During a recent trip to the food market, while contemplating buying bananas, I was suddenly struck by the image of Chiquita Banana on a label sticker. Fruit-topped and smiling, she seemed to be inviting me to enjoy the same tropical sun under which she labored to provide the world with the wholesome goodness of bananas. I vaguely remembered seeing this kind of image before, that is of a woman dressed up with fruit, maybe on TV. Intrigued by the idea of mobilizing the image of a Latin American woman to sell bananas, I investigated Chiquita and discovered an amazing gendered, racialized history, intertwined with the American political agenda and popular imagination in the 20th century. In this paper, I examine how gender relations, framed by notions of masculinity, femininity, race, nation, and family, have shaped the creation of the banana market, the conditions of labor which supply the market with produce, and the emergence of the banana as a cultural signifier.