Philander
C. Knox, 3 January 1910, M-862, reel 1142, RG 59, National Archives and Records Admin-
istration, College Park, Maryland (hereafter NARA).
30. Dosal, Doing Business with the Dictators, 125; Gillick, Life and Labor in a Banana
Enclave, 19497; Williams, Rise of the Banana Industry, 120; the corpses discovery is
reported in Valeriano Romero to Jefe Poltico, Livingston, Telegramas, 1916, paquete 3,
JPI-AGCA. See also Gillick, Life and Labor in a Banana Enclave, 124, 150.
became an increasingly important component of United Fruits labor control
strategy.
31
The dangers of these policies, and the racial tensions they encouraged,
became apparent on 9 May 1914, when two Jamaican workers from United
Fruits Tehuana farm, Alfred Esson and Nathan Gordon, went to the nearby
Quich farm to gamble. Esson won forty dollars from several ladino workers,
who attacked the two men on their way back to their farm. Esson was killed, and
Gordon narrowly escaped. The next morning, a group of Jamaicans marched to
the Tehuana farm to settle the score but instead killed two ladinos unconnected
to the incident. Upon learning of the ladinos deaths, the local comandante
telegraphed President Estrada Cabrera that sixty armed Africans are killing all
the native inhabitants. The dictator seized the opportunity to crack down on
black immigrants, instructing the provincial governor to take any steps you may
think necessary to repress the evil. Over the next week, Guatemalan soldiers
raided and occupied banana farms throughout the enclave. In the violence and
arrests that followed, Guatemalan ofcials proved more concerned with terror-
izing West Indians than with nding the murderers. For their part, United Fruit
managers showed little concern for their workers safety, and many applauded
the repression. As one British diplomat complained, the company was prone in
cases of this sort to wash its hands of its negro employees in order to avoid giving
displeasure to the Government. He might have added that United Fruit often
welcomed state violence as a means of cowing its West Indian workers.
32
Antiblack sentiment among Guatemalan elites rose in the wake of the 1914
clash. One Guatemala City newspaper warned of the Africanization of the
north coast, where dark bands of insolent negroes . . . plunder, assassinate,
[and] violate . . . with impunity. In August, Estrada Cabrera imposed an immi-
gration law requiring all persons entering Guatemala to deposit $500 with
customs ofcials. Although United Fruit convinced him to reduce the deposit
and to extract it only from black immigrants, the policy indicated the states
growing determination to resist the racial changes United Fruit was bringing to
the nation.
33
For their part, many Guatemalan police and military ofcials expressed this
rising racism by stepping up harassment of ladino women engaged in relation-
ships with West Indians. They often referred to such women as mujeres de mala
conductain essence, whoresand sometimes as negreras, or women who
31. By far the best study of United Fruits policies of labor segmentation, albeit on the
Costa Rican-Panama border, is Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work, especially chapters 6 and 12.
32. Cutter to Young in Young to Grey, 14 May 1914, FO 371/1921 (25290), PRO; Daniel
Ayala to Jefe Poltico, 14 May 1914, 1914, paquete 3, JPI-AGCA; Godfrey Haggard to Foreign
Ofce, 1 June 1914, FO 371/1921 (27762), PRO. The best account of this incident appears in
Gillick, Life and Labor in a Banana Enclave, 15565.
33. La Repblica quoted in Gillick, Life and Labor in a Banana Enclave, 180; Stuart
Lipton to Secretary of State Bryan, 14 September 1914, M-655, reel 29, RG 59, NARA; Opie,
Adios Jim Crow, 247.
group with blacks. In several instances, local comandantes forced such women
to work as unpaid cooks for military garrisons. Such practices drew upon a long
Guatemalan tradition of forced labor, but they also revealed the inuence of the
enclaves Jim Crow culture.
34
The most chilling example was that of Coman-
dante Cornelio Ortega, who routinely ned ladino women living with blacks.
Those who could not pay were forced to grind corn for his garrison. His abuses
came to light following an appeal sent directly to Estrada Cabrera by James
White, a Jamaican employee of United Fruit. I am asking you kindly to have
some mercy on the poor black jamaican that is working in this Quirigua Divi-
sion, for we are bearing some [hard] punishing burden [here] by the present
comandent, wrote White. It can not be . . . that you would ever issue a lawthat
all the jamaican that is living with the native woman of this country . . . are to be
charge[d] from ten, fteen, seventy to seventy ve dollars gold to keep a woman
in their house.
