Tanya Flores Hodgson

Tanya Flores Hodgson’s Banana Republica, 2021, is a visceral self-portrait that denounces the entanglement of corporate greed, imperial violence, and intergenerational trauma in Central America. Against a backdrop collaged with Chiquita stickers—each rebranded with the names of Central American countries—the artist stages herself as both subject and witness. Wearing a white blouse stained with blood, she holds a basket of bananas dyed a piercing red. Blood splatters across the composition, seeping into the archival plantation image that frames her body, collapsing past and present into a single tableau of violence and memory.
The work explicitly references the legacy of companies such as United Fruit (now Chiquita) and Dole, which throughout the 20th century controlled vast expanses of land in Central America through colonialist practices, hyper-exploitation, and CIA-backed coups such as the 1954 overthrow of Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz. These interventions seeded decades of civil war, fueled death squads, and poisoned thousands of workers with pesticides. Yet, as Flores Hodgson underscores, this violent history remains cloaked in the cheerful branding of banana corporations, epitomized here by the smiling Chiquita lady surrounded by a halo of corporate logos.

Through blood, bananas, and body, Banana Republica exposes the gendered dimensions of this violence: the artist bleeds while holding fruit that stands for both nourishment and death, recalling forced sterilizations, toxic exposures, and the exploitation of women laborers in the fields. By placing herself at the center, Flores Hodgson insists that the trauma of foreign intervention is not a distant past but a lived inheritance. The work reclaims the visual language of branding and advertising to stage a counter-image—one that forces recognition of the costs borne by Central Americans under U.S. imperialism and corporate domination.