THE OTHER IN THE OTHER: USING THE STORIES OF QUINCE DUNCAN TO TEACH COSTA RICAN CULTURE AND HISTORY IN THE SPANISH LANGUAGE CLASSROOM

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By

JERRY KINNEY

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A THESIS

Submitted to the faculty of the Graduate School of Creighton University in Partial

Fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in the Department

of Liberal Studies

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Omaha, NE

August 6, 2016

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ABSTRACT

Many intermediate Spanish foreign language teachers are currently “teaching culture” as a series of facts that are added to lessons sporadically when time allows.

Research shows that high school-level Spanish teachers predominately focus on teaching grammatical structures and vocabulary because this is what textbooks and exams, including the National Spanish Exam, emphasize. This thesis argues that by reading and discussing the short stories of the Costa Rican writer Quince Duncan, students will be able to learn about the country’s history and culture from the perspectives of his characters while, also, still learning grammar and vocabulary.

Duncan’s characters are members of the country’s minority West Indian community and have been left out of the nation’s dominant historical narrative, la leyenda blanca. By examining the non-dominate culture through these characters and their lives, the idea of a national culture will be problematized and students will learn for than just factual knowledge. This thesis provides teachers with materials to teach about Costa Rica’s historical events through the lens Duncan's stories provide.

Students can become aware of the ways in which people at the margins and centers of a society view each other and interact and also begin to consider these interactions in their own cultures. Along with a detailed summary of four of

Duncan’s stories, are lists of key vocabulary, historical background summaries, teaching suggestions, and discussion questions that will allow teachers to insert these stories into existing curricula. Kinney iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am very thankful to the many professors who helped me conceive and create this thesis. Specifically, I would like to thank Dr. Fidel Fajardo-Acosta for his detailed feedback, guidance, and willingness to spend over two years on this project.

I am also deeply indebted to my two thesis readers, Dr. Claudia García and Dr.

Patrick Murray, as well as to Dr. Ngwarsungu Chiwengo and Dr. Richard White for their inspiring courses that helped me better understand the world. Finally, I want to thank Mr. Quince Duncan for taking the time to respond to my interview questions.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION….……………………………………..………………………….……………………………..1

CHAPTER 1--The Danger of The Single Story………………………………..………………….….22

CHAPTER 2—Teaching With Stories: Costa Rican History and Literature……………..36

CHAPTER 3—Living In Limón: “Una canción en la madrugada”/”Dawn’s Song”……………………………………………………………………………………………………....75

CHAPTER 4—Fighting In Limón: “Un regalo para la abuela”/ “A Gift for Grandma”…………………………………………………………………………………………………….….…96

CHAPTER 5—Playing In Limón: “El partido/ “Go-o-o-o-al!”...... 112

CHAPTER 6—Working In Limón: “La leyenda de José Gordon”/ “The Legend of Joe

Gordon”………………………………………………………………………………………………………….127

CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………………………………….153

APPENDIX—An Interview with Quince Duncan………………………………………………..157

WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………………………………………162

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. 1. A conceptual model of the Standards' 3 P's…………………………………………….p. 11

Fig. 2. Las Bolas stone spheres near the Terraba River in Southeastern Costa Rica created by the Diquís People between 500-1000 A.D…………………………………….….p. 42

Fig. 3. African tripod. This artifact was found in Limón Province and was created between 300-800 A.D…………………………………………………………………………………..…p. 43

Fig. 4. A map of the colonial division in the Caribbean………………………………………p. 45

Fig. 5. Tomás Povedano de Arcos (1847-1943), Rescate de Dulcehé (before 1941).

Oil panting depicting the Spanish Governor Coronado returning a young woman,

Dulcehé, to her brother, the cacique Corrohore, after her anduction by a rival tribe.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….……...p. 46

Fig. 6. A map showing the cities of San José and Alajuela…………………………………..p. 50

Fig. 7. Much of Costa Rica's coffee was shipped to Europe from the port of

Puntarenas……………………………………………………………………………………………………..p. 54

Fig. 8. Detail of the mural "Alegoría del café y el banano" by the Italian artist Aleardo

Villa that hand in Costa Rica's National Theater……………………………………………….p. 56

Fig. 9. Coffee collectors in Costa Rica at the end of the 19th century…………………...p. 57

Fig. 10. Statue of Juan Santamaría in Alajuela, Costa Rica. Santamaría set fire to a building during a battle with William Walker’s forces saving many Coast Ricans.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………p. 58

Fig. 11. Basilica of the Virgen of Los Angeles in Cartago, Costa Rica…………………...p. 60

Fig. 12. Carlos Luis Fallas's 1941 novel Mamita Yunai about the challenges working for United Fruit………………………………………………………………………………………………p. 64

Fig. 13. Costa Rica’s Limón Province is highlighted in red………………………………....p. 77 Kinney vi

Fig. 14. Workers hauling banana by mule in the early 1900’s…………………………....p. 80

Fig. 15. A Costa Rican banana plantation in the early 1900's……………………………..p. 83

Fig. 16. A Limonese family photographed near the end of the 19th century……….p. 87

Fig. 17. A Calypso band in Limón……………………………………………………………………..p. 89

Fig. 18. A Costa Rican passenger train in 1910…………………………………………………p. 96

Fig. 19. Map of Costa Rica's Provinces……………………………………………………………...p. 99

Fig. 20. A twenty colón coin…………………………………………………………………………..p. 100

Fig. 21. A cartoon published in Diario de Costa Rican in 1923………………………...p. 109

Fig. 22. Joel Campbell (left) celebrates after scoring the first goal for the Costa Rican national team in their 2014 World Cup match against Uruguay………………………p. 119

Fig. 23. El Estadio Nacional de Costa Rica opened in 2011 and replaced the original national stadium that was built in 1924. The Costa Rican National Soccer Team plays its home games in this stadium…………………………………………………………….p. 122

Fig. 24. Map of Costa Rica's Atlantic Zone showing the railway that connected Puerto

Limón with the exiting line……………………………………………………………………………p. 129

Fig. 25. Workers in Costa Rican cutting bananas from trees……………………………p. 130

Fig. 26. Marcus Garvey in 1924……………………………………………………………………...p. 136

Fig. 27. Jamaican Banana workers in 1894……………………………………………………..p. 139

Fig. 28. A Oklahoman mother and her children photographed in 1936 during the

Great Depression………………………………………………………………………………………….p. 149 Kinney 1

INTRODUCTION

I first read Quince Duncan’s short story “Una canción en la madrugada” for an Advanced Spanish Composition class that I was taking as a part of my Masters in

Language Teaching graduate program. I enrolled in this course to improve as a high school Spanish teacher, but I was not prepared for the doubt that Duncan’s story would create in my mind regarding the manner in which I was “teaching culture.”

Reflecting upon these doubts, I realized that the ways in which I was teaching about cultures and other peoples was flawed. I was offering students fun facts and trivia instead of teaching them to develop an intercultural competence that would allow them to understand culture, how it is created and experienced, and to be able to work, live, and interact with people from different parts of the world (or even in different parts of the world).

By reading and studying Duncan I learned that immigrants from all over the

Caribbean and their descendants played a significant role in Costa Rica’s development. Through his stories and the research they inspired, I learned that during the last three decades of nineteenth century, immigrants, predominately

Jamaican in nationality, were recruited to Costa Rica to construct a railroad that could carry coffee from plantations in the Central Valley to the Caribbean coast.

Initially, these immigrants saw themselves as temporary workers and that the majority planned to return to Jamaica once the project was completed. This mindset of temporality led these immigrants to preserve their home cultures by continuing to speak English and by continuing to practice their Anglican faith. They resisted assimilation so as to make their transition back to Jamaica smoother and to Kinney 2 maintain an identity living so far away. The Costa Rican government also believed the immigrants would return home once the project was completed and tolerated the immigrants but did not work to integrate them into society. They saw the immigrants as a temporary problem they needed to endure for the country’s financial benefit. However, even before the railroad was finished, fruit producers, including the companies that would later form the United Fruit Company, seeking to take advantage of the large immigrant workforce, offered the immigrants jobs in the burgeoning banana industry and a majority of the immigrants stayed in Costa Rica.

The American and British entrepreneurs who led these companies favored

Jamaican workers because of their ability to speak English and their willingness to endure the difficult working conditions. The country’s first banana plantations were located in the virtually uninhabited Limón Province along the Atlantic Coast. Laws prevented immigrants from inhabiting other pars of the coutry and this region became a Caribbean enclave inhabited by descendants of the original Jamaican immigrants who lived geographically, linguistically, culturally, politically, and in most other ways separate from the rest of Costa Rica.

As I read more of Duncan’s stories and about Costa Rica’s history, I discovered that the contributions of these Jamaican immigrants to the development of Costa Rica have been left out of the country’s dominant historical narrative. This narrative, referred to as la leyenda blanca, claims that Costa Rica was formed as a classless rural democracy by a small group of independent Hispanic farmers. The people I was reading about in Duncan’s stories were not represented, or were misrepresented, in many of the country’s historical accounts. Moreover these Kinney 3 accounts that diminish or ignore the contributions of African and West Indian immigrants were included in textbooks used in Costa Rican schools. In a video interview with Duncan that our professor asked us to watch, Duncan said that many

Costa Rican schools teach from racist texts that portray Costa Ricans of African descent as inferior to Costa Ricans of Hispanic heritage perpetuating stereotypes and racist attitudes to younger generations of Costa Ricans. The absence of African descendant voices and discussions of their contributions to the country’s formation are wrongs that have not yet been corrected. The persistence of these accounts that disparage West Indians and ignore their contribtions facilitate sterotypes, racism, and discrimination.

