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Bananeras
Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America
Dana Frank
Pages: 128ISBN: 0-89608-755-7
Format: paper
Release Date: 2005-09-29
This book is also available in cloth
"I want to learn how to defend myself from whoever tries to oppress me, whether it's my husband, my union, or my boss."—a bananera
Women banana workers—mujeres bananeras—are waging a powerful revolution by making gender equity central in Latin American labor organizing. Their successes disrupt the popular image of the Latin American woman worker as a passive bystander and broadly re-imagine the possibilities of international labor solidarity.
Over the past twenty years, bananeras have organized themselves and gained increasing control over their unions, their workplaces, and their lives. Highly accessible and narrative in style, Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America recounts the history and growth of this vital movement.
Starting in 1985 with one union in La Lima, Honduras, and expanding domestically through the late 1990s, experienced activists successfully reached out to younger women with a message of empowerment. In a compelling example of transnational feminism at work, the bananeras crossed borders to ally with banana workers in five other banana exporting countries in Latin America, arguing all the while that empowering women at every level of their organizations makes for stronger unions, the better to confront the ever-encroaching multinational corporations.
When the bananeras of Latin America, with their male allies, explicitly integrate
gender equity into their organizing work as essential to effective labor internationalism-when
they refuse to separate the global struggle against transnational corporations
from the formidable efforts at home to achieve equity and respect-they inspire
all of us to envision a new framework for internationalism that places women's
human rights at the center of global class politics.
Read more about Frank's research for Bananeras at UC Santa Cruz Currents Online.
Other topics that are related to Labor and Class Politics are:
Table of Contents
Introduction On the Road1 The Work Enslaves Us
2 SITRATERCO: Women’s Power Is Union Power
3 Honduras: A Free Space
4 Latin America: The Big Challenge
5 The War at Home
6 Global Allies
Conclusion A New Kind of Labor Movement
Dana Frank
Click here to view Dana Frank's full Author PageDana Frank is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism (Beacon, 1999); Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919–1929 (Cambridge, 1994); and, with Howard Zinn and Robin D.G. Kelley, Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls and the Fighting Spirit of Labor's Last Century (Beacon, 2001). Her work has also appeared in The Nation, the Washington Post, In These Times, New Labor Forum, and numerous scholarly journals. Long active in labor solidarity work, since 2000 she has worked with the US Labor Education in the Americas Project (US/LEAP) in support of the banana unions in Latin America.
Read more about Frank's research for Bananeras at UC Santa Cruz Currents Online.