US Banana Companies and Truxillo Railroad Honduran Spanish, Coins, Housing and Transportation

Some Effects of the US Banana Companies’ Presence in Northern Honduras on Honduran Spanish and some reflections on Coins, Housing, and Transportation

By Wendy Griffin January 2015

As a result of the Banana companies’ presence in the North Coast of Honduras some English words became part of the lexicon of Honduran Spanish, particularly as it is spoken on the North Coast.

Words related to jobs within the Company

Timekeeper

Breakman

Both Timekeeper and Breakman were high status jobs within the company. The timekeeper had the opportunity to live in company housing. There are no Spanish translations in Honduras used for these jobs.

Watchiman   There is a related verb watchimanear which Garifunas on the North Coast still use like the phrase Estoy watchimaneando estos guineos, Estoy watchimaneando una casa. The Honduran Spanish word for this job is vigilante.

Yardero.  Many older Garifunas noted that their job was yardero. I asked Yaya about  what was the job yardero. She said when you have a yarda (like a wharf, the area in front of where the ships are where Garifunas were active loading bananas and doing other things, related to the English term naval ship yard) then the people who work there are yarderos. The person who is in charge of all the people working in the yarda is known as the jefe de la yarda, which was the job of the father of my friend Sebastian Marin. Garifuna yarderos and even the jefe de la yarda usually continued to live in Garifuna communities and commute to the port to work.  Sebastian Marin’s father had a pass (pase in Honduran Spanish) that let him travel on the train anytime he wanted which he used to travel to his agricultural lands in Barranco Blanco which the train passed through as well as to go to work in Puerto Castilla. 

Other Garifuna men who were just temporary labor for loading and unloading ships like Yaya’s father and Jeca’s father, the company sent the train from Puerto Castilla to pick up the workers in Trujillo and then take them to Puerto Castilla to work.  It usually took more than one shift (tanda) to unload or load a ship, so the train would bring the first group of workers back to Trujillo and pick up the second group.  Loading or unloading a ship could continue into the night as the Truxillo Railroad brought a dynamo (generator) which provided electricity not only for Puerto Castilla, but also for Trujillo.  It was such a good dynamo that it continued working into the 1980’s in Trujillo when it was sold to Reco (Roatan Electric Company) in Roatan to provide electricity there in the Bay Islands. 

Yaya was angry that they sold it, because it provided good and steady light to Trujillo while being hooked up to the national ENEE electricity grid is characterized by frequent power outages that lasts for hours and sometimes days. “Era buena luz,” she said.

At one point Garifuna men in Trujillo had apparently travelled to Puerto Castilla in their own canoes to work, maybe before the rail route between Puerto Castilla and Truxillo was finished, as there was the comment about the United Fruit Company had the Great White Fleet, but the Garifunas travelling between Trujillo and Puerto Castilla with sails on their canoes made up the small white fleet. But at the time my Garifuna informants knew of the railroad, and their fathers worked there, the Garifunas both men and women generally went by train to Puerto Castilla. The road to Castilla which could be travelled by bus came much later.

Although Honduran Spanish has the Spanish Word "ferrocarril" for railroad, if you were going to say something like I went to Olanchito by train (Yo fui a Olanchito en tren), the Spanish word for train would be tren. Although  the legal Honduran name for the United Fruit's subsidiary in Northeastern Honduras was the Truxillo Railroad Company  among the Garífunas of Trujillo it is still known simply as "la compañía" (the company) in Spanish and "la company" in Garífuna, almost 70 years after it left.  The Tela Railroad Company, the other United Fruit subsidiary in Honduras, is usually called La Tela (Mi papa trabajó para la Tela. My father worked for the Tela Railroad Company) and the Standard Fruit Company la Standard and the Cuyamel Fruit Company la Cuyamel.   La Compañía Hondureña de Vapores (The Honduran Steamship Company) was the legal name for United Fruit's shipping company between Honduras and the US.  United Fruit was rather notorious among US historians for moving profits around  among subsidiaries so that the profits were neither taxed in Honduras, nor in the United States, and partly this was done by organizing the Honduran growing side, the US distribution side,and the shipping side as separate companies and the shipping side and its rates it charged itself as the distribution side were key for hiding profits from taxes in both countries.

Names of verbs used for work for the company or with American and Caribbean workers

Mopear- This is a North Coast verb to mop the floor. The more common Honduran term to mop the floor is trapear from trapo a rag.  Most Honduran women who got jobs working with whites or Hispanics in company housing or to clean (asear) offices had no previous experience with mopping, as they came from houses that had dirt floors which do not require mopping.

Asear “to clean” comes from the name of a detergent or soap Ace sold at that time.

Chapear-Usually translated by gringos as to chop, such as to chop down the grass or brush or weeds with a machete.  Quiere le chapea la grama? (Do you want me to chop down the grass?) Some gringos call the man who does this is the chopiman, following the same way to make the word as watchiman.

Names of Fish

For reasons I do not know two types of fish commonly sold in Trujillo only have names that come from English.  All other fish have Spanish names.