Contemporary history has still yet to fully recognize this community’s importance, and their story is not widely known. This shocked me and not only changed the way I thought about Costa Rica, but led me to question the ways that I was presenting and teaching other cultures to American high school students. The fact that I had been completely unaware of the importance of Jamaican immigrants to Costa Rica’s formation led me to wonder what else I was leaving out of my teaching. What else did I not know about the places, peoples, and cultures of the

Spanish-speaking world about which I was supposed to be teaching? In what ways was I perpetuating incomplete representations of people in the Spanish-speaking world?

At the same time I was taking the graduate course, my teaching colleagues and I were beginning the process of selecting a new textbook series for our beginning and intermediate high school Spanish courses. This provided us the Kinney 4 opportunity to have conversations regarding what each of us considered important in a text as well as what we wanted our students to know. We discussed our teaching styles, our methodologies, and what we were specifically looking for in the new materials. Culture teaching, for most of us, was something we added on to lessons when time allowed. We frequently shared anecdotes with our students about the time we had spent in some Spanish-speaking countries, but we were teaching culture simply as knowledge. We were not teaching students skills that allowed them to be able to enter into another culture and understand the historical, social, and even subjective value of cultural manifestations like art, music, industry, or food. We were not preparing them to understand the diversity of cultures and identities that often exist within a given nation or region. Even though our students could point to the cities of Spain on a map or describe an empanada, we knew this did not mean that they understood what it might mean to be Spanish or Chilean.

The knowledge we were teaching was not encouraging our students to step out of their own ethnocentrism and enter into another culture. Because we were separating our language and cultural teaching, we only had time to teach students about the dominant culture within a few of the countries of the Spanish-speaking world. We were neglecting the plurality of cultures that exist within an individual and nation. It was these revelations coupled with the knowledge that I received from studying Duncan that led me to realize that my cultural teaching was superficial and lacking.

Eventually, I reached the conclusion that I needed to allow my students to enter into other cultures through lived experience or something that came close to Kinney 5 that direct and genuine contact with the life of the peoples we were studying. The majority of my students were white, middle class, and native English-speakers, and I knew that their opportuniries to come into contact with people from other parts of the world were very limited. However I saw it as part of my job to allow these students to be able to understand how race, socioeconomics, and even geography shape one’s view of the world. I determined it would be semi-authentic experiences, like those that can be achieved by getting students to see the world from the point of view of fictional characters, that would prepare students to be able to understand, appreciate, or discover another culture in a deeper way. Although the teaching of a set of observable “realities” was important, I wanted to connect these realities to the historical or subjective experiences that give them cultural value. But how could this be accomplished? What teaching materials could I use? I knew where I wanted to take my students but getting there seemed complicated. I had more questions than answers. Although I was aware that attempting to learn about another culture from the confines of a classroom a continent away is complex and often incomplete I wanted to offer my students more than what I was currently offering.

I started by assessing my current practices and the materials I was using to teach. My first step in attempting to teach “realities,” was to consider my current practices of “teaching culture”. Specifically I needed to examine how the textbooks, travel brochures, films, songs, and the like were presenting these realities. I needed to determine if the materials I was using led students to look at the interplay between all of the forces that contribute to their creation.

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As my colleagues and I continued our discussions about teaching materials there was some debate as to why we needed to deviate from our current practices.

One colleague questioned if we can really do more than give our students a tourist’s view of another part of the world in the classroom and we discussed the difficulty of teaching about Costa Rican culture from the confines of classroom in the American

Midwest. During our discussions we mentioned the textbooks, films, magazines, songs, literature, newspapers, and other sources we used to teach about other people and cultures. We acknowledged that by using these sources as teaching materials we risked leading our students to form false or distorted images of the people that inhabit other parts of the world. These sources were just manifestations of culture. They were cultural products, and although these products can provide great information about the ways other people live, communicate, work, eat, govern, and the like, they cannot be disconnected from the society from which they come.

In his book Cultural and Materialism, the cultural anthropologist Raymond

Williams states, “… in any society, in any particular period, there is a central system of practices, meanings and values, which we can properly call dominant and effective. … But this is not, except in the operation of a moment of abstract analysis, in any sense a static system. On the contrary we can only understand an effective and dominant culture if we understand the real social process on which it depends: I mean the process of incorporation. … Thus we have to recognize the alternative meanings and values, the alternative opinions and attitudes, even some alternative senses of the world, which can be accommodated and tolerated within a particular effective and dominant culture” (Williams 38-39). Williams reminds us that we Kinney 7 cannot assume that any representations of another group relay the entirety of that group or the people that make up that group. The creators and financiers of these sources must be considered, and the political, commercial, religious, and other motives must be vetted. Even though my colleagues and I knew from our own experiences that the cultural manifestations we used could never completely and accurately sum up the experiences and lives of an entire group of people, we were teaching other cultures to high school students as if these manifestations found in textbooks, brochures, and elsewhere, were both accurate and complete representations.

In an essay titled “Culture is Ordinary” Williams demands that culture is a whole way of life. He states that separating cultural representations from the lived culture from which they come is an impossible and even dangerous task. For

Williams, it is a simplification to reduce the experience one has with culture to those meanings that are most visible. He states that, “a culture must be interpreted in relation to its underlying system of production.” For this to happen a culture must be examined both in the common meanings that people gather from these manifestations, such as films or music, as well as the individual meanings that are constantly changing, and being formed and re-formed. Williams challenges those who consider mass marketed manifestations of culture as markers by noting, “the second false equation is this: that the observable badness of so much widely distributed popular culture is a true guide to the state of mind and feeling, the essential quality of living if its consumers” (Williams 99). In other words one cannot assume that the cultural manifestations that we can most readily observe are Kinney 8 representations of anything at all. How scary would be if someone were to make judgments about all Americans based on the music currently being played on the radio, from what is served in fast food restaurants, or from what pundits are screaming about on cable television channels? When studying another culture it is essential to attempt, even in a small way, to experience the interplay between the art and the people who consume and appreciate it. Culture cannot be separated from the society and contexts where it is produced because this separation can lead to drastic simplifications that can roadblock any sort of real learning about these other peoples and cultures.

Eventually, our search for a new textbook series led us to look more closely at what Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century says about how culture should be taught in today’s classrooms. Standards is a government document that was published in 1996 with funding from the United States

Department of Education, a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and, suspiciously, the two large foreign language textbook publishing companies,

D.C. Heath and Company and EMC Publishing Company. Dozens upon dozens of foreign language teachers, national and state professional organization directors, two United States’ Senators, representatives from the U.S. department of Education and many others are credited with serving on Standards’ Task Force, Board of

Directors, Advisory Council, Project Staff, or Board of Reviewers. The initial push for the creation of Standards came from the Bush and Clinton administration’s top- down attempts to improve our nation’s educational system by writing and publishing content area standards. To date, many state language professional Kinney 9 organizations, and even some state legislatures, have spent much time discussing, modifying, and debating Standards.

Hundreds of journal articles have been written on the standards and their implications. However, as Howard University’s Professor James Davis has observed, much of what has been written is contradictory, confusing, and nothing more than

“babble” that has prevented real and lasting change from occurring in classrooms

(Davis 152). The document has done little to impact the way foreign languages and cultures are taught in American high schools. With so many organizations to appease and state politicians to contend with, the document does little to effect the significant changes needed in foreign language education. The need to appease so many people and the miles of red tape to navigate has rendered the document useless and devoid of significant suggestions for changing the way culture is presented in American foreign language classrooms.

Moreover, the document preserves the ethnocentricity of foreign language education that primarily focuses on preparing students to travel or do business in other parts of the world. Instead of allowing students a vantage point from which to experience people and their cultures, the document encourages teachers to give students a tourist view of another place and its people. The absence of a discussion about the impact of colonialism, its lingering effects, and instances of neocolonialism from Standards is particularly alarming. Considering that Standards is attempting to outline how American teachers need to teach about the cultures of many countries still working to throw off their colonial yokes, the lack of discussion about these topics is cause for serious concern. Kinney 10

The vagueness of the goals of foreign language teaching listed in Standards does not provide teachers with much direction for changing what they are already doing in their classrooms. Standards states that our students must be able to

“engage in conversations” (42), “provide and obtain information” (42), “express feelings and emotions”(42), and “exchange opinions” (42). Standards defines “the term ‘culture’ as the philosophical perspectives, the behavioral practices, and the products-both tangible and intangible-of a society” (Standards 47). The document calls students to “recognize the distinctive viewpoints that are only available through the foreign language and its cultures” (56), “understand the concept of culture through comparison of the culture and their own”(58), and “use the language beyond the school setting” (64). Students are called “to demonstrate an understanding of the relationship between the practices and perspectives of the cultures studied” and to “understand the relationships between the products and perspectives of the cultures studied” (Standards 50-51). These goals are so vague that they carry little meaning. Most teachers who read the standards must dismiss them almost immediately, probably purporting that their students can already complete these basic tasks that most preschoolers can accomplish.

The document’s blandness does not lead teachers to teach about the world’s cultures in the complex way that Williams describes. The document is organized around the alliterative 5’Cs (Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities) that serve as the titles of the overarching categories of each of the document’s goals. During one of our discussions, a colleague joked that at least the

5C’s were words that actually began with the letter C as opposed to the infamous Kinney 11

3R’s (Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic) that were once used to describe educational pedagogy. This joke revealed the skepticism she had for the document and its ability to accomplish much of anything. As we discussed the document further, the use of the 5Cs alliteration as well as its use of the 3P’s (Products, Practices, and

Perspectives) became gimmicky and, quite frankly, forced. The overuse of alliteration made us suspicious of the document’s ability to deeply consider the teaching of culture in the language classroom.

