Book report “Gender, power and migration in the Costa Rican Caribbean, 1870-1960
Lara Putnam is an American professor and historian (Pittsburgh). She has specialized, throughout her life, in Latin American history and in dynamics of power in this area, which generally tend to be focused from ethnicity and from the concept of honor. He has also generated various migration studies, such as his books.". We could then imagine that the book that will be analyzed, "Gender, power and migration in the Costa Rican Caribbean, 1870-1960", is an amalgam of themes that this writer has studied closely throughout her career.
Indeed, in this book Putnam analyzes countless topics: it tracks the changing dynamics of the genre, kinship and the community in the region of the plantations of Costa Rica, the role of blackness in the structuring of work, the exchanges thatThey shaped the life of migrants, prostitution and the impact of ideas on ethnicity, gender and honor in the exercise of power. His methodology, as I will explain later, is refreshing. It is based on sources that range from autobiographies to judicial transcripts, and addresses issues such as intimacy between prostitutes and insults between neighbors, thus analyzing the connections between political economy, popular culture and everyday life. "Thus," writes the author in the first pages of the book, "the present study investigates the changing contour of the genre, family and community among migrants, who were both within an enclave and within a state".
In terms of the evidence used, the author points out that "this study uses microhistoric techniques to create a portrait of migrants’ lives without limiting themselves to patterns that contemporary observers perceived". Indeed, by using quantitative and qualitative sources the author portrays us the cultural construction of the Caribbean. These sources offer a more representative panorama of the degree to which the acts of the state or ideologies of the elite affected people’s lives or drained in their narrative. Another technique used is to follow specific social phenomena over time, even during times when sources were insufficient. The author also uses the comparison between patterns to explain trends, which are corroborated by personal testimonies.
The historical period on which the book is covered from 1870 to 1960 and, at the spatial level, is located in the Caribbean, elaborating a mapping of migrations from the Antillan and Central America countries. At the end of the 19th century, the migrants of Jamaica, Colombia, Barbados and other places reached the Caribbean of Central America, built railways, made channels, sold meals and cultivated farms. On the coasts of Costa Rica, specifically in Limón, American businessmen established vast bananas plantations. During the next half century, export auges attracted thousands of migrants to settlements in the region.
We can send ourselves to the Posas text, "the banana plantation in Central America", which indicates the essential characteristics of these enclaves: "they had been erected (…) in virgin areas" to which only "through the railroad" could be reached (posas,1993). In the vicinity, peoples of the company were built, where the workers lived separately from the foremen. These workers lived in wooden barracks, which were long, narrow and very hot. Generally there lived a dozen families. But it is different to read such a description, to read the counts of the disputes that arose there. Putnam in his book also describes the life of these workers and how the artificial creation of these peoples, which only existed according to the banana plantation, came to forever modify the social structure of the province of Limón.
It should be noted that, in terms of the regional context, although the book focuses on Limón, it is emphasized that processes and events are not self-contained. What happened on the periphery deeply affected the development of life in Limón. This is how migration is a central axis of the development of geopolitics. In his words, “the events in the province of Limón depended on events and processes of a broader region: the Western Caribbean, which covered coastal declines from Guatemala to Colombia and the islands of Jamaica and Cuba.”Putnam highlights these interrelations throughout the book;This sociocultural, economic and political dependence between the Caribbean, the Coastal and Costa Rica countries.
Confirming this, precisely, she points out in the first chapter that “the unilateral relocations that appear in global statistics hide a system in which people traveled repeatedly, creating a migratory field that expanded to include new sites of economic dynamism as thedecades ". Regional dialogue is, then, undeniable. The approach to migration as a correlation system is a latent perspective in the book and that is corroborated with what is seen in classes and readings: Central America is an exchange bridge in every way, and its exchange with the Caribbean generates interconnections,in the macro and individual, which are undeniable.
In contrast to this, Putnam analyzes to what the United Fruit Company tried to permeate in this particular lifestyle of the Caribbean coast of Central America, and of the islands there located. In this sense, I think it is important to generate an argumentative bridge with the concept of "Banana Republic" and how the dimension of neocolonial domination crystallized. In the "Banana Republic", in the words of Elías and Vidal, "the production and marketing of bananas developed around transnational owners". Putnam constantly emphasizes the power exercised by these owners about Afro -descendant men and women, but emphasizes that this power and support was only carried out in relation to work, bananas and the generation of wealth.
Its conclusion is that the UFC, although it wanted to interfere in economic and political terms, never had reformist or moral construction desires. Putnam describes it as follows: “His employer was particularly powerful;The unusually persuasive state. And yet, none seems to have dictated the terms of the local debate on sexual virtue, personal behavior, family values or domestic order (…) the company’s rhetoric about the improvement of morality was left alone in that, in rhetoric ”. That is, the UFC never strived to reform the private sphere of their workers and the women around them.
