A CHIQUITA BANANA KID
I am from the âsweet waistâ of America: Honduras, a country marked in history as the quintessential expression of the banana republic. Its Atlantic alluvial coasts attracted lovers that made her land fit for kings for many years. Acres of humid and fertile land, dressed by hundreds of cabbages, in a young Central American republic, playing the home of kingsâthe North Carolina novelist O. Henry made a name for himself with this story, right at the crossing of the nineteenth century. O. Henryâs satirical narrative Cabbages and Kings, in whose pages Honduras is referred to as the Banana Republic, became a classic widely read in schools across the United States of America (and their international schools) in the twentieth century.1
âThe 300 miles of adventurous coast has scarcely known for hundreds of years whom rightly to call its master,â relates O. Henry. âGentleman adventurers throng the waiting rooms of its rulers with proposals for railroad and concessions.â A century after, we know who won the favor of Honduran rulers, the United Fruit Company, Inc., later known as Chiquita Banana.
Settled in a territory as vast as 650,000 acres of the most productive land along the Atlantic coast of Honduras by the first quarter of the twentieth century, the United Fruit Company began the process of building national âprogress.â That is how we, most of the Honduran population, thought of the United Fruit Company for most of the twentieth century. The national craving for modernizing Honduras with the help of the Chiquita Banana became the project of a century. As the North American company applied its architectural and entrepreneurial geniuses to its key infrastructuresâports, railroads, state-of-the-art hotels, hospitals, administrative buildings, grocery stores, country clubs with golf courses, sport centers, cinemas, tennis courts, and the likeâsparks of hope invaded the public imagination. Needless to say, the spacious and luxurious real estate, where middle- to upper-management employees lived, fueled the public appetite for âtomorrowlandâ; a living condition for the middle class second only to that of the architects of this society, the United States of America itself.
All commodities and living upgrades developed by the United Fruit Company were strategically located in specific geographical areas where its main operations took place. Given the splendor of progress in these regions in contrast to the average Honduran neighborhood, locals came to baptize these areas La Zona Americana (the American zone). Likewise, the United Fruit Company became nationally known as La CompañĂa (the Company). The political leverage that La CompañĂa enjoyed with the Honduran executive power and other public agencies was unprecedented.2 The United Fruit Company was given the opportunity to sport a new capitalistic economy, sustained by an upper-middle-class managerial society that correspondingly exemplified a particular US cultural and patriotic lifestyle.
I grew up in La Zona Americana for most of my early childhood and adolescence. My father worked for the United Fruit Company as middle management. My mother, a white lady of British American descent, kept our home in line with such status. Both of my parents played golf, but my mom was exceptional. She won several tournaments, both locally and nationally. Golf was the family sport, an extravagant pastime in a âThird World country.â Memories about life in La Zona Americana have made a significant impression on meâLa Zona Americana, tomorrowland, in one of the most impoverished countries of the American continent; a geography of progress lived as the American dream, protecting me from the foes of national poverty and underdevelopment; a flare of success on my head among losers; as if Jehovah, in the words of Neruda, had distributed this piece of land, this juicy waist of my country, to La CompañĂa; a beautiful life, a good life, the ultimate truth.3 I grew up to be a Chiquita Banana kid.
A WESTERN CATHOLIC
Like most Latin Americans, I was raised Roman Catholic, the national religious identity of Honduras. During my youth I attended different Franciscan elementary schools. Though not very active in the church and its liturgical celebrations, âbeing Catholicâ was how we identified as a family. School taught us well who our founders were. Roman Catholicism founded the Western religious imagination of the Americas at the time of the âdiscovery of the New World.â4 Such religious imagination cemented three centuries of colonial life and shaped what we know as Latin America and the Caribbean today. The mission of the Roman Catholic tradition has a deep, broad, and lasting history in the American continent. I practiced what the Cuban American Catholic theologian Orlando EspĂn calls âthe daily religion of western Catholics.â5 Popularly speaking, I was a Roman Catholic in my own way, but a Catholic nonetheless.
THE PROTESTANT ENCHANTMENT
As a young man, I attended a Protestant junior high/high school by the name Instituto Departamental Evangelico Anna Dorothea Bechtold, locally known as la misión evangélica (the evangelical mission). The school was founded in 1939 by Miss Anna D. Bechtold, an Anglo-American missionary from the Reformed church. Part of its purpose was to evangelize children and youth in the community and provide them with what she thought to be a more holistic and modern education than that available in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. This, of course, acc...