Figure 1. A conceptual model of the Standards' 3 P's. (Image source: Standards for Language Leaning in the 21st Century)

Standards’ “3 P’s” cultural model fails in many ways. Although the document acknowledges the interplay between products, practices, and perspectives, the model does not connect culture with actual people. The model keeps the target culture at arms length. It does little to address how a foreign language student could understand the value that members of the other cultures assign to these products, practices, or perspectives. The document also fails to recognize the multiplicity of Kinney 12 cultures that is common in today’s globalized world. Standards assumes that the cultures and peoples of the Spanish-speaking world can be studied statically, outside of the dynamic nature of real life that constantly changes the way culture is both perceived and produced within any given cultural community. If we want to create generations of students who consider the world differently, the Foreign

Language Teaching Profession must begin to promote curricular decisions that allow students to experience other cultures authentically. If we want students to do more that list the capital cities of Spanish-speaking countries and know sets of facts, we must ask our students to read and discuss works of literature that end the representational loops that present foreign peoples and cultures as exotic, uncivilized places that are only viewed as they once were, or at least once perceived to be so that we can help students see the other in a new and more accurate way.

As stated before, textbook companies contributed to Standards’ publication.

It is therefore no surprise that the document does not clarify or give advice for teachers regarding the teaching of culture and that it offers little guidance for determining which products, practices, or perspectives to study. The document does not acknowledge the difficulties of examining cultural aspects in isolation.

Without offering guidance on the importance of considering the sources of productions and by failing to recognize differences in the lived culture among the people of any given geographic location, the document fails to address the difficult, controversial, and essential topics of what to teach and why. Textbook companies, then, are free to insert any information about other parts of the world without needing to worry about these deeper questions. The superficiality of Standards Kinney 13 allows teachers to avoid the topics of colonialism and neocolonialism altogether. By failing to make specific teaching suggestions Standards has also allowed large First

World textbook publishers to avoid topics that encourage students to deeply consider the worlds’ cultures and how it is made manifest both collectively and individually.

Standards’ dissection of culture into products, perspectives, and practices stands in stark contrast to Raymond Williams’ point that culture is so ordinary, or basic, that it is impossible to separate out products from the perspectives. For the cultural materialist like Williams, there is an important relationship between what is happening in a society and the content of the cultural forms produced by it. One cannot hope to understand another culture by only looking at a small piece of it. In

“Culture in Ordinary,” Williams describes a teashop near the campus of Cambridge where he studied. He says that the teashop’s regular customers fixate on the trivial differences of behavior and variations of speech that set them apart from all of those who did not frequent the teashop. Williams accuses these customers of taking

“culture from where it belongs” because these customers attempt to label certain practices and things as culture while calling other practices and things uncultured

(Williams 94). Williams took issue with attempts by some to say this is culture but that is not culture; with those who attempted to separate high-culture from what ordinary people were doing in their homes or neighborhoods. For Williams, culture is so ordinary to each human that it cannot be separated from the whole person and made a series of parts or actions. Kinney 14

Ultimately, the Standards model fails to communicate effectively that students need a direct experience with the other culture in order to gain an entry point to examine the culture on a deeper level. The most enriching direct experience is a face-to-face encounter, but since a face-to-face encounter is difficult in the foreign language classroom, literature, film, art, poetry, music, can be used to draw students from their own culture and allow them to see the world from another vantage point. Without being forced, through an encounter or experience with the other culture, to see the world through another lens, students will not be able to do anything other than learn cognitively about the other culture. Thes experiences engage a student’s affective learning. Affective learning, according to Dale Lange,

“involves receiving knowledge and attending to it, responding to knowledge with willingness and enjoyment, valuing difference, organizing values into systems and planning to respect difference, and showing a willingness to revise attitudes” (Lange

127). Foreign language teachers must recognize Standards’ deficiencies and work to provide students with these semi-direct encounters with other people and cultures.

In addition to the inadequacies of Standards, there are many other obstacles in today’s educational environment that make culture teaching and learning difficult. The prevailing attitude of American students regarding learning about other cultures is one such obstacle. A 1995 study by Guntermann et al found that when students studying French and Spanish as a foreign language were asked to rank the importance of culture and the skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking only 4% of French learners and 3.4% of Spanish learners ranked culture as most important (qtd. in Chavez 30). The majority of students felt that learning a Kinney 15 foreign language is limited to learning the linguistic aspects and how to communicate. Culture, for many, seems peripheral and ultimately not essential.

These students fail to see the value in studying another culture. Their viewpoint is reinforced by a consumer culture that sells the American way of life as the ideal and by a political culture that wants students to fear people from other parts of the world and to be vigilant against attempts to subvert or steal the American dream.

Steeped in the rhetoric of American Exceptionalism, many American students do not feel they have anything to gain from members of other cultures and their ways of life. Student’s attitudes are generated and reinforced by family members, media outlets, other teachers, the political landscape, public opinion, current events, friends, and socioeconomics, just to name a few. Sadly, many of these forces that shape students’ cultural attitudes reinforce ethnocentric and stereotypic viewpoints. These attitudes become so ingrained in students that it is very difficult for a teacher to counter these powerful forces and attempt to change a students’ point of view.

Students live in a world in which cable news channels, many politicians, newspaper publishers and the like are not focused on attempting to encourage students to avoid their own ethnocentrism. Too often these entities play to this ethnocentrism in order to sell their wares or gain approval. Teachers may feel outmatched to overcome attitudes that students have already formed and avoid challenging these formed attitudes so as not to ignite conflict. Many teachers may feel nervous to take on difficult topics like identity, race, ethnicity, conflict, immigration, or politics for fear of the differences of opinion that may upset the Kinney 16 classroom dynamic. Therefore even well intentioned teachers, might find themselves at a disadvantage when it comes to making curricular changes.

Teachers are encouraged to focus on the linguistic and communicative aspects of foreign language teaching because the presence of many cultures within each given national boundary due to social class divisions, immigration, war, globalization, and other factors can seem overwhelming. Teachers may teach about their own experiences in other counties, and native speakers have much to offer about their home countries in the classroom, but these presentations, by and large, are still separated from the linguistic content and “remain didactic, oriented towards the transmission of information” (Paige et al 118). The failure of teachers to question the ways that textbook companies and politicians have limited our ability move away from our ethnocentrism and to explore more than just the trivial aspects of another culture is a serious issue that American educational systems must face. The absurd fear that by acknowledging the merits of another culture’s way of living and thinking our students will become less American has caused school districts to purchase textbooks that reduce and trivialize the contributions of others and their way of living. Teaching in this way is affirmed by the content of the National

Spanish Exam, AP Language Exams, and by many college language placement exams that focus almost exclusively on assessing students’ linguistic knowledge and communicative abilities instead of their ability to navigate cross-culturally and their level of intercultural competence. These assessments reinforce the lack importance assigned to cultural topics in foreign language education and provide rationale for deleting culture lessons from the curriculum. Kinney 17

Researchers Ramirez and Hall determined that textbooks, more than any other factor, determine the context, order, pace, practice, and assessments of a foreign language classroom. The researchers found that photographs are the primary way textbooks relay cultural information (Ramirez and Hall 50). Although photographs can be important communicators of knowledge, emotion, and location, typically photos in the text these researches examined were of a person or group smiling into the camera and a caption giving their name and nationality (Ramirez and Hall 50). Ramirez and Hall discovered that the photos offered easily digestible representations of another culture. Textbooks avoided showing people in situations that might invite controversy. Photos of materially poor people, for example, rarely appeared in the texts these researchers studied. The images portrayed the other culture as “far off”. Scenes that looked “foreign” reinforced students “notions” of what a foreign place might look like, but did little to advance cultural learning. All of the photographs in textbooks these researchers examined depicted people they determined to be of the middle to upper socioeconomic classes (Hall and Ramirez

63). The photos did not challenge students to recognize difference nor see the world in a new way. Although the internet contains many authentic photos that can provide better representations of others, far too few teachers are seeking them out or using them in meaningful ways. Hall and Ramirez conclude their article with a series of questions that they want language teachers to address such as, who decides the content of the textbook?, what are the criteria for what should and should not be included? They encourage teachers “to reflect on how their textbooks develop cultural literacy through the use of exercises that promote higher levels of Kinney 18 abstraction and critical modes of thinking” (Ramirez and Hall 64). Until we as foreign language teachers address these questions, lasting changes in the way culture is presented will be beyond our grasps.

In his essay “Education and Neocolonialism,” Philip Altbach identified that

“the processes of patronage and control by which the colonial and neo-colonial powers continue to exercise a dominant role in selecting, licensing, publishing, and distributing the texts of the post-colonial world and the degree to which inscriptive practices, choice of form, subject matter, genre, etc. is also subject to such control, have received far less attention than they deserve” (Altbach 455). Although it should be no surprise that for-profit textbook companies are publishing books that attempt to appeal to broad categories of learners and to remain timeless, teachers and administrators must begin to question the power these companies have in determining content, curriculum, pace, and the like. For textbook companies, culture is best kept as a neat and tidy add on to their linguistic material. It is time that language educators begin to question the motives and materials of these companies.

It is my sense that the problems my colleagues discussed while choosing a new textbook series are not unique to our school. I imagine there are many teachers who feel that the ways they are teaching culture are inadequate and that there are many who recognize the damage that is being done by these texts. There must be many teachers who know that we must stop relying on texts that perpetuate colonial viewpoints of the world. I belive that many teachers will welcome the chance to insert authentic texts into their curricula that represent post-colonial Kinney 19 discourses reflecting the interests and objectives of others. As teachers we have much power to influence textbook publishers and ultimately it is up to us to begin to question the vague and vapid goals Standards presents and the way culture is presented in most textbooks. If we call for better materials administators and textbook publishers might listen. Although there will be those that see the teaching of other cultures as a threat, we must remind these people that in order to prepare students to live, work, and survive in the globalized world they must be interculturally competent.