35
The appeal initiated an investigation that revealed much about race relations
in the banana lands. In March 1915, White had traveled to Zacapa to bring back
a ladino woman named Mara Exaltacin Rivera, whom he planned to marry.
But upon their arrival at Quirigu, White testied, The military squad took her
away . . . and carried her to the Comandancia, where Ortega informed him that
he was obliged to pay ten pesos American gold to be able to take his woman
home. In explaining the ne, Ortega declared that by the order of the Presi-
dent every black that has a ladino woman [mujer del pas] must pay ten pesos
gold. White convinced Ortega to take nine, paid him, and considered the
matter closed. But two months later, while White was away on an errand, Ortega
and several soldiers seized Rivera at Whites home, loaded her onto a small rail
engine, and headed west to Quirigu. Learning of the abduction, White
returned to Quirigu and waited for the rail car below United Fruits ice factory.
When the car came into sight, he realized it was on a collision course with an
oncoming train. According to his testimony, White yelled for them to jump off
the car, but it was in vain. In the following moments, Ortega and his soldiers
leaped from opposite sides, leaving his woman . . . , who upon the strong
collision of the train with the rail car, was torn to pieces.
36
Rushing to the scene, White demanded that Ortega tell him why he had
abducted Rivera and caused her death. Declaring that he did not recall White
paying him, Ortega jailed the grief-stricken man for three days. During the
ensuing investigation, other women came forward to testify against Ortega. The
34. An excellent treatment of this connection between racial and sexual politics is Douglas
W. Trefzger, Making West Indians Unwelcome: Race, Gender, and the National Question in
Guatemalas Banana Belt, 19141920 (paper presented at the 23d annual meeting of the Latin
American Studies Association, Washington, DC, 68 September 2001).
35. James White to Estrada Cabrera, 9 November 1915, Criminal: Cornelio Ortega por
Abuso de Autoridad, Rf. no. 854-d, 1916, paquete 3, JPI-AGCA.
36. Testimony of James White, 28 December 1915, ibid.
comandante initially denied having charged Jamaican blacks who live in mat-
rimony with ladino women, but he later reversed himself, claiming, Jamaicans
did not like him because he employed prostituted women, who sold themselves,
in the camps and farms of the United Fruit Company. In Ortegas eyes, all
women who consorted with blacks were, by denition, prostitutes. Although he
was removed from his post and briey imprisoned, his actions revealed the
growing tensions between West Indians and ladino ofcials and workers.
37
Ofcial harassment of West Indians only grew in the late 1910s, often with
encouragement from United Fruit. This connection was most direct in the
companys relationship with local comandantes. Military garrisons resided on or
near every banana plantation. Paid and housed by the corporation, soldiers
provided unconditional support to management, acting essentially as a colonial
police force. As a result, it became increasingly difcult to distinguish between
Guatemalan and company abuses of black workers. In Quirigu in September
1918, for example, ladino soldiers detained Barbadian William Chase for non-
payment of his bills. According to a Jamaican witness, when Chase protested his
arrest, the soldiers clubbed Chase cruelly with their ries. Attempting to
escape, Chase rushed into a company ofce to seek help from M. D. Landry, a
United Fruit paymaster. Landry asked the soldiers to discontinue clubbing
Chase but then turned him back over to them. Of course, incidents of ofcial
abuse were rife throughout Guatemala. Racial hierarchy had long justied
violence and exploitation of Mayan Indians, and Guatemalan society certainly
harbored antiblack sentiments rooted in the legacy of colonial slavery. Never-
theless, ladino ofcials treatment of black immigrants bore a striking resem-
blance to American practices and seemed tightly connected to the racial order of
the banana zone. Guatemalan ofcials operated within the highly racialized
world of United Fruits enclave, and it seems reasonable to conclude that the
corporations culture of white supremacy and racialized labor control helped
shape ladino treatment of black immigrants.
