Foundation Project

The role of the United States in Central America has evolved over centuries, from military intervention to economic expansion. American filibusters used expansionist policy to push for regime change throughout the Americas, often working for American companies. Perhaps the most famous of these is William Walker, who briefly became the President of Nicaragua, stationing himself in San Juan Del Norte (Greytown). At the turn of the twentieth century, banana and lumber companies built a series of "company towns" across the Caribbean lowlands of Central America, including Tela and La Ceiba in Honduras, and Bilwi (Puerto Cabezas) and Bluefields in Nicaragua. These companies took advantage of an already established functional region that depended on resource exports for centuries. The Caribbean lowlands also operates as a vernacular region, recognized by its inhabitants as facing the Caribbean and encouraging regional migration patterns that solidified its identity as a mix of African, Indigenous and European communities. Migration patterns played a major role in solidifying Caribbean Central America as a place distinct from the mainland. As an isolated region between land and water, it attracted escaped slaves, Native American hunter-gatherers, European anti-capitalists and pirates who moved from settlement to settlement from the beaches of Belize to Panama. This created a circulation of regional migration that influenced a more fluid sense of ethnicity in comparison to the ladino/mestizo population. Relocation diffusion, being the use of an idea or practice introduced by individuals from another location, can be seen in the traditional houses of the Garifuna, and in many of the foods they eat, including fufu and hudutu.

One of the region's largest indigenous groups is the Miskitu, who are famous for their turtle hunting skills. English colonists, pirates and settlers from the Cayman Islands hired the Miskitu for turtling, allowing their traditional ecological knowledge to diffuse to formal colonies. Their methods spreading to other parts of the Caribbean is an example of expansion diffusion, as the practice "snowballed" out to Jamaica, Belize and the Cayman Islands.

American companies built towns on Miskitu land, which were used to export bananas and lumber. However, the US government and its military also had an interest in the region. The US occupied the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua in the 1920s-1930s, attempting to squash the popular rebellion of the revolutionary leader Augusto Sandino. Thirty years later, in 1961, the US military used the pier of Bilwi, built by a New Orleans based lumber company, to set off for the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion.

Sources:
Hermann B. Deutsch, The Incredible Yanqui.
Lester Langley and Thomas Schoonover, The Banana Men
The Standard Fruit Papers, Tulane University Special Collections
The Hermann B. Deutsch Papers, Tulane Special Collections
The Sandino Rebellion Records, US State Department
Bernard Nietschmann, Caribbean Edge

New Orleans and the Central American Caribbean: An economic core and its periphery.