Yellowtail

King Fish

Housing

Baracas, baracones—The single men’s housing where they lived in open bay dorms were known as baracas (from barracks in English) or baracones (large barracks). These were built of wood with corrugated zinc roofs. In Trujillo the baracas of the company were still standing in Jerico in the mid-1950’s. Ladino and Indian men from the Interior and even from El Salvador often arrived alone on the Coast either because they were young and single like Lazaro Flores’s father or because their wives were tending gardens and chickens and children back home.

Honduran poet Roberto Sosa his Salvadoran father arrived in the banana zone as a young man and there married a Honduran woman his mother. The struggles of his poor Salvadoran father who chopped weeds for the banana companies led to him writing poetry about the poor, Los Pobres, or even more poor than the Honduran peasant, the dispossessed proletariat rural workers, Los Desposeidos. The life in the baracones figures prominently in Ramon Amaya amador’s book on life on a Standard Fruit plantation Prision Verde. “Cuidando gente” –cooking and washing clothes for single men workers on the banana camps and in banana towns was a common profession of women including Black English speakers like Betty Meigham’s mother, and Garifunas like Doña Alisa’s mother.

Better housing was available for higher grade workers or those who were married. Doña Sasa’s Garifuna father a fruit inspector had a house in Puerto Castilla in the Worker’s Zone before the American Zone.  They had a wooden house with separate bedrooms, electricity, a telephone, running water, and the United Fruit was famous in Honduras for its system of having running water fill tanks which then washed away the human waste from the shared bathrooms along a ditch. In the 1930’s she had in Puerto Castilla more amenities than 90% of rural Americans at the time.  The old United Fruit Truxillo Railroad telephone switchboard and white porcelain sinks, as well as the broadaxes used to cut mahoghany and cast iron wood burning stoves imported from Pittsburgh, were saved and are in the Rufino Galan Museum in Trujillo.

The Garifuna workers in the Trujillo area who lived in their own communities like Doña Jeca’s and Yaya’s fathers lived in the houses typical of the Garifunas of the time such as clay houses with palm thatch roofs, called in Honduran Spanish casas embarradas con techo de manaca. In other Garifuna communities the houses of the Garifunas who worked for the banana company were sometimes of different materials like caña brava (wild cane, maburu in Garifuna) in Triunfo de la Cruz and the whole house being made of cohune palms leaves (manaca) in Tournabe, both in the Tela area. The Garifuna men alternated between living at home where their wives were farmers and working with the banana companies, often just walking from their communities like Triunfo and San Juan to the banana company town, which left them time to help their wives with clearing the land when they wanted to plant. Because the Black English speakers usually lived in company housing, and the Garifunas usually lived in their own communities, this was one factor that cut down on the social interaction between the two groups.  

Perhaps because her father would be away working for the banana company in Puerto Castilla, but he went by train, Yaya went to the Guaymoreto Lagoon alone in her father’s canoe and collected coconuts, harvested other products her mother had there, fished, and collected crabs. Yaya’s parents only had girls that lived past childhood. It was unusual for Garifuna girls to go out in canoes by themselves, but she learned to.  

Names for Coins

Un daime (from the US money dime)- This can refer to both the Honduran 20 centavo coin or to actual US dimes.  During the banana boom period, Honduran money was pegged to the US dollar 2 lempiras to 1 dollar, so 20 centavos was worth 1 US dime.  In the early part of the Truxillo Railroad, there was not enough Honduran money that was reaching the Coast to pay the workers, so the company paid the workers in actual US dollars and coins.  According to Gilberto Izcoa the head of the Honduran Numinists club, a law actually had to be passed to permit the circulation of US money on the North Coast, even though all during the 19^th century any type of Latin American silver coin circulated on the North Coast, for example when the banana trade started in the Bay Islands, they said many soles (the Peruvian silver currency) arrived in the Bay Islands.

The British had been accustomed to pay actual silver British sterling coins to the Garifuna mahoghany cutters and examples of hidden buried sterling coins have been found in older Garifuna houses, such as in Trujillo, where the person died prior to telling his family where he had hidden his coins. There is a whole genre of Honduran oral literature tales about people dying before they tell where they buried their money in that era before banks. 

Some foreign companies on the Honduran North Coast prior to the Truxillo Railroad like the Aguan Navigation Company   had issued tokens worth a certain amount in Honduran currency which was divided at the time into pesos, toston (half a peso), a quarter of a peso, a half of a quarter of a peso (12 cents) and half of that (6 and half cents) and fichas (3 cents).  The Aguan Navigation Company also introduced the first paper money in Honduras which they issued in their own name.

Scrip money, worth so much to buy at a company store, or just to exchange at the end of a period of cutting mahoghany or received for selling rubber was called “vales” (it has this value, also the word for IOU’s in Honduran Spanish).  Prior to the arrival of the Truxillo Railroad Company, much of the economy of the North East Coast was already described in1910 as working with “vales” which circulated as currency among people, rather than the currency issued by Honduran government.