38
37. The investigation le includes several documents given to such women by Ortega
himself, declaring, for example, Fidelia Ochoa will not be bothered by my garrison for three
months because she has completed her term of service. Ortega to Ochoa, 18 October 1915,
ibid.; testimony by Cornelio Ortega, 31 December 1915, ibid. I owe the location of this case in
the Guatemalan archives to Trefzger, who treats these events in greater detail in Making West
Indians Unwelcome, 1217. His interpretation of the events differs markedly, however.
Trefzger perceives a more general anti-West Indian policy in such incidents. In contrast, I nd
the fact that Ortega was investigated, removed, and incarcerated to be among the most striking
aspects of this case. Such an outcome indicates that antiblack sentiments were hardly institu-
tionalized within the Guatemalan justice system. For all the abuses and corruption of ofcial
institutions in Guatemala in this period, one can hardly imagine a similar investigation and
verdict in the contemporary U.S. South. Ortegas incarceration certainly indicates that his
views and policies were not accepted by higher ofcials, such as Jefe Poltico Luis Monzn.
38. Edward Reed to Jack Armstrong, 19 March 1918, FO 252, 543/no. 14, PRO. For his
part, Estrada Cabrera welcomed the opportunity to expand state power on the north coast. One
mark of this militaristic state formation in the Department of Izabal was the volume of
paperwork dedicated to military matters. In the early 1900s, relatively little of the Jefe Polticos
business dealt with maintaining and supplying garrisons. By the late 1900s and early 1910s,
As the enclaves imperial overlord, United Fruit also had other, subtler means
of disciplining its labor force. As Steven Gillick has noted, the company was the
landlord, grocer, doctor, teacher, supporter of churches, entertainer, and law
enforcement ofcer of Guatemalas north coast. Any and all of these services
could be peremptorily revoked by white managers, who called upon local of-
cials to carry out their orders. This combination of U.S. corporate power and
ladino enforcement often had a devastating impact on West Indians lives. One
example was that of Hubert Parkes and his wife, who together had managed to
save over $1300 and planned to return home to Jamaica. When Parkes quit his
job on the Seminole farm on 16 September 1918, however, United Fruit ofcials
immediately ordered him evicted from company housing. As British Consul
Edward Reed later observed, Parkes had all of his personal property in the
house and thus was not in a position to leave the house in a moment[]s
notice. The next morning, Parkes traveled to the division headquarters of
Virginia to collect his last paycheck, and his wife left to run errands. While they
were gone, ladino police, under company orders, entered their home, threw
their possessions outside, and made off with their $1300.
39
Despite these continued abuses, the position of black workers in the enclave
actually improved in the late 1910s and early 1920s. In these years, hundreds of
West Indians left Guatemala to ght in World War I or to work elsewhere, while
ladinos continued to migrate to the north coast. Because of their work experi-
ence, the West Indians who remained moved into positions as foremen and
timekeepers over ladino work crews. From United Fruits perspective, this labor
segmentation helped divert ladino economic and racial resentment away from
the company and toward West Indians. It also helped defuse growing nationalist
sentiment among ladino workers by making black West Indians, rather than
white Americans, the face of corporate control.
40
however, military matters occupied fully one third of the paperwork. In addition, state efforts
to collect information on and to police the regions population expanded accordingly. By 1909,
the towns of Los Amates and Morales each had twelve-man garrisons, while the large United
Fruit plantations of Virginia and Cayuga had fteen and thirteen, respectively. Republica de
Guatemala Fuerza Ordenaria, compiled for the Jefatura Poltica, 1909, paquete 1, JPI-AGCA.
