Afro-Jamaican traditions and labor organizing on United Fruit Company plantations in Costa Rica, 1910

Journal of Social History, Summer, 1995 by Avi Chomsky

While Costa Rica's reputation of being the most pacific and homogeneous of the countries of Latin America is not entirely undeserved, historians have increasingly called this view into question. Recent works have documented inequalities in land tenure, concentrations of power, and social struggles which make Costa Rica look more like its Central American neighbors than had previously been assumed.(1)

Left out of the consensual view of Costa Rican history, in particular, have been social and political developments in the country's Atlantic Coast province of Limon. Central America's Atlantic coast has traditionally been more closely linked to the Caribbean than to the rest of the isthmus, and Limon's tropical rainforests have remained isolated from Costa Rica's cool, coffee-growing highlands until the present. However, in the late nineteenth century U.S.-based companies began to build railroads and plant bananas in Limon, recruiting workers primarily from Jamaica. Thus the society which developed in Limon was an English-speaking enclave of white North American managers and black Jamaican workers, with a culture and history quite distinct from the rest of Costa Rica, although inevitably intertwined.(2) In particular, the extreme polarization of race and class on the Atlantic Coast contrasts sharply with the more homogeneous central valley.

Although Costa Rican nationalists and anti-imperialists have protested the United Fruit Company's domination of the Atlantic Coast for close to a century, they have generally had little contact with the Jamaican banana workers themselves.(3) This paper focuses on these workers and seeks to uncover the ways in which they attempted to challenge the presumably dominant plantation system by creating a very different kind of life and society in its shadows. The workers brought with them a rich cultural tradition, based on their African background and their generations of plantation work under slavery for the British, which became the basis for organizations and collective action which allowed them to escape from, or to resist, Company domination. This culture of resistance encompassed several apparently contradictory elements: a British identity and a faith in the British Crown as the protector of the slave or worker's interests; involvement in Protestant Non-Conformist sects; and belief and participation in African-based religious forms.(4) In particular, I seek to illuminate the ways in which culture, belief systems and everyday forms of resistance grow into, or intersect with, those areas more commonly studied by labor historians: working-class organizations, unions, and strikes. I focus on the first labor union formed by the UFCO's Jamaican workers, and a three-week strike it led in late 1910, as a window into the lives and culture of the workers.

Between 1900 and 1913 some 20,000 Jamaicans migrated to Costa Rica, attracted by the newly-established United Fruit Company banana plantations. The earliest migrants were single men who lived in Company barracks, but soon families followed and a thriving Jamaican community developed in the Limon area.(5) Through the late 1920s the UFCO maintained a core of some 5,000 Jamaican workers, along with some 2,000 native Costa Ricans, while many others worked as tenants or contractors for the UFCO or for large Costa Rican planters. These migrants were part of a stream of West Indians who left in the decades after emancipation when depression in the sugar industry and unavailability of land for alternative cultivation made subsistence impossible at home.(6) As in Panama, where they went to work on the railroad and canal-building projects, many Jamaicans were mobile and in-and out-migration were high, but by the early 1900s a fairly stable community had developed as well.

The UFCO faced a myriad of difficulties in establishing a labor force to grow its bananas. Finding "free" labor to work in plantation agriculture has been notoriously difficult throughout the history of the Americas, yet the Company had to somehow recruit workers. Until the 1920s, few Costa Ricans were attracted to the coast.

The Jamaicans who came to Costa Rica were mostly second-generation ex-slaves (slavery was abolished in Jamaica in the 1830s), and came from a cultural tradition which shared both an aversion to what they considered slave-like about plantation agriculture, and a language, religion and organized social life developed to survive, mitigate or challenge these "slave-like" conditions. The solutions that the workers in Costa Rica sought to the challenges confronting them have strong parallels in the Jamaican slave tradition. Workers wanted access to land, for both subsistence and market production. They tried to maximize their independence with respect to the plantation, and they forged social ties outside of plantation domination in their families, communities, organizations, and religions, both Christian and African. In particular, Afro-Jamaican religious tradition which encompassed Protestant Non-conformism and obeah and myalism - two African-based religious forms which flourished among the slaves, and which was a major factor behind a number of slave and post-slavery rebellions in Jamaica - played a crucial role in labor organizing in Costa Rica. The Jamaicans in Costa Rica, as had the slaves in Jamaica, attempted in both confrontational and accommodationist ways to develop in the shadows of the plantation a system which satisfied their material and spiritual needs.