Fluent Essays

For this assignment, you are to read a journal article about a topic related to a regional topic within the context of the class, and you are asked to use articles from the JSTOR database. Unfortunately, Grossmont College does not have JSTOR available from its library, but some of you may have used JSTOR from institutions like Mesa, Palomar and Southwestern Colleges, in addition to San Diego State or Cal State San Marcos. Therefore I will provide you with an ample selection of articles that I have downloaded from Palomar Colleges JSTOR database. All you need to do is pick any of the articles for your review. Just click the Files section from the Canvas class menu, and open the folder that says 115_JSTOR articles. In the folder are several subfolders with topics arranged by nation, in alphabetical order. The articles are in PDF format and labeled by the topic of the article, so just browse the collection of articles before you make your final selection. You do not need to notify me of your article choice, just pick any one of the articles in any of those subfolders, and youre ready to roll!The due date for this review is Thursday, May 28 at 11:59 PM. No late papers will be accepted, all reviews must be submitted by May 28. The report is to be 5-6 pages in length. Please be sure to use both a title page and works cited page. (title and works cited pages do not count toward the overall page count of your review) You are also encouraged to follow the MLA or Chicago formats to develop this report. Please double-space your review. This review will count as 20\% toward your final grade. And in your works cited page, please list the name of the article that you will be summarizing and analyzing. This an example of the type of the format you should follow:“Argentina in 1983: Reflections on the Language of the Military and George Orwell, by Alberto Ciria. Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Vol. 11, No. 21 (1986), pp. 57-69.In terms of the content of the report, I am looking for two main points of discussion. First, you should devote the first half of the report to a summary of the main points that the author is trying to convey to the reader. To help you to address this issue, consider some of these questions: What type of article is this? Is the author presenting an original feature, or is he/she conducting a book review? If this is a book review, what book (or books) is being reviewed? What is the author’s purpose for writing this article? What is the author’s academic or professional background?As for the second point of discussion, this is where you provide your opinion or perceptions of the article. In other words, what did you think about it? What were the strengths or weaknesses of the article? How did the article relate to the class? You are definitely encouraged to write in first person singular (I feel that..., I think..) as you provide your opinions. As a general rule of thumb, your JSTOR review should be about 60\% summary and 40\% commentary. Thus a 5-page review with about 3 & 1⁄2 pages summary and 1 & 1⁄2 pages commentary is an ideal proportion.PreviousNext history_assignment.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview William Luis Red, White, and Black: Communist Literature and Black Migrant Labor in Costa Rica Author(s): Russell Leigh Sharman Source: Afro-Hispanic Review, Vol. 24, No. 2 (FALL 2005), pp. 137-149 Published by: William Luis Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23054578 Accessed: 26-09-2019 23:46 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms William Luis is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to AfroHispanic Review This content downloaded from 205.153.156.220 on Thu, 26 Sep 2019 23:46:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Red, White, and Black: Communist Literature and Black Migrant Labor in Costa Rica Russell Leigh Sharman Brooklyn College-CUNY general strike in the banana fields of Limon province on the Caribbean coast. For In more 1934, thea century stillthe United fledgling Party of Costa Rica organized a massive than half Fruit CompanyCommunist (UFC), the first truly post colonial multi-national corporation, had operated with complete autonomy in the once forgotten, sub-tropical plains of the Caribbean coast. Importing tens of thou sands of black migrant laborers at the turn of the century from the British Commonwealth islands, the UFC successfully created an enclave society with its own language and its own laws.1 But by 1934, banana production had fallen precip itously, and many black migrants had become small producers. Most of the planta tion laborers were white Costa Ricans fleeing the economic depression of the high lands and Nicaraguans fleeing the aftermath of Augusto Sandinos insurgency. Led by Carlos Luis Fallas, a young lieutenant in the three-year-old Communist Party, thousands of laborers walked off the plantations, protesting the lack of adequate healthcare and decreasing wages. The strike was a qualified success. The UFC eventually agreed to most of the demands, but the Communist Party failed miserably in its attempt to organize sup port among black migrants. Retribution came swiftly in the form of a new contract with the UFC and its plans to shift its entire operation to the Pacific Coast. In a com panion law to the new contract, known as Article 5, black migrants were expressly prohibited from moving with the company. Left to fend for themselves on the deplet ed and disease ravaged soil, black migrants were at the mercy of new Costa Rican bureaucrats sent to the province to re-educate non-native settlers. By 