39. Gillick, Life and Labor in a Banana Enclave, 123; Edward Reed to Jack Armstrong,
3 January 1918, FO 252 543/no. 1, PRO.
40. Evidence of this demographic shift abounds in the criminal records of the Department
of Izabal. A surprisingly large number of cases involved clashes between literate, English-
speaking West Indian foremen in their late 30s and 40s, and young, illiterate ladino workers
who had migrated to the banana lands from elsewhere in Guatemala. On 12 February 1917, for
example, the military commissioner of the Dartmouth plantation, Juan Fajardo, accused Jamai-
can James Dempster of disobedience and offenses to the authorities. According to Fajardo, in
the afternoon of the previous day, he had arrived at the farm to take Jamaican Samuel Cooper
into custody for a legal infraction committed again my authority. In apprehending Cooper, he
explained that he hoped to impress respect [for] justice upon the black race, which views with
such indifference, and even makes a joke of, our laws. Fearing resistance, Fajardo asked three
ladino farm workers to assist in the arrest. Although the men agreed, their foreman, Dempster,
forbade them from participating. According to Fajardo, Dempster declared he did not want
Guatemalan authorities interfering with his operations and otherwise showed that the blacks
All the while, of course, United Fruit continued to segregate whites from
nonwhites, including ladinos. When necessary, white Americans admitted light-
skinned Guatemalan elites to social functions, but they openly referred to all
Hispanics as spigs, or worse. Indeed, many of United Fruits white employees
exhibited greater disdain for the Catholic, racially ambiguous ladinos than they
did for West Indians. In 1920, for example, Texan writer Eugene Cunningham
met an American blacksmith named California Jack Dempsey, who had
recently quit his job with United Fruit and possessed a deep contempt for the
niggers about him. Their inability to speak English he regarded as a personal
affront. To Dempsey, blacks and ladinos alike were niggers. Former United
Fruit manager John L. Williams conrmed this pattern, recalling that the
attitude of the average white employee of the fruit company is one of sneering
contempt for the native of the country. Spig is the epithet applied to all Latin
Americans irrespective of their ofcial or social position. While he asserted that
anti-Hispanic racism was rarely public, except at times when a drunken Ameri-
can attempts to whip single-handed the entire police force of a town, it seems
likely that ladinos encountered U.S. racism on a regular basis.
41
This caste system also extended to the companys new enclave on Guate-
malas Pacic coast. Frances Emery-Waterhouse, the wife of United Fruit
manager Russell Waterhouse, observed that onher plantation, social strata are as
sharply observed as machete blades, and one must conform. The ne and
cultured Latin-American employees and their families were snubbed and slighted
by the North Americans and treated with ill-disguised contempt, she noted,
and because I made no secret of my liking for [them], I was sharply criticized.
After a few uncomfortable evenings, and one wretched afternoon when a party
of norteamericanos refused to shake hands with a charming little Guatemalteca
who was having tea with me, I entertained [Americans and ladinos] at different
times, she recalled. But this practice incited a newlandslide of recrimination: if
I wished to hold my social position, I would have to stop inviting Latinos to my
do not want to be governed by the authorities. When the three ladinos went with Fajardo
anyway, Dempster red them. Yet the investigation that followed revealed that Cooper had
been making wood planks to build a bridge and that the planks had disappeared. When he
discovered Fajardo had stolen them, he recovered his property. Enraged, Fajardo set out to
arrest Cooper. For assistance, he called upon young ladino workers rather than West Indians.
When Dempster opposed him, he urged prosecution of the foreman in racially charged
language that aimed to sway higher ofcials. After the full story emerged, both Dempster and
Cooper were freed. Dempster was thirty-seven years old, literate, and most likely a long-time
employee of the company. In contrast, the three ladinos Fajardo pressed into service were in
their early twenties, illiterate, and originally from other parts of Guatemala. Juan Fajardo to
Juez Municipal Morales, 12 February 1917, Criminal: Contra el capitan de trabajadores de
Dartmouth James Dempster, 1917, paquete 3, JPI-AGCA.
41. Eugene Cunningham, Gypsying through Central America (New York, 1922), 240. As for
relations with Guatemalan elites, Williams noted that, as the banana districts are not fre-
quented by any of the upper class people of the country, the race relations between them and
the white employees is reduced to a minimum. See Williams, Rise of the Banana Industry,
12021.
home. Emery-Waterhouse precipitated a new scandal by admitting she would
allowher daughter to marry a Latino. Yet she eventually succumbed, recogniz-
ing that such practices reected the attitudes of any spot in the American Tropics
where Americans and Englishmen foregather.
