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

On the early twentieth-century Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, "[g]en-der," Putnam argues in The Company They Kept, "was manufactured locally, from imported parts" (215). Men and women migrated to the Limón area from the British West Indies, from the highlands of Costa Rica, and from Nicaragua seeking work. But they migrated for different reasons, and their life experiences were different. The Company They Kept effectively puts together material from archives, personal remembrances, interviews, and field observation to discover the choices that the migrants made and the culture that they produced.

Migration to Costa Rica for black West Indians was a part of a life-work cycle that was also likely to carry them to Cuba and the United States and around the world as ship's crews. Generally, immigrants did not arrive on the coast because of formal government or company schemes but traveled instead along links of kinship and acquaintance on which they continued to rely for help in their new situation. For the men, the attraction was wage labor on railroad projects and banana farms. Women, by contrast, were more likely to work in the service or informal sectors that supported the export labor force. Putnam stresses the entrepreneurial quality of this women's work, whether sewing, washing, or cooking, but whether these women actually preferred this work to wage labor, had such been available to them, is not clear.

During the local boom periods of the turn of the century and the 1920s, men greatly outnumbered women, and some West Indian and Hispanic women found full or part-time prostitution profitable. Despite the United Fruit Company's well-known "civilizing" rhetoric, Putnam finds that the company paid scant attention to the "morals" of its workers or to such public health problems as venereal disease that were not directly affecting production. Moreover, the women involved strongly resisted government efforts to regulate prostitution. Rejecting their despised position, poor men and women constructed and employed a rich street culture with an array of sexually tinged challenges and responses, as well as personal violence and even the courts, to assert and defend an "honor" that their betters were reluctant to acknowledge.

Deadly interpersonal violence against women by both West Indian and Hispanic males was almost always, Putnam suggests, the "woman's fault." That is, it resulted from a woman's efforts to change a relationship against the wishes of a man, which, according to the dominant "scripts" of local popular culture, left him no alternative but violence. Individuals and groups in early twentieth-century Limón, in the best bricoleur fashion, chose those elements of imported and locally generated popular culture that helped them best to deal with a particular situation.

The Company They Kept joins a growing body of new scholarship about migration to the Caribbean coast of Central America that sees this movement as not simply the result of global capitalist imperatives but of individual, informed choices. The book is well written and thoroughly documented, but the chapters are topically organized, requiring careful recalibration of the mental time line as each is begun.