Reconfiguring Enclave Identities: West Indian and Ladino Workers on Guatemala’s Caribbean Coast, 1930–62

By the mid-1940s, the banana plantation zone of Izabal in Guatemala had uniquely become a region of immigrants primarily attracted to the area by the United Fruit Company beginning in the latter years of the nineteenth century. In this paper, I focus on Jamaicans and other West Indians in this region, not as a self-contained entity, but as part and parcel of a changing social and political environment in Guatemala. Indeed, both Afro-Guatemalan and Ladino (non-indigenous) labor leaders from this area played vital roles within larger national struggles for labor rights during the country’s unprecedented democratic opening (1944 to 1954). Yet the key participation of United Fruit workers in labor unions that fundamentally chipped away at United Fruit’s dominance over the area has been regrettably overlooked. These grassroots efforts, I demonstrate, ran parallel to the government’s strategy of shedding the country’s status as a “banana republic” by incorporating this key region into its plan of economic development.

While previous scholars contend that the West Indian population was summarily unwelcome and pushed out of the country by the early 1930s, this conceptualization ignores the growing dual identities that formed in the plantation zone. I focus on West Indians (and their descendants) to demonstrate that they positioned themselves in leadership roles within social movements as Guatemalans, yet without losing sight of their West Indian background. I show that “Guatemalan” and “Jamaican” were not mutually exclusive categories. I maintain that the West Indian population—themselves brought by the United Fruit Company—ironically served a key role in challenging the Company’s total dominance over the province of Izabal as Guatemala’s reformist government sought to bring this important region under national sovereignty.