The Costa Rican state, on the other hand, if trying to interfere in the private lives of the inhabitants of the region. Posas, in his book "The banana plantation in Central America (1870-1929) explains that" the liberal state in Costa Rica was deeply concerned about the "demoralization" of the lower classes, and the rhetoric of social hygiene would eventually be used to justifydiscriminatory policies in Limón ". Here is another topic, extremely relevant, in collation. This is another undeniable and characteristic dimension of the "banana republics" that portrays in Putnam detail: biological determinism. This has its origin in scientific racism that intended to "demonstrate" through evolutionary genetics that some ethnicities were lower than others, even using the word "race" to legitimize these constructs. Putnam offers a historical context that would be important to mention: “The collapse of the banana boom of the 1920. The impact of this juncture on race policies in Costa Rica was unmistakable (…) the imputations on the biological nature and moral character of black workers suddenly assumed a central role."
Indeed, these racist perspectives fell into the construction of the national imaginary, especially vallecentralino, and xenophobic attitudes were generated against the black population that were even positivized in segregationist laws. These restrictions were not exclusive to Costa Rica: Afro-descendant populations lived apart from "nation-states that had made whiteness a prerequisite for full citizenship". Certain stories reference these prohibitions and how they affected them to the development of their professional, family and personal life.
Throughout Lara Putnam’s extensive work, her positioning against a specific actor is perceived: the United Fruit Company, represented in more personal terms by the foremen. She reiterates the project of economic imperialism, more cultural or moralizing, of the company and racism and injustices of which the workers from their "racist bosses" were victims, as she herself calls them. In essence, the most latent criticism that is perceived by the author is against the imaginary of racial superiority and against neocolonialism.
Finally I will address the central theme of this work. This axis provides an argumentative line along the data and the exposed testimonies: the gender or, more specifically, the feminization of migration. Putnam explains that women were not only a crucial component in the organization of production, but were also concomitant in parenting, family, loving and sexual dynamics in the area. Putnam thus summarizes the main challenges of women in Limón: "Male privilege included sexual freedom and the difficulties of poor women included sexual vulnerability". This was true for poor women in general, regardless of their ethnicity. But the black women of this province had the added difficulty that, generally, their families sent them, being very small, from the Antilles to our country to be the breeders of alien sons and daughters, the lovers, the satiaries of desires of desires, seeking to root a socioculturally very different region than its origin.
But Putnam is also emphatic in mentioning that women in this region, even immersed in gender intersections, migration, work, community and violence, sought to claim their individual freedom. This is how the author shows several cases in which women used legal mechanisms to demand their rights and to defend their honor. Prostitutes women, meanwhile, used sex as a currency to have access to resources, housing and stability, always defending their strong dignity. In short, Putnam is truly innovative in its use of gender to rethink racial relationships and ethnic identities in the Costa Rican Caribbean.
Conclusions
Let’s look at how Elijah describes and Vidal, in general terms, the dynamics that were gestated at the time studied:
“If an North American multinational performs operations directly in a country in Latin America and the Caribbean, it does so in order to make profits. From their economic and social activities, the increase in migrations, the formulation of state policies towards the affected regions, of changes in land use, distribution of land tenure and, of course,Environmental. They also transformed the productive dynamics of the regions where they invested;They modified the demographic and ethnic composition of populations, the occupational, the living conditions and the role of local government."
The approach to socio -historical and political studies is generally like this: methodical, brief and punctual. The selected extract describes the dynamics of the UFC and the regions where it settled from a socio -political and economic perspective. But the analysis emanates from an impersonal perspective. For this type of researchers, collective trends, demonstrated at the level of data and public policies, are more relevant than the personal experiences of the people who experienced this situation. And how could we claim, if in the academy and in the fields of formal research it is expected (and almost required) this type of structure, with a formal and technical language, with demographic generalizations and without an apex of subjectivity?
That is, in my opinion, what differentiates Lara Putnam’s approach. From the beginning of her work the author uses an academic language, but sometimes it borders the narration, generating a mixture of styles. This is not conventional in this nature, but its sources are not typical either. Testimonies are part of a story that, accompanied by figures and evidence, build a more complete image of what life was in the Caribbean of our country. Defroving to tell and analyze these particular cases, they exemplify the processes of oppression and domination that worked at the macro level.
This, I think, is the main contribution of this book: to return more personal, and therefore closer, the struggles and the dynamics of power in the midst of the prevailing structure. In this way, and to describe how neocolonialism was specified in this territory, it gives a voice to women and the black population. Thus, it manages to demystify these populations, destroying imaginary and then elaborate new ways of understanding the regional dynamics of power, and always positioning against the determining actor of this migration: the United Fruit Company and the US interventionism.
- Bibliography
- Elías Caro, J. AND. & Vidal Ortega, A., 2013. Banana Multinationals and Economic Empire. History School Magazine, Volume 12, PP. 1-25.
- Pittsburgh, u. either., s.F. Putnam, Lara. [Online]
- AVAILABLE AT: http: // www.History.Pitt.Edu/People/Lara-Putnam
- [Last access: November 2, 2018].
- Posas, m., 1993. The banana plantation in Central America (1870-1929). In: General History of Central America. San José: UCR Editorial, PP. 111-166.
- Putnam, l., 2013. Gender, power and migration in the Costa Rican Caribbean, 1870-1960. San José: Editorial UNED.
Leave feedback