The present volume is a worthy successor to the classics by Charles Kepner and a solid contribution to the debate within anthropology and history on the various meanings and uses of “ethnicity” in American multiracial societies. The crudity of social conditions on Central America’s banana coast is rendered with a direct, powerful prose and a rare intellectual transparency and introspection.
The study surveys the development and consequences of the ethnic identity and labor-market insertion of West Indian blacks and local Hispanics and Amerindians in the United Fruit Company-dominated region of Bocas del Toro (Panama) and Sixaola-Talamanca (Costa Rica) since the late nineteenth century. The work is particularly important as perhaps the first book-length analysis of the ethnically complex reality of Central America’s Atlantic lowlands. Bourgois’s most original findings concern early twentieth-century production and labor policies of the company and contemporary Hispanic and Amerindian incorporation in the labor force and local society. The work provides many fine insights about blacks, for which it is understandably heavily indebted to the doctoral research of Charles Koch and Roy Simon Bryce-Laporte.
Most weaknesses in this study are directly related to its strengths. The author’s pioneering work in local corporate archives in disrepair is undercut by the difficulty of future consultation by other scholars. Bourgois does a fine job of searching out the local, Spanish-language literature, including theses, but he, or his editor, persists in using the Anglicized capitalization of all the words in each Spanish title. The author’s arguments for the social conservatism of upwardly mobile blacks and for the denationalization of the company’s Hispanic administrators are well founded but occasionally exaggerated. Similarly, too simplistic a picture is painted of Hispanic Costa Ricans’ undeniable, if partial, assimilation of racism and white-supremacist ideology. Finally, the theoretical contribution—that ethnicity is materially based in the historical evolution of the labor market—may be of significance to current anthropological debate in the United States, but will come as little surprise to historians of Latin America, long ago reconciled to dealing with white-supremacist mulattos in Brazil or the Dominican Republic, or bitterly impoverished “white Indians” in Guatemala.
Bourgois has produced a groundbreaking study. All those interested in Central America’s Atlantic coast, as well as those intrigued by the resiliency of ethnic identity in modern American labor history, will find valuable materials and insights in this work.