In following chapters, I will offer teachers resources for teaching Costa Rican culture and history through the stories of Quince Duncan. I will argue that reading and discussing authentic literature offers one way for students to gain an entry point into other cultures and experience another in a more direct way. It is literature that offers readers a glimpse into a character’s “whole way of life” and allows writers to establish their own national identity. I will draw from the researchers Scott and Huntington who concluded that “by reading and discussing brief but challenging literary texts, novice-level learners can gain insight into the expressive and cultural nuances conveyed through the target language, which in turn may sensitize them to ways in which the language can foster cross-cultural understanding and exchange (Scott and Huntington 4). I will also suggest four short stories written by the Costa Rican writer Quince Duncan that can be used to enhance culture teaching in the advanced secondary level foreign language classroom. In order to support the use of Duncan’s short stories as an entry point, I will also draw upon Clarie Kramsch’s idea of the “third place,” which she describe as a vantage Kinney 20 point, achieved through dialogue about experiences, from which one can examine oneself and one’s own culture as well as another culture. This vantage point not only allows one to develop a knowledge and awareness of another culture, but also encourages students to see themselves as cultural beings. As Kramsch states, They

[language learners] cannot understand another’s viewpoint if they don’t understand the historical and subjective experiences that have made this person who they are.

But they cannot understand these experiences if they do not view them through the eyes of the Other” (Kramsch “Culture in Foreign Language Teaching” 61). These revelations will be important for the classroom discussions that occur after the reading of the story.

The literature of Quince Duncan can be used to create this “third place” and therefore encourage meaningfully dialogue between students and teachers about one’s own culture and the other culture. Literature gives us the freedom to leave behind our own realities (our first place) and become open to new realities (a second place). If in the language classroom the “first place” is a student’s own identity, culture, and worldview, and the “second place” is the identity, culture, worldview of the Other, the “third place” provides learners the space to consider both at the same time. In the “third place,” were the student is conscious of another’s point of view, Kramsch comments “they [language learners] occupy a position where they see themselves both from the inside and from the outside”

(Kramsch “Culture in Language Teaching” 62). After reading and entering the second place, teachers can then direct the students to Kramsch’s “third place” by leading a discussion that challenges, compares, contrasts, and clarifies the first and Kinney 21 second places from the vantage point of the “third place.” Because the discussion is grounded in the story that teachers and the students have read, the room becomes a community of learners as opposed to a more traditional teacher/student dynamic where the teacher lectures to impart knowledge that the students duitifully receive.

The use of literature in the classroom creates common ground from which teachers and students can dialogue about the characters and the contents of the story in a way that allows them to avoid making generalizations, or falling into stereotypical and ethnocentric viewpoints. The language of the dialogue that occurs between the learner and the story’s characters, the narrator, and at times the author, gives meaning to the habits, beliefs, history, setting, work, struggles of the other persons as well as the student. Learners are able to enter into the character’s world, and their practices, products, and perspectives become more than mere observable realities. When the character speaks, we hear an authentic voice. We have a “direct” encounter with a member of the other culture. The short story and its characters create interest for the exploration of historical and cultural themes because, as

Crawford-Lange and Lange recognize, “cultural themes are more powerful when they specify a provocative concern or issue that relates to the learners” (Crawford-

Lange and Lange 263). Through another culture’s literature, we can help students gain an awareness and knowledge of another culture’s history, language, art, food, music, celebrations, etc. in order to understand, at least to some degree, how each of these products and practices shape the worldview of the other people and his or her community.

Kinney 22

CHAPTER 1

THE DANGER OF THE SINGLE STORY

In the 2009 talk “The Danger of the Single Story,” presented at the Ted Global

Conference in Oxford, England, the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie described the dangers of using one viewpoint, or story, to sum up the entire experience or character of a country, group of people, or an entire continent. For

Adichie, “having a single-story means having just one reference point from which to judge another group of people.” In that talk, she shared various anecdotes from her own experiences where a person or group was reduced to a snapshot. Adichie described her childhood and growing up in Nigeria. She said that the books she read presented white, blue-eyed, characters playing in the snow, and because she had only one vision of fictional characters, her own early stories were filled with white blue-eyed characters. Adichie and almost every one else in her city were black and did not have blue eyes, but she believed that characters in her own writing must appear like the characters she read about in works of British and American

Literature. Adichie says it was not until she began reading Chinua Achebe and

Camara Laye that she realized people like her could exist in literature. Her exposure to these writers, as she states, saved [her] from having single story of literature and allowed her to see the world more broadly and to know that characters with dark skin could exist in literature (Adichie “The Danger of the Single Story”).

Adichie’s belief that all fictional characters had white skin and blue eyes was due to the fact that she was “shown a people as one thing over and over again [and] that is what they become”(“The Danger of the Single Story”). Her single story was Kinney 23 also the result of which stories were available to her. Her possession of only a single story was not about childhood naiveté. It was also about power and wealth. Adichie says that “power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person” (“The Danger of the Single Story”). How stories are told, when they are told, and by whom they are told are not matters of chance but are due to unequal distributions power and wealth. Many stories are available about Americans, for example, because of our country’s relative wealth and power. This power and wealth allows American media, art, and literature to penetrate almost all corners of the world. However if those without wealth, and therefore without power, are viewed through sound bites, newspaper articles, or anecdotes, it is difficult to see others as they truly are. If these single stories are the only stories one hears, one’s world-view is severely limited, and racism, stereotypes, and fear can be perpetuated. Conversely, when we become exposed to more than one story about other people and the places they live our viewpoint can dramatically change. Our vision of the Other is expanded and becomes more authentic. Adichie says, “start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story” (“The Danger of the

Single Story”). What we see, what we hear, and what we read determines how we view others, and if we only have a single story our view is incomplete.

Although we cannot possibly read everything or know every story, we can recognize that by only having one story we risk racism, ethnocentrism, and Kinney 24 stereotyping. If we accept our deficiencies as problems that need correcting, we will seek out more stories. Adiche says, “when we reject the single story we regain a kind of paradise” (“The Danger of the Single Story”). The rejection of the single story can send one on a quest to know more. We can begin to consider how stories change based on who it telling them. We will be exposed to other viewpoints and, hopefully, find stories that empower and humanize other people and counter stories that have reduced them to caricatures.

As language teachers it is our job to try and give students more stories. We must see to it that other people, places, and cultures are not reduced or simplified.

Literature can give students direct experiences with fictional members of the other culture. It can also allow students to understand the discursive construction of identity, as it takes place in literature and in human social and political life. When students have an opportunity to hear the voices of others, and of a writer who offers the unique insight of an insider’s perspective, they are provided entry into those cultures. Clifford Geertz “states that culture is more than simply knowledge …

“culture does not live in the minds of individuals, but in their interactions with one another” (Geertz 45). Claire Kramsch’s definition of culture echoes Geertz’s. She describes culture as “membership in a discourse community that shares a common social space, history, and common images” (Byram and Kramsch “Language and

Culture”10). Although we cannot readily transport our students around the globe and insert them into other discourse communities, we can use literature to allow them entry into fictional discourse communities. Teacher-moderated discussions of these literary texts can provide students with the social and historical backgrounds Kinney 25 necessary to understand the texts and facilitate interpretation of complex ideas and situations.

Along with acknowledgment of the flawed way many educators are teaching about the world’s people and cultures must come the call for better teaching materials. It is imperative that these materials allow students to hear voices from within the countries and regions that are being studied. We must seek out voices that are underrepresented in American classrooms; the voices that have been silenced and left out of dominant national histories. The objectives of the Language

Department should be different from those of the History Department and the

English Department, and our curricular and textbook choices must reflect these differences. If we seek to give students new knowledge that broadens their perspective of the world and allows them a deeper appreciation of other people, cultures, and customs, we must carefully consider the cultural products and views we bring into the classroom. It seems to me that literature offers us a direct route towards accomplishing these goals of Foreign Language Education.

In this chapter, I will argue that the stories of the Costa Rican writer Quince

Duncan can provide American students studying Spanish as a Foreign Language with encounters that allow them to see Costa Ricans as complex and human characters. Discussions about these stories can give students new vantage points from which to see the world. Duncan calls his fiction Afrorealism and he uses this term to describe works that “desarrollan personajes negros, superando el nivel de la caricatura” [develop black characters, who rise above the level of the caricature and of stigmatization] (“Afrorealism,” all translations my own except where otherwise Kinney 26 specified). According to Duncan, Afrorealistic works are “medulares en la búsqueda de identidad, reconciliación con su herencia cultural arrebatada, y asunción de su etnicidad afro hispánica” [central in the search for identity, reconciliation with silenced cultural heritage, and the assumption of an Afro-Hispanic identity]

(“Afrorealisim”). Duncan says that Afrorealistic works do not relegate African descendants nor their practices to what the writer Nicolás Guillen calls “decorative elements.” American students need to be exposed to representations of African- descendent peoples such as those that Duncan’s stories provide in order to be able to reject their “single story.” Duncan’s works do not repeat or reference mainstream literature, but rather they offer a new vision; new stories from which to enrich our students understanding of this small Central American country.