42
This strict caste system revealed not only an imported Jim Crow framework
but a colonial mentality that United Fruit cultivated every bit as carefully as
bananas. White managers and their families were encouraged to think and act as
a colonial aristocracy ruling over nonwhite subjects. As U.S. traveler Arthur
Ruhl noted in 1928, When you do nally get down to Quirigua, and the
banana-plantations, screened overseers headquarters and spotless hospitals of
the United Fruit Company, you are, for all practical purposes, in a detached bit
of the United States, with its colonial ruling class as remote, psychologically,
from the land it lives in, as are the Canal Zone Americans at Panama.
43
And as in Panama, Hispanic residents resented this Jim Crow colonialism.
American discrimination toward Hispanics clashed sharply with ladinos own
notions of racial hierarchy and nationalism. Since the 1870s, Liberal elites had
encouraged ladinos to view themselves as the core identity of the nation, supe-
rior to the Mayan majority. Yet in the banana enclave, with few exceptions, they
found themselves on the colored side of the color line. Such conditions
encouraged not only anti-American resentment but racial tension within the
workforce, as ladino laborers sought to distance themselves from blacks and
claim the benets of citizenship and racial supremacy. In fact, for many frus-
trated ladinos, black immigrants became a symbol of U.S. domination.
This combination of American and ladino racism placed West Indians in a
tenuous position, and they responded in a variety of ways. Some called on the
British government for support; others departed Guatemala. But many turned
to racial solidarity, and as in Cuba, Panama, Costa Rica, and the U.S. mainland,
black workers welcomed Marcus Garveys Universal Negro Improvement Asso-
ciation (UNIA). Garvey himself had worked for United Fruit in Costa Rica, and
his program appealed to West Indians throughout the U.S. Caribbean empire.
At the associations August 1920 conference in New York City, Clifford Bourne,
a West Indian resident of Puerto Barrios, informed his fellow members, When
we started our association, the United Fruit Company, a company that has tried
to down everything done by the Negro, and especially, the Black Star Line, tried
to get the President of the Republic, Manuel Estrada Cabrera, to forbid us from
42. Frances Emery-Waterhouse, Banana Paradise (New York, 1947), 94, 12425.
43. As in other colonial settings, white women gained a reputation for racial snobbishness
and abuse of domestic workers. Encouraged by their own elevated status, such women wel-
comed the chance to play the lady. Arthur J. Ruhl, quoted above, described one woman who
spoke a complacent but awful Spanish yet was aficted with that superiority complex which,
amongst Americans who go to live in backward tropical neighborhoods, seems to attack the
females of the species more virulently than it does their husbands. See Arthur Ruhl, The
Central Americans: Adventures and Impressions between Mexico and Panama (New York, 1928),
27071.
having our meetings, but I told them: You may stop us temporarily, but we are
going to be conquerors in the end. While failing to conquer the company, the
UNIA did succeed in establishing four divisions and one chapter in Guatemala.
44
Nevertheless, United Fruits policy of racial segmentation ensured that its
workforce remained internally divided. As a result, when a large strike erupted
on the north coast in February 1923, ladino laborers focused their anger not on
United Fruit but on their black coworkers. According to U.S. Consul Arthur
Geissler, the strike was based partly on a demand for an increase in wages
and partly on objection to alleged preference for negro laborers. Soon after,
he reported that 200 native stevedores at Porto [sic] Barrios and 800 native
farm laborers of United Fruit Company are striking for higher wages and
prevent[ing] about 2,000 negro plantation workers, nearly all from Belize and
Jamaica, from working. The strikers called on the company to expel the West
Indians and to give their jobs to ladinos. Many of the nations elites supported
them. One Guatemala City newspaper declared, For a long time we have been
observing that the Fruit Company, gives preeminence to people of color, whose
work is as and sometimes less efcient than that of natives, and it called on the
government to protect our workers, giving them ample guarantees and the
preference to which their status as Guatemalan citizens entitles them. For its
part, United Fruit worked to exacerbate racial tensions by pressuring black
workers to break the strike and by importing additional West Indian laborers by
steamship. Such policies only heightened antiblack sentiment among ladinos
and contributed to racial violence during the strike.
