Source: Tulane University Howard-Tilton Memorial Library. Early Images of Latin America Collection. “Cutting Bananas”. Box 10, Album 12, Costa Rica_05
The image above is from 19th century Costa Rica, where there are workers harvesting bananas, most likely, on a hacienda.
From the reading, Accounting for Taste, by John Soluri, many issues surrounding the banana industry during this time are revealed. The author discusses three main facets of the banana trade: export, mass markets, and disease. I would like to further discuss mass markets to gain a deeper understanding of the photo I have chosen.
As we know from class, haciendas are a place where people work in a similar fashion to “Sharecropping”. So the workers depicted are probably contributing to their hacienda and working for an owner of a property taking part in the mass market of bananas being shipped off to the United States of America. According to, John Soluri, bananas were still a novelty in the US in the 19th century until World War I.
The company Gos Michel fruit made up most of the imports of bananas to the United States. Concepts of things like a “banana tax” were proposed but otherwise shot down because bananas were considered the “poor man’s fruit”. This was the beginning of the mass consumption and market of the bananas. With high demand comes with the need of supply. Therefore, companies were pouring money into ways to make production, harvesting, and transport faster and more efficient in order to fulfill the demand.
In the picture above, “Cutting Bananas” , is from the 1890’s. So this is before many of these new efficiencies were in place. This photo represents the raw and hard work that went into harvesting bananas in Costa Rica which were apart of the beginning of this banana boom in the US.