| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

John Soluri. Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States. Austin: University of Texas Press. 2005. Pp. xiii, 321. $21.95.
Among the commodities that symbolize Latin America to those outside the region, few are as multivocal as the banana. At once an emblem of carefree sensuality in 1940s musicals and of U.S. domination over "banana republics," the meanings we impute to the banana speak volumes about the ambiguities of hemispheric interactions. Nor is it possible to overstate the impact of bananas in Central America, where no other commodity has so altered the region's ecology, ethnic relations, and power dynamics. In the early 1900s, U.S.-based banana companies such as United Fruit transformed vast stretches of rainforest into monoculture plantations, while laying railroads and creating settlements that attracted a polyglot mix of workers. For the fruit companies, these daunting accomplishments were "improvements" wrought by the civilizing influence of the United States. In contrast, the region's intellectuals, such as Honduran novelist Ramón Amaya Amador, viewed banana plantations as dangerous and oppressive environments that enriched the companies at the cost of human dignity and national sovereignty. The title of his best known work, Prisión Verde (1950) succinctly captures this point of view.	1
Since the muckraking exposés of Charles David Kepner in the 1930s, the dominant role of the U.S. fruit companies in Latin America has generated a sizable scholarly literature. A spate of recent works examine power relations within particular locales incorporated into the global banana trade. These sites permit a close examination of the strategies of plantation managers to create a segmented labor force by manipulating workers' ethnic and national identities. Other locales, where independent farmers produce fruit under contract, illustrate how growers have cultivated allies to circumscribe the influence of U.S. firms. Recent studies have done much to challenge earlier unidimensional views of workers, growers, and the state as simply the pawns and/or victims of United Fruit. One is tempted, then, to ask what is novel about John Soluri's contribution to this growing literature.	. . .

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