The Effect of the United Fruit Company and the Resulting Banana Enclave on the

Racial Problems in Costa Rica in the Early 20th Century

Jordyn Wagner

Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Sociology and Anthropology
Berry College

28 November 2012
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In many Latin American and Caribbean nations, particular commercial commodities rule the

economy. For Costa Rica, the golden (or rather yellow) commercial industry in the early twentieth

century was that of banana production and exports. The banana exporting business saw booms and

busts throughout this period, but the effect it had on the racial relations within the nation, which

were already entrenched within ideologies of its people, endured. Racial hysteria between those

who immigrated to work on banana plantations in Costa Rica from the West Indies (who were

Black) and those who were already there (who were Hispanic and the “real” Costa Ricans) already

existed. Perhaps one of the main reasons for the heightened tension that built atop existing rift,

however, was the presence of the United Fruit Company in and its monopoly of the banana

production and export business in Costa Rica in the early 20th century.

The commercial banana industry in Costa Rica actually began “as a side line of another

activity” (Jones and Morrison 1952:1). This business developed out of the need to provide freight

income to finance the continued construction of the railroad being built by Minor C. Keith

(beginning in 1871) from the port of Limόn on the Atlantic (Caribbean) coast to the capital of Costa

Rica, San Jose (Echeverri 1992; Harpelle 2000; Jones and Morrison 1952; Spence 2000). Keith

planted bananas on the coastal lowlands next to where his railroad was being constructed, and after

this railway section was finished, the transport of the bananas began, heading to the port city Puerto

Limόn (Echeverri-Gent 1992). Several years later, in 1899, the United Fruit Company was formed

when Keith partnered with Andrew Preston, owner of the banana exporting business called the

Boston Fruit Company, consolidating their businesses in order to secure their supply interests and

expansion of production (Echeverri 1992; Jones and Morrison 1952). Thereafter, Costa Rica

experienced an expansion of its commercial banana production.

The years of 1880 to 1930, known as years of “export boom” in Latin America, represent

this expansion of the banana business and the expansion and monopoly of the United Fruit Company

in Costa Rica (Andrews 1997:7). This boom was the result of an increase in the industrialization
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and urbanization occurring in North America and Europe, which “greatly stimulated the demand for

Latin American primary commodities” (Andrews 1997:7). Consequently, in Latin America there

was a surge of export-driven economic growth that had both political and social effects on peoples

of Latin American and Caribbean nations. Given its racially-sensitive society with its “long history

of being organized and stratified along racial lines” (Andrews 1997:7), many of these consequences

in Costa Rica were rooted in the issue of race.

Prior to any migration and prior to the United Fruit Companies presence in Costa Rica, racial

issues existed. After gaining independence, the idea of homogeneity of the nation became the

source of nationalism (Harpelle 2000). Light-skinned Hispanics who claimed their “lineage and

ethnicity to their Iberian colonizers” held particular ideologies which were unleashed on the darker-

skinned peoples (Spence 2000). When slavery was abolished and after independence, these light-

skinned peoples believed that the Blacks in Latin American were the obstacle that was preventing

societies from developing (Harpelle 2000; Spence 2000). Indigenous descendants as well as the

later immigrating blacks that came from the West Indies to work on banana plantations at the

beginning of the 20th century were viewed as the inferior population.

This immigration began because the expansion of the United Fruit Company’s banana

business. This expansion called for more land, which was not a problem, as the Caribbean

Lowlands of Costa Rica was geographically ideal for the expanding the business and exports, as well

as climatically ideal for actually growing the bananas (Jones and Morrison 1952). In order to have

successful expansion on the Atlantic coast, however, there was a need for more labor workers. This

is where the role that the United Fruit Company played in heightening the already existing racial

tension began, as it controlled “labor, communications, commerce and every other aspect of life in

the Atlantic region” (Harpelle 2000:31). In the region where this banana production had expanded,

population was sparse, because Costa Ricans did not want to work there (Koch 1977, Spense 2000) .

