Banana Fallout Class, Color, and Culture Among West Indians in Costa Rica

The expansion of European capitalism engendered a worldwide dislocation of laboring people. With the mass appropriation of human labor came an inequality based largely on race. Representative of this process were the West Indians who fled poverty & sought opportunities in railroad construction & on United Fruit Company plantations in Costa Rica in the nineteenth century. These American-owned plantations manipulated ethnic differences between West Indian Blacks & Hispanic Costa Ricans to the benefit of the enterprise. UCLA Center for Afro-American Studies is proud to announce the release of BANANA FALLOUT: CLASS, COLOR, & CULTURE AMONG WEST INDIANS IN COSTA RICA by Trevor W. Purcell, which presents an anthropological analysis of the West Indians' adjustment in Costa Rica over a hundred-year period. The book also looks at the development of the inequality that occurred as Blacks, who initially saw themselves as superior to local Hispanics, later found themselves at the mercy of a Hispanic cultural hegemony. An important contribution to the anthropology of West Indians in the Caribbean's Hispanic borderlands, the book is rich in its observations on race, class, & mobility among West Indian immigrants & lays the foundation for comparison with other such immigrant communities in other areas of the Americas.Purcell, Trevor W. is the author of 'Banana Fallout Class, Color, and Culture Among West Indians in Costa Rica' with ISBN 9780934934374 and ISBN 0934934371.