Fruits of colonialism: The production of mangoes as commodities in northern Haiti

Abstract

After the 2010 earthquake, many stakeholders in Haiti and across the globe worked together to increase Haitian mango harvest for export, ostensibly as a way to improve people’s lives. To date, however, no study has examined how such an increase may be affecting the producers beyond statistical measures. Using archival research and fieldwork in the Artibonite Department in Haiti, this article examines the social consequences of the labour process of Haitian peasants as they pick and process mangoes for export. After describing the biogeography of the mango, I describe the different systems of labour used in mango harvesting. I argue that the growth and harvesting of Haitian mangoes for export reflects social differentiation between those who can organize labour according to monetized relations and those who incorporate the domestic unit into commodity production. Furthermore, as more production shifts to work based upon monetized relations, the balance of economic power shifts towards adult men.

Sidney W Mintz: Charting an anthropology of the Caribbean

“…A major preoccupation was the unique development of the Caribbean peasantry and how they might be distinguished from proletarians (Mintz, 1973b, 1974c, 1978, 1985c; cf. Besson, 2018; Giusti-Cordero, 1996; Jayaram, 2018). He identified four major types of peasants: ‘Squatters', escapees before the plantations system took off, ‘early yeomen', early indentured labourers who finished their contracts, ‘the proto-peasantry', where adaptation to peasant life while still enslaved, later freed, and ‘runaway peasantries', that is, maroons, those whose resistance put them outside plantation society (Mintz, 1974b: 146–156).…”

“…Mintz, 1955) and as historical documentation for future Caribbean anthropology more generally (Giovannetti et al., 2015). Despite his abjuration of ‘theory’, Mintz provided historical and ethnographic materials animated by a materialist/Marxist anthropological agenda to inspire new perspectives on the Caribbean, to anthropologies of money in the postmodern world (Guyer, 2018), the typologies of ‘plantation’ and ‘hacienda’ (Edelman, 2018), and new approaches to 21st-century Caribbean peasantries (Besson, 2018; Jayaram, 2018).…”

Caribbeanist Anthropology and Minerva's Owl: Lessons Forgotten, Lessons Learned

“…But there certainly are emergent transitions to be studied in the region, and here I would point toward Vanessa Agard‐Jones's (2013) work on environmental toxicity in Martinique, Rivke Jaffe's (2016) work on urban environmental justice in Jamaica and Curaçao, Kiran Jayaram's (2018) work on the social and cultural consequences of export mango production in Haiti, Ryan Jobson's (2021) ethnographies of petrochemical extraction in Trinidad, Olivia Gomes da Cunha's (2018, 2021) work on the afterlife of American bauxite mining in a Suriname maroon village, or the questions of national sovereignty—or the lack thereof—explored by my former students: 11 Greg Beckett (2019), Yarimar Bonilla (2015, 2020), Lee Cabatingan (2016, 2018, 2020), Jeffrey Kahn (2019), and Chelsey Kivland (2020) in the context of Haiti's perennial crisis, Guadeloupe's syndicalist movement, the Trinidad‐based Caribbean Court of Justice, the evolution of the U.S.‐Haitian water border, or grass roots organizing in Port‐au‐Prince, respectively (see Thomas, this issue). Brent Crosson's (2020) updating of the study of Afro‐Caribbean religious traditions in light of post‐Asadian discussions of secularism belong in that picture, as does Stuart Strange's (2018) explorations of Ndyuka “metaphysics of history” and affliction, or Anthony Medina's (2020) dissertation on Cuban “ pandillas ”—i.e., criminalized Black male associations (which Medina carefully disentangles from both the image of U.S. “gangs” and Central American “ maras ”)—that can be profitably read together with Jovan Lewis's (2020) ethnography of Jamaican online scammers.…”