Ticos claimed that the Atlantic coastal region was too “unhealthy” for them, but wages were likely
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to be the large factor in their decision to avoid working in the area (Koch 1977:339; Harpelle

2000:30). For this reason, Atlantic Zone businesses, which at this point included the United Fruit

Company which needed more workers to meet the demands of its expanding business, were

“encouraged to import foreign workers so as not to disturb that arrangement” (Koch 1977:339;

Striffler and Moberg 2003).

Specifically in the province of Limόn, there were less than eight thousand people before the

Company imported over 20 thousand West Indians into the region, making West Indians the largest

minority group in Costa Rica (Andrew 1997; Harpelle 2000). The majority of these imported

laborers were “West Indian Negroes” (Jones and Morrison 1952:5), who came not only as a result of

a pull from the economic opportunity in Costa Rica, but also a push from current economic

conditions from the countries they were coming from (Echeverri-Gent 1992). Most of these workers

were from Jamaica because its agricultural industry was suffering from the sugar depression in the

Caribbean (Chomsky 1995; Koch 1977). As a result, a great number of workers left Jamaica, as

well as Barbados and St. Kitts, to look for job opportunities in other countries, including Costa

Rica(Echeverri-Gent 1992; Spence 2000).

Needless to say, at the beginning of the 20th century, a welcoming spirit toward foreigners in

general was all but inexistent. Many immigrants who came to work on the banana plantations in the

Atlantic coastal lands and in the province of Limόn faced difficult working conditions and similar

isolation (both socio-political and geographical in nature) from the rest of Costa Rica, but there were

some problems that West Indian immigrant workers specifically faced that were unique to them.

These West Indians were said by United Fruit Company administrators to have been given no

“formal preference … over locally born Hispanics,” but the West Indians’ good command of

English and their “efforts to cultivate close ties of patronage with their American supervisors and

employers” did give them some advantages that were clear to the local workers (Andrews 1997:16).

Additionally, West Indians were prepared for different jobs needed for the banana business, having
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already been a part of the various aspects of banana production (Echeverri-Gent 1992). Because of

these factors, black workers, on the average, occupied the more highly-paid jobs (initially), which

certainly did not make the white Ticos happy (Koch 1977). Costa Ricans thought of themselves as

a “racially pure society,” so the West Indian’s securing of jobs with UFCO just added to the strike

the Costa Ricans already held against them just for being black (Harpelle 2000:29). And because

white workers represented the minority in the Atlantic coastal region at this time, they used their

national-majority status to pass off racial discrimination toward the West Indians as nationalism

(Koch 1977).

The West Indian enclave that eventually developed in Limón led to the “polarization of race

and class” in the Atlantic coastal region, which was a sharp contrast to the rest of the central valley

which was more homogeneous in race and class (Chomsky 1995:838). Tension increased between

these West Indians and the homogeneous, central valley Ticos, not only because of their dark skin

color, but also because the West Indian workers also brought with them their cultural traditions from

the countries they came from (Chomsky 1995; Harpelle 2000; Spence 2000). These traditions

which were largely based on their African heritage and traditions that developed while in British

slavery, which only served to isolate them more from the ‘authentic’ Costa Ricans who were

“‘white,’ spoke Spanish, and…Roman Catholics” (Harpelle 2000:30).

More than anything though, West Indians were viewed differently and discriminated against

because, unlike the European immigrants who just “undercut the position of locally born ‘national

workers,’” West Indians represented a threat to Costa Rica’s racial pure society, because they

represented a “complete negation of whitening” (Andrews 1997:19). This discrimination affected

not only West Indians’ working lives but also their lives outside of the banana plantations: these

black workers were also rejected by the racially-sensitive society as a whole. Black workers in Costa

Rica were, in fact, “not welcomed outside of the Atlantic coastal banana plantations” (Echeverri-

Gent 1992:282), because they were viewed by members of society, including many legislative and
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political leaders, as a threat to the racial purity that Costa Rica desired. One cabinet member even

expressed the desire for a legislation that forbad the settling of blacks beyond specific geographical

boundaries (Echeverri-Gent 1992). Even decades after the initial influx of these West Indians into

Costa Rica, even the most ‘progressive’ papers exhibited prejudice against blacks (Echeverri-Gent

1992:282).

