The Wild Bunch

Abstract

With a focus on the experiences of the United Fruit Company’s skilled and white-collar employees, Banana Cowboys makes a welcome contribution to the scholarship in the field and sheds new light on corporate America’s colonial project in the Caribbean. By examining the United Fruit Company (UFCO) from the perspective of these white, mid-level employees, Martin provides a nuanced and complicated understanding of the workings of the company: its racialized system of labor, its social welfarism, and its expansive cultural agenda, which sought to reshape the land and remake the people. Working and living in an in-between space, Martin argues that these white employees actively promoted the company’s agenda while their oft-ambivalent attitudes exposed the contradictions and inherent tensions in its mission on the ground. For, as the author explains in his introduction, “those white North Americans charged with being ‘the exploiters’ were subjected to a colonial regime that attempted—not always successfully—to mold and discipline them. The relationship of white Anglo-Saxons to the company’s colonial projects thus provides a lens into the fractures and vexations running through those efforts all along” (10).