Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Transnational Histories, Literatures, and Cultures

CHAPTER 1. Costa Rican Grounds and the Founding of the Coffee Republics

W hen the National Theater first opened its doors in San José in 1897, Costa Rica was beginning an era of progress, modernization, and urbanization. The inauguration of the theater, with its neoclassical architecture and imported Italian artwork (Ferrero 2004, 146), marked over two decades of the fortification of the national economy and the consolidation of the nation’s cultural identity. According to the Costa Rican literary critic Álvaro Quesada Soto, the theater was viewed by many as a “réplica en miniatura de una ópera europea [miniature replica of a European opera house]” (1998, 31), representing not only the romantic ideals but also the positivist, modernizing agenda of the coffee oligarchy and its extended network known as the caficultura (caficulture).1 A cornerstone of nation building in Costa Rica, the theater remains a symbol of the cosmopolitan aspirations of an oligarchic class for whom the theater was built (1998, 31) and its self-styled intelligentsia called El Olimpo (the Olympus) (Quesada Soto 1988, 1995, 1998; Rojas and Ovares 1995).2 Affiliated with the caficultura through family ties, education, profession , and economic, political, and cultural networks, the Olimpo wrote for an exclusive public, as literacy at the turn of the century was limited to the educated, wealthy class. It is estimated that in 1892 close to 69 percent of the population in Costa Rica was nonliterate (Segura Montero 1995, 12n4; Fumero 2002), compared to as high as 80 to 90 percent in the rest of Central America (Taracena Arriola 1993, 170; Fumero 2002). At best, in the 1860s 30 percent of the Costa Rican population was literate, while a far smaller percentage had access to print material (Vega Jiménez 1992, 117; Molina Jiménez 1995, 65).3 Privileged by socioeconomic class and racial and gender status, a powerful “poCHAPTER 1 Costa Rican Grounds and the Founding of the Coffee Republics 20 Dividing the Isthmus blación maculina alfabeta” (male literate population) (Taracena Arriola 1993, 170) with “universal suffrage” ruled over the majority of people in Central America. According to Arturo Taracena Arriola, this ruling elite, comprising at most 10 to 20 percent of the population (1993, 170), determined how states would be run and how nations would be defined. That group in Costa Rica was El Olimpo—the male privileged class associated with the coffee-producing oligarchy. From the start, the literate and literary culture of the ruling caficultura played a significant role in producing the founding cultural narratives of Costa Rica, as they would across Central America. Intellectuals, writers, and politicians associated with El Olimpo assumed the task of molding national identity through the development of political, economic , and cultural policies. Writers such as the Costa Rican national Carlos Gagini (1865–1925) and the Guatemalan émigré Máximo Soto Hall (1871–1944) expressed the caficulture’s economic, political, and social values, as well as its cultural anxieties at the turn of the century. In their works, Soto Hall and Gagini represented the tensions of a brokered Central American cultural intelligentsia that sought economic, political, and cultural leverage on the eve of the construction of the Panama Canal. In his arguably anti-imperialist, futuristic novel titled El problema (The Problem) (1899), Soto Hall identified the subjection of the Central American national oligarchies and bourgeois classes to the United States as an ideological problem and social pathology that would continue to plague Central America well into the future. In a similar vein, Gagini, in El árbol enfermo (The Sick Tree) (1928), and José Martí, in his literary sketches of Costa Rica written during his short travels through the country, examined the crisis of a nation struggling to define itself as modern and cosmopolitan while staying true to its provincial traditions and ideals.4 The Making of a Nation in the Tropics On the cusp of the twentieth century, Costa Rica would thus emerge as a modern Central American nation, with a tropical difference. Concentrated in the Central Valley—the coffee-producing region of the country—the Costa Rican intelligentsia consciously cultivated the image of Costa Rica as an exceptional nation (Molina Jiménez and Palmer 1992; Ovares et al. 1993; Ovares 1994; Molina Jiménez 1995) and laid Costa Rican Grounds 21 the foundations of its national mythology as an arcadian coffee republic (Quesada Soto 1998, 35). According to Flora Ovares: Esta visión del pasado, forjada sobre los mitos del paraíso y la edad de oro...