Synopses & Reviews
In the late nineteenth century, migrants from Jamaica, Colombia, Barbados, and beyond poured into Caribbean Central America, building railroads, digging canals, selling meals, and farming homesteads. On the rain-forested shores of Costa Rica, U.S. entrepreneurs and others established vast banana plantations. Over the next half-century, short-lived export booms drew tens of thousands of migrants to the region. In Port Lim¹n, birthplace of the United Fruit Company, a single building might house a Russian seamstress, a Martinican madam, a Cuban doctor, and a Chinese barkeep--together with stevedores, laundresses, and laborers from across the Caribbean.
Tracing the changing contours of gender, kinship, and community in Costa Rica's plantation region, Lara Putnam explores new questions about the work of caring for children and men and how it fit into the export economy, the role of kinship as well as cash in structuring labor, the social networks that shaped migrants' lives, and the impact of ideas about race and sex on the exercise of power. Based on sources that range from handwritten autobiographies to judicial transcripts and addressing topics from intimacy between prostitutes to insults between neighbors, the book illuminates the connections between political economy, popular culture, and everyday life.
Review
"A vivid, beautifully written, sophisticated, and insightful book. By focusing on the intersections of gender, migration, work, community, and the subjective dimensions of honor and violence, Putnam provides an entirely new perspective on the history of the banana region of eastern lowland Costa Rica. (Catherine C. LeGrand, author of Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations)"
Review
"An engaging and stunningly well-written work that dissects invented traditions with powerful anti-essentializing effects. In this welcome brand of social history we learn just how culture and values interact with choice and individual personality. (Lowell Gudmundson, author of Costa Rica Before Coffee)"
Synopsis
Includes bibliographical references (p. 275-295) and index.
About the Author
Lara Putnam teaches Latin American and Caribbean history at the Universidad de Costa Rica.
Table of Contents
The evolution of family practice in Jamaica and Costa Rica -- Sojourners and settlers : economic cycles and traveling lives, 1850s-1940s -- Las princesas del dollar : prostitutes and the banana booms, 1890s-1920s -- Compaäneros : communities and kinship, 1920s-1950s -- Facety women : rudeness and respectability, 1890s-1930s -- Men of respect : authority and violence, 1890s-1950s.