Although many US writers about the United Fruit Company complained about company stores and scrip money, none of the people I interviewed mentioned scrip money or that it was an issue. The Garifunas who ran errands for their parents had cash daimes to spend, the Jamaicans who bought bread and fresh root crops from the Garifuna women had daimes to spend, the Pech who sold pigs to the company butcher shop in Trujillo got paid cash which they invested in imported goods like iron kettles, underwear, and cloth,and Honduran anthropologist and author Dr. Lazaro Flores’s Lenca father went home to the mountains of Lempira after working a number of years with the banana companies including the Truxillo Railroad with $200 cash in his pocket which he used to buy a coffee finca in 1929 and start his own little store in his home town on the Salvadoran border of  Vallaolid Lempira. That is how his father had enough money to send all of his 12 children to be professionals who ended working for Honduran and Salvadoran universities, the Ministry of Education, INFOP, etc. If scrip money was needed for the Commissary in Puerto Castilla, the Garifunas among themselves traded the money they had for the chits they needed to buy at the Commissary in Puerto Castilla with people who did not work for the Company.

To pay its workers out on the plantations, the Truxillo Railroad would add a car to the train and put the coins in a heavy metal box, and as the train stopped in the different banana plantation towns, the pagador (he who pays) would pay the workers.  The Truxillo Railroad also had a railroad car that acted as a post office that also was available as the train stopped at different plantations to pick up bananas. A good road that went out to the towns that the Truxillo Railroad served was not built until after Hurricane Mitch in 1998.

The Honduran government at the banana boom gave Banco Atlantida which was owned by Standard Fruit permission to print the paper money of first the peso notes and later the lempira note.  When the Honduran government went to the silver lempira coin (.900  fine silver) around 1928, they did not originally designate any small change coins, according to Garifuna Vicente Lopez which caused the circulation of US small coins and the older peso variety coins to circulate well after the change to the Lempira by the Honduran government. 

Honduras used as its central bank the Banco de Honduras, which although founded by people associated with the Honduras and New York Rosario Mining Company in Honduras became a subsidiary of Citibank, and the Honduran government had Banco Atlantida issue its paper money until 1950 when the International Monetary Fund/World Bank team visited Honduras and told them basically you have to get a grip. How can you have a state monetary policy if your money is printed by the subsidiary of a transnational corporation and your Central Bank is owned by another transnational coproation? You have to have your own Federal Reserve Bank, and after that the Honduran government’s Banco Central was founded and began to issue its own bank notes and coins.

Gilberto Izcoa is in the process of publishing a book on Honduran banks and bank notes issued for use in Honduras either by banks or other companies. Except for the Aguan Navigation Company's paper money which was printed in Trujillo, almost all Honduran banknotes were printed outside the country.  

Many of the most sought after goods at the time of the Truxillo Railroad like one pound of (wheat) flour, one pound of rice, cost one daime. You could buy soap and matches in quantities as small as one ficha.

Not only Honduran Spanish was affected by these changes but also Garifuna. The Garifuna word for matches is machi. The general Garifuna word for money is censu (cents). For example to say I have no money is Uogiati censu.  The Garifunas also have a word for larger sums of money that comes from the Spanish word for bills (billete)—biyuyu. Ghosts that hang around because they are tied to money on this earth are biyubiyuti, and there is still a creek called biyuyuti in Barrio Cristales, Trujillo.

Un buffalo- This can refer to the Honduran 10 centavo coin or the buffalo nickel. This word is still used in expressions like No tengo ni un buffalo (I don’t have even 10 centavos). A pound of beef cost un buffalo and un daime.

Un bledo-The US pennies at the time had sprigs of wheat on them, so they were called “bledos” (sprigs of wheat). The memory of these coins is mostly retained in the phrase Me da un bledo. I don’t care about it even one cent worth.  The Garifunas seldom mention bledos, but rather fichas, which Gilberto Izcoa thinks was a coin worth 3 cents.

Honduran coins issued by the Honduran government are scarce to find because since they were usually of a high silver content, they were used to pay for exports, and the people who received them just melted them down for their value in silver, instead of having to “exchange” them per se.  Honduras throughout the colonial period and through the 19^th century has significant problems minting enough official coins to meet the demand for coins, and other types of currency, such as unminted cut silver pieces, frequently circulated as money.  At the time of the Truxillo Railroad, in the Interior of Honduras, it was not uncommon to pay for cloth with certain amount of corn or beans, for example. Even in Trujillo, merchants who could not pay their Lloyd’s of London brokerage fees would sometimes pay Mr. Melhado with antiques which are still in his apartment above the Banco de Occidente building in Trujillo instead of cash noted Belinda Linton.

 The Honduran 20 centavo coin was small like the size of a dime, and the Honduran 10 centavo coin was bigger than the 20 centavo coin,  just as buffalo nickels were larger than US dimes.

Travel between the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa and the North Coast towns like Trujillo were difficult, such as a 10 day trip by mule or a 15 day on foot still in the early 20^th century. The Honduran government could not even get cash to pay the soldiers which protected the port of Trujillo to the area, and so Trujillo merchants during the time of the Truxillo Railroad, particularly the British Consul the Melhado family of merchants and Lloyd’s of London representatives in the port, had to pay the Honduran soldiers who protected the port, notes Honduran historian Elizeth Payne.