45
Throughout the 1920s, United Fruit and U.S. government ofcials watched
developments on the north coast closely, but their concerns lay with white lives
and property. When racial violence did occur, they absolved themselves of
any responsibility. In doing so, they emphasized the natural antipathy between
Hispanics and blacks while ignoring the role U.S. white supremacy and labor
segmentation had played in shaping the social dynamics of the enclave. To white
Americans, racial conict in the banana lands arose in spite of, rather than
because of, United Fruits imperial culture. Racial and economic tensions on the
north coast subsided only with the geographic shift of banana production. In the
late 1920s, banana disease struck the Caribbean banana lands, forcing United
Fruit to secure new lands for cultivation. Like Costa Rica, Guatemala offered
the company vast concessions on the Pacic coast, on the condition that it
exclude blacks. United Fruit agreed, and the new Pacic workforce remained
44. Reports of the Convention, 3 August 1920, in Robert A. Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey
and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers (Berkeley, CA, 1983), II: 51415. Of the
four UNIA divisions, the largest was apparently that of Los Amates, with 212 members.
Incomplete membership totals are available at the Harlem branch of the New York Public
Library, micro R1571, reel 1, UNIA records, Schomburg Center for Black Studies, New York
City.
45. Newspaper clipping included in Geissler to Secretary of State Hughes, 6 and 10
February 1923, M-655, reel 20, RG 59, NARA.
almost entirely ladino. Nevertheless, the company transplanted its colonial caste
system to the new enclave, where white managers appreciated the greater avail-
ability of Mayan domestic servants. Meanwhile, West Indians were locked out of
the thriving Pacic plantations. As the north coast declined, they either departed
or found themselves trapped in a tropical version of the American Rust Belt.
46
The 18841930 period witnessed a complex interaction between U.S. impe-
rial expansion, domestic American race relations, and the internal dynamics of
Guatemalan society. By the mid-1880s, modernizing Guatemalan Liberals had
set their country on a course for commercial development, in large part by
promoting a national ladino identity that marginalized the Mayan majority and
justied a system of forced agricultural labor. Yet their determination to develop
the north coast and build the Northern Railroad subverted their dreams of
economic autonomy and a gradual whitening of their nation. From 1884
46. See Cindy Forster, Reforging National Revolution, in Identity and Struggle at the
Margins of the Nation-State: The Laboring Peoples of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean,
eds. Aviva Chomsky and Aldo Lauria-Santiago (Durham, NC, 1998), 200201; and Cindy
Forster, The Macondo of Guatemala: Banana Workers and National Revolution in Tiqui-
sate, 19441954, in Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas, eds. Steve
Strifer and Mark Moberg (Durham, NC, 2003), 19296.
Figure 5: United Fruit Board of Directors, circa 1950. Victor M. Cutter is seated at the back
left (Cutter papers, courtesy of Dartmouth College Library).
to 1908, U.S. railroad contractors imported thousands of African-American
workers to the north coast. This clash between economic development and
national racial identity only grew with the advent of United Fruit. By the 1910s,
the corporation had constructed a white supremacist colonial enclave on the
north coast. Although Guatemalan ofcials approved United Fruits efforts to
control its black workforce, they worried that the company would Africanize
the region by importing thousands of West Indians. Still worse, in their eyes,
was the companys determination to place ladinos on the colored side of the
color line. In response to these rising racial anxieties and United Fruits
demands for labor repression, Guatemalan ofcials harassed and abused black
immigrants, thereby exacerbating black-ladino tensions. As ladino migration to
the region grew in the late 1910s and 1920s, a shrinking number of West Indians
found themselves ascending the labor hierarchy but also targeted as symbols of
Yankee imperialism. White managers used these racial tensions to prevent class
solidarity and to direct nationalist resentment away from the company. By the
1930s, these factors, along with banana disease, had contributed to the exclusion
of black workers from United Fruits new Pacic division.
Although the prohibition of black employment restricted United Fruits
hiring options in its Pacic enclave, the company adapted easily to the virulent
racism it had helped foment. Perhaps this came naturally. After all, by 1930,
Victor M. Cutter was president of United Fruit. Despite his rapid rise through
the corporate ranks, he remained the same rugged banana pioneer. Although
Cutters years of jungle clearing and negro management were behind him, his
friend Hugh Wilson maintained that he has kept the grin, the abrupt manner
and, I suppose, the willingness to bash a buck negro should the latter become
drunk and obstreperous.
47
47. Wilson, Education of a Diplomat, 37.

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