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The Costa Rica Reader

Duke University Press

Chapter One

The exceptional attributes of contemporary Costa Rica are commonly assumed to have pre-Columbian or colonial origins. In the century after 1880, nationalist historians forged three myths in particular about these origins, ones frequently repeated uncritically by visitors and American scholars. One is that when the Spanish arrived, they found but a tiny indigenous population in Costa Rica. The second holds that the Spanish conquest of the area was essentially peaceful. The third, more complex, myth of Costa Rican exceptionalism claims that the lack of indigenous people to serve as laborers and the scarcity of precious metals made Costa Rica a poor and marginal colony, a condition from which a society of homogeneous yeoman farmers without any meaningful class or racial divisions emerged and flowered in the eighteenth century. This, then, constituted the humble but sound origin of the "rural democracy" that remains the core of the nation-state to the present day.

The first two of these myths are nonsense. Historical demographers have shown that prior to the arrival of Columbus in Cariari (today Puerto Limon) in 1502, the territory of Costa Rica was home to about 400,000 indigenous people. They were organized into small and politically fragmented chieftainships, not comparable in complexity to the Mayan groups in the north of Central America. Some of the largest and most organized indigenous societies in Costa Rica were located in the Nicoya region. They were influenced by Mesoamerican culture, and the cultivation of corn predominated. In the Caribbean lowlands and the Pacific south, by contrast, populations were more dispersed, the consumption of pejibaye (the rich, pulpy fruit of a palm tree) and yucca was the norm, and the influence of Chibcha culture from northern South America prevailed. Both poles influenced the Central Valley, which was divided into two confederations of chieftainships, Garabito and Guarco. The Spanish conquest of Costa Rica lasted for more than half a century after efforts got underway in 1510. The genocidal enslavement of the indigenous societies of Nicoya on the Pacific north coast was the conquest's first stage. Its second phase began with fruitless attempts to consolidate a Spanish settlement on the country's Caribbean side. In the process, the Spaniards reduced the indigenous population to the point of extinction through disease, war, reprisals, relocation, and brutal exploitation. The Native American population stood at about 120,000 in 1569, and had fallen to 10,000 by 1611. By 1675, a mere 500 "Indios" paid tribute. One can hardly call any of this a peaceful conquest of a virtually uninhabited area.

Addressing the myth of rural democracy requires a more nuanced look at the way colonial Costa Rica was configured into three different zones-a basic division established by about 1650. In the Central Valley encomenderos (Spaniards with special rights to indigenous labor and tribute), colonial functionaries, and ecclesiastics took control of the agricultural and craft wealth produced by the indigenous populations. In the Pacific center and north, cows, mules, and horses were raised on great estates. This area's economy experienced its greatest growth after 1750, when the displacement of pasturage by export crops in El Salvador opened a market for cattle on the hoof from Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Finally, on the Caribbean side, some cacao production developed and enjoyed a brief boom, but waned in the face of competition from Caracas, Maracaibo and Guayaquil. Although the cacao boom was based on the labor of imported African slaves, the slave trade was limited in Costa Rica and did not become an alternative to compensate for the collapse of the indigenous population. Beyond these spaces dominated by Spanish culture, in the coastal plains of Talamanca and near the current border with Nicaragua, so called indios bravos (wild Indians) took refuge and resisted Spanish conquest until the second half of the nineteenth century.

Costa Rica found itself on the margins of the colonial Central American world due to a lack of mines and the scarcity of indigenous survivors. The Spaniards who settled in Costa Rica failed to construct a society similar to that of their neighbors, that is, one based on the exploitation of indigenous and slave labor. The development of a peasant economy in the Central Valley indeed proved the fundamental outcome of this failure. The families of small and medium agriculturalists constituted a free peasantry with a strong mercantile vocation, and they did become the principal social group of the Central Valley during the eighteenth century. In contrast to the myth of rural democracy, however, an unequal access to land and significant differences in wealth marked their reality, and in their majority, they had mixed-race (mestizo and mulatto) ancestry. Agricultural colonization begun by this peasantry extended the primary area of settlement from Cartago and environs to the west, leading to the founding of the towns of Heredia (1706), San Jose (1736), and Alajuela (1782). These tiny urban milieus, where the more specialized artisans lived, also bred a clear colonial elite made up of small groups of merchants, owners of large estates, and military, civil, and ecclesiastical functionaries. Their wealth came from unequal exchange with the peasantry: they bought the agricultural surplus at low prices and sold imported articles at high ones. The so-called rural democracy of the eighteenth century was a society of peasants and merchants in which the exploitation of the former by the latter was not based on physical coercion, but rather on the different position each enjoyed in market relations.

Ethnic and class differences did divide and separate the population of the Central Valley, but the people experienced four important processes of integration. First, social hierarchies depended increasingly on economic wealth rather than ethnic origin, a phenomenon aided by the process of race mixture. According to figures from 1777-78, the province was ethnically comprised of 60 percent mestizos, 18 percent mulattoes and blacks, 12 percent Indians, and only 10 percent Spanish (both peninsular and American-born, the latter of whom claimed pure racial lineage back to Spain). Second, in contrast to other parts of Hispanic America, where a deep cultural division existed between Indian and Hispanic societies, in the Central Valley of Costa Rica, a Hispanic and Catholic culture took shape and was shared-if unequally-by most groups. The third factor favoring social cohesion was the size and location of the mass of the population. In 1824, the province had only about sixty thousand inhabitants, and four out of every five of them lived in the Central Valley, in small urban and rural communities strongly endogamic. As a result, the spread of family ties helped to compensate for social and ethnic divisions and promoted cohesion at a time when colonization of the agricultural frontier tended to remove emigrants from their hometowns. Finally, as some of the following selections will reveal, Costa Ricans tended to channel individual and collective conflicts along legal and institutional avenues even in the colonial period.

When Costa Rica became independent in 1821, it was the society of the Central Valley- not that of the Caribbean with its...