Duncan’s Afrorealistic works share six basic characteristics. These works use an “afro-centric” vocabulary, identify African symbols, work to restate the collective historical memory of the African Diaspora, reaffirm the concept of ancestral communities, adopt a perspective from inside of the community, and search for and proclaim the African identity (“Afrorealism” 3). For high school students, Duncan’s deterritorialized works can offer a glimpse of the world’s complexities and provide students with a non-Eurocentric viewpoint. By reading works that illustrate the world’s complexities, students can better understand that national or linguistic labels often do not reveal much about the identity and culture of its inhabitants. Afrorealistic works disorient students by offering counter- narratives that challenge their incomplete national narratives and provide them with other stories about other people and places. Duncan is a black man and far too Kinney 27 few black writers make it on high school syllabi. By offering students stories written by a non-white writer written in Spanish, readers are forced to become active travelers who have to find their way in unfamiliar territory and to reconsider that which they thought had already been settled.

Duncan’s works are particularly valuable for Spanish as a foreign language students because they fall into the genre that Deleuze and Guattari called “minor” literature. Works of “minor literature” are characterized by three main elements.

The works are deterritorialized, political, and collective. On a basic level, Duncan works to achieve a linguistic deterritorialization. He presents characters that speak

Spanish as their second language. These characters mispronounce the dominant language and use their status as non-native speakers to navigate the world around them. Readers are forced to become “nomads” who are challenged to find their way in this literature that challenges the core cultural beliefs that have formed their worldview. Although students will need help decoding the significance of the texts, they can readily examine themselves as they consider the story and it characters. As

Deleuxe and Guattari state, “because the collective and national consciousness is often inactive in external life and always in the process of disintegration, it is literature which produces an active solidarity, and … this situation make[s] him [the writer] all the more able to express another consciousness and another sensibility”

(Deleuze and Guattari 17). Duncan’s literature attempts to both establish an identity for Afro-Costa Rican people within the dominant culture as well as critique this same group. By adopting this perspective of seeing another culture from the minority point of view, authors communicate an “active solidarity among members Kinney 28 of the collective group” and communicate this solidarity to readers (Deleuze and

Guattari 17). Working towards this solidarity allows this literature to “become a relay for a revolution machine-to-come, not at all for ideological reasons but because the literary machine alone is determined to fill the conditions of a collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere” (Deleuze and Guattari 17). It is this literature that brings humanity to groups that are absent from dominant literatures.

Duncan is the grandson of immigrants. Much of his childhood was spent in the town of Estrada in the Limón Province, where the majority of his fiction is set.

Duncan has written six novels: Hombre Curtidos (1971), Los cuatro espejos (1973),

La paz del pueblo (1976), and Final del calle (1979), Kimbo (1990) and A Message from Rosa (2004). He has published three collections of short stories: El pozo y una carta (1969), Una canción en la madrugada (1970), and La rebellión pocomía y otros relatos (1974), and two collections of children’s stories: Los cuentos del hermano

Araña (1975) and Los cuentos de Jack Mantorra (1988). He has also published numerous essays and articles all focused on bringing recognition to Costa Rica’s

West Indian community and their contributions. As a member of the country’s minority demographic, Duncan is deeply connected to the stories he tells. For

Duncan, culture is “the way in which we conduct our lives, the way in which we identify ourselves, the way through which we communicate and the reality we create in our relation to others” (Duncan, “Interview”). His stories focus on cultural exchanges that take place between individuals and others making them highly personal works of the human experience. Kinney 29

Duncan’s work can make high school students aware of the contributions of people of West Indian descent, predominately Jamaicans, who began arriving in

Costa Rica’s Limón Province around 1872 to construct a railway system that would transport coffee from the country’s center to the Atlantic Coast. Although thousands of immigrants of African ancestry from across the West Indies were recruited as laborers, they have been largely left out of the country’s dominant historical narrative called La leyenda blanca (“the white legend”). This term was first printed in Theodore Creedman’s book Historical Dictionary of Costa Rica and his citation states that the phrase can be traced back to the 19th century, when the nation’s coffee-producing elite used the legend to celebrate their economic and political success. This legend falsely claims Costa Rica was established by a group of white,

Catholic, Spanish peasants who founded the country alone without the help of indigenous groups or an immigrant workforce. According to Dorothy Mosby, this national myth is used to distinguish “Costa Rica from the large indigenous-mestizo population to its northern frontier (Nicaragua) and the mestizo and afro-mestizo population to the South (Colombia, later Panama) and promotes Costa Rica’s relative “whiteness” as a symbol of its progress and proximity to European ideas of cultural progress (Mosby 29). This myth has become commonly accepted. One of the country’s leading historians, Carlos Monge Alfaro, even published the myth in his history text that is used in many Costa Rican schools.

Limón Province, then, is a border region where residents work to preserve their home culture yet find ways to adapt and survive in their new place. The region was sparsely inhabited when immigrants began arriving at the end of the nineteenth Kinney 30 century and formed Limón as a Caribbean enclave within the country. An awareness of this community can allow students to see the complexities and diversity that often exist within national borders. Students will learn about this immigrant workforce and their descendants and see the impact they have had in

Costa Rica. Unlike the fact-based learning about places and peoples that most textbooks favor, learning through literature allows students to assume the point of view of the characters themselves. Students cease to study the culture from afar by examining statistics and demographics and enter instead into the narratives and accompany the characters on their fictional journeys. By assuming the insiders’ perspective, students will be able to consider these characters as more fully human.

Like his fictional work, Duncan’s non-fictional work has also been focused on creating awareness of the contributions of the West Indian community. In 1975, he and the historian Carlos Meléndez collaborated on a collection of essays called El

Negro en Costa Rica that is still today one of the most important works regarding the

Afro-descendant experience in Costa Rica. More recently, Duncan contributed to the

Del Olvido a la Memoria series. This series, sponsored in part by UNESCO, is designed to educate teachers throughout Central America about the experiences and contributions of Afro-descendent people throughout the region. As Duncan states in the series’ introduction, “la ausencia de información sobre algunos aspectos de nuestro pasado fue sustituida por un conjunto de valoraciones en las cuáles los estereotipos y el racismo encontraron espacio fértil para germinar y crecer” [the absence of information about some aspects of our past was replaced by set of assessments that allowed stereotypes and racism to find fertile space to germinate Kinney 31 and grow] (Duncan Del Olvido a la Memoria Guía Didactica 5). The series hopes that by educating teachers about the contributions of Africans and African-descendent peoples that they will develop teaching lessons that bring these contributions to the foreground and eliminate existing stereotypes and racism. This re-education provides teachers and students with more complete images of the lives of marginalized populations and works to make additions to the national narrative in recognition of the role African-descended peoples have played in the region’s development. Duncan has said that the series has been successfully used throughout Central America, a region that, “not withstanding the overwhelming evidence of African and Afro-descendent presence in the area, the official historical memory of our past has been nurtured by silences, a few disperse hints plagued with racial bias and imprecisions presented as morally correct truisms. Classic

Central American Historians rather choose to ignore the subject” (Duncan,

“Interview”). Duncan notes that “doctrinarian racism has a very tight grip on our

[Costa Rican] culture” and that it is difficult to “disarticulate four hundred years of theological, anthropological, sociological, political, philosophical constructions, designed by very brilliant minds of Europe and their U.S. and otherwise located counterparts” (Duncan, “Interview”). The Del olvido a la memoria series gives teachers tools from which to change the way that minority populations are presented and regarded in Central American classrooms. Lessons developed with the information the series provides can give students a more accurate view of the contributions and participation of African descended people in the region’s Kinney 32 development. Duncan sees literature and education as means toward accomplishing the difficult task of ending the silence.

In Duncan’s short fiction, the West Indian immigrants and their descendants are more than victims who have been exploited by the fruit companies and the Costa

Rican government. Although they have suffered from the predatory business practices of American and Costa Rican entrepreneurs, they are more than just temporary laborers that the Costa Rican government has admitted inside their borders out of necessity. Duncan’s characters transcend their victimhood and are presented as more fully human. Duncan’s work is valuable because to brings recognition to people that most other fiction and non-fictional works have forgotten or silenced. Frantz Fanon has written about the power of literature like Duncan’s and notes in his essay “On National Culture,” “that by losing its characteristics of despair and revolt, the drama becomes part of the common lot of the people” (Fanon

153). Although Duncan’s characters encounter their share of adversity, it does not define them. Therefore, students will be able to consider characters whose dominant historical narratives have left them in the shadows and called them victims and outcasts in a way that emphasizes their humanity more than their victimhood. Duncan does not present simple folklore or a vision of the past but provides a new lens from which to view Costa Rican history through the eyes of these immigrants and their descendants.

Duncan is a black man who writes in Spanish. These two characteristics alone can show students the diversity of skin colors that exists in the Spanish- speaking world. In the minds of many of my students, black men do not speak Kinney 33

Spanish nor do they tend to associate the name Duncan with a Spanish-speaker. On a more complex level, students can begin to see that immigration in not a topic unique to the United States. This discussion, of course, will lead to topics such as colonization, slavery, identity, and struggles for independence. Duncan’s works problematize the Eurocentric representations of minority cultures that have kept them in the margins and relegated their story to the subplot of national narratives.

If, as language teachers, we intend to change the way our students think about the world and about how they view their own existence, we too must problematize

Eurocentric representations and offer our students meaningful alternatives.

The high school where I teach is not racially diverse. Less than 10% of the student-body is non-white. Most of my students only have a “single-story” of most parts of the world other than the United States. When I mention Columbia, for example, they quickly mention Shakira or ask about drug cartels. Most of what these students know about other parts of the world, specifically the Spanish- speaking world, has been distilled though American movies, television shows, music, and media outlets. This is not to say my students are callous and insensitive.

In fact, they are very sensitive. When we study the Dominican Republic they sympathize with Dominicans of Haitian decent who suffer racism and persecution.

They want to do something to help young children from Honduras or El Salvador who fear violent gangs and attempt to make the journey to the United States alone.

