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Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States

2006; Duke University Press; Volume: 86; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2006-074

1527-1900

Darío A. Euraque,

Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development

This is a very ambitious book. A model for conceptualizing and researching how the globalization of agricultural commodities links peripheral and central areas of the world economy, it should find an audience far beyond specialists on Central America and even Latin America. Such studies should include analysis of the environment and nature as agents of change and arenas of human struggle and praxis; Soluri does this and more. Equally welcomed, the book is well written, free of jargon, erudite and yet amenable, and it is amply illustrated with carefully selected photographs and maps designed to illustrate specific issues argued in key chapters and particular sections.Soluri seeks to link and explain the economic, social, environmental, and even scientific dimensions of the history of banana cultivation, exportation, and consumption, which connected Honduras and the United States, between the 1890s and the early 1960s. Such an agenda requires not only a conceptual sophistication rarely applied to Honduran historiography; it also requires, to be successful, a broad and deep command of a great variety of different archival holdings, both in the United States and Honduras. This last is not easy to do. Soluri’s book successfully carries out his mission on all levels.Banana Cultures effectively addresses a number of historiographical issues. In the narrower context of Honduran history, Soluri for the first time systematically looks at how, why, and to what extent foreign-owned banana companies (especially Standard and United Fruit) transformed the natural environment of the country’s north coast: what Soluri calls “altered landscapes” and “transformed livelihoods.” Work on the infamous banana companies has historically emphasized their imperial economics, their labor practices, and especially their political involvement in coups, civil wars, and everyday politics. Here these issues serve primarily as backdrop, but the endnotes deftly point uninitiated readers to that sad literature.Soluri’s basic argument is that when we look closely at environmental and scientific efforts to deal with banana diseases (as he does), the motivations behind and consequences of other agents’ actions — from laborers to executives to politicians — acquire a greater degree of historical complexity: what Soluri calls “the entangled agency of people, plants, and pathogens” (p. 217). Hopefully, the book will be translated into Spanish so Honduran scholars and the country’s versed general public can benefit from it as well.If this happens, most Hondurans — including many of the older relatives of this reviewer — will be amazed with the other main achievement of this terrific book: its analysis of the economics, sociology, and culture of U.S. banana consumption between the 1890s and the 1950s. Soluri seems to have searched for and found every possible source on U.S. banana imports and consumption, especially after the first two decades of the twentieth century, at which point (with witty language) he informs his readers that “bananas were slipping into everyday life in the U.S.” (p. 57). Hondurans, and probably U.S. citizens, will be amazed to learn that the “ubiquity” of the banana in the 1920s in the U.S. influenced even a scene in William Faulkner’s classic novel, As I Lay Dying. By the 1950s, not only poets, novelists, and musicians engaged bananas in the U.S.: “the companies themselves constructed images of bananas and the tropics through mass-marketing campaigns” (p. 61) that included everything from children’s books to recipes for their moms that featured “baked bananas in the peel” and “ham banana rolls” (p. 161).Soluri’s analysis and stories linking agriculture, pesticides, environmental change, and banana cultures and consumption in Honduras and the U.S. is grounded in a wealth of information gathered in depositories in the U.S. and in Honduras, from special collections in national archives and libraries to unique Latin American collections in universities and colleges in both countries. One of the most attractive results of this kind of systematic research is the assortment of wonderful black and white photographs — 24 of them — that illustrate environmental landscapes and how they were transformed on the north coast of Honduras. These photographs show everything from United Fruit Company pasture to, my favorite, “Workers — under watchful eye of overseer — hauling bananas with mules (c. 1925)” (p. 146).Finally, Soluri (probably unique among Honduranist historians in the United States) worked in regional archives in municipalities and lived in towns in and around the country’s north coast. Anyone who reads this book carefully will see references to documents that can be examined only in towns like Tela, El Progreso, La Lima, Sonaguera, Olanchito, and others. This experience in turn undoubtedly served Soluri well when he interviewed almost 30 Hondurans of various ages and genders — common people who today live and vividly remember how the complexities of the globalization of banana production and consumption transformed their lives and their landscapes. The information gathered from these interviews amounts to a collective and private sensibility that Soluri skillfully weaves into his narrative and analysis of Honduran and U.S. history in the twentieth century.