| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 60

REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS

Dana Frank, Bananera: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America (Cambridge, MA: South End Press 2005)

SINCE THE LATE 1980S, there has been a proliferation of studies on women and social movements in Latin America. Despite the plethora of work on women's activism south of the US border, there is a paucity of scholarship on their role in transforming contemporary trade unions, which risks creating the false impression that women's involvement in trade unions is a relic of the past. This engaging, accessible book by labour historian Dana Frank is therefore a welcome and much needed addition to the literature on women and the labour movement in Latin America.

The author takes US on a journey that begins in a pick-up truck barrelling down a treacherous road from Honduras, packed with three women (plus the author) who are going to give a workshop on the difference between sex and gender to fellow women banana workers in Guatemala. Frank explains that she was able to gain the trust of her travelling companions, or the mujeres bananeras ("banana women") as they call themselves, due to the close personal friendships that she formed working as a consultant for the US Labor Education in the Americas Project, which helped to create a union label for Central American banana unions in 2002. The result is a sensitive portrait of the struggles that women banana workers have waged to gain full access to their own unions.

The book is divided into six short chapters plus an introduction and conclusion. The first three chapters describe the ups and downs of the banana export industry in Latin America, the gendered division of labour at both work and at home, and a brief history of the unions that emerged in the mid-1950s to defend the rights of banana workers, focusing on the case study of SITRATERCO, the oldest banana union in Honduras. The fourth chapter describes the activities of COLSIBA, a federation of banana unions from Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panamá, Ecuador, and Colombia that was founded in 1993 to strategize support for embattled banana unions. The fifth chapter describes the "War at Home" and the personal ordeals that women banana workers have gone through due to their involvement in unions. In very macho societies such as Honduras, one of the main barriers limiting women's participation in union life is that they have to ask permission from male partners to even leave the house, thus making it difficult for women to become trouble makers in the male-dominated labour movement. The sixth chapter describes the international alliances and organizations that have supported the banana women's activities in raising gender consciousness and building women's identity as trade unionists.

One compelling part of the book recounts how the rise of women's activism in banana unions was facilitated by internal democratization within SITRATERCO. Since the 1960s when women entered the banana industry, work has been divided by a sexist division of labour in which men work in the fields and women are confined to the packinghouses, where the pay is much lower even though the working conditions are equally harsh. Since the field workers always outnumbered the packers by four to one, it was difficult for women to gain access to union office. In 1975, however, a Left-affiliated male leadership overthrew the conservative leadership that was affiliated with the Cold War AFL-CIO, and the new leadership changed the union's internal structure. They established two rank-and-file committees – one for the maledominated agricultural division, and one for the female-dominated packinghouse. Although empowering women was not necessarily the intention of these men at the time, as Frank argues, the establishment of two rank-and-file committees "finally opened the door for women to fully enter the union." (24) Women's organizing blossomed from there.

By the mid-1980s, "the winds of Central American Left feminism were blowing across the border" (25) from Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Women's frustration with the sexism that pervaded the revolutionary movements in these countries also stiffened the resolve of women banana workers in Honduras to demand equal access to union office. As Frank notes, the bitter experience of the Sandinista Revolution and other guerrilla movements demonstrated that just because women were encouraged to fight along their male counterparts did not mean the latter were willing to share power. As in the revolutionary movements, women had to fight against the patriarchal leadership for access to resources and representation in their unions.

The call for action within the SITRATERCO union occurred in the mid-1980s, when the predominantly male union leadership suddenly appropriated an ILO educational grant intended for women's organizing. In 1986, women members of SITRATERCO launched a campaign to create a Women's Committee with official status and its own officers. The proposal was initially defeated, but thanks to the women's persistence, it passed in 1988. A little more than a decade later, workshops and activities geared towards the particular needs of women are now part of the unions' daily activities. In 2005, Adela Torres, a Colombian woman, was elected as General Secretary of the largest banana union in Latin America.

Since the book is so short (137 slim pages), it left me wanting more information on a couple of key issues. Frank explains clearly how women's struggles to raise gender consciousness have transformed men's and women's lives and their visions of trade unionism. It is less clear, however, how women's involvement in the union has affected collective bargaining, if at all. It would be interesting to know more about what demands have been put on the table as a result of women's activism, how this has affected women's perception of their own unions, and in turn, the mobilizing capacity of the union to defend workers against employers.

Frank also talks little about how the banana workers' struggles fit into the broader context of the Central American or Latin American labour movements. A few comparisons of the strategies chosen by banana women with workers in other sectors would help illuminate why there has been revitalization within the banana sector and not elsewhere. For example, Linda Bickam Méndez's work on women workers in the maquiladoras in Nicaragua suggests that women have found the leadership of trade union centrals to be so patriarchal and impenetrable that they opted to form the María Elena Cuadra organization, which the organizers define as an "alternative" to a trade union. By contrast, Frank states clearly that "at every turn," the mujeres bananeras "framed their struggle for women's equality and empowerment in terms of union power." (30, her emphasis) I was left wondering whether the birth of women's activism in the Honduran banana unions was simply an unintended consequence of earlier democratization within the union or if there was something particular in the way that the international solidarity networks in the banana export sector have developed to help support women's struggles to transform their unions rather than work outside of them. Perhaps Frank will enlighten US on these questions in her forthcoming book on international labour solidarity, expected in 2007.

Nonetheless, there is such a great deal of information packed into a short space that these comments should not be read as a criticism but as a call for more research on the role of women in trade unions in Latin America. Among other important lessons, Frank's study underscores the importance of internal democratization for union revitalization.

South End Press has made this book available in an affordable paperback and it is written in accessible, engaging prose. For these reasons and many more, it would be a welcome addition to course syllabi on issues related to social movements, women's studies, and Latin American labour history, particularly at the undergraduate level.


SUSAN SPRONK York University

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