¹ For the Liberacionista version, see Gudmundson, Lowell, Costa Rica before Coffee (Baton Rouge, 1986),Google Scholar Introduction and Chapter 5, and “Peasant, Farmer, Proletarian: Class Formation in a Smallholder Coffee Economy, 1850–1950,” Hispanic American Historical Review 69:2 (May 1989), 221–257; for the Liberal version see Palmer, Steven Paul, “A Liberal Discipline: Inventing Nations in Guatemala and Costa Rica, 1870–1900” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1990), pp. 156–172 Google Scholar and chapters 8 and 9.

² See Palmer, “A Liberal Discipline,” chapter 6 for an extended discussion of this.

³ Bergquist, Charles, Labor in Latin America (Stanford, 1986), pp. 11–12.Google Scholar

⁴ On West Indian out-migration and upward mobility, see Koch, Charles, “Ethnicity and Livelihoods, a Social Geography of Costa Rica’s Atlantic Zone” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kansas, 1975) (pp. 326,Google Scholar 335, 344, 378) and “Jamaican Blacks and their Descendants in Costa Rica,” Social and Economic Studies 26:3 (September 1977), pp. 339–361, Bourgois, Philippe, Ethnicity at Work (Baltimore, 1989),Google Scholar chapters 6 and 7, and Harpelle, Ronald N., “West Indians in Costa Rica: Racism, Class and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Community” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1992).Google Scholar Purcell, Trevor presents an alternative view of West Indians as upwardly mobile and identifying with their white employers from the start in Banana Fallout: Class, Color and Culture among West Indians in Costa Rica (Los Angeles, 1993).Google Scholar However, I believe he fails to address the complexities of West Indian class and cultural identity, as well as their labor militancy, during the 1910s. See Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work, pp. 51–58 and Chomsky, Avi, “Afro-Jamaican Traditions and Labor Organizing on United Fruit Company Plantations in Costa Rica, 1910,” Journal of Social History, forthcoming, June 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵ Soto, Alvaro Quesada, La voz desgarrada: la crisis del discurso oligárquico y la narrativa costarricense (San José, 1988), p. 86.Google Scholar See also the rest of chapter 2, and Soto’s, Quesada, La formación de la narrativa nacional costarricense (San José, 1986), p. 213 ff.Google Scholar

⁶ Vega, Eugenio Rodríguez, Los días de don Ricardo Jiménez (San José, 1974), p. 166.Google Scholar

⁷ Liberacionista leader Figueres’s political career took many different turns over the course of several decades. Like Jiménez, though, his use of anti-UFCO rhetoric in a populist appeal did not deter him from working closely with the Company-and against its workers-on labor issues, as I discuss below.

⁸ His speeches are reproduced in Oreamuno, Ricardo Jiménez, Ricardo Jiménez: Su pensamiento (Vega, Eugenio Rodríguez ed.; San José, 1980).Google Scholar It was La República which characterized his speech of August 28, 1907 as “brilliant” (Jiménez, p. 183).

⁹ Jiménez, , Su pensamiento, p. 180.Google Scholar

¹⁰ de la Cruz, Vladimir, Las luchas sociales en Costa Rica, 1870–1930 (San José, 1984), p. 63.Google Scholar

¹¹ Jiménez, , Su pensamiento, p. 187.Google Scholar

¹² Jiménez, , Su pensamiento, pp. 198–200.Google Scholar

¹³ Jiménez, , Su pensamiento, pp. 181–182.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Jiménez, , Su pensamiento, p. 186.Google Scholar Meléndez, Carlos cites this quote as evidence of Jiménez’s “just and sympathetic attitude towards blacks,” Meléndez, Carlos and Duncan, Quince, El negro en Costa Rica (San José, 1981) p. 91,Google Scholar but admits that he could not find the source of the quote.

¹⁵ “Nosotros los delegados nombrados por los Trabajadores y Obreros de Limón, a Vos. con reverencia decimos,” petition to Jiménez, President Ricardo from 600 Limón workers, August 8, 1910, Archivo Nacional de Costa Rica Google Scholar [ANCR] Serie Gobernación 3134.

¹⁶ “Narrative Report of the Disturbances in Limón, Costa Rica among the Labourers imported from the Leeward Islands,” Enclosure No. 1 in Mr. Consul Cox’s Despatch Commercial No. 12 of the 8th of December, 1910, British Foreign Office 288/125, p. 276.

¹⁷ Telegram from Ricardo Jiménez to Charles Ferguson, November 26, 1910, printed in the Limón Times, November 29, 1910.

