This is a study of how land rights, banana contracts, and gendered ideologies and practices coalesce to shape rural livelihoods on Ecuador’s southern coast. In 2012, over three hundred workers organized into five agricultural associations to apply for Plan Tierras and the redistribution of the military’s banana and guadua bamboo plantations. In 2015, four of the associations successfully gained their provisional land title to continue with banana exports whereas the transfer of the guadua plantations remains at an impasse. I use a (feminist) political ecology framework and (political) ethnography to analyze land redistribution, contracts, and gendered disparities in Ecuador’s banana industry – the world’s leading banana exporter. My analysis is based on fourteen months of ethnography in 2018-2019, over 80 semi-structured interviews with members and workers of the five associations, and a photovoice project held with women banana workers. I make three inter-related arguments. First, the ability for associations to pay the state for the land is predicated on the banana contract. Without a contract, the associations are vulnerable and economically insecure. Unstable contracts or unreliable banana contracts contribute to flexible work contracts and labor precarity. Second, the gender quotas required for the association’s membership increased women’s access to land rights and enhanced women’s leadership and decision-making power within the associations. However, women’s ability to benefit from land is based on the gendered division of labor that places women in the packing plant and men in the field. Third, I argue bureaucratic processes hinder the effective redistribution of land. Waiting for the state and land rights turns into a grievance that encourages local organizations to join national-movement organizations and seek alternative channels to the state. Waiting is a temporal and spatial processes and a site of struggle for the recognition of land rights and a political opportunity for movement-building.