However, these sympathies are still only single-stories. Without being exposed to additional stories through education or travel, students cannot reach the “kind of paradise” that Adichie describes. Kinney 34

Most of these single stories emphasize how my students are different from the Dominicans, the Colombians, or the Hondurans rather that show them the ways in which they are similar. They are not invited to consider how it is that gangs are so powerful in these countries or even what role the United States and other superpowers play in these situations. For American secondary school students, studying Duncan’s work in its specific historical geographic and cultural contexts can teach them about Costa Rican history while activating their awareness of their own position in contested cultural situations. Students view both the other culture and their own cultural background at the same time thus allowing them to view similarity and differences outside of their deeply ingrained cultural position.

By examining the characters as they navigate the structures and feelings that constitute their experience, students can sense and come to appreciate the differences between common culture and individual culture. Readers can begin to question the mass-market versions of culture that are presented through the media and reinforced by certain textbooks. Donald K. Gordon argues, “that although

Duncan focuses on the West Indian experience in Limón and examines social issues in Costa Rica, his work has a universal quality because it illuminates the crisis of identity that befalls the offspring of the first generation to arrive in a new cultural setting” (qtd. in Harpelle “The West Indians of Costa Rica” 3). When we consider using these stories to educate students, Henry Giroux’s phrase “border pedagogy” applies. Giroux coined the phrase to acknowledge “the situated nature of knowledge, the partiality of all knowledge claims, the indeterminacy of history and the shifting, multiple and often contradictory nature of identity” (Giroux 26). Giroux Kinney 35 believes that by encouraging students to “cross borders” by reading texts that provide them with other voices, languages, settings, races, genders, etc., “they can eventually learn to use diverse cultural resources to fashion new identities within existing configurations of power” (Giroux 28). Students grapple with the complexities and muddiness of “real life” and acquire knowledge that can help them navigate life’s ambiguities. It is my hope that this thesis can provide one way of teaching culture through literature to allow our students to move beyond “single- stories” of other people and other cultures and begin to see the world in a new and deeper way. Kinney 36

CHAPTER 2

TEACHING WITH STORIES: COSTA RICAN HISTORY AND LITERATURE

In the introduction and first chapter of this thesis, I have discussed the statistical, numbers-oriented, and stereotyped factoids that are common in the teaching of world cultures in American Secondary School Foreign Language classrooms. I have argued that many teachers rely on these factoids because they do not feel qualified to teach about culture. I have stated that many teachers do not feel teaching about culture is central to language teaching because local, collegiate, and national assessments tend not to assess students’ cultural competence. This has led teachers to teach about the world’s cultures infrequently. Researchers have discovered that when instructors do teach about cultures they rely on textbooks for the content of their cultural lessons. These texts, in an effort to appeal to a broad audience and have a long life as the textbook of choice, present culture as a static and monolithic set of “fun facts.” Cultural lessons, therefore, tend to be generic or stereotypical views of the art, food, celebrations, or geography of other peoples, their homelands, and their cultures. At best, these lessons give students a tourist’s view of the life of another group of people and are centered around some basic facts about food, holidays, or monuments and allow students to compare and contrast their home culture with cultures elsewhere. However most of these materials and the manner they are presented do not allow students to develop an intercultural competence that empowers them to relate to members of other cultures, to assume their points of view, or to avoid ethnocentrism. In short, our students are not Kinney 37 acquiring the skills necessary to successfully live in our increasingly diverse and multi-cultural world.

In summarizing the problems with current educational practices, Jim

Greenlaw states, “because most high school multicultural literature programs to date have not taken into account the relationship between cultural representations and imperialism, teachers of such courses have not developed the necessary pedagogical strategies to enable their students to examine the many problems of cultural difference and identity which they encounter during their textual investigations” (Greenlaw 5). The problem Greenlaw describes is similar to the problem Quince Duncan and Rina Cáceres sought to confront with their contributions to the Del Olvido a la Memoria series. In the introduction to the teacher’s guide to the series, Duncan states that the absence of African and African descended voices from the region’s official history and from Central American classrooms is not an innocuous omission. Duncan insists that these silences and misrepresentations allow for racist images and distorted perceptions to stay in place and continue dominating the region’s discourses. Ronald Harpelle notes:

“National histories consistently ignore the contributions of West Indian immigrants to the economic and social development of modern Costa Rica” (Harpelle, “The

Social and Political” 103). Without black writers and black characters, racist representations, which reduce the Costa Rican’s African-descended populations to caricatures, persist unchanged.

Duncan has said that his purpose as a writer has been to be the voice of Afro- descended Costa Ricans. Through his fictional and non-fictional work alike, he has Kinney 38 provided a vision of the African descendants’ experience in Costa Rica that counters the Eurocentric viewpoint that dominates western literature. Duncan states that his work, and the work of other Afrorealistic writers, “se orienta por una parte a elevar el nivel de consciencia histórica y por otra a desmitificarla de la gran cadena de negaciones, mitos, omisiones, victimismos, y descaradas mentiras que constituyen la historia oficial que se enseña en nuestros centros educativos” [oriented itself on one hand to elevate the level of historical conscience and on the other hand to demystify this history from the long chain of denials, myths, omissions, victimizations, and shaming that constitute the official history that is taught in our [Central American] educative centers] (Duncan “Afrorealismo”). Duncan writes to involve West Indian immigrants and their descendants in Costa Rica’s national discourse and to humanize and criticize them for failures to organize against the United Fruit

Company and the Costa Rican government. He points out how internal disputes within the community weakened it and ultimately allowed it to lose much of its identity. Duncan seeks to entertain and to educate others about the contributions of the members of this marginalized Costa-Rican ethnicity. His works examine life in

Limón between the years of 1872, when immigrants first arrived to construct a stretch of railroad from San José to Puerto Limón on the Atlantic Coast, and the early

1950s when many African descendants became citizens and either moved to San

José or left the country in search of other opportunities. Duncan’s desire to highlight the contributions of Afro-descendants in Costa Rica during an identifiable historical time period makes his work very valuable for students studying the languages and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world, because it stresses the historical, geographic Kinney 39 and human specificity of those phenomena. His work provides voices that can reveal much about the region and its history in a way that can help students to become more inter-culturally competent and also understand the local, grounded and interconnected nature of language and its meanings.

Reading and discussing Duncan’s stories can help American students understand and problematize the Eurocentric views of Costa Rica that dominate today’s language classrooms. Students can begin to consider the cultural dynamics of our world more critically and accurately. In the following chapters, I will suggest possible ways of using four of Duncan’s short stories in secondary-school foreign language classrooms. I will suggest that reading and discussing these stories will allow students to examine life in Limón from an insider’s perspective. The stories that will be discussed are: “Una canción en la madrugada” (“Dawn’s Song”), “Un regalo para abuela” (“A Gift for Grandma”), “El Partido” (“Go-o-o-al”), and “La leyenda de Joe Gordon” (“The Legend of Joe Gordon”). I have selected these four stories for three main reasons. First, I think their topics and characters can capture the attention of American secondary-school students. Second, I believe these stories can be placed in specific sociohistorical contexts and thus provide students a glimpse of what life was like for residents of the Limón Province of Costa Rica in the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. Third, these stories provide their readers with a direct and focused encounter with the culture of West

Indian immigrants and facilitate in-depth and detailed discussions about the significance of historical events and from the perspectives of genuinely different others. Kinney 40

As part of the discussion of each story, I provide a summary of the setting and relevant historical background information. This information is designed to help teachers develop effective lessons around each story as well as to provide teachers with information that can help them discuss and interpret each story with their students. Along with the historical background and commentary, I offer a list of key vocabulary items that could be taught to students before they read the story. This vocabulary can be combined with whatever grammatical structures are being taught. In this way, these stories can be inserted into existing teaching units that are usually centered about a specific grammatical structure. If, for example, the present perfect tense was being studied, a teacher could focus on uses of this tense in the story and then formulate discussion questions about the text using this target structure. Following these materials, teaching suggestions are offered to help teachers lead effective discussions with their students aimed at generating awareness and encouraging detailed attention to the lives and history of Afro- descendant Costa Ricans, as well as creating opportunities for comparative reflection on contemporary American society and the students’ own historical and cultural situations. Historical facts and discussion of cultural products, practices, and perspectives are given greater depth by connecting them to the specifics of the lives of the people in the communities that produce these cultural manifestations in the course of their own experience of historical events. The final section in each chapter contains a list of discussion questions that will encourage students to deeply consider the stories as well as their own cultures in relation to the characters’ experiences. Teachers can lead their discussions in English or in Spanish depending Kinney 41 on their students’ abilities and questions could be reworded so as to include the target grammatical structures and vocabulary.

Duncan’s texts can offer students a way to see the complexities of the world and go beyond the static and misleading representations that are common in textbooks. By learning about Costa Rica through the contexts these stories provide, students will be able to explore topics like culture, identity, race, gender, and socioeconomic status as they affect the way one interacts with others and with the discourses relevant to one’s situation in the world. Jim Greenlaw believes that the use of postcolonial deconstructive reading strategies while discussing and interpreting texts “offers teachers and students a means of opposing racist discourse by helping them to question ethical beliefs and ethnocentric biases in their texts, in their class discussions, and in their interactions with the world outside the classroom (3). By using these stories as a starting point, teachers can move beyond the mechanical handling of facts and dates and instead apply factual and contextual information to the living and dynamic situations represented in the stories that illuminate the ways in which one’s culture, as well as those of others, are lived, created, and transformed. This applied, relational knowledge along with discussions grounded on culturally specific settings and situations can then challenge and change the way our students see the world and encourage the development of a true intercultural competence.