¹⁸ Hoja Obrera 1:7 (November 28, 1909).

¹⁹ “Ultraje a una raza,” Hoja Obrera 60 (November 28, 1910).

²⁰ Montero, Octavio, “Pobres negros!” Hoja Obrera 61, December 6, 1910.Google Scholar Costa Rican historiography has tended to see the banana workers as the most “advanced” or proletarianized sector of the working class, and thus in a position to lead other workers towards a true working-class consciousness. Oliva argues that the San José workers’ response to the strike shows a working-class consciousness that transcends race (Oliva, Mario, Artesanos y obreros costarricenses 1880–1914, (San José, 1985), p. 150,Google Scholar and goes so far as to say that the banana sector is key in forming a national proletarian consciousness (p. 43). De la Cruz also associates the Limón labor movement with anti-imperialism from the beginning, citing a 1912 worker protest when the Company raised the American flag (de la Cruz, Vladimir, Los mártires de Chicago y el primero de mayo de 1913, (San José, 1985), p. 72 Google Scholar; Bourgois, , Ethnicity at Work, p. 54).Google Scholar Most of these accounts are based on a somewhat teleological perspective which assumes a unidirectional trajectory of consciousness towards communism. In fact, the development of workingclass consciousness (if indeed such a thing ever developed) was much more complex, and imbedded in particular cultural, political, religious and national-as well as economic-relationships.

²¹ Jamaican union members succeeded in helping the St. Kitts replacement workers organize their own strike against the Company. I discuss the multi-layered cultural, religious, political, and national, as well as class identity of these workers, and how this sustained the strike, in Chomsky, “Afro-Jamaican Traditions and Labor Organizing.”

²² de la Cruz, Vladimir, Los mártires de Chicago, p. 78.Google Scholar Workers from Limón apparently did not attend, but sent a telegram of support (ibid., p. 86).

²³ Monge, Joaquín García, Obras escogidas (San José, 1981 [1974]), pp. 244–45.Google Scholar This speech is also reproduced in de la Cruz, , Mártires de Chicago, pp. 92–107.Google Scholar Harpelle believes that the speech demonstrated García Monge’s racism, as he referred to the “illustrious progenitors of (their) Aryan race” (Harpelle, , “West Indians in Costa Rica,” p. 45).Google Scholar However, García Monge uses “Aryan” to refer to the “natural religions” of India, which celebrate and sanctify work, in contrast to the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions, which see work as a curse. Thus I do not believe that this quote indicates anything about his attitude towards West Indians in Costa Rica.

²⁴ See Soto, Alvaro Quesada, “Transformaciones ideológicas del período 1900–1920,” Revista de Historia 17 (1988), 99–130.Google Scholar

²⁵ Monge, García, Obras escogidas, p. 253.Google Scholar

²⁶ Monge, García, Obras escogidas, p. 209.Google Scholar

²⁷ Daniel Camacho highlights García Monge’s activities in the Comité Pro-Sandino in Rica, Costa from 1928 on (“El pensamiento y la actividad antimperialista de los próceres costarricenses de los años veinte. Su significado actual,” Casa de las Américas 25:151 [1985], pp. 19–22).Google Scholar Mario Oliva also mentions this kind of political anti-imperialism-opposition to U.S. military interventions in neighboring countries–among workers in the early decades of the century, although he concludes that “It would be wrong to conclude that during this period workers’s organizations assumed the struggle against imperialism as their own; they did not construct a consistent line of thought which would be maintained in succeeding years, nor did they promote a sustained political current of anti-imperialist ideology” (Oliva, Artesanos y obreros costarricenses, p. 156).Google Scholar Jorge Volio’s career perhaps followed a similar trajectory, as he maintained his anti-imperialism but drew away from workers’ issues. See de la Cruz, Las luchas sociales (passim.).

²⁸ See de la Cruz, , Las luchas sociales, pp. 115–117.Google Scholar As Bourgois, notes, “the Hispanic labor movement told West Indian workers to abandon a class-based struggle in order to rally behind nationalism for a country that was too racist to recognize them as citizens” (Ethnicity at Work, p. 61).Google Scholar The Socialist Party, and Vicente Sáenz, however, denounced the war as caused by manipulation by imperialist oil and banana companies (de la Cruz, , Las luchas sociales, p. 118).Google Scholar

²⁹ Monge, Joaquín García and Zumbado R, M.A. [President and Secretary General of the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País] to the Constitutional Congress, January 6, 1927, ANCR Serie Congreso Google Scholar 15400.

