United Fruit Company and Guatemala of Miguel Angel Asturias

Author(s)

Amina Maria Figueroa Vergara

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2010-04-16

Examining board members

Julio Cesar Pimentel Pinto Filho; Cecília da Silva Azevedo; Laura Janina Hosiasson

• Advisor: Julio Cesar Pimentel Pinto Filho

Abstract

In the end of the XIX Century a young American enterpreneur founded in the Republic of Costa Rica a company to export banana: the United Fruit Company. Even though the banana commerce and other tropical fruits had represented only a part of the exported products by the Central America countries the coffee export for instance has always been more significant the companies that traded bananas were eternalized by a great variety of novelists in some Central American countries were they acted. This work aims to show, as a possibility to represent the History of the United Fruit Company in Guatemala, the books that composes the Banana Trilogy: Viento fuerte (1949), El Papa Verde (1954) and Los ojos de los enterrados (1960) from the Guatemaltec writer Miguel Angel Asturias. Using novels as a historic source and accomplishing the joint between the literary and historic speech, the intention is to show the interpretation of Asturias concernig the action of this muitinational company in his country, to open debate between both speeches and to articulate the historic information and the treatment that Asturias gives to this information in his Banana Trilogy books. (AU)