In July 1899, six municipal officials in El Paraíso, Honduras, placed their signatures on a document that listed the names of area residents who grew bananas for export. The municipal secretary, Bartolomé Bueso, signed with a heavy hand, perhaps an indication of the fatigue running through his fingers after recording more than two hundred names complete with several columns of statistics related to banana production. Similar scenes took place in other Honduran municipalities in response to a national survey carried out with the intention of making known “one of the great sources of wealth of our Atlantic Coast.”1 That same year, another group of men met in Trenton, New Jersey, to sign a different type of document—a corporate charter that established the United Fruit Company. The creation of both documents reflected a shared perception that export banana growing was a lucrative livelihood. However, the survey was never published and...
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