A Review of Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race, and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras

Once home to sprawling banana plantations under the control of U.S. multinationals, the history of the northern coast of Honduras is crucially bound with capitalist exploitation and extraction. This part of the story is well known, but there are relatively few works that chart the everyday struggles waged by working-class Hondurans on the banana plantations.

Suyapa Portillo Villeda’s Roots of Resistance speaks to these silences in the historical record, drawing forth the revolutionary zeal and resistance of poor workers and how these unlikely radicals posited frameworks for another Honduras, one in which just working conditions were tethered to larger visions for societal change. Their efforts eventually led to the 1954 strike that not only paralyzed the banana industry, but also, she argues, laid the foundation for a national labor movement and the resistance to the 2009 coup d’état. In this sense, her account is a powerful rejoinder to the claim that Hondurans passively endured the machinations of U.S. imperial forces in the region.

Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race, and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras by Suyapa G. Portillo Villeda (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021, 385 pages)

Portillo draws on archival materials and oral histories with banana workers to excavate the revolutionary roots of the 1954 banana strike, which essentially shut down production across the entire industry. The protagonists of this larger drama are the working-class men and women who labored on the banana fields and within company housing camps. These individuals—not the revolutionary vanguard—recognized the exploitative conditions under which they labored and drew up a sweeping list of demands aimed at improving workers’ rights. These achievements are immensely significant considering the powerful forces they were up against, namely the Tela Railroad Company and Standard Fruit Company. Working-class workers posited new frameworks of resistance that, she contends, continue to shape left politics in Honduras today.

Portillo’s account is beautifully rendered in clear and evocative prose, letting the reader access the emotional landscape of the time and how individual participants, men and women alike, claimed a place in this epic uprising against imperial exploitation. Chapter 3 provides a portrait of everyday life on the banana fields, while Chapters 4 and 5 delve into the gender and racial makeup of Honduran society and how these markers of difference dictated the type of work individuals could access within and on the margins of the banana fields. Women and Black workers often found themselves relegated to less desirable positions, as cooks, corteros (stem cutters), yarderos (yard workers) and other low paid contract work; thus, the experience of class subjugation was intimately tethered to race and gender.

The book provides a particularly close engagement with gender, which is accomplished through a rich assortment of oral histories. Portillo’s oral historical research with banana workers builds on the Latin American tradition of testimonio literature. This approach allows her to fill absences in the historical archive, since the experiences of working-class women, Black, and Indigenous workers are often excised from these records. Her insistence on incorporating intimate scenes, even memories, as historical evidence for the larger story brings texture to the life experiences of these individuals. For instance, we see how women cooks viewed their labor, which was often informal, to be of equal importance to that of men in more desirable positions. For Portillo, their life-sustaining work provided the basis for a working-class feminist consciousness that would continue to develop over the course of the 20th century. Women workers, she argues, “challenged and reworked a system that otherwise would have taken complete advantage of them, constructed other forms of morality and honor, and reassembled what it meant to be a woman in the campos” (p. 175).

As the ancestral territory of the Garifuna and Miskitu peoples, the Caribbean coast of Honduras is a distinctly racialized geography and yet the land and labor of Black Hondurans remains largely underappreciated in historical accounts of life on the banana plantations. Portillo tackles these issues in the introduction to her book and intermittently throughout the text. We learn about how Garifuna dominion over their ancestral lands was all but erased to achieve the production goals of banana corporations and their allies in Tegucigalpa (p. 34). We learn of Garifuna men and women who, despite their marginal positions within the banana industry, contributed powerfully to the revolutionary fervor of the time. But, perhaps most importantly, we learn how Blackness is situated in relation to the social struggles of the time. These insights are particularly valuable given the anti-Black racism that undergirded emergent nationalist discourses and the ideology of mestizaje.

In the closing chapters, Portillo’s analysis of race and racial subjugation is less textured. Garifuna participation in the anti-coup resistance movement was motivated by concerns they shared with other dispossessed classes, but the claims of Garifuna Hondurans were also crucially about the defense of territorial autonomy on the coast and resistance to anti-Black racism. The suspension of democratic rule following the coup made these matters even more urgent given the abundant resources concentrated within Black and Indigenous territories and the primacy of resource extraction in the post-coup economy.

In the final chapter and conclusion, Portillo grapples with Honduras’s recent political history. The forms of resistance that emerged in response to the 2009 coup against Manuel Zelaya, she asserts, are closely linked to this earlier period of labor activism on the banana plantations. She insists the 1954 strike seeded a larger movement for labor rights, in addition to creating a culture of resistance that captured the demands of various historically marginalized social groups within Honduras. Hondurans, as Portillo makes clear, have a long history of organizing against the predatory aims of capital. Roots of Resistance instills a sense of hope for a better future despite the vastly unequal power relations that characterize the Honduran present.  

Christopher A. Loperena is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center and author of The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras (Stanford, 2022).