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Chapter 3 Altered Landscapes and Transformed Livelihoods The last train on the Truxillo ran on April 5, 1942, and the last purchase of fruit was in March. There will henceforth be no outlet for the small farmers in that section. robert whedbee, april 18, 1942 ‘‘I believe, Honorable Minister, that the true sons of Honduras should not be impeded when we want to work our own lands,’’ wrote a frustrated Víctor Medina Romero on October 8, 1932, in a letter addressed to the Honduran minister of development.1 Born and raised in the Honduran highlands, Medina first migrated to the North Coast in the 1920s. There he found work as a day laborer ( jornaliando) for the fruit companies . He later left the North Coast only to return in 1932 with the hope of establishing a farm near thevillage of Corralitos, Atlántida. Medina’s letter explained that because there were no forested lands (montañas vírgenes) in the area, he had sought permission to cultivate a guamil that belonged to Standard Fruit. When a company official informed him that the land would be made available via lease in the upcoming year, a disappointed Medina turned to the national government for help with gaining access to land that ‘‘I need so badly in order to make my own living. The companies only want slaves; the worker remains with nothing after buying his necessities.’’ He concluded his letter by reminding the minister about the difficulties of squatting: ‘‘if these companies do not give their consent to work an abandoned farm, they won’t want to buy the fruit that one harvests!’’ Víctor Medina’s brief yet evocative letter sheds light on the dynamic intersection between landscape and livelihood negotiated by those who ventured to the North Coast in the early twentieth century with the hope of tapping into the region’s ‘‘green gold.’’ However, his self-described iden- 76 ba na na c u lt u r e s tity as a ‘‘true son’’ of Honduras potentially obscures the fact that women also migrated to export banana zones. For example, sometime around 1927, Ángela Coto-Moreno’s mother decided to leave her home in southern Honduras and head for the North Coast in the hope of finding some of her children. Accompanied by only seven-year-old Ángela, she made the difficult journey through the mountainous central region of Honduras before reaching the Sula valley, where she found both her children and a job as a labor camp cook. Ángela eventually married and left the banana camps to establish a small farm with her husband.2 The experiences of Víctor and Ángela were not unique: thousands of men and women migrated to the North Coast in the first half of the twentieth century. They came from all over Honduras in addition to El Salvador, Jamaica, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Belize, and Mexico. Immigrant life in export banana zones was highly dynamic: people moved from farm to farm and from job to job, blurring the boundaries between campesino/a and obrero/a. Hundreds of small-scale growers produced Gros Michel bananas for export and/or grew a variety of grains, fruits, and vegetables for local markets. Although farming afforded freedoms unavailable to plantation workers, it also held many risks linked to weather, volatile markets, and the fruit companies’ monopoly power over railroads and shipping. Panama disease added another destabilizing element to everyday life: the fruit companies’ practice of shifting production left residents of abandoned communities to confront the vexing task of forging new livelihoods in altered environments. For squatters, an already tenuous situation was compounded by the threat of eviction, or, as Medina’s closing remark suggested , an inability to market one’s produce. In struggles for control over resources, working people frequently employed rhetorics of place that appropriated elite discourses about nation building for their own needs. Working-class visions of the North Coast tended to be as contradictory as the process by which the Honduran state attempted to incorporate the region into an imagined mestizo nation . Spanish-speaking migrants such as Víctor Medina and Ángela CotoMoreno forged collective identities in opposition to both the hegemony of the U.S. fruit companies and the presence of ‘‘black’’ and ‘‘foreign’’ laborers. The North Coast was a contested contact zone that gave rise to both anti-immigrant campaigns and utopian land colonization projects in places that lay beyond the shadows of the banana plantations. [18.220.137...

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