Who were the 700 people from New Orleans who helped bring bananas to the U.S.?

Bananas are everywhere — school cafeterias, $9 smoothies, perhaps even rotting on your kitchen counter. They’re a cheap source of fiber and potassium, and it’s no wonder they’re Walmart’s best selling product.

Bella Gamboa, currently a med student in Baltimore, has been casually interested in the history of the banana since high school.

“They are such an omnipresent fruit in the U.S.,” she said. “But the way that we eat them here is also a very particular thing.”

The most ubiquitous variety of banana in the U.S., the Cavendish banana, is a relatively recent invention. It wasn’t popularized until the 1950s, and in much of the world, they still eat other, very different varieties of the fruit which aren’t necessarily yellow, long or skinny.

Recently, Gamboa was listening to an episode of NPR’s Throughline from 2020, “There Will Be Bananas,” which details the history of the banana in the States. The episode follows Minor Cooper Keith, a businessman who ruthlessly recruited people to lay railroads in Costa Rica in the early 1870s.

He eventually used the railroad to export bananas to the U.S., a business venture that eventually became the United Fruit Company, but before completion, most of the workers he recruited died or ran away once they knew how bad the conditions were. The railroads are the result of thousands of deaths. Even Keith’s own brothers lost their lives working on the project.

A few years into the endeavor, Keith went to New Orleans to recruit more workers, allegedly from prisons.

“He basically calls for volunteers,” said Dan Koeppel, author of the book “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World,” on the podcast. “And he says, anybody who volunteers — helps me build my railroad to completion — is going to get a pardon. Seven hundred prisoners volunteer. But only 25 prisoners survive to get their pardons — 25 out of 700.”

Looking into prisoners’ stories

“I was really intrigued by this detail,” said Gamboa.

The detail was presented as an aside in the larger story about bananas, but to Gamboa, the historic footnote was “part of this broader trend that’s often sort of at the margins.” The story of bananas, and many other things for that matter, seem to be a story about incarcerated labor.

“Who were these prisoners? What were their stories/fates?” Gamboa asked Curious Louisiana. “How does Louisiana unexpectedly fit into the story of bananas as an American staple food?”

Let’s start with Koeppel. He’s far from the first to repeat this statistic. Many contemporary books and articles about the history of bananas repeat a similar line with minimal variation: “700 prisoners” arrived in Costa Rica to work on the railroads, and only 25 survived. But these sources provide scant details regarding these people or what actually happened to them. Through library archives, old newspaper clippings and interviews with both Koeppel and a historian, Curious Louisiana looked into it.

They weren’t prisoners. At least, not all of them.

According to Eric Seiferth, curator/historian and lead on the current exhibition at The Historic New Orleans Collection titled “Captive State: Louisiana and the Making of Mass Incarceration,” there’s no known original source information documenting 700 prisoners leaving New Orleans for Costa Rica. If that did happen, someone should have definitely noticed.

“Seven hundred people would be more people than there were spaces to incarcerate in New Orleans,” he said. He doesn’t have exact numbers for the Orleans Parish Prison at the time, but he said when its replacement was built in 1930, the capacity was 400 beds. “It’s hard for me to believe that there were so many people that they had 700 people in the Orleans Parish Prison, when 100 years later, the jail had half that capacity.”

Plus, Seiferth said, the story doesn’t really cohere with incarcerated labor practices or the pardon system at the time. According to him, the early 1870s lines up with the convict lease era in Louisiana where rights to contract out that labor were owned by one guy: Samuel James.

“The city would have no incentive to send away prisoners because they relied on them for their urban workforce,” he said. “That’s who did everything in the city, who took care of the streets and cleaned the markets and cleaned the buildings. All that work was done by people in the workhouses and in the police jails and things like that.”

Plus, Keith also wouldn’t have the authority to grant pardons to anyone — that was and still is under the discretion of the governor.

‘It will be repeated again’

Here’s what we do know: in the 1870s, Minor Cooper Keith was strapped for labor while building the railroad, and he, or someone he was affiliated with, went to New Orleans to do some recruiting.

According to “Empire of Green and Gold,” a book written by Charles Morrow Wilson, a former publicist for the United Fruit Company, Keith’s uncle, Henry Meiggs placed an ad in New Orleans’ newspapers enticing people with the promise of steady work and $1/day. The book “Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World” by Peter Chapman tells a similar story, adding that the wages attracted “many occupants of the city’s jail.”

But there are no citations for where these books got that information from, and a library associate at the New Orleans Public Library was unable to turn up the advertisement or any advertisement placed by Meiggs. A search in the Times-Picayune archives yielded an 1872 ad recruiting people to work on the railroad in Costa Rica but for $.80 per day. It was not placed by Keith or his uncle.

Either way, people went. Probably because the promise of a job and pay were better than whatever their lives looked like at home. Working on the railroad was hard and dangerous. Most people didn’t make it back, and their stories seem to be lost to history.

New Orleans comes into play

As for how New Orleans fits into the larger story of bananas, that part of the question is much more straightforward — a matter purely of geography. According to Koeppel, it was key to bringing bananas into the U.S. because it was centrally located. The company that eventually merged with Keith’s venture to become the United Fruit Company was the Boston Fruit Company.

“That gives you an idea of where they were shipping bananas before: Boston, New York, Port of New Jersey,” said Koeppel. “That’s great for urban demand in the most populated parts of the country, but if you’re trying to get to Chicago, St. Louis, other Midwestern cities, then you need to be a little closer.”

New Orleans was that closer port to help distribute bananas beyond New England and to the rest of the U.S., and workers from New Orleans lost their lives laying the tracks that made exporting bananas from Costa Rica possible.

Today, incarcerated labor is still embedded in the nation’s supply chain. 

“In prisons across Louisiana today,” Seiferth said, “everybody’s forced to labor, and they’re not really paid.”