Contested Identities in Costa Rica

Contested Identities in Costa Rica PDF

Author: Liz Harvey-Kattou

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2019-06-28

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1789624177

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Costa Rica is a country known internationally for its eco-credentials, dazzling coastlines, and reputation as one of the happiest and most peaceful nations on earth. Beneath this façade, however, lies an exclusionary rhetoric of nationalism bound up in the concept of the tico, as many Costa Ricans refer to themselves. Beginning by considering the very idea of national identity and what this constitutes, this book explores the nature of the idealised tico identity, demonstrating the ways in which it has assumed a white supremacist, Central Valley-centric, patriarchal, heteronormative stance based on colonial ideals. Chapters two and three then go on to consider the literature and films produced that stand in opposition to this normative image of who or what is tico and their creation as vehicles of soft power which aim to question social norms. This book explores protest literature from the 1970s by Quince Duncan, Carmen Naranjo, and Alfonso Chase who narrate their experiences from the margins of society by virtue of their identity as Afro-Costa Rican, feminist, and homosexual authors. Cinema from the twenty-first century is then analysed to demonstrate the nuanced position chosen by national directors Esteban Ramírez, Paz Fábrega, Jurgen Ureña, and Patricia Velásquez to challenge the dominant nation-image as they reinscribe youth culture, a female consciousness, trans identity, and Afro-Costa Rica onto the fabric of the nation.

Threatening Others

Threatening Others PDF

Author: Carlos Sandoval-Garcia

Publisher: Ohio University Press

Published: 2014-08-27

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0896804437

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During the last two decades, a decline in public investment has undermined some of the national values and institutions of Costa Rica. The resulting sense of dislocation and loss is usually projected onto Nicaraguan “immigrants.” Threatening Others: Nicaraguans and the Formation of National Identities in Costa Rica explores the representation of the Nicaraguan “other” in the Costa Rican imagery. It also seeks to address more generally why the sense of national belonging constitutes a crucial identification in contemporary societies. Interdisciplinary and based on extensive fieldwork, it looks critically at the “exceptionalism” that Costa Ricans take for granted and view as a part of their national identity. Carlos Sandoval-García argues that Nicaraguan immigrants, once perceived as a “communist threat,” are now victims of an invigorated, racialized politics in which the Nicaraguan nationality has become an offense in itself. Threatening Others is a deeply searching book that will interest scholars and students in Latin American studies and politics, cultural studies, and ethnic studies.

Contested Identities Split Loyalties

Contested Identities Split Loyalties PDF

Author: Val Karanxha

Publisher:

Published: 2020-09-26

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13:

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The core claim of this book is that Puerto Rico is the outcome of distinct imperial policies that shaped the identity. The US takeover in 1898 became a critical point whether to preserve the imperial identity or to embrace the North American, identity and culture. In their effort to maintain their control over Puerto Rico, the local elites embraced the nation-state's idea to block attempts of assimilation and invent a Puerto Rican national identity. This political objective became divisive and led to clashes between the clusters of the elite competing for power. One cluster of the Puerto Rican elites supported independence from the United States. The other cluster promoted cultural nationalism within the United States. Hence, in their political discourse, for both clusters, the other was the United States.

The Saints of Progress

The Saints of Progress PDF

Author: Carmen Kordick

Publisher: University Alabama Press

Published: 2019-01-29

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 0817320024

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A reshaping of traditional understandings of Costa Rica and its national identity The Saints of Progress: A History of Coffee, Migration, and Costa Rican National Identity chronicles the development of the Tarrazú Valley, a historically remote—although internationally celebrated—coffee-growing region. Carmen Kordick’s work traces the development of this region from the early nineteenth century to the first decades of the twenty-first century to consider the nation-building process from the margins, while also questioning traditional scholarly works that have reproduced, rather than deconstructed, Costa Rica’s exceptionalist national mythology, which hail Costa Rica as Central America’s “white,” democratic, nonviolent, and egalitarian republic. In this compelling political, economic, and lived history, Kordick suggests that Costa Rica’s exceptionalist and egalitarian mythology emerged during the Cold War, as revolution, civil war, military dictatorship, and state violence plagued much of Central America. From the vantage point of Costa Rica’s premier coffee-producing region, she examines local, national, and transnational processes. This deeply textured narrative details the inauguration of coffee capitalism, which heightened existing class divisions; a successful armed revolt against the national government, which forged the current political regime; and the onset of massive out-migration to the United States. Kordick’s research incorporates more than one hundred oral histories and thousands of archival sources gathered in both Costa Rica and the United States to produce a human history of Costa Rica’s past. Her work on the recent past profiles the experiences of migrants in the United States, mostly in New Jersey, where many undocumented Costa Ricans find low-paid work in the restaurant and landscaping sectors. The result is a fine-grained examination of Tarrazú’s development from the 1820s to the present that reshapes traditional understandings of Costa Rica and its national past.

Signifying Identities

Signifying Identities PDF

Author: Anthony Cohen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-10-12

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1134651678

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This collection of extended papers examines the ways in which relations between national, ethnic, religious and gender groups are underpinned by each group's perceptions of their distinctive identities and of the nature of the boundaries which divide them. Questions of frontier and identity are theorised with reference to the Maori, Australian aborigines and Celtic groups. The theoretical arguments and ethnographic perspectives of this book place it at the cutting edge of contemporary anthropological scholarship on identity, with respect to the study of ethnicity, nationalism, localism, gender and indigenous peoples. It will be of value to scholars and students of social and cultural anthropology, human geography and social psychology.

Place, Language, and Identity in Afro-Costa Rican Literature

Place, Language, and Identity in Afro-Costa Rican Literature PDF

Author: Dorothy E. Mosby

Publisher:

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13:

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In Place, Language, and Identity in Afro-Costa Rican Literature, Dorothy E. Mosby investigates contemporary black writing from Costa Rica and argues that it reveals the story of a people formed by multiple migrations and cultural transformations. Afro-Costa Rican writers from different historical periods express their relation to place, language, and identity as a "process," a transformation partly due to sociohistorical circumstances and partly in reaction against the national myths of whiteness in the dominant Hispanic culture. Black writers in Costa Rica have used creative writing as a means to express this change in self-identity--as West Indians, as Costa Ricans, as "Latinos," and as a contentious union of all these cultural identifications--as well as to combat myths and extrinsic definitions of their culture. Mosby examines the transformation of identity in works by black writers in Costa Rica of Afro-West Indian descent as particular national identities find common ground in the expression of an Afro-Costa Rican identity. These writers include Alderman Johnson Roden, Dolores Joseph, Eulalia Bernard, Quince Duncan, Shirley Campbell, and Delia McDonald, all of whose works are analyzed for their use of language and their reflections on place and exile. Their works are also read as articulations of generational shifts in the assertion of cultural and national identity. Mosby convincingly argues that Afro-Costa Rican literature emerged out of the African-derived oral traditions of Anglo-West Indian literature. She then goes on to show how second-generation writers included this literary tradition in their work, while fourth-generation poets refer to it only through occasional allusions. With the current growth of interest in Afro-Hispanic and Afro-Latin American cultural and literary studies, this book will be essential for courses in Latin American and Caribbean literature, comparative studies, Diaspora studies, history, cultural studies, and the literature of migration.

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