In the Shadows of State and Capital: The United Fruit Company, Popular Struggles, and Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 1900-1995 (review)

The United Fruit Company has earned the justified ire of scholars throughout the Americas for its ruthless conduct during the era of the "banana republics." Although UFCO came to Ecuador in the 1920s, later than its "classic" period in Central America, the enclave pattern of plantation production parallels its behavior elsewhere. To be sure, differences existed, in that bananas came to Ecuador in the wake of the collapse of the cacao industry and UFCO never gained the political influence that it enjoyed in countries such as Guatemala. Moreover, Ecuadorian banana workers demonstrated considerable success in gaining concessions from the multinational giant, often with state support. However, in both regions, contract labor eventually replaced the enclave plantation system, giving UFCO a more "secure" economic environment for banana production than it had enjoyed early in the 20th century.

Striffler uses this well-known process as the context for a fascinating case study of labor militancy, political struggle, and state involvement in the restructuring of banana production in the Tenguel region. His study skillfully develops several themes: it offers an ethnohistorical account of how "local" actions "shaped broader processes of production, marketing, and accumulation within the global banana industry" (p. 6); it presents a closely argued analysis of how laborers articulated their interests within changing economic conditions; it explores the changing conduct of a less than hegemonic state in the face of contending demands by labor militants, regional elites, and UFCO representatives; and it pays serious attention to the centrality of politics in the historical process. In this, "I have attempted to understand capitalism through the ethnographic study of a particular locale while at the same time making capitalism, that is, broader forces, central to my understanding of that locale" (p. 207). He succeeds in this ambitious goal.

The book is divided into two parts. Part I, "The World of the Plantation," traces the arrival of UFCO in Ecuador and the construction of the Tenguel enclave. Interviews with workers sustain a nuanced understanding of "Fordist" labor conditions that included housing, clubs, and good wages. Labor militancy emerged in the 1950s as workers inside and outside the enclave struggled against UFCO in pursuit of increased autonomy and direct control of land. Struggles brought increased political and organizational skills and differentiated encounters with state agencies, just as disease ravaged the Gros Michel banana, leading UFCO to shift much of its operations to Central America and thereby undercutting the economic prosperity that had underpinned the banana zone. State repression after 1963 helped to bring the era of the enclave to an end.

Part II continues to center upon local militancy, but explores the often-contradictory relations with state agencies and the emergence of a contract labor system that ultimately transformed regional peasants into wage laborers. Agrarian reform efforts in the late 1960s and early 1970s seemingly offered peasants who were mobilized into regional associations the opportunity to gain land, but these associations ultimately subordinated local efforts to an increasingly strengthened state apparatus more responsive to regional economic and political power-brokers. Ironically, perhaps, successful popular organizations were co-opted by the state.

Together, these two parts constitute a masterful analysis of agrarian transformation at the local level. Striffler's use of interviews imparts a human face to a historical process that is too often depersonalized by global forces and grand theories. The generational dynamics that separated Tenguel workers in the 1950s and popular organizations in the 1970s are particularly well articulated. In his conclusion, Striffler reveals his ambitious project as one that aims to help bridge the divide between 1960s structuralism and "populist/postmodern" studies of agency rooted in sub-altern theory. His articulation of changing worker agency vis-à-vis a strengthening state and...