Bananeras. Dana Frank
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raised two kids on her own, sums up:
The work on the banana plantations enslaves us, because we work twelve hours a day or longer; that means that we almost don’t live with our families and our children are looked after by our siblings, aunts and uncles, or grandparents, those of us that have family support; those who don’t, their children are left alone. Most of the women are both father and mother to their kids.26
Domitila Hernández and Iris Munguía both volunteered the same common saying: “They say that on the banana plantations, we don’t raise our children—our families do.”27
Historically, most banana workers in Latin America have lived on company-owned housing clustered near or on one edge of the plantation. Classic company houses are wooden, either a two-family unit with a room downstairs for each family to cook and eat in, another upstairs for sleeping, and perhaps an open space for hanging hammocks; or a long row on the same model. More recent company-owned houses are made of cinder block. They have a gloomier feel, but as one banana woman explained, “A bloque is better than the wooden houses because it’s easier to clean, and doesn’t fall over in a storm”—no small consideration in hurricane country.28 In recent years the corporations have begun selling off company houses to the workers, in a long-term move away from paternalism, but the alternatives can be even worse—and certainly more expensive. In all cases, substandard housing makes housework even more difficult.29
Wherever the women live, banana cultivation permeates their lives, literally. Although the companies are legally barred from spraying where people are present, and the situation has improved dramatically in recent years, the women still live daily lives not far from the aerial crop spraying of pesticides.30 The unions’ survey of banana women concludes with this chillingly eloquent passage:
The women in the banana zones often face the effects that banana production has on the environment: when they wash clothes, when they cook food, when they want to keep a garden or cultivate a small plot in areas near the plantation, in their reproductive lives when they or their partners are contaminated with agrochemicals that produce birth defects or malfunctions in their bodies.31
In all the countries, moreover, water quality is usually terrible, often poisoned by chemical spills from the same companies.32
If banana packinghouse work is dangerous, exhausting, and, in the women’s own words, “enslaving,” the banana regions’ lack of economic development leaves the women with few other options for employment. The only other jobs lie in the informal economy—usually making and selling food in small batches or sometimes working as a domestic servant. Most women banana workers have only a sixth-grade education—in Guatemala, the worst case, 34 percent are illiterate—which further limits their choices. With steady employment at a living wage, unionized or not, women banana workers are in fact the lucky ones. Until they’re forty. After that, it’s grim. Age combined with gender discrimination leaves only the informal economy or family networks to help them survive. When they leave the packinghouse, women from unionized plantations receive, though, a lump-sum pension payment of perhaps $2,000, which they use to help buy a house, start a tiny business, or pay a coyote to get them into the United States to be with children who are increasingly forced to migrate.33
Why are so few other choices available? Since the debt crises of the 1980s, neoliberal economic policies imposed by the United States through the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank have tightened the noose around all these Latin American countries. As part of structural adjustment programs to pay back loans, their governments have been forced to conform to a tight formula: cut back State-funded social services, privatize government-owned entities, and reduce the economy to two export tracks, instituted through new free trade agreements—export agriculture in open and disastrous competition with more powerful economies in the North, and maquiladora-style industrial development. The results have been disastrous throughout Latin America. And there’s no place at all in this model for women over twenty-five; no jobs, no safety net.34
The banana women’s situation, in other words, is always precarious. Trapped in the cold arms of the banana transnationals, the women’s fate is intertwined not only with the global banana industry, but also with the future of the banana labor movement. And they know it. That’s why, beginning in the mid 1980s, they fought so hard for a place within it.
a ‘María Amalia’ is a psuedonym, as are all the names of the women whose autobiographies appear in Lo Que Hemos Vivido. The authors use first names only, which I am using here in single quotations, to distinguish them from actual first names to which I refer.
Packinghouse worker, Buenos Amigos Plantation, El Progreso, Yoro, Honduras, September 2004
Mirian Reyes, pioneer of SITRATERCO women’s work, August 2003
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