This racial discrimination directed against West Indian workers led them to become victims

both within and outside of labor movements, especially after a decline in exports from the region

after 1913 due to soil exhaustion and banana diseases caused the planting and production to begin to

slow down in Limόn (Echeverri-Gent 1992; Jones and Morrison 1952). On the banana plantations,

race “created a barrier between black and Hispanic workers [and] in many ways blacks were victims

of the Hispanic-led labor movement” (Echeverri-Gent 1992:282). In many ways, the United Fruit

Company actually stirred this pot of racial tension in Costa Rica when it comes to labor movements.

Whereas Latin American elites and governments were committed to ‘whitening’ their national

societies and “actively discouraged black immigration and in some cases formally banned it,”

companies owned by the United States that were located in Latin America were “completely

uninterested in the racial ‘improvement’ of the countries in which they operated” (Andrews

1997:17). The main concern of US-owned businesses was the “provision of labor in adequate

numbers, regardless of its race or provenance” (Andrews 1997:17). This portrays companies,

including the United Fruit Company, as equal-opportunity employers based on human justice and

equality, but upon further investigation, one comes to find that for the United Fruit Company, there

was an the exploitative underbelly not represented by this equal-opportunity image. The United

Fruit Company’s interest seems to not have been in promoting equality but in fostering their own

productivity and profits; it was “indifferent to the goal of ‘improving’ the racial composition of the

region” (Andrews 1997:24). In fact, it took advantage of the racial divisions already present among

its workers.
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Like many contemporary scholarship dedicated to Costa Rica, the United States itself

promoted the image of Costa Rica as one of the “most democratic and tranquil countries in the

hemisphere…a harmonious society, living at peace with each other and with nature” (Spence

2000:48). In reality, especially in the early 20th century, there were great racial divisions in Costa

Rica and in the United Fruit Company which the company itself used in order to “undermine labor

strikes and worker rebellions” (Andrews 1997:18). The years of the export boom marked the

beginnings of unionization within Latin American nations, and these labor forces, as a result of the

high influx of immigrant workers, were largely multi- racial and national (Andrews 1997).

According to Andrews (1997:18), “Racialized immigration programs and informal employer

preferences for some racial or ethnic groups over others badly aggravated such divisions, which

employers did not hesitate to use as a weapon against worker mobilization.” Specifically, the United

Fruit Company “cultivated and exploited ethnic and racial divisions among workers” in order to

defeat strikes begun by West Indians in Costa Rica (Andrews 1997:18). Company employers were

able to effectively divided and conquered workers (for example, in the 1934 strike), because they

exploited already real ethnic and racial divisions among its workers (Andrews 1997).

Outside of deliberately exploiting racial tension, the United Fruit Company was also blamed

by Costa Ricans for the increase in racial problems in Costa Rica. The United Fruit Company was

accused not only of “monopolizing one of the country’s chief exports” (Harpelle 2000:36), but also

of being responsible for introducing this unwelcome ‘race.’ Chomsky notes (Spence 2000) that the

perception of many white Ticos in Costa Rica during this time was that:

The UFCO was bringing in too many black workers and darkening the racial

composition of the country…[T]he black, who it is known, has a greater

predisposition to sickness…and [b]lack immigration is not appetizing and it is

illogical that it be tormented here. The Black is only good for the Company as a

beast of burden and for the Junta de Caridad as a buyer of lottery tickets; but he is
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deadly for the social order: vicious, criminal in general. He mesticizes our race,

which is already darkening, and all his savings are sent to Jamaica.

Costa Ricans themselves, however, cannot go without blame for having a hand in the exploitation of

existing racial and ethnic tension in Limon. Critics of the United Fruit Company took advantage of

and thereby heightened this divisive tension too, by encouraging Hispanic plantation workers to

battle against the Company (Harpelle 2000). This increased the rift between Hispanic and West

Indian banana workers. But here, again, the argument can be made that Costa Ricans would not have

been able to exploit these existing tensions if the United Fruit Company had not come in the first

place, monopolized their chief economic source, and encouraged the influx of West Indian

immigrants. Had the economic stakes not been so high due to the monopoly the United Fruit

Company held in Costa Rica, perhaps the racial tension would not have been so high.

