Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America

by Dana Frank

Book Overview

Women banana workers--bananeras--are waging a powerful revolution by making gender equity central in Latin American labor organizing. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0896087557
• ISBN13: 9780896087552
• Release Date: October 2005
• Publisher: South End Press
• Length: 137 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.9" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

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Electrical BANANERAS

At first I found myself a little bored reading BANANERAS, Dana Frank's total reimagination of the labor union as the engine of women's liberation in first Honduras then elsewhere south of the border, but then the sweep of her narrative began to carry me away. Not liking bananas myself, I had somehow merely lived my whole life without ever inquiring about the women who picked and packed them. Who were these women? How have they eked out meaningful existences desite isolation and backbreaking labor? How do they change history with solidarity and an unspoken feminism? For, as Dr. Frank reveals wryly, the Latin American bananeras recoil from the word "feminism" itself, treating it as though it had no meaning nor place in the vocabulary of the modern radical worker. In a way, Frank's book is the story about how a word lives even when it is judged irrelevant and in consequence unspoken. Richly researeched, the new BANANERAS makes manifest in rich ways the geometrical growth of the new labor unions powered by women's work (though some of the locals employ Latins of several genders). Frank was there when the women met and organized; she attended some of the furit packers' conferences and showed how uneducated women managed to cope with, then translate for the benefit of others, both absent and present, hifalutin technical and political concepts such as transnational trade agreements. She showed what happens when one woman's isolation showly begins to transform, like the shards of a broken flower pot, into a multifaceted, yet striking new mosaic of terra cotta. She brings her characters to life with simple pen strokes, like Colette. Here she is, for example, introducing us to Selfa Sandoval, a Guatemalan fruit worker: "Selfa is a laughing, energetic, tough cookie, who remains powerful in her union because she works hard and fellow rank-and-file members know it." Not only do we see Sandoval herself, but we see her in context of a group of shadowy, but respectful, union members in the general population. Friends who have studied with Dr. Frank, in the seaside town of Santa Cruz perhaps two hours south of here, have talked about her work in history as a three-pronged trident, like Neptune, ready to strike at a single second. One fork shows us that, there are no Americans, there are only "Americans." Another looks for the hope of successful social movements. And a third, and the sharpest of all, is her brain.