Portillo Villeda set out to write a workers’ history of a 1954 Honduran banana strike. Extensive oral histories allow her to foreground the perspective of banana workers and union organizers, as well as female food preparers, venders, and sex workers who participated in or otherwise supported this north coast strike. This book is not, however, a traditional labor history. Indeed, in 2009, when Honduras experienced a military coup, Portillo shifted her project to consider also how the 1954 strike was informing a new generation of activists.
This is an ambitious project with many strengths. First and foremost, Portillo succeeds in recovering the voices of women workers. Portillo defines these women as lynchpins who freed male banana workers and US-owned companies from the concerns of workers’ food preparation. Like Lara Putnam's earlier work in Puerto Limón, Portillo's work on domestic relations reveals rich ground for future studies on the interplay of labor and gender in banana zones.
Portillo argues that male banana workers crafted a local identity as hardworking “Indios,” which was fundamental to pre-strike organizing efforts. In this context, an Indio was not an Amerindian, but a person born in Honduras. Yet, race seemingly trumped national origin, as Portillo explains that Hispanic Salvadorans could easily claim this identity, but Garifuna workers born in Honduras were largely unable to do so. Moreover, Garifuna and West Indian workers were relegated to the most dangerous and least desirable jobs on the north coast. Portillo's work on race and nationality borrows from her oral histories and Darío Euraque's earlier work on Honduran censuses.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the 1954 strike was that it was largely successful. Banana workers secured better wages and the right to unionize, and the strike would serve as a model for workers in other industries. The original strike organizers, however, many with communist leanings, were arrested by Honduran officials during the strike. In fact, the strike ended under the leadership of a second central committee, which was much less radical and was able to reach an agreement with management and avoid government persecution.
Portillo smartly ties the suppression of communist union leaders to global Cold War political dynamics. She underscores that the strike occurred in the same year that Guatemala's democratically elected government fell victim to a US-CIA organized military coup. Portillo suggests that the United States acted after Guatemala refused to sign onto the OAS's 1954 Caracas Declaration, which asked all member states to commit to opposing communism in the region. This is an oversimplification, if not a distortion. As this is not a book on Guatemala and she makes no mention of the extensive historiography on this topic, it is unclear why Portillo chose to counter the traditional narrative that the coup was organized in response to the government's bold land and labor reform programs that threatened the United Fruit Company's vast landholdings and profits, as well as those of local elites.
In her final chapter, Portillo shares excerpts from oral histories she collected from post-coup activists and politicians, including ousted president José Manuel Zelaya. Her interviews reveals that some opposition leaders connect the strike of 1954 to their contemporary activism. Many younger activists, as Portillo notes, were educated about the strike by parents who were activists in the 1980s. As histories of the strike were banned by the military dictatorship, remembering the strike was for many years a subversive act. As fascinating as this argument is, Portillo all but skims over the 1970s and 1980s. A deeper analysis of these decades and how stories of the strike were communicated in those years would have strengthened Portillo's argument on how state repression helped forge popular memories of the strike.
Even though this book might have benefitted from more work on the decades between 1954 and 2009, Portillo has succeeded in writing a bottom-up study of the 1954 strike that will be of interest to scholars interested in integrating women workers’ stories into broader labor histories.