1950, two prominent members of the Communist Party of Costa Rica had established themselves as best-selling authors with novels set in Limon in the 1930s. In 1941, Carlos Luis Fallas published his first novel, Mamita Yunai, a thinly veiled memoir of his experiences in Limon as both a laborer and an organizer. A decade later, in 1950, Joaquin Gutierrez published, Puerto Limon, also a fictional memoir of his experience as the son of a wealthy landowner during the historic strike. Both works received critical acclaim, and most often because of their portrayal of black migrant laborers. According to Ian Smart, Carlos Luis Fallas Mamita Yunai (1941) and Joaquin Gutierrezs Puerto Limon (1950) are indeed the pioneering works that Afro-Hispanic Review • Volume 24, Number 2 • Fall 2005 ~ 137 This content downloaded from 205.153.156.220 on Thu, 26 Sep 2019 23:46:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Russell Leigh Sharman put Costa Rican West Indians solidly on the literary map for the first time (22). Lisa Davis describes Puerto Limon as notable for its sympathetic portrait of the Blacks of Limon (154). Even the noted black Costa Rican author Quince Duncan, though he would later retract his praise, wrote: [Fallas] has produced some of the most beau tiful pages about black people ever written by a Costa Rican, and Gutierrez [in Puerto Limon] has created his best black character. He has all the cultural features of the Afro-Caribbean (14, 20) .2 Indeed, blackness proved a powerful symbol of bourgeois capitalist oppression in the arsenal of communist propaganda, inextricably linking the histories of the Communist Party and black migrant labor.3 It was a symbol that the Communist International during this same period was counting on to pave its way into the Western Hemisphere. According to the Comintern, black Americans were the Achilles heel of American Capitalism (Caballero 23). As young intellectuals, Fallas and Gutierrez employed this symbol to great effect. In the worlds of Mamita Yunai and Puerto Limon, the United Fruit Company was the embodiment of US imperial ism, black laborers were the paradigmatic oppressed workers, and the underdevel oped, unfamiliar Caribbean province of Limon was the stage for dramatic conflict. And yet, a close reading reveals a paradox in the theme of blackness, both in the history of communism in Costa Rica as well as the literature that was produced by its leaders. It seems that blackness, as a political and literary symbol, was a pow erful image of oppressed labor, and yet its embodiment in the laborers themselves was an equally potent image of imperialism. Add to this the insidious racism of the time, and black migrant laborers became both protagonist and antagonist in a drama that white intellectuals were writing for them. The result, according to Rojas and Ovares, for Fallas work is that the text oscillates between an intention to integrate Indians and Blacks and the inability to achieve that objective (133). Lorein Powell argues that in Puerto Limon we find two messages; one explicit ... that is a message of lib eration for the working class, and the other implicit ... that excludes Blacks from both the elite or the working class, and places them as a sub-species of humans irre deemably condemned to exploitation (111). With the work of Fallas and Gutierrez, the Communist Party of Costa Rica successfully appropriated the image of blackness as a powerful force for social change, while perpetuating the denigration of blackness embodiment in the very workers they claimed to support. This article explores this curious paradox through the histories of black migrant labor and the Communist Party in Costa Rica. Focusing on the watershed event of the banana strike of 1934, the article traces the literary appropriation of blackness in the work of communist writers. Ultimately, the role of blackness in Costa Rican communist literature reflects a particular failing of 138 ~AHR This content downloaded from 205.153.156.220 on Thu, 26 Sep 2019 23:46:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Red, White, and Black: Communist Literature and Black Migrant Labor the Communist International in the first half of the 20th century, that is, the implic it imperialism of ideology that relegated the colonized Other to the margins of their own struggle. Carlos Luis Fallas Carlos Luis Fallas, or Calufa as he is popularly known, was born in the high land province of Alajuela in 1909. In the prologue to his novel Marcos Ramirez, Fallas writes: On my mothers side, I have peasant roots. When I was four or five years old, my mother agreed to marry a shoemaker who was very poor and already had six daughters. I was raised, well, in a proletarian home (9). Costa Rican historian Ivan Molina argues this was merely good political strategy for a communist leader in the 1950s. According to Molina, Fallass ancestors were prosperous farmers who sent at least one son to San Jose to study law, and Fallas himself was part of the privileged 8.6 percent of the males, born between 1906 and 1915 in the entire country, that enrolled in at least one year of secondary education (45). Fallas moved to Limon in 1926 at just sixteen years old. Fallas had used what privilege he enjoyed in the highlands to enter the shoemaking profession, a respectable skilled trade that would become one of the flashpoints for labor organi zation. It seems a dispute at work, however, sent him in search of employment in the Caribbean province along with thousands of others in the 1920s: At sixteen I trav eled to Limon on the Atlantic littoral of my country, fiefdom of the