Masculinity and the Invention of the United Fruit Company's Banana Frontier, 1899–1930

During its first three decades of operation, the United Fruit Company addressed serious problems among its white North American employees living around the Caribbean basin. Many of these technicians and low-level supervisors either succombed to sickness or failed to adapt to the climate, to the remoteness of company enclaves, or to the company's expectations. Definitions of masculinity worked in concert with advances in tropical epidemiology to make the region's tropical lowlands suitable homes and workplaces for caucasians. With the company's blessing and sponsorship, these men made their tropical surroundings into spaces where their own (as opposed to nonwhite laborers') physically vital masculine selves could be honed or even built from scratch. Sport facilities inscribed this notion of masculinity onto the landscape of company towns, while plantations and uncultivated lands played the part of “banana frontier,” with referents in the history of the U.S. West. United Fruit's efforts to craft a masculine ethos of tropical employment reconstituted the tropics as a place where white masculinity could flourish—an inversion of paradigms holding that tropical climates had deleterious effects on caucasian male bodies. Such conceptual foundations played a key role in cementing United Fruit's field of operations in the Caribbean basin.