Ronald Harpelle

Racism and nationalism in the creation of Costa Rica's Pacific coast banana enclave.

The creation of the new banana enclave on Costa Ricas Pacific coast in the 1920s marks a significant watershed in the social and political history of race relations in the country. The culminating event in what was a lengthy battle over the composition of the workforce on the new plantations was the signing of the 1934 banana contract between the government of Costa Rica and the United Fruit Company. In addition to allowing for the continued growth of the industry in Costa Rica, the agreement took aim at the West Indian immigrant by prohibiting “people of colour” from working for United Fruit on the Pacific coast. Subsequent to the agreement, the state made a conscious effort to force the integration of the West Indian community. The government closed English schools, pushed farmers off their land, and deported West Indians in order to purge the province of Limón of people who were not citizens, but who belonged to a well-established immigrant community. As a result, resident West Indians were forced to re-examine their relationship with the country and they engaged in a protracted struggle to overcome heightened levels of discrimination.

West Indian Sojourners in Guatemala and Honduras

Review of: Race, Nation, and West Indian Immigration to Honduras, 1890-1940. Glenn A. Chambers. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. xii +202 pp. (Cloth US

Practical Dreamers: Communitarianism and Co-operatives on Malcolm Island (review)

35.00)Black Labor Migration in Caribbean Guatemala, 1882-1923. Frederick Douglass Opie. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009. 145 pp. (Cloth US

Radicalism and accommodation: Garveyism in a United Fruit Company enclave

65.00)

West Indians of Costa Rica : race, class, and the integration of an ethnic minority

argues that these films offered the way forward to a world in which workers became more equal with management. In turn, in his view, these films reflected the Communist Party’s wartime praise for labourmanagement committees. But the Communist interest in the LMCs was in their effectiveness at increasing wartime production and prosecuting the war against fascism. In peacetime, after they were criticized by the Soviets for going too far in the effort to collaborate with ‘progressive’ elements of capitalism, they were anxious to reassert the class-struggle character of trade unions and to avoid entanglement with organizations like LMCs in which workers were subordinated to bosses. In general, Khouri finds far more that is revolutionary in NFB films than his own evidence suggests. He also finds far more that is revolutionary in CPC politics of this period than the literature on the CPC reveals. Barely mentioning the CCF at all, he does not deal with either its ideology or meteoric rise during the wartime period. Most of what the social-democratic NFB films propounded during this period fit just as well with pre–Cold War CCF ideology as with wartime Communist ideology. The war quite simply caused many Canadians, almost a majority in some attitude surveys, to move sharply left. While a minority had concluded during the Depression that capitalism was a bankrupt system, the success of wartime planning in ending unemployment and mobilizing the economy suggested to far more people that a new system was needed. No doubt, as Khouri suggests, some people were influenced in that direction by the campaigns of the CPC, particularly in the union struggles during the war. But more seem to have been led to theCCF than the CPC. Were the NFB filmmakers, with their emphasis on the need to replace competition in Canada with cooperation, all under the thrall of CPC ideologues? Without some harder evidence than Khouri provides, I would very much doubt it. ALVIN FINKEL Athabasca University

Bananas and Business: West Indians and United Fruit in Costa Rica

Abstract The Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) became the largest organised movement among people of Mrican descent that the world has known. As a result of its popularity, the UNIA and Marcus Garvey have been the subjects of numerous books and articles.1 However, historians have tended to focus on Garveyism in the United States despite the spread of the movement to many parts of the world. A recent trend in the literature is to take a more inclusive view of Garveyism and to recognise the international dimensions of movement.2 According to Judith Stein, the meaning of Garveyism varied as it was not just a phenomenon in the United States. Class, ethnic and other differences were important determinants in the evolution of the movement.3 One good example of both the popularity and the character of the movement outside the United States is in the region of Limón, Costa Rica.