The image I selected is from the 1890s and is a photo of workers in Limón, Costa Rica transporting bananas for the United Fruit Company. This image is a great representative of not only the modernization of Latin America but also a great representative of the export oriented economic boom of the late 19th century in Latin America. The modernization that this economic boom was tied to was the heavy investment in railroads throughout Latin America. Like many Latin American countries at this time Costa Rica was open to foreign investments and had their railroads built by the Northern Railway Company, a British company who built the railways in exchange for the ownership rights to the railways until the late 20th century (The Rich Coast Project). Minor Keith, the owner of the railroad company, was also the co-founder of the United Fruit Company which would become a large part of the Costa Rican economy (The Rich Coast Project). With Costa Rica being in the tropics, the produce grown here for export was mainly tropical commodities such as bananas. Tropical commodities were generally produced in a areas where there where large indigenous populations, which Limón a very indigenous, black, and creole area was. Given the area and the demographic of people that these companies, like the United Fruit Company, were hiring along with the growing social acceptability of discrimination against indigenous and black communities, Keith saw this as a perfect place to invest in. Companies decided that these areas would remain infrastructure light, meaning that the jobs of laborers in these areas were physically demanding. In the picture you can see there is definitely a transportation device but no real heavy industrial machinery. It seems as if that device is more for the efficiency of the transportation process which in the end would make exporting goods faster compared to the idea of fully industrializing which would cost more and benefit the laborers possibly even creating and more proletarianized workforce. Due to the cheap labor cost and the ability to underpay workers in these areas, companies exploited that and avoided further industrialization. This desire to accrue capital by companies was also matched by the Costa Rican government. From the 1870s to the 1930s the chief exports coming out of Costa Rica where coffee and bananas(Dawson 2022, pg.103). The creation of an efficient railway system along with new more efficiently produced bananas, are a couple of the main reasons for the export oriented economic boom in Costa Rica in which over the course of 62 years leading up to 1912 Costa Rica’s export rate grew by 3.5% annually(Dawson 2022, pg.107). Now having all this information it allows one to observe this picture in a deeper historical context. At first glance one may have viewed this picture just as the title says “transporting bananas”, but given the broader context of the time you can see that there are layers to this still image that typify the colloquialism “a picture is worth a thousand words.” References: The Rich Coast Project. “Costa Rica Railway Company Ltd. and Northern Railway Company.” The Rich Coast Project, The Rich Coast Project, 12 Dec. 2016, http://www.therichcoastproject.org/photo-collections/2016/10/23/costa-rica-railway-company-ltd-and-northern-railway-company. Dawson, Alexander S. Latin America since Independence: A History with Primary Sources. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2022.
