This article explores one of the earliest large-scale uses of biocidal agro-chemicals in Latin America, the United Fruit Company's hand-spraying of its banana plantations to control sigitoka disease from 1938 to 1962. After discussing the environmental context of sigatoka and the early development and implications of the spray technology, the essay focuses on the thousands of workers who applied the chemicals. Using Costa Rica as a case study, it explores workers' sense of the personal costs of their work as well as their ambiguous relationship to the larger banana workers' union movement. Because of differences in ethnicity, age, and masculine status, pesticide workers were not part of the labor movement's militant core, but their participation in strikes gave unions great power for a time. This power, along with workers' individual job actions, forced fundamental changes in the pesticide program, demonstrating the importance of integrating labor into the study of environmental change in agricultural capitalism.

Revolutionary Cuba since 1959 has outpaced most other Latin American countries at raising life expectancy and reducing infant mortality. Pre-revolutionary Cuba from 1900 to 1959 did even better, however, outperforming all other Latin American countries for which data are available. Pre-revolutionary Cuba became Latin America's unlikely champion of mortality decline despite experiencing slow economic growth and high income inequality, a record that is inconsistent with the “wealthier is healthier” interpretation of mortality reduction. It also achieved this distinction despite being ruled by governments that are sometimes portrayed as corrupt, personalistic, patronage-ridden, subordinate to U.S. business interests, and neglectful, at best, of the exploited and downtrodden. We attribute pre-revolutionary Cuba's rapid mortality decline to its health care system's accessibility to a large fraction of the poor and to features of the island's history, geography, labor union movement, and political system that contributed to this accessibility.

For the past twenty years, the organized black consciousness movement in Brazil has argued that Protestant Christianity is a highly assimilationist religion that pushes black converts to abandon their racial identity and seek incorporation into dominant white culture. The present study, based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro, challenges this view. By analyzing how Pentecostal churches address the issues of appearance, color, courtship, and womanhood, this research note argues that although evangelical Christianity involves a variety of beliefs that are incompatible with a strong ethnic identity, this religion also includes a range of ideas and practices that nourish rather than corrode black identity. The essay concludes by exploring the historic potential of several churches that have made the intersection of faith and race an explicit part of their agenda.