³⁰ Monge, Joaquín García and Zumbado R, M.A. [President and Secretary General of the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País] to the Constitutional Congress, January 6, 1927, ANCR Serie Congreso Google Scholar 15400.

³¹ Ibid.

³² Informe que presentó la Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País a la Comisión encargada de estudiar los contratos celebrados entre el Gobierno de Costa Rica y Mr. M.M. Marsh y la UFCO, respectivamente, ANCR Serie Congreso 15400.

³³ Marco, A. Zumbado, R., “Un aspecto del asunto, una visión del problema,” November 15, 1926, ANCR Serie Congreso Google Scholar 15400.

³⁴ See Bourgois, , Ethnicity at Work, pp. 73–84,Google Scholar Koch, , “Ethnicity and Livelihoods,” p. 378.Google Scholar As mentioned above (n. 4), Purcell presents an alternative view.

³⁵ Letter from Deputies Ulate, et al to Congress, August 2, 1930, ANCR Serie Congreso 15699, fol. 133. Interestingly, the Company strongly supported Ulate when he ran for president in 1948 against the Communist-supported Rafael Calderón Guardia, showing that Ulate’s conservative and racist nationalism was much less threatening to it than were its organized workers.

³⁶ Testimony of Chaves, Pombilio August 29, 1932, ANCR Serie Congreso 16358,Google Scholar fol. 50.

³⁷ Testimony on August 29, 1932, ANCR Serie Congreso 16358, fols. 56–57.

³⁸ Report of the Commission, ANCR Serie Congreso 16358, fol. 132.

³⁹ Petition to Congress signed by 574 Limón residents, July 1933, ANCR Serie Congreso 16753.

⁴⁰ Mendoza to Bustos, n.d., ANCR Serie Congreso 1032, fol. 14.

⁴¹ Mendoza to Bustos, , August 26, 1933, ANCR Serie Congreso 1032, fol. 15.Google Scholar

⁴² Mendoza to Bustos, , April 7, 1933, ANCR Serie Congreso Google Scholar 1032, fol. 5.

⁴³ Mendoza to Bustos, , September 18, 1933, ANCR Serie Congreso Google Scholar 1032, fol. 21.

⁴⁴ Some 17 were identified as “colonos propietarios or owner-colonos on the Castillo Banana Company’s Cartagena farm. They apparently owned their cultivations, and had a contract with the Company requiring them to sell all their bananas through it (see description in Augusto Alpízar Young’s letter to the Secretario de Gobernación y Policía, San José, November 14, 1934, ANCR Serie Gobernación 11684).

⁴⁵ Lists of these workers and colonos can be found in ANCR Serie Gobernación 11684.

⁴⁶ For example, during the strike the Party’s newspaper, Trabajo, congratulated the “Colored Workers of the Atlantic Zone” for “your valiant attitude… Here you are on your post, giving an outstanding example of bravery, fighting shoulder to shoulder with your companions in slavery in that great battle against the United Fruit Company. LONG LIVE THE SOLIDARITY OF THE SPANISH AND COLORED WORKERS” (Trabajo, August 11, 1934, cited in Bourgois, , Ethnicity at Work, p. 107).Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Bourgois, , Ethnicity at Work, p. 109.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Ortega, Acuña, La huelga bananera de 1934 (San José, 1984), p. 35.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Bourgois found, in interviews in the 1980s, that some blacks “dismissed the strike as ‘foolishness’ and grumbled over having had their bananas chopped up by ‘Spanish strikers,’” although others did sympathize with the striking workers. He also noted that those who had been small planters at the time of the strike generally opposed it, while those who had been day laborers supported it (Ethnicity at Work, p. 108).

⁵⁰ Bourgois, , Ethnicity at Work, p. 109.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Barrantes, Emel Sibaja, “Ideología y protesta popular: la huelga bananera de 1934 en Costa Rica,” Licenciatura thesis, Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica, 1983, pp. 37,Google Scholar 57; Bourgois, , Ethnicity at Work, p. 109.Google Scholar Two newspapers, La Voz del Atlántico in Limón and El Diario de Costa Rica in San José, served as virtual company mouthpieces in trying to turn West Indians against the strike by depicting the Communist Party as racist (Ortega, Acuña, La huelga bananera, p. 45 Google Scholar; Bourgois, , Ethnicity at Work, p. 109 Google Scholar; Sibaja, , “Ideología y protesta popular,” p. 154).Google Scholar Most Costa Rican elites, however, had little interest in pursuing this line of thought in 1934: it was really not until after 1948 that elites began to view West Indians as worthy allies in the anti-Communist struggle.