Well before the United Fruit Company withdrew from the Caribbean Lowlands of Costa

Rica entirely in 1942, they began developing a new plantation on the Pacific coast (Harpelle 2000,

Jones and Morrison 1952:7). What was the effect of this shift from Atlantic to Pacific regions on the

population? Negotiations had begun between the United Fruit Company and the Costa Rican

government which did not help with the racial hysteria. With the new contract formed between the

Costa Rican government and the United Fruit Company in 1934 came many new problems for the

West Indians (Harpelle 2000). Lack of West Indian participation in protests and strikes against

UFCO and the 1934 contract specifically, was yet another strike the Hispanic population held

against the West Indians (Harpelle 2000). But again, this is indicative of Costa Ricans having used

the monopoly of the UFCO as an excuse to claim another West Indian infraction, ignoring that it is

not just the United Fruit Company’s fault; there is a national problem of racial discrimination.

Nevertheless, this new contract of 1934 was also disliked by West Indians even though they

were not directly involved with protest. The contract did a number of things that were unpopular

with the West Indians for their discriminatory nature, including: the prohibition of ‘people of color’
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from working the United Fruit Company on the Pacific Coast; forced integrations of West Indians

into the Costa Rican culture including the closing of English-speaking schools and forced

conversion to Catholicism; and the pushing of some West Indians off their farms or deportation

altogether (Harpelle 2000; Spence 2000). Blacks complained that the company had repaid their

‘faithfulness’ with a betrayal and that they were “abandoned by United Fruit without any

consideration for the sacrifices they had made to make the banana business in Costa Rica an

overwhelming success” (Harpelle 2000:50; Koch 1977). In 1937, the United Fruit Company

“stepped up development of the Pacific banana zone, and it sharply curtailed shipments of fruit from

Puerto Limon” (Koch 1977:350), and as a result, blacks were “marooned in the declining Atlantic

Zone.” Ultimately, the banana enclave that developed institutionalized racism in the country, and

the contributions made by the community of West Indians were forgotten or ignored.

When Spence (2000) visited to Costa Rica at the end of the 20th century, she found very few

black people in the central region of Costa Rica, because “the ‘Negros’ lived in Limon.” The

obvious geographical division along racial lines is still readily apparent in Costa Rica today:

“Ravages of a history characterized by racist ideology are manifested in their destitute life ways

today” (Spence 2000). Even today, there is some refusal of society to acknowledge blacks. Despite

this history of discrimination, heightened in the early 20th century by the boom and busts of the

banana industry and the presence and monopoly of the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, older

inhabitants that Spence (2000) spoke to in Puerto Viejo still have pride for who they are. One man

said, “Don’t speak no Spanish to me, man, I speak English,” showing that the pride for their cultural

and racial heritage have prevailed in the face of a long history of racial discrimination.
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References Cited

Andrews, George Reid

1997 Black Workers in the Export Years: Latin America, 1880-1930. International Labor and

Working-Class History 51:7-29

Chomsky, Avi

1995 Afro-Jamaican Traditions and Labor Organizing on United Fruit Company Plantations in

Costa Rica, 1910. Journal of Social History 28(4):837-855.

Echeverri-Gent, Elisavinda

1992 Forgotten Workers: British West Indians and the Early Days of the Banana Industry in

Costa Rica and Honduras. Journal of Latin American Studies 24(2):275-308.

Harpelle, Ronald N.

2000 Racism and Nationalism in the Creation of Costa Rica’s Pacific Coast Banana Enclave.

The Americas 56(3):29-51.

Jones, Clarence F., and Paul C. Morrison.

1952 Evolution of the Banana Industry of Costa Rica. Economic Geography 28(1):1-19.

Koch, Charles W.

1977 Jamaican Blacks and Their Descendants in Costa Rica. Social and Economic Studies

26(3):339-361.

Spence, Glenys P.

2000 The Wages of Whiteness in a Sinful Paradise: Blacks in Costa Rica. Black Diaspora

(July/August):48ff. http://www.weyonke.org/BlacksInCostaRica.htm, accessed November

15, 2012.

Striffler, Steve, and Mark Moberg, ed.

2003 Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas. Durham: Duke

University Press.