Race and Labor, from Maya Ruins to Bananas and Chewing Gum

The Moynihan Institute’s Program on Latin America and the Caribbean is proud to host Sam Holley-Kline from the American Council of Learned Societies fellowship program.

Holley-Kline will present as-yet-unpublished archival research on the relationships between archaeological labor, race and extractive industry in early twentieth-century Guatemala. The paper explores how ideas of race prevalent in the banana and chicle (chewing gum) industries played out in two contexts: the Archaeological Institute of America’s excavations in Quiriguá (1910-1915) and the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s research in Uaxactún (1926-1937), both of which relied on transnational labor forces.

In the first, archaeologists drew on patterns of racial discrimination characteristic of the United Fruit Company in managing workers. In the second, racialization did not entail discrimination but still reflected archaeologists’ beliefs about what kinds of bodies were suitable for certain kinds of work. Ultimately, the research seeks to understand the politics of archaeology from the ground up, and relative to the transnational firms and actors that scholars relied on to do their work in the field.