Fruitful and Dangerous Intersections: Race, the United Fruit Company, and Scholars of Empire Converge in Central America

Abstract

Jason Colby’s The Business of Empire examines the United Fruit Company (UFCO) and race relations in UFCO’s Central American banana enclaves, with Costa Rica and Guatemala as primary examples. Explaining that the book “is about the intersection of corporate power, U.S. expansion, West Indian migration, and local aspirations in Central America” (p. 3), Colby also provides a scholarly intersection, offering original research synthesized with scholarship from diverse fields, most notably work by social historians of labor and race with that of historians of U.S. foreign relations. The result is a welcome addition to a growing literature that integrates international, national, and local histories and explores state and non-state actors. Colby opens by synthesizing the rise of U.S. influence from 1848 to 1904, narrating how U.S. government and corporate-based empire emerged as Central America’s liberal modernizers sought foreign capital to build railroads for their nation-building programs. The U.S. state encouraged private ventures like Minor Keith’s, while black West Indian workers migrated to Central America’s Caribbean coasts seeking opportunity. Colby then analyzes UFCO’s corporate colonialist mentality and emergent strategy of dividing workers by race and nationality between 1904 and 1921. Managers in public (Panama Canal) and private (UFCO) enclaves shared attitudes and personnel committed to colonialism and racialized views, practiced race-based hiring, and enforced the color line. Colby argues that this reflected not transplantation of southern Jim Crow, but national and imperial racial conceptions intensified by U.S. empire building. Managers like Ivy Leaguer Victor Cutter saw themselves as progressive “civilizers” in tropical zones, and travel writers and visitors to banana enclaves absorbed and propagated imperial racial views. Meanwhile, labor disputes advanced by West Indian workers led UFCO officials to recruit Hispanic workers to divide labor. As blacks enjoyed elevated status over Hispanic workers because of English-speaking skills developed through enclave experience or status as small business owners, Central Americans resented denigration of enclave Hispanics and imperial claims that UFCO was responsible for modernizing backward nations. Ominously for West Indians (and UFCO), Central American governments defended Hispanics over black workers during episodes of racial violence and began to restrict West Indian immigration and pass discriminatory laws.