Forgotten Workers: British West Indians and the Early Days of the Banana Industry in Costa Rica and Honduras

Abstract

The Central America of books, and indeed of our imaginations, does not have very many black actors. That is not because blacks have not been present in the unfolding of Central American history. It is because their participation has been selectively ignored. During the last decade there have been a few welcome exceptions to this trend; however, a lacuna still remains. This article focuses on the role played by the first generation of black British West Indian immigrants in the development of the Costa Rican and Honduran labour movements - an area of history in which blacks have been particularly ignored. To this day the populations of black British West Indian descent living on the Atlantic Coast of Costa Rica and Honduras have remained outside the mainstream of political and cultural life in these two countries. It is not surprising, therefore, that they have also been neglected historically. Nowhere is this tendency more glaring than in the literature on labour history – especially that concerned with the important banana exporting sector. With few exceptions, the role of the British West Indian workers in the early period of the banana industry is dismissed. Those that acknowledge their role minimise the workers' importance by arguing that they failed to act collectively in challenging their employers. In brief, this view argues that black West Indian workers are not important to a study of labour politics in Honduras and Costa Rica. Historical evidence renders this suggestion invalid. The British West Indian workers who came to Honduras and Costa Rica during the last century in search of employment were neither indifferent to, nor totally accepting of, their situation.

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