Surviving Work: Masculinity and Resistance in the Banana Regions of Honduras, 1944–57

For workers of the United Fruit Company and the Standard Fruit Company in the North Coast of Honduras during the first half of the 20th century, violence was endemic to the work they were hired to perform. Cutting bananas under brutal conditions of humid heat, clouds of pesticides, meager wages, poor treatment and insalubrious housing, workers endured work and living environments marked by violence. Yet over time these workers, men and some women, developed the campos bananeros (living quarters) into places where they 'felt free' within Company landholdings but outside of Company-controlled settlements and official towns. These workers survived and made a home where many feared to go. Company town-dwellers, Anglos and Hondurans alike, thought of banana camp workers as violent, armed, macho men to be feared. The myth of violent campeños (banana workers), who would draw machetes at slightest provocation, has become a part of Honduran local lore of the North Coast, including their now revered organizing of the great banana strike of 1954.

This paper will explore the narratives of violence and violent workers as told by locals and banana workers themselves, and will analyze workers’ and companies’ roles in creating 'violence' in the banana camps. These narratives of violence were inculcated by the companies, the nation and workers in the process of the construction of the working class and the labor movement in Honduras and proved influential, and indeed sometimes damaging, in later developments of the 1980s labor movement and influence up to this day.