Myths of ethnicity and nation

About this book

In this study, Mark Moberg examines the conflicts in Belize's ethnic and national identity by focusing on their effects and manifestations in the country's banana export industry. Moberg explains how an array of local and transnational forces - government strategies for economic growth, the policies of the multinational company that exports Belizean bananas, the actions of plantation owners - have combined to exploit and manipulate ethnic tensions among workers within the banana industry. The result, Moberg shows, has been the imposition of oppressive and often fatal working conditions designed to create a subservient labor force. Workers, for their part, have responded with an extensive repertoire of "everyday resistance," ranging from slander to sabotage and ambush. Moberg explores the ways in which these patterns of labor control and employee resistance reflect the rising ethnic conflicts at the national level and how these, in turn, are rooted in an arduous history of Afro-Caribbean and Hispanic confrontation throughout lower Central America. Myths of Ethnicity and Nation integrates a finely detailed historical and ethnographic analysis of labor relations with a survey of the transnational dilemmas that have become to the forefront in Belize. Its keen insights and thoughtful, empirically based analysis will be of great use to any student of Central American peoples and cultures, Latin American development, ethnicity and nationalism, and the anthropology of work.