United Fruit Company, the powerful North American trust that extended its banana empire to all the nations of the Caribbean (Marcos Ramirez 9). Fallas would have quickly found it difficult to employ any of his advantages in the port city. Most West Indians were not only better educated, but could speak English, the language of UFC management. According to Molina, The very small space that existed for an immigrant like him in the universe of Limons urban labor market was perhaps what prompted Fallas to work on the plantations of the United Fruit Company. The experience was traumatic for a young man whose model of agri cultural employment was that which prevailed on the farm of his maternal grandpar ents (46). Fallas spent the next five years in the immense and shadowy banana fields of the United where [he] lived the life of a peon (9). Still, he worked his way up from peon to tractor operator, an unusual achievement for a wage-earner that was not Afro-Caribbean (46). In 1931, the year the Communist Party of Costa Rica was founded in San Jose, Fallas returned to the highlands where he joined the new party and became a labor organizer in the shoemaking industry. His rise in the Communist Part was meteoric. Fallas recalls, I was involved in the organization of the first labor syndicates in AHR ~ 139 This content downloaded from 205.153.156.220 on Thu, 26 Sep 2019 23:46:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Russell Leigh Sharman Alajuela and directed the first strikes. I was imprisoned several times and wounded in a bloody clash between workers and police in 1933 (Marcos Ramirez 10). In that same year, at the age of 25, Fallas was sent back to Limon with the express purpose of organizing the largest general strike in Costa Rican history. After the banana strike of 1934, Fallas returned to San Jose where he was promptly arrested at the home of Manuel Mora. Fallas refused to eat until his release, which came shortly thereafter in response to public pressure. In the aftermath of the strike, Fallas became more involved with communicating the message of the Communist Party. Along with other young intellectuals like Carmen Lyra, Fallas wrote articles and essays, gave speeches and organized rallies. Not yet thirty, Fallas was not the youngest of the new communist leadership. Almost all of the principle actors in the communist movement were in their twenties or early thirties. The Communist Party gave young intellectuals the opportunity to express their ideals in a way that would never be possible in the more conservative mainstream political parties. This culminated in the publication of Mamita Yunai in 1941. The novel actu ally originates in a series of articles published by Fallas in Trabajo, the Communist Partys newspaper, during 1940, but with its publication in 1941 it became one of the most successful works of Costa Rican literature to date, translated into more foreign languages than any other Costa Rican title. In fact, according to some, it was suspi ciously successful. Many of the languages Mamita Yunai was published under were those of Soviet Bloc countries at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s. Although there is no direct evidence that the Communist International financed or in any other way promoted the book, some modern critics have speculated as to its phenomenal success (Powell; Molina). As Molina asks, To what extent is this a result of the commercial success of Calufas texts or the result of the self-serving insertion of those same texts, whose literary value is not impugned here, into the offi cial transnational culture of the communist universe? (51). Though Fallas would pen several other works of fiction and non-fiction, Mamita Yunai would remain his most popular. The novel is a thinly veiled autobiog raphy of Fallass time in Limon as a young laborer and as an official in the commu nist party, though not necessarily in that order. The narrative begins in 1940, with the protagonist, Sibaja, on a train bound for Limon to monitor a regional election. Sibaja is a young but experienced elections monitor for the Worker and Peasant Bloc, the political party under which the Community Party stood for elections. Much of this first half of the novel involves Sibajas interactions with local police and other election officials, while thousands of black migrant laborers file through the jungle on their way to Panama in search of work after the devastation of the strike. The sec 140 ~ AHR This content downloaded from 205.153.156.220 on Thu, 26 Sep 2019 23:46:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Red, White, and Black: Communist Literature and Black Migrant Labor ond half of the novel takes place 14 years earlier, when a 19-year-old Sibaja is still working the banana plantations of Limon province. The strike of 1934 takes place in the space between these two main sections of the work, an implied event that rad ically transforms the social landscape and the young protagonist. It is the unwritten center of dramatic action, just as black laborers and the specter of blackness itself remain central to the narrative though referenced only obliquely. Imperialism is the most obvious target of criticism in Mamita Yunai, and impe rialisms most obvious embodiment is the UFC, from which the novel takes its name. But the title belies a more subtle characterization, that of the embodiment of the UFC itself. Black laborers are portrayed as referring to the company in their Caribbean Creole as mamita yunai, a Spanglish phoneticization of mommy and United Fruit Company. Not surprisingly, black laborers are portrayed as naive