Photo: Javier Lopez Casertano
Suyapa G. Portillo Villeda is Associate Professor of Chicana/o Latina/o Transnational Studies at Pitzer College. Her research and teaching priorities include Central American history, migration to the U.S., gender and labor in Central America, LGBTTI Latina/o populations and queer (im)migration in the Americas. Her work focuses on the intersections between labor, gender, ethnicity, race and other marginalized identities in workers’ lives in Central America and in the U.S.
Book Cover Illustration by Victor Lopez
Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race, and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras
★ Winner of the Sarah A. Whaley Book Prize (National Women’s Studies Association, 2021)
On May 1, 1954, striking banana workers on the North Coast of Honduras brought the regional economy to a standstill, invigorating the Honduran labor movement and placing a series of demands on the US-controlled banana industry. Their actions ultimately galvanized a broader working-class struggle and reawakened long-suppressed leftist ideals. The first account of its kind in English, Roots of Resistance explores contemporary Honduran labor history through the story of the great banana strike of 1954 and centers the role of women in the narrative of the labor movement.
Drawing on extensive firsthand oral history and archival research, Suyapa G. Portillo Villeda examines the radical organizing that challenged US capital and foreign intervention in Honduras at the onset of the Cold War. She reveals the everyday acts of resistance that laid the groundwork for the 1954 strike and argues that these often-overlooked forms of resistance should inform analyses of present-day labor and community organizing. Roots of Resistance highlights the complexities of transnational company hierarchies, gender and race relations, and labor organizing that led to the banana workers strike and how these dynamics continue to reverberate in Honduras today.
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Praise for Roots of Resistance
“First and foremost, Portillo succeeds in recovering the voices of women workers. Portillo defines these women as lynchpins who freed male banana workers and US-owned companies from the concerns of workers’ food preparation…Portillo’s work on domestic relations reveals rich ground for future studies on the interplay of labor and gender in banana zones.”
— Carmen Kordick, Southern Connecticut State University, The Americas, Vol 79, Issue 2
“Roots of Resistance is a striking piece of scholarship. In addition to the book’s myriad insights, Portillo Villeda writes with a distinct humanity that professional historians frequently shy away from. She unabashedly speaks as a ‘Central-American-American’ and her project reflects a ‘search for self . . . the country beneath my skin.’ This urge to access an indistinct yet omnipresent past is familiar for those of us who grew up in households haunted by unspoken memories of the Cold War. For Central Americans who grew up in this liminal space between past and present, Portillo Villeda reminds us that there is not only insight in uncovering these stories, but power in preserving them, as the roots of future resistance.”
— Ilan Palacios Avineri, The University of Texas at Austin, A Contra corriente, Vol. 20, Num. 3
“…the author’s main purpose and the book’s major arguments: to connect, characterise and ground the resistance and social movements in Honduras after the coup of 2009 in the roots, character and legacies of the 1954 banana strike and its historiography and generational memories…Given the publicity associated with the 2009 coup, and its continuing legacy today in Honduras and far beyond, the book’s accomplishment is superbly relevant to Honduran scholarship and contemporary debates beyond it, not only to a very broad academic audience in the United States and beyond, but for an educated general public as well. In fact, it freshly links Honduran history to the present in ways that virtually no other history book about Honduras has done… This is a major and unique contribution to modern Honduran and Central American historiography.”
— Dario A. Euraque, Trinity College, Bulletin of Latin American Research, Volume 42, Issue 1
Alberto Beltrán, 1955
“Grounded in oral histories that revolve around the great strike of 1954 led by banana workers, Roots of Resistance offers a much-needed intersectional approach to histories of labor activism in Honduras by integrating race, class, and gender. Suyapa Portillo Villeda relates her stories with an underlying sense of urgency driven not only by her interest in documenting past struggles, but by a desire to show their relevance for the future of Honduras and Hondurans.”
— John Soluri, Carnegie Mellon University, author of Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States
“Portillo Villeda’s history of the 1954 strike joins a vast literature on the role and legacy of the fruit companies that once regarded the countries of Central America as their fiefdoms. It is eminently readable, empathetic, and meticulously researched but also entirely original in its attention to the gendered and racialized dimensions of the strike…her book should become essential reading about the labor movement in Central America, proof that it is possible to say something truly new about an already welltrodden episode in the region’s arduous history.”
— Mark Moberg, University of South Alabama, HAHR (November 2022)