⁵² Vega, Rodríguez, Los días de don Ricardo, pp. 135–36.Google Scholar

⁵³ Cited in Ibid., p. 136.

⁵⁴ Ibid., p. 137. Except for several UFCO-dominated papers, the Costa Rican press followed Jiménez’s path of initial sympathy turning into opposition after the UFCO rejected the negotiated settlement. See Acuña, , La huelga bananera, p. 45.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Petition to Romagosa, Juan E. and Chaverri, Virgilio (Limón’s deputies in Congress) from Limón Blacks, December 1, 1934, ANCR Serie Congreso Google Scholar 17004, fol. 83.

⁵⁶ See, for example, report by the Governor of Limón in Costa Rica Ministerio de Gobernación, Policía, Trabajo y Previsión Social, Memoria (1936), p. 8 (“many foreigners-especially the great black majority–declare themselves to be Costa Rican for the mere fact of having been born in the country”); or his report in 1937 that many were taking citizenship because of the UFCO’s policy of preferential employment of Ricans, Costa (Memoria [1937], p. 64).Google Scholar

⁵⁷ Explaining that white workers were complaining about the prevalence of blacks working for the Company in Limón, the Governor wrote: “A more satisfactory arrangement for the aggrieved was prevented by the fact that many of these blacks are Costa Ricans by origin or by choice and that the displacement of blacks to put in more whites… could aggravate the problem of the great emigration of blacks to the interior which happened recently there” (Costa Rica Ministerio de Gobernación, Policía, Trabajo y Previsión Social, Memoria [1937], p. 59).

⁵⁸ Costa Rica Ministerio de Gobernación, Policía, Trabajo y Previsión Social, Memoria (1936), p. 86.

⁵⁹ Costa Rica Ministerio de Gobernación, Policía, Trabajo y Previsión Social, Memoria (1937), p. 56.

⁶⁰ La Tribuna, November 3, 1928, cited in Sáenz, Alfredo, Contratos y actuaciones de las compañías de ferrocarril de Costa Rica, la Northern Railway Company, y la United Fruit Company en Costa Rica (San José, 1929), p. 295.Google Scholar

⁶¹ Costa Rica Ministerio de Gobernación, Policía, Trabajo y Previsión Social, Memoria (1934), p. 22.

⁶² Koch, however, found several sources that indicated that blacks did work on non-UFCO plantations in the Pacific, (“Ethnicity and Livelihoods,” p. 293 Google Scholar n. 1).

⁶³ See Purcell, Banana Fallout, and Harpelle, Ronald, “West Indians in Costa Rica,” pp. 165–7Google Scholar and chapters 6 and 7 for extensive discussions of this phenomenon. The contradictions involved in this assimilation process are poignantly illustrated in Duncan’s, Quince, Los cuatro espejos (San José, 1973).Google Scholar

⁶⁴ Throughout the 1940s U.S. officials became increasingly concerned about Communist influence in the government. Schifter, Jacobo documents the evolution of official U.S. attitudes in Las alianzas conflictivas: las relaciones de Costa Rica y Estados Unidos de la Segunda Guerra Mundial a los inicios de la Guerra Civil (San José, 1986).Google Scholar By 1948 the U.S. Embassy was comparing the situation in Costa Rica to that in Eastern Europe (Memorandum by Mr.Bennet, William Tapley Jr., of the Division of Central American and Panama Affairs, March 26, 1948, Foreign Relations of the United States [FRUS] 1948 vol. 9, pp. 502–3).Google Scholar

⁶⁵ See Kargleder, Charles L., “Social Rebellion as Represented in Costa Rican Fiction, 1940–50,” SECOLAS Annals: Journal of the Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies 15 (1984), 54–62 Google Scholar for an extended discussion of literary trends in this period.

⁶⁶ Dobles, Fabián, “La mujer negra del río,” in Duncan, Quince ed., El negro en la literature costarricense (San José, 1975), p. 76.Google Scholar

⁶⁷ Harpelle, , “West Indians in Costa Rica,” p. 261.Google Scholar

⁶⁸ Fació, Rodrigo, Estudio sobre la economía costarricense (San José, 1975 [1942]), pp. 60–61.Google Scholar

