The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1960

by Lara Putnam

In the late nineteenth century, migrants from Jamaica, Colombia, Barbados, and beyond poured into Caribbean Central America, building railroads, digging canals, selling meals, and farming homesteads. On the rain-forested shores of Costa Rica, U.S. entrepreneurs and others established vast banana plantations. Over the next half-century, short-lived export booms drew tens of thousands of migrants to the region. In Port Limon, birthplace of the United Fruit Company, a single building might house a Russian seamstress, a Martinican madam, a Cuban doctor, and a Chinese barkeep--together with stevedores, laundresses, and laborers from across the Caribbean.

Tracing the changing contours of gender, kinship, and community in Costa Rica's plantation region, Lara Putnam explores new questions about the work of caring for children and men and how it fit into the export economy, the role of kinship as well as cash in structuring labor, the social networks that shaped migrants' lives, and the impact of ideas about race and sex on the exercise of power. Based on sources that range from handwritten autobiographies to judicial transcripts and addressing topics from intimacy between prostitutes to insults between neighbors, the book illuminates the connections between political economy, popular culture, and everyday life.

Genres: Latin American History, History

427 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Lara Putnam is University Center for International Studies research professor in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh, where she has been Department Chair since 2014. She writes about Latin American and Caribbean history; migration, kinship, and gender; and the impact of digital technology on historical research. Publications include The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1960 (2002) and Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (2013), as well as more than two dozen chapters and articles. Putnam's research on contemporary grassroots political organizing has appeared in Vox.com, New Republic, Washington Post, Washington Monthly, Democracy Journal, and beyond. She is active in grassroots organizing in Southwest Pennsylvania.

Reviews

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating piece of social history on race, violence, and sexuality among migrants in late-19th and early-20th century Port Limon, Costa Rica. Putnam's quotes extensively from primary sources, resulting in a detailed and delightfully vulgar portrait of life during the banana years. The book is clearly influenced by contemporary transnationalism scholarship and is an important to-read for anyone interested in diasporas, globalization, and/or Central America. Recommended.

[Lauren Farrauto · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very long and drawn out. The research was interesting but could have been summed up much more succinctly