Kinney 42

THE HISTORY AND ART OF COSTA RICA

Figure 2. Las Bolas .Stone spheres near the Terraba River in Southeastern Costa Rica created by the Diquís People between 500-1000 A.D. (Image source: wikimedia.org).

THE PRE-COLUMBIAN ERA

The first humans in present-day Costa Rica were groups of hunter-gatherers who first arrived during the Paleolithic Era between 12,000-8,000 B.C. The region’s geographic position on the Central American isthmus made it a natural meeting place for Mesoamerican tribes and South American tribes. The northwestern part of this territory, called the Nicoya Peninsula, was the southernmost point of the cultural influence of the Nahuatl people, and the Chibcha tribes influenced the central and southern parts of the region.

These tribal groups did not became sedentary until 8,000-4,000 B.C., when the tribes learned to domesticate plants for food consumption and other uses. Tools associated with agriculture and other activities were made from stones or bone fragments from early humans and animals. Evidence of the carving ability and sophistication of the tools used by the Neolithic peoples inhabiting Central America Kinney 43 can be seen in the stone spheres still present in Costa Rica today. These spheres are believed to have been created in the first millennium A.D., by the Diquís people, but they were not unearthed until the 1930s by United Fruit Company employees clearing land near the Térraba River in the southwestern part of the country. Those who have studied this era believe these spheres may have been used to mark territorial limits, indicated the proximity of a leader’s home, or were used in

Figure 3. African tripod. This artifact was found in Limón Province and was created between 300-800 A.D. (Image source: wikimedia.org). religious practices. Although the significance of these impressive spheres is still unknown, they have been declared UNESCO World Heritage Sites and survive today as a testament to the ingenuity and technical skills of these early inhabitants of

Costa Rica.

As agriculture became more productive and made more food available, the population grew and more people stayed put in the region. This increased population and food supply allowed individuals and families to focus on different tasks within the community. Many individuals and families could specialize in Kinney 44 complex crafts. This sophistication allowed a stable society to develop but also increased inequality. The historians Iván Molina and Steven Palmer note that “the egalitarian character of the first villages disappeared and the division of labor increased and a hierarchy of villages took shape” (4). In addition to farmers, there were people who organized and distributed the produce; warriors who defended the land and crops from other tribes; and of course the cacique (chief), who led all of these operations. Villages were linked together within their territory into chieftainships called cacicazgos.

As carcicazgos became larger, social differentiation increased and the members of each chieftainship acquired well-defined social roles that were determined by kinship networks, tribal status, and wealth. According to Molina and

Palmer, privileged individuals and groups were “charged with regulating everyday life, … [and] these elites arranged the distribution of riches, power, and knowledge in their favor” (10). This hierarchal social, political, and economic system lasted until the sixteenth century, when the Spanish arrived in Costa Rica. Kinney 45

Figure 4. A map of the colonial division in the Caribbean. (Image source: wikimedia.org).

THE COLONIAL ERA

There were 400,000 indigenous people living in Costa Rica when Christopher

Columbus made land fall in 1502. However, by the time the conquistadores established a permanent presence in the area in 1569 the indigenous population had already shrunk to 120,000 members. Molina and Palmer state, “the conquistadores were actually preceded by the arrival of their viruses and bacteria, which began to decimate the indigenous populations” (19). Nevertheless, the indigenous population had a strong presence throughout the region and fiercely resisted colonization efforts. Kinney 46

Colonial Costa Rica was part of the Audiencia of Santiago de Guatemala also known as the Captaincy General of Guatemala and was subdivided into two jurisdictions called the Province of Costa Rica and the Corregimiento of Nicoya. The

Figure 5. Tomás Povedano de Arcos (1847-1943), Rescate de Dulcehé (before 1941). Oil painting depicting the Spanish Governor Coronado returning a young woman, Dulcehé, to her brother, the cacique Corrohore, after her abduction by a rival tribe. (Image source: Wikimedia.org). majority of the population was located along the Pacific Coast and even though

Columbus made land fall at Cariay, now called Puerto Limón, located on the Atlantic

Coast, this side of Costa Rica was left relatively unsettled. Initially the Spanish had difficulty maintaining a colonial settlement in Costa Rica. As Molina and Palmer put it, “the Spanish subjugation of Costa Rica came late in the conquest of Central

America, and it was never really completed” (19). Conquistadores were met by vicious attacks by the indigenous peoples, difficult or impassable terrain (especially on the East Coast), and an oppressive climate. These factors hampered the

Spaniard’s ability to fully subdue and occupy the region. The colonizers resorted to violently dismantling the cacicazgo system. Indigenous people were enslaved and dispersed throughout the Captaincy. The Spanish even resorted to pulling up their Kinney 47 own crops when native peoples invaded their settlements, in order to force them to withdraw from lack of food. These factors as well the colony’s relative lack of gold and silver and its distance from the captaincy’s capital in Guatemala allowed the

Province of Costa Rica to have some autonomy that most other colonial areas did not enjoy.

In 1563 the Spanish did finally establish Cartago as the colonial province’s first capital and established a new system of governance, the encomienda system.

The Spanish crown divided the capital into encomiendas and appointed an encomendero to take control over the labor, agriculture, and products of the area.

The encomendero was instructed to defeat and enslave the indigenous groups living within the territories of his emcomienda. Although the Spanish already knew that

Costa Rica did not have much gold or silver, the colony was producing many foodstuffs and other products, like blankets, ceramics, and hardwoods, that could be exported throughout the region and sent back to Europe.

Molina and Palmer characterize three basic cycles that Costa Rica’s export economy went through in the seventeenth century (31). During the first cycle that lasted from from 1590 to 1680, mules were traded throughout the region. The animals were raised on the country’s Pacific coastal region and in the pastures of the

Central Valley and were valuable for their ability to transport food products and handcrafted goods up and down the isthmus. The second cycle began around 1650 when competition in the mule trade from Nicaragua and Honduras prompted the

Costa Rican colony to begin its export of lard and leather. The exportation of these two products was short lived and the Costa Rican colony soon began producing and Kinney 48 exporting its first boom crop—cacao—across Central America, the Caribbean, and to

Europe. This third cycle called the cacao boom lasted from 1727-1747 but according to Molina and Palmer, “the splendor of the cacao boom was fleeting, its rapid decline was due to a combination of different factors: taxes imposed by the

Crown, an absence of appropriate roads and ports, deficiencies in quality due to production methods, and attacks by pirates and the fearsome zambo mosquitos (a

Caribbean ethnicity resulting from a union of indigenous people and marooned slaves)” (33). Competition from other colonial cities, such as Caracas and Guayaquil, that also produced the commodity was another big factor for the industry’s rapid decline. Economically speaking, these cycles yielded relatively little profit for the

Spanish Crown, and Molina and Palmer state, “at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Costa Rica was a poor, empty, isolated, and marginal colony” of relatively little value to the Spanish Crown (27). Put simply, Costa Rica was a colonial backwater that received only the passing attention of the colonizers.

The Spanish devoted minimal resources and sent few slaves to Costa Rica, which prevented the colony from establishing large haciendas. The production, cultivation, harvesting, and exportation of these diverse products that did occur in

Costa Rica was done mostly by indigenous people and slaves. Like all of the others colonies, Costa Rica exploited indigenous workers and slaves to keep its export economy running. However, the indigenous population of 400,000 prior to

Columbus’s arrival had continued to shrink, and “by 1569, once the Spaniards had managed to gain a permanent foothold, there were only 120,000 indigenous people, and by 1611 there were a mere 10,000 left” (Molina and Palmer 19). In need of Kinney 49 more laborers, Spain intensified its efforts to conquer the Talamaca region on the

Atlantic Coast in order to subjugate the indios bravos living there. The Spanish also increased the number of black slaves it was importing. In El Negro en Costa Rica,

Duncan reveals that “el explorador español Sánchez de Badajoz, que transita por ‘la costa rica’ en 1540, estaba acompañado de nueve negros esclavizados” [the Spanish explorer Sánchez de Badajoz, who traveled to ‘the rich coast’ in 1540, was accompanied by nine black slaves] (Meléndez-Chaverri and Duncan). According to

Molina and Palmer, slave “labor was exploited fairly cautiously in Costa Rica, given that the elevated cost of a slave made him or her an investment that had to be protected by the owner” (36). When landholders needed money, slaves were given the opportunity to purchase their freedom and most slaves were given their freedom upon the death of their owner. Soon the Costa Rican colony was inhabited by Hispanics, slaves, many different indigenous groups, groups of freed slaves, and a growing mulatto and mestizo community that was the result of mixing among all of these groups.

The imported slaves mixed with the growing mulatto and mestizo populations to create a sizable mixed race population. Rina Cáceres-Gomez and

Carlos Meléndez, who have both collaborated with Quince Duncan, found evidence of a group of mulattos, mestizos, and freed-slaves living and working in 1676 in what became know as La Puebla de los Pardos in eastern Cartago. Cáceres-Gomez notes that residents participated in all aspects of city life. They worked in the fields, in artisanal trades, and served in the military (71). Meléndez notes “La Puebla fue fundada en los propios ejidos de la ciudad; el gobernador Sáenz Vázquez, para Kinney 50 estimular el desarrollo de este núcleo, autorizó la creación de un cabildo en ella, con tres regidores, un alcalde, un alguacil mayor y otro menor” [the town was founded just outside of the city; the governor Sáenz Vázquez, in order to stimulate the development of this community, authorized the creation of a town council, with three councilmen, a mayor, a chief and assistant bailiff] (Melénez-Chaverri and

Duncan).