⁶⁹ Fació, , Estudio sobre la economía, p. 173.Google Scholar

⁷⁰ Repression against the left during the Junta included proscription of the Communist Party, mass firings of union officials and sympathizers, mass arrests and exiles, and several massacres of union activists on the banana plantations, including one near Limón in which several of the local leaders of the 1934 strike were killed while in military custody. On repression against the left, see Aguilar, Marielos, Carlos Luis Fallas: su época y sus luchas, (San José, 1983),Google Scholar chapter 5, Schifter, Jacobo, La fase oculta de la guerra civil en Costa Rica (San José, 1985),Google Scholar chapter 5, Benavides, Enrique, “El codo del diablo,” in Casos célebres, casuistica criminal (San José, 1968), pp. 139–162),Google Scholar Ferreto, Arnoldo, Gestación, consecuencias y desarrollo de los sucesos de 1948 (San José, 1987), pp. 36–38,Google Scholar 100–102, Gardner, John W., “The Costa Rican Junta of 1948–49” (Ph.D. dissertation, St. John’s University, 1971),Google Scholar Chapter XI.

⁷¹ Figueres, José, “Costa Rica’s New President Explains Why ‘We Don’t Want Foreign Investment,’” The New Leader XXXVI:35 (August 31, 1953), pp. 2–3.Google Scholar Less than a year later he was denying that he had ever opposed foreign investment, and told the U. S. Ambassador that his words in the article had been misconstrued (Memorandum of Conversation, by the First Secretary of the Embassy in Rica, Costa [Stewart], February 9, 1954, FRUS 1952–54, vol. 4, pp. 836–37).Google Scholar

⁷² [Hill] U.S. Ambassador in Rica, Costa to Department of State, December 28, 1953 FRUS 1952–54, vol. 4, p. 835.Google Scholar

⁷³ The U.S. Ambassador reported that during a visit to the banana region “Figueres condemned the communist leaders and advocates of strikes as ‘anti-worker’ and anti-Government because of their irresponsibility in bringing about losses, and he asserted that it is immoral to follow a communist labor leader unless one is prepared to accept a communist government and all the loss of liberty that would imply” (letter from the Ambassador in Rica, Costa [Woodward] to the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs [Holland], October 27, 1955, FRUS 1955–57, vol. 7, p. 12).Google Scholar

⁷⁴ Memorandum of Conversation, by the First Secretary of the Embassy in Rica, Costa [Stewart, ], February 9, 1953, FRUS 1952–54, vol. 4, p. 839.Google Scholar

Figueres’ changing attitude towards the UFCO once in power is documented in FRUS 1952–1954, vol. IV, pp. 829–54. He initially sought “50 percent of profits and [an] end [to] ‘discrimination’ by firm against Costa Ricans”; with the long-range goal of the Costa Rican Government’s purchase of United Fruit Company's physical assets in Costa Rica, amortized over a 12–14-year period, and an arrangement whereby the Ricans, Costa would produce the bananas and United Fruit would market them in the United States” (Hill, to Department of State, November 25, 1953, FRUS 1952–54, vol. 4, p. 833).Google Scholar In February 1954 the U.S. Embassy reported that Figueres’s “attitude toward United Fruit Company and U.S. private investment [has] softened considerably… the President’s attitude was in sharp contrast to that of last November when he lashed out at United Fruit" ( Stewart, to Secretary of State, February 9, 1954 FRUS 1952–54 vol. 4, pp. 835–6),Google Scholar and that “the President’s reasoned attitude and apparent delight that United Fruit was cooperating satisfactorily in the negotiations contrasted greatly with that of a few months ago, when he bitterly complained of a ‘country within a country’ ” (Memorandum of Conversation, by the First Secretary of the Embassy in Rica, Costa [Stewart, ], February 9, 1954, FRUS 1952–54 vol. 4, p. 836).Google Scholar

⁷⁵ Letter from the Ambassador in Rica, Costa [Woodward, ] to the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs [Holland], October 27, 1955, FRUS 1955–57, vol. 7, pp. 10,Google Scholar 17.

⁷⁶ Letter from the Ambassador in Rica, Costa [Woodward, ] to the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs [Holland], October 27, 1955, FRUS 1955–57, vol. 7, pp. 13,Google Scholar 16. The Ambassador continued to wax eloquent about the “extraordinarily valuable opportunity” Figueres’s attitude afforded the Company. “The Company might even be able to devise some workable ideas for ‘employee participation’ in the beautification and improvement of their houses–even to the point of substantial savings in labor costs for such functions as painting, etc.,” he continued (p. 17).

⁷⁷ Meléndez, and Duncan, , El negro en Costa Rica, pp. 135–36.Google Scholar

⁷⁸ See Dunkerley, James, Power in the Isthmus: A Political History of Modern Central America (London, 1988), pp. 431–434 Google Scholar for an extended discussion of this phenomenon.