This is an ongoing and long-term project, supported by the Magnum Foundation Counter Histories Fellowship.
What is Peel It Good?
Peel It Good borrows its name from the glossy marketing slogan printed on Chiquita banana stickers, instructing consumers how to peel a banana “correctly”: gently, from top to bottom, without resistance. This project rejects that smooth instruction. Instead, it peels forcefully, layer by layer, through the banana’s history, refusing the ease with which its violence has been concealed.
Costa Rica is internationally celebrated as a tropical paradise, synonymous with biodiversity, ecotourism, and environmental leadership. Yet beneath this image lies a history of exploitation that continues to shape both bodies and landscapes. The banana plantations that once thought symbolized progress and economic prosperity have produced a legacy of dispossession, environmental devastation, and bodily harm. This is not a closed chapter of the past, but the living outcome of a system established by the United Fruit Company and sustained today by transnational corporations such as Chiquita and Del Monte.
In Sixaola, history marks the conditions, men work seventeen-hour days under sun and chemicals, hardened by labor and illness, coughing blood after years in the fields. Women across generations—bear care, reproduction, and survival. Rivers are poisoned, soils exhausted; the plantation economy scars ecosystems and lives.
This degradation threatens both environment and social life. Displacement, polluted water, illness, and dependency reflect a shared dispossession. Violence has grown as narcotrafficking merges with banana plantations; bodies found on farms reveal that these sites are no longer only exploitative workplaces, but territories of crime, fear, and death.
The violence inflicted on the land mirrors the violence imposed on workers’ bodies: both are treated as expendable commodities.
Peel It Good renders this continuity visible, exposing how colonial, corporate, and transnational violence persists in everyday life. At the same time, it honors the endurance and resistance of these communities, insisting that behind every exported banana lies a hidden history of pain—and a persistent hope that another future remains possible.
1970s protest poster urging a boycott of Del Monte, condemning its global plantation practices for fueling poverty, hunger, and worker exploitation, and warning that food is used as a tool of power in international politics.
A crate of plantains harvested by children in Sixaola, Limón, Costa Rica. These plantains are exported to South America.
A plastic toy gun lies on freshly harvested bananas, placed there by a little boy of 8 years old who often plays with it while working in the fields. Workers in Limón’s banana plantations have been increasingly targeted in organized crime-related violence, including thefts, internal disputes, and revenge killings, such as the 2023 murder of a foreman and several cases in 2024 in Batán, Limón. Residents say the rise in drug trafficking has created a tense environment for local communities.
June 11, 2024: Two men killed on a Limón banana plantation, amid reports linking the industry to rising violence, organized crime, and drug trafficking networks affecting local communities.
These are the small aircraft that, every week, spray agrochemicals over banana plantations, flying just a few meters above homes and schools in the Sixaola area. This practice causes a range of health problems among the local population, from common symptoms such as headaches, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and skin irritation, to more serious long-term conditions. The photograph is intervened with chemicals from the banana industry and paint.
Esteban began working on a banana plantation at an early age. At 37, he started experiencing eye discomfort, unaware that it was caused by years of exposure to agrochemicals. “Del Monte never took responsibility,” he says. Now 49, he lives with partial blindness and no compensation. His only income is a small pension of about $370 a month. supporting eleven family members.
Photograph of a Chiquita Brands International plantation worker showing burns on his face caused by the agrochemicals used within the plantation. The worker describes these burns as feeling like thousands of needles piercing his skin. The photograph is intervened with the same agrochemicals, along with punctures made by needles, so that its very materiality becomes testimony to what happens to workers’ skin. The intervention is carried out using agrochemicals sourced directly from the banana industry itself. In that contact, the paper reacts: it stains, yields, fractures. It reacts. And in that reaction, new questions emerge, as if the materiality of the archive itself were speaking. Thus, the question opens: if the archive reacts in this way, what happens to the skin? to the bodies that harvest day after day? to the childhoods marked by that same invisible contact? Some papers also absorb the workers’ sweat; others even the blood shed in the midst of the workday. The archive ceases to be a simple record: it becomes body, witness, voice.
Blue plastic banana bags impregnated with insecticides such as chlorpyrifos or bifenthrin are seen on a plantation in Costa Rica. The bags are used to protect banana bunches from pests but pose serious health risks to workers, including acute toxicity affecting the nervous, respiratory, and circulatory systems. Workers report cases of vision loss caused by direct contact with the bags while handling them without protective equipment.
Six-month-old Dylan Lorenzo lies in a bed pedestal with bananas arranged by his mother, Dylan had been hospitalized after repeated respiratory complications, while his family mourns the recent death of his four-year-old cousin, a child who spent days intubated before dying from cancer and parasitic infections. Over the past decade, at least ten children from the same extended family have died before the age of five, victims of preventable diseases linked to contaminated water and chronic exposure to agrochemicals used in banana plantations. Residents and workers describe a cycle in which children are born, raised, and buried among banana fields, where chemical exposure and harsh labor conditions turn common illnesses into fatal ones.
A shirt stained with chemicals and latex after a 12-hour workday. This is how the workers’ clothing ends up including that of children, who earn only nine dollars per day.
Peel it Good is a multidisciplinary project that unfolds across photography, archival research, and intervention. The act of intervening in the archive activates it as a living document, as a witness to the realities experienced in the past of banana plantations. It is a gesture that stretches the archive, revealing what still persists.
The intervention is carried out using agrochemicals sourced from the industry itself. In this contact, the paper reacts: it stains, yields, cracks. It responds. And through that reaction, new questions emerge, as if the material itself were speaking.
The question then opens up:
if the archive reacts this way,
what happens to the skin?
to the bodies that harvest day after day?
to the childhoods shaped by that same invisible contact?
Some papers also absorb the workers’ sweat; others even bear traces of blood shed during the workday. The archive ceases to be a simple record: it becomes a body, a witness, a voice.
The project works with living and contemporary archives that project questions into the future. Through the documentation of banana workers on platforms such as TikTok, it reveals how certain dynamics of exploitation rooted in Taylorism and in contemporary forms of slavery are choreographed, aestheticized, and circulated on social media, becoming content that the capitalist system both produces and consumes.
Peel it Good thus aspires to become an anthropological showcase: a space where structural violence is transformed into shared spectacle, into digital narrative, into symbolic commodity.
A website, currently under construction, will host this archive in its multiplicity: the historical, the intervened, and the contemporary production. It is conceived as a space that seeks to democratize access to both the document and its language, built from within the community as well as through research and artistic practice. As a guiding thread, the project traces connections between Latin American archives and the history of banana plantations, revealing continuities, ruptures, and resonances.
Finally, Peel it Good is envisioned as an expanded exhibition: a space where performance, objects, projections, photography, and archive converge. A place where the viewer not only observes, but smells, feels, and embodies the reality the project evokes. All of this will culminate in a final fanzine-format publication, designed to document the archive in print. This material will not only circulate at events where the project is presented, but will also be distributed within communities, functioning as a tangible witness to the history of bananas.
