Black Labor Migration in Caribbean Guatemala, 1882–1923

Introduction

Introduction In 1884, steamships loaded with laborers from the U.S. ports of Mobile, Galveston, and New Orleans, and from the West Indies, began to arrive at the Caribbean port of Puerto Barrios, in Izabal, Guatemala. U.S. contractors had begun hiring black and Latin American workers to lay track throughout the Central American republic in the early 1880s, and black workers used the steamships to get to the railroad camps.1 Many migrants who set sail for Guatemala were seeking to earn enough money to purchase property and improve their lives. Whether or not they managed to do so depended to a certain extent on the nature of their relationships with their employers as well as with the Guatemalan nationals they encountered. This book focuses on black labor migration to Guatemala in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with particular attention to the experiences of black immigrants and their relations with Guatemalans and other Latin Americans. The earliest black workers came to Guatemala as contract laborers for railroad construction projects. The majority of them worked for what became the International Railroad of Central America (IRCA), and later for the United Fruit Company (UFCO) of Boston. Upon the completion of the lowland railroad projects in 1908, some men stayed on as employees of IRCA, while others took jobs with UFCO or worked in the capital city, in the interior of Guatemala. Starting in 1914, company officials on the Caribbean coast began hiring Guatemalan nationals to replace the migrant laborers . Thereafter, migrants increasingly became farmers or entrepreneurs and relocated to other parts of the Americas. Prior to the Great Depression, foreign-born workers of African descent composed the largest segment of the Caribbean coast workforce in Guatemala . Between 1893 and 1918, they organized numerous labor movements in tandem with Guatemalan nationals. Unpaid back wages and intolerable working conditions on the coast proved decisive in prompting workers to strike and unionize. At that time, banana exporters depended on the Northern Railroad to ship bananas to the Caribbean coast for export. When railroad workers decided to strike, their goal was to shut down the railway lines that ran through the banana plantations all the way to the dock at Puerto Barrios.2 Turn-of-the-century Guatemala offered migrant workers opportunities, but it was nonetheless a dangerous and difficult place to make one’s fortune. 2 Introduction U.S. State Department records point to a pattern of Guatemalan officials’ carrying out violent anti-immigrant attacks against foreign laborers. Migrants of all nationalities suffered unprovoked thrashings at the hands of officials who used swords, rifle butts, and pistols to beat them into bloody submission . Rural officials arrested workers, particularly black migrants, without probable cause and then forced them to perform prison labor without trial or compensation. Black American prisoners in Guatemala spent years in jail cells without trial. Departmental governors acted as the military dictators of their departments. Judges and other officials were “merely puppets who eagerly appl[ied] the good law of the land to vicious purposes,” as the governor directed them to do.3 Departmental officials carried out acts of brutality without fear of reprimand because President Estrada Cabrera (1898–1920) usually protected them from charges of excessive use of force. The president himself carried on a reign of terror at the national level.4 Conflict between laborers and officials in Guatemala arose because elites held in contempt workers in general, and black foreign workers especially. Caribbean coast workers engaged in a constant struggle for survival against their employers and Guatemalan officials. Studies of Caribbean coast laborers are scarce to nonexistent, but where these workers are represented in the historical record, they tend to be depicted as passive pawns of their employers and victims of state repression during the repressive dictatorship of President Estrada Cabrera. This book advances a revisionist interpretation, arguing that workers of African descent have played an important role in Guatemala’s history since the 1880s when liberal elites first revamped the republic’s economic development and modernization plan. Indeed, the history of black labor in lowland Guatemala is an important part of the larger history of the Atlantic World.5 Dockworkers and railroad employees in particular had considerable influence on national events due to the central role of coffee and banana exports in the Guatemalan economy. Caribbean coast workers in Guatemala proved to be important political allies during revolutionary movements against José María Reyna Barrios in 1897 and Manuel José Estrada Cabrera in 1920, and their...