dependents to the mother company, just as they were described during the strike of 1934. For Fallas, the embodiment of the UFC was not North American plantation management, which is hardly ever mentioned, but black laborers who, for the most part, remain loyal to their employer despite its imperialist oppression of all workers. In one telling scene, a young Sibaja and his co-workers attempt to buy provisions at a company store, only to be overcharged and insulted by the black proprietor. When the local police officer supports the black man over Sibaja and his friends, the group sulks out of the store, cursing the Negro, the police and the United [Fruit Company] (Mamita Yunai 149). For Sibaja, and Fallas, the three were often synony mous. Inasmuch as Mamita Yunai is an overt critique of the UFC, some of the most insidious racial stereotypes in Costa Rican lite Fallass story there are condescending references to Afro-Carib the various indigenous groups living along the southern coast. T of the province of Limon, Talamanca, is described as a region p [who] for the most part [are] illiterate, speak almost no Spanish, an and miserable life (18). Throughout the novel, the diminutiv employed to refer to Afro-Caribbeans. When they are not inf demonized as the narrator observes: more than men, [the Bla like black demons with muscles shimmering under the sun (19 analogies are exhausted, limonenses are likened to the curiously describes the menagerie of passengers on a coastal train: Conte tance, the convoy would give the impression of an extravagant carn which rose the muffled rumble of a barbaric and savage party The reliance on such racist stereotypes to paint the image o is all the more surprising through the voice of the narrator, AHR ~ 141 This content downloaded from 205.153.156.220 on Thu, 26 Sep 2019 23:46:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Russell Leigh Sharman through Limon to alleviate the suffering of oppressed workers. Unlike Gutierrez (see below), Fallas always identified with the working class. His experiences in the shoe factories of the highlands and on the banana plantations of the Caribbean coast legitimated his credentials as a labor organizer and a man of the people. Indeed, Fallas continues to be lauded as a writer for the Costa Rican everyman, relying on dialect and slang to convey his narrative. But the everyman in Costa Rica, especially in the years between the strike and the civil war, was still deeply resentful of the black presence in Limon province. The Africanization of the Caribbean coast was directly connected to the emergence of the UFC, a corporation that had outmaneuvered local producers and excluded local workers (See Melendez and Duncan, Bourgois, and Harpelle). As in Fallass novel, the most visible embodiment of the company was the ubiquitous black laborer; a struggle against one was a struggle against the other. And yet, it is no coincidence that communism got its start in Limon4, for blackness, the Achilles heel of American Capitalism, was the perfect symbol of cap italist oppression in Marxist ideology. As such, despite his tendency to demonize black laborers, Fallas is able to compassionately express their frustration as well: There is no work, we cant cultivate the earth, they wont let us earn a living on the Pacific.... Must we die of hunger then? Or again, The men, with arms raised, shrunken under the weight of their great black bodies, all formed an impressive and macabre whole, resembling a parade of fugitive phantoms. From where have they come and to where are they going, dragging through the centuries the gathered weight of their scorched flesh? Where will they find their Promised Land? (Mamita Yunai 21, 25). But even here, the compassion is a compassionate distance, evoking the tone of condescension criticized earlier. Images of ghoulish parades, blackness as somehow damaged whiteness (scorched flesh), and transient homelessness plague the preceding quote, excluding any hope of Costa Rica as that welcoming Promised Land. Joaquin Gutierrez Joaquin Gutierrez began his writing career almost a decade after Fallas blazed the path. But unlike Fallas, Gutierrezs credentials among the working class were dif ficult to establish. Born to a landowner in Limon province, Gutierrez grew up on one of the many independent farms in the province that supplied fruit to the UFC. His father would have been one of those across the table from Fallas during the strike of 1934, had he not long since taken a post as Costa Rican ambassador to the United States. Gutierrezs first book, Manglar, was published in Chile, where he lived as a journalist and chess champion during the Costa Rican civil war of 1948. His second 142 ~ AHR This content downloaded from 205.153.156.220 on Thu, 26 Sep 2019 23:46:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Red, White, and Black: Communist Literature and Black Migrant Labor novel, Puerto Limon, which focuses on labor and class struggle in the port city, was published in 1950. While the well-traveled and erudite Gutierrez would have found little in com mon with the average working class Costa Rican, something Fallas could always count on, his credentials as a communist were impeccable. During the 1960s, he spent several years in China and the Soviet Union as a translator, ensuring his repu tation as a well-connected member of the Communist International. Equally at home in Santiago, Chile and San Jose, Costa Rica, Gutierrez seamlessly joined his life of privilege with his leftist politics. I met with Gutierrez at his home outside San Jose in ... Purchase answer to see full attachment