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

Notes

Notes introduction 1. See contributions in Striffler and Moberg, eds., Banana Wars; Marquardt, ‘‘ ‘Green Havoc’ ’’; and by the same author, ‘‘Pesticides, Parakeets, and Unions.’’ For an anecdotal history of banana consumption, see Jenkins, Bananas. 2. See Karnes, Tropical Enterprise; and May and Plaza, The United Fruit Company in Latin America. 3. The foundational dependency text is Cardoso and Faletto, Dependencyand Development in Latin America. In the Central American context, see Torres Rivas, Interpretaci ón del desarrollo social centroamericano. (Also see the English-language version, History and Society in Central America, trans. Sullivan-González.) Important analyses of the export banana industry utilizing dependency frameworks include Posas, ‘‘La Plantación Bananera en Centroamérica’’; Pérez-Brignoli, A Brief History of Central America; Laínez and Meza, ‘‘El enclave bananero en la Historia de Honduras’’; and Frassinetti, Enclave y sociedad en Honduras. For an insightful review of dependency perspectives on Honduras, see Euraque, ‘‘El Imperialismoy Honduras como ‘república bananera.’ ’’ 4. LeGrand, ‘‘Living in Macondo.’’ Forcritiques of dependencyand world systems theories, see Cooper et al., Confronting Historical Paradigms. 5. Euraque, Reinterpreting the Banana Republic. Also see LeGrand, Frontier Expansion and Peasant Protest in Colombia; Putnam, The Company They Kept; Striffler, In the Shadows of State and Capital; Forster, ‘‘Reforging National Revolution’’; Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work; and Chomsky, West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company. An unpublished work that devotes considerable attention to non-company banana growers in Honduras is Brand, ‘‘The Background of Capitalistic Underdevelopment.’’ 6. On the difficulties of separating culture and nature, see the essays in Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground. On agroecology, see Carroll, Vandermeer, and Rosset, eds., Agroecology. 7. Geographer Carl Sauer argued that Native Americans cultivated the banana well prior to contact with Europeans and Africans. Banana expert Norman W. Simmonds disagreed, contending that the first banana arrived from the Canary Islands via the Spanish friar Tomás de Berlanga. For an assessment of the evidence, see Langdon, ‘‘The Banana as a Key to Early American and Polynesian History.’’ 8. See essays by Marshall and Tomich in Cultivation and Culture. Also see the 248 n ot e s to pag e s 6 – 1 1 collection of primary sources on Brazilian slavery compiled by Conrad, Children of God’s Fire. 9. Gilbert and Hubbell, ‘‘Plant Diseases and the Conservation of Tropical Forests ,’’ 104. Note that the relationship between disease incidence and monocultures is not directly linked to levels of biodiversity, but rather to host density. Mundt, ‘‘Disease Dynamics in Agroecosystems.’’ 10. See the otherwise impressive works by Bulmer-Thomas, The Political Economy of Central America Since 1920; and Wells and Topik, The Second Conquest of Latin America. 11. Among the first scholars to note the connection between Panama disease and the preference for Gros Michel bananas in U.S. markets was Kepner, Social Aspects of the Banana Industry, 19–21 and 89–91. Three more recent works have also noted the link: Chomsky, West Indian Workers, 66; Marquardt, ‘‘Green Havoc,’’ 52–58; and Ellis, Las transnacionales del banano en Centroamerica, 77–99. 12. On the region’s pre-Columbian history, see Newson, The Cost of Conquest. 13. Euraque, Reinterpreting the Banana Republic. Also see articles in the theme issue edited by Euraque in Mesoamérica 42 (December 2001); Echeverri-Gent, ‘‘Forgotten Workers’’; O’Brien, The Revolutionary Mission; Langley and Schoonover, The Banana Men; and Karnes, Tropical Enterprise. 14. Argueta, Bananos y política; Barahona, El silencio quedó atrás; García Buchard, Poder político, interés bananero, e identidad nacional en centroamérica; and Frasinetti, Enclave y sociedad en Honduras. 15. Data on banana exports are neither complete nor entirely reliable for the period of time covered in this study. Sources tend to vary on specific figures, but there is agreement on broad trends: Jamaica was the leading exporter in the early twentieth century until production in Honduras expanded during the 1920s. From the early 1950s to the present, Ecuador has been the leading exporterof bananas. See Kepnerand Soothill, The Banana Empire; Ellis, Las transnacionales del banano en Centroamerica, 53–55, 400; and Bucheli, ‘‘United Fruit Company in Latin America,’’ 92. 16. See Karnes, Tropical Enterprise; and García Buchard, Poder político, interés bananero, e identidad nacional en Centroamérica. There are exceptions to this tendency in the scholarship. Euraque (‘‘Modernity, Economic Power and the Foreign Banana Companies in Honduras’’) found that 28 of 35 mayors to hold office between 1884 and 1920 were banana growers. Also see...