West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870–1940 (ISBN 0-8071-1979-2) is a 1996 book written by Aviva Chomsky. It details the history of the U.S.-based United Fruit Company, formed in 1899 from previous railroads and banana-growing interests in Costa Rica. It also describes how the local workers developed their own parallel socio-economic system. The book was awarded the 1997 Best Book Prize by the New England Council of Latin American Studies. It also assists in telling the story of how indins suffered in the plantations they worked in and connnects to Rigoberta Menchu, who has won a Nobel Prize, and once worked in plantations similar to the ones owned by the United Fruit Company.
Famous quotes containing the words west, indian, workers, united, fruit and/or company:
“He is every other inch a gentleman.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)
“The principal thing children are taught by hearing these lullabies is respect. They are taught to respect certain things in life and certain people. By giving respect, they hope to gain self-respect and through self-respect, they gain the respect of others. Self-respect is one of the qualities my people stress and try to nurture, and one of the controls an Indian has as he grows up. Once you lose your self-respect, you just go down.”
—Henry Old Coyote (20th century)
“Ireland still remains the Holy Isle whose aspirations must on no account be mixed with the profane class-struggles of the rest of the sinful world ... the Irish peasant must not on any account know that the Socialist workers are his sole allies in Europe.”
—Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)
“What chiefly distinguishes the daily press of the United States from the press of all other countries is not its lack of truthfulness or even its lack of dignity and honor, for these deficiencies are common to the newspapers everywhere, but its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion. It is, in the true sense, never well-informed.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“As a tree my sin stands
To darken all lands;
Death is the fruit it bore.”
—Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830–1894)
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—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)