The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1960 (review)

This book is a strong addition to the growing literature on migration within the Caribbean Basin and its impact on economy and politics of receiving countries. Building on recent work by Aviva Chomsky and Ronald N. Harpelle, Putnam broadens our knowledge of the important region of Limón on the Atlantic side of Costa Rica. One major contribution is her focus on the role of immigrants from Jamaica, Nicaragua, Cuba, and other parts of Costa Rica in shaping the social, political, and economic relationships in the banana zone. She challenges long-held beliefs that United Fruit (UFCO) was the most important actor in the process and persuasively argues that "banana exports and labor migration responded to separate dynamics, neither of which functioned at the will of UFCO officials" (p. 4). While acknowledging that UFCO practiced social engineering in places such as Ecuador, Putnam finds there was a significant gap between rhetoric and practice in Costa Rica and that UFCO only partially shaped social relations in the region.

The author's method of analysis is equally innovative. By using gender as the fundamental cornerstone of her investigation, she broadens our understanding of the social dynamics that shaped life in the Limón banana zone. She acknowledges the significance of race and nationality, but she finds the impact of gender on social relationships to be most important, although in flux due to external influences. She concludes that "gender was manufactured locally, from imported parts" (p. 215). The results were that often "regional migration flows and life cycle patterns had molded communal tendencies into the exact opposite of what attention to cultural heritage would have predicted" (p. 214).

After developing the ethnographic and historical influences on the area, the book focuses on the 1890s-1930s period. The topics broached include prostitution in the banana zone, the place of women in community and kinship networks, court cases concerning insults and slander, and the evolution of an aggressive, violent masculine ideal in the early periods of boom and bust and how it affected perceptions of the region.

Putnam employs a wide variety of sources: Costa Rican government documents (including court records and census data), autobiographies, and existing oral histories form the bulk of the primary data. She also effectively incorporates the existing secondary literature from anthropologists and sociologists to produce this extensively researched book.

As with any good work, the author leaves the reader wanting more. In particular, I wanted to know more about the period after the rise of the modern state during the early 1940s. For example, how did the constitution of 1949, which removed many restrictions (or at least public discrimination), change relationships in the Limón region? Were political relationships and other public space issues noticeably altered when women gained the right to vote? Did the rise of the national health care system and other postwar reforms dramatically modify the region?

This thought-provoking analysis clearly challenges some common perceptions and extends our knowledge of the complexities that shaped the banana zones in Costa Rica. This is a significant book that any historian of the region of Latin America should pick up at the earliest possible date.