Writing assignments

Source: Colby, J. M. 2006. “Banana growing and negro management”: Race, Labor, and Jim Crow Colonialism in Guatemala, 1884-1930. Diplomatic History 30(4), 595-621

Looking at the Export Boom as Modernity in Latin America, Dawson argues that the notion of order, then progress is “critical to the story of the late nineteenth century” as Latin America’s elites believed their nations wouldn’t modernize without first establishing order. (2014:115). In the region, many countries relied on North American investors to stabilize the production of railroads which were seen as the key to modern progress. Colby’s article “Banana Growing and Negro Management”: Race, Labor, and Jim Crow Colonialism in Guatemala, 1884–1930  explores how U.S. culture of white supremacy played a central role in shaping labor control and race relations on Guatemala’s north coast (599). To me, it shines the light on the ideas of ‘order, then progress’ in regards to the institutionalization of racism in Guatemala’s main export plantations and the construction of the Northern Railroad.

From 1870-1930 Guatemala’s principal exports were coffee and bananas (Dawson, 2014:118). After the creation of synthetic dyes, “modernizers identified coffee exports as the engine of national progress, and they called on the government to force the highland Maya into laboring on coffee plantations” when liberal coffee planter Justo Rufino Barrios “passed taxes and labor laws designed to force Mayan Indians into agricultural labor and trap them in a debt peonage” (Colby, 2006:601-602). Colby explains how racial conceptions of ‘Indian” and ‘non-Indian’ or ‘Ladino’ served economic purposes, as Ladinos held occupations such as labor recruiters, and police or military officers. Theses jobs held control and order over Mayan workers for the production of coffee exportation. This idea of order among the Maya was purely racial. Guatemalan elites in the 1800’s saw them selves as “cursed” by Guatemala’s Mayan majority because the Maya were ““strongly addicted to their own habits, ways and customs.” Only through white immigration and the leadership of a light-skinned elite, such men argued, could the nation overcome its backward Indian majority” (Colby, 2006:600).

Similarly, racism was also utilized in the production of the Northern Railroad. As railroads were seen as the key to progress among Latin American elites. In 1882 Barrios made deals with U.S. contractors for the construction of the Northern Railroad which would connect coffee and banana plantations for exportation and railroad rely heavily on black American labor (Colby, 603). Although workers were out of the U.S., the Jim Crow practices of the southern states were transplanted to the Northern Coast of Guatemala (Colby 2006:606). Violence against African Americans pushed them to flee to Guatemala’s interior, but by 1903 Guatemalan judges applied vagrancy laws to bring African Americans back to work (Colby 2006:604). Sadly, although U.S. diplomats generally protested anti-black violence, responses were usually “couched in racial terms” and was done mostly to maintain respect of American citizenship (Colby 2006: 604). Since the United States shared racial conceptions of African descendant peoples, defense of victims merely strengthened U.S. imperialism as well as racist ideologies and indirectly justified Guatemalan laws which enabled the coercion of Maya and people of African descendent to work on plantations and railroads.

            Colby’s article gives a lot of attention to the United Fruit Company, as an empire in itself, and its racist practices as an example of corporate colonialism in Guatemala. The article expresses a number of cases of blatant violence and racism against African American and British West Indian workers of the United Fruit Company and the Northern Railroad. The racial institutionalization in areas of export production suggest that it is the manifestation of the idea that Dawson puts forward of ‘order, then progress’ as ‘racial order, then progress’.

        Source:             Peard, Julyan. Race, Place, and Medicine”  The Idea of the Tropics in      Nineteenth-Century Brazil. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

Chapter three of this book talks about how race was considered in the examination of specific diseases that were common in Brazil in the later half of the 19^th Century, and how these ideas strategically shaped perceptions about “backwardness” and “modernization” in regards to politics, and the Brazilian economy. The studies were done by a group of doctors who called themselves the Tropicalistas. When this idea was first introduced to the medical public, ideas circulated and varied around the question of how “tropical medicine” would be defined. For example, “should tropical pathology be concerned with such… disorders that appeared to be largely exclusive to hot and humid climates? Or were all disorders of Brazil to be considered tropical in the sense of being universal but subject to peculiar exacerbating factors in the tropics?” (81). Regardless of the ever-changing definition of tropical medicine, the focus of disorders that occurred in this area allowed Brazil to use the “demystification of ‘tropical’ disorders” to fend off European ideas of Brazilian cultural, and biological inferiority (83-84).

Problems of race further developed with these studies by Europeans ideas, based on high mortality rates, that they were lacking a certain immunity that those who were born in the tropics did not. Because this immunity was not understood, it further led to European doctors believing that “whites ‘degenerated’ morally, and physically, in the Brazilian climate” because “blacks, as native to the tropics, were considered degenerate” (85). These beliefs were set by debates dealing with whether physical racial characteristics correlated with qualities of intellect, or social progress, and whether “crossbreeding” of races led to inevitable degeneration (85).

A shift began to occur after the end of the slave trade in 1850. Despite the economic reliance on slavery in the past, in 1870 voices began to condemn the institution, and the Tropicalistas were among them. Because slavery was now viewed as backwardness, Tropicalistas linked the cholera epidemic to the harsh conditions of slavery. Now the economic question arose of “how to ensure and efficient and orderly free-market force as the country moved toward the end of slavery” (89). Basically what happened was a social “whitening” which allowed “mullatoes” to change their race by assimilating to ““civilized” manners that the white upper-class Brazilians deemed appropriate” (91). This “whitening” of Brazil disproved the two ideas from North American and European racial science: “that racial hybridization must mean degeneration and regression, and that racial differences were only biologically determined and not malleable to social conditioning”. This gave Brazilian doctors the import role of creating an image of an “improved race” (92).

            The freeing of slaves and the “whitening” of a more “civilized” race integrated people from slavery into positions as prestigious as doctors, and therefore contributed to the economic development of Brazil. This helped allow the nation to transform from a “backward” society heavily reliant on slavery to a “modernized” society which held different views of miscegenation than other slave societies. It is interesting to see this way of modernization in contrast to countries such as Guatemala, which adopted Jim Crow practices from the United states to fuel their economy.