"Banana Growing and Negro Management": Race, Labor, and Jim Crow Colonialism in Guatemala, 1884–1930

Abstract

In the spring of 1912, twenty-six-year-old Hugh Wilson learned of his appointment as U.S. chargé d’affaires in Guatemala City. A former Yale classmate of Secretary of State Philander C. Knox's son, Wilson welcomed the news and promptly boarded a New Orleans steamer for Puerto Barrios, Guatemala's busy banana port. There he was met by the United Fruit Company's superintendent, Dartmouth-educated Victor M. Cutter. With “a broad grin on a rugged clean-shaved face,” Wilson recalled, the immaculately dressed Cutter was “picturesque,” “a huge figure in tropic white” that “O. Henry would have cherished.” As the young diplomat followed Cutter down the gangway, he caught his first glimpse of United Fruit's 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 Fruit's 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