La Puebla was also the site where, in 1635, a mulatta girl discovered La

Negrita, a 20-centimeter dark-colored statue of the Virgin Mary. Although the discovery of La Negrita was not a supernatural event, like the apparition of the

Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico, the icon in now venerated throughout the country and is the country’s patroness. Initially, however, during colonial times, veneration of La Negrita was limited to members of the black, mulatto, and mestizo communities who lived near a shrine built for the Madonna. The Anthropologist

Russell Leigh Sharman, who has written about La Negrita, states, “the cult of La

Negrita began as an invention of the church and colonial state to organize the growing mulatto population around Cartago” (845). La Puebla was a threat to the

Hispanic colonizers and they used La Negrita as a means of assimilating them to their religious tradition. Although La Negrita did not become the country’s

Figure 6. A map showing the cities of San José and Alajuela. (Image Source: wikimedia.org) Kinney 51 patroness until 1824, when authorities engaged in efforts to galvanize support for the Costa Rican states’ nationalist agenda, the story of La Negrita does also challenge the myth that portrays Costa Rica as a rural democracy of racial homogeny and reveals one-way indigenous groups were subjugated and forced to assimilate into the colony.

During the first part of the Colonial Era, the colony’s elites, and therefore wealth and power, were centered near Cartago in the Central Valley. The elites were the descendants of the original conquerors but there efforts to unify the colony and centralize its control were largely unsuccessful. Natural resources were available throughout the region which allowed people to settle in many parts of the colony. This made uniting the population difficult. Additionally, indigenous and former black slaves wanted to live separately from those who sought to dominate them and formed their own communities across the Central Valley. As the population grew and spread, more cities were established. The eighteenth century featured the founding of many cities, Heredia in 1706, San José in 1736, and Alajuela in 1782. There were many social inequalities visible in these newly settled areas as resources were only devoted to locales where colonial authorities sought to make a profit. Molina and Palmer state that “in contrast to the myth that Costa Rica was a classless rural democracy in the late colonial period, certain differences were visible even among peasants and farmers” (38).

Surprisingly, the second half of the eighteenth century saw resurgence in the region’s indigenous population and by 1800 indigenous people made up 14 percent of those living in the country’s Central Valley (Molina and Palmer 45). One percent Kinney 52 of the population was black, but 17 percent of the 50,000 living in the area were

Pardos, mulatos, and zambos (Molina and Palmer 45).

In part due to its relative poverty, there was no record of the art and literature produced during the Colonial Era. Additionally colonial powers were only interested in wealth production and did not give much concern to the promotion of artistic endeavors. In her essay about the history of Costa Rica’s National Theater,

Yanina Rovinski confirms that artistic production was also sparse during the

Colonial Era due to the Catholic Church’s aversion to non-religious cultural manifestations (Rovinski). As the Church was allied with the interests of the

Spanish Crown, art that was produced was usually focused on evangelization and proclaiming the Church’s messages. The art community, like almost all of the colony’s endeavors, were slow to grow, and by the end of the colonial period Costa

Rica was still a relatively disjointed collection of cities and large rural areas farmed by former slaves, indigenous peoples, and Hispanics.

THE POST-COLONIAL ERA

Like the other Central American countries, Costa Rica achieved independence quickly and without an armed revolution. Political upheaval in Europe, caused by the Peninsular War (1808-1814), led to disorder of the Spanish Crown. Spanish colonial authorities in Mexico were overthrown during the resulting chaos and by

1821 the bulk of Central America became independent. At the time of independence, Costa Rica’s major cities --Cartago, Heredia, San José, and Alajuela-- were not united in any way. They were rival towns competing in their business Kinney 53 endeavors on an isthmus with an uncertain future. The cities of Cartago and

Heredia favored annexation by the Mexican Empire, while San José and Alajuela preferred to remain separate. From 1821 until 1824 Costa Rica was an unsettled republic ruled by a succession of junta governments. In 1823, these conflicting visions resulted in the young country’s first civil war in which Cartago was defeated and San José became the country’s new capital. The San José leaders decided Costa

Rica should join the loosely knit United Provinces of Central America. However the isthmus’s fragile union did not last long. It struggled to stay together and after many failed attempts to form a functional relationship dissolved in 1838.

Costa Rica had already engaged in a second civil war in 1835 and did not become an entirely independent republic until 1848, when the authoritarian dictatorships of Braulio Carrillo Colina (1838-1842) and, later, José Francisco

Morazán Quezada (1842-1842), forced the organization and integration of the country’s different regions into a more unified political entity. Costa Rica signed its first constitution in 1848, but the Constitution was not met with universal approval, and the new republics’ growing pains continued. Molina and Palmer state “the very

Constitution that finally declared Costa Rica a republic stripped thousands of Costa

Ricans of their citizenship, and blocked many from running as electors” (59).

Citizenship was offered only to those who had a minimum of 200 pesos in personal wealth, and the electoral system disenfranchised many Costa Ricans from the selection of political leaders. This pushed many out of the political process. The historian James Busey notes that prior to 1913, “leading citizens elected local electors, who then chose regional electors who in turn elected chief executives as Kinney 54 well as deputies” (56). With power and wealth still held by the coffee elite in the

Central Valley, poorer farmers, indigenous peoples, mulattos, former slaves, and many others were left to their mercy when it came to deciding the country’s course.

The Constitution increased tensions between the city and countryside and many were disenfranchised from the young country’s political, economic, and social systems. These tensions and disenfranchisement would persist well into the twentieth century.

Figure 7. Much of Costa Rica's coffee was shipped to Europe from the port of Puntarenas. (Image source: CIA Factbook/ wikimedia.org)

During the first three decades of the nineteenth century, coffee was Costa

Rica’s chief cash crop. “The golden bean,” as it was called, led to a dramatic expansion of not only the country’s agricultural production, but also to developments in infrastructure, employment, and growth in new regions. Rich merchant families, many of whom were descendants of the conquistadors, became the country’s coffee elite and were given the name cafetaleros. The cafetaleros controlled almost all aspects of the new coffee industry and the country. The historian Alvaro Quesada Soto states, “the coffee oligarchy established itself as the Kinney 55 dominant class and intended to consolidate, under its direction, a national state with a uniform ideology under the labels of political “liberalism” and a philosophy of

“positivism” (99). The cafetaleros held a monopoly on credit, controlled trade, and owned all of the tools and machines that processed the beans and were used for exportation. However despite the power the cafetaleros held over the industry’s infrastructure and business, the coffee itself was grown predominantly on small family farms. These small producers formed a significant class of peasant farmers in the Central Valley because the coffee elite relied on their produce. Molina and

Palmer conclude that it was impossible “for the new coffee bourgeoisie to expropriate the peasants violently or to submit them to servitude as occurred in many other countries. The only option left open to the wealthy was to exercise a type of domination that recognized the liberty and the property of their social inferiors” (Molina and Palmer 51). These farmers and others became a relatively large middle class and many found some prosperity even though they were ultimately still at the mercy of the wealthy cafetaleros, who controlled credit, and access to land and trade. Although coffee financed much of the development and many of the advances of the young country, the inability to move coffee efficiently and cheaply from the Central Valley to the Atlantic Coast for exportation along with a series ineffective governments whose only goal was to appease the rich cafetaleros left Costa Rica, and much of Central America, relatively unstable politically and economically until the end of the nineteenth century. This made the country vulnerable to foreign entities that sought to exploit Central America’s cash crops and labor to become rich. Kinney 56

The economic success of the coffee industry did lead to the development of the country’s first public art culture. The historian Alvaro Quesada Soto states, “the first printing press arrived to the country in 1830 and the first published books were school texts and governmental documents; books with literary content only began to be published in the decade after 1890” (99). In 1850 electors chose Juan

Rafael Mora Porras (1849-1860) as the country’s president, and he immediately set

Figure 8. Detail of the mural "Alegoría del café y el banano" by the Italian artist Aleardo Villa that hand in Costa Rica's National Theater. (Image source: wikimedia.org) into motion many modernization efforts. One such effort was the creation of the

Teatro Mora, which staged performances of Shakespeare and other European playwrights. The cafetaleros favored European artists over local artists and Costa

Rican artists did not receive the same attention as European art. The theater’s decorations themselves came from Paris and as Russell Sharman states, included a

“lounge room from the era of Louis XIV and a majestic curtain depicting Minerva and her sister gods on the summit of Parnassus” (qtd. in Rovinski). Ticket prices were exorbitant and “theater going” was only possible for an elite few to see shows Kinney 57 by Bretón, Antonio Gil y Zárate, and other European dramaturges. When country’s national theater opened in 1897, a large ceiling mural depicting both the coffee and banana industries was commissioned for the ceiling. Instead of hiring a local painter, the Italian artist Aleardo Villa received the job and created a scene that inaccurately depicts coffee growing at sea level and bananas growing upside down.

A new tax on coffee paid for the theater’s construction including the mural, called the Alegoría del café y el banano.

Figure 9. Coffee collectors in Costa Rica at the end of the 19th century. (Image source:

Wikimedia.org) The most significant threat to the young Costa Rican republic occurred in

1854. An American mercenary soldier, a filibuster named William Walker, took power of Nicaragua while it was in the midst of a civil war. Costa Rica’s President

Mora Porras feared that Walker’s objective was to take control of the isthmus and build an inter-ocean canal across Nicaragua through forced labor imposed on the citizens of the region. Mora Porras tried to unite the other Central American governments to drive Walker from the region. The Costa Ricans defeated Walker two years after he had taken Nicaragua and managed to maintain their Kinney 58 independence. A mulatto laborer from Alajuela named Juan Santamaría became the country’s first national hero for the courage he displayed during a battle against

Walker. At the Battle of Rivas, Santamaría set fire to a building from where Walker’s forces were firing upon Costa Rican troops. Santamaría was killed but his actions saved many Costa Rican lives. Santamaría is still celebrated today and the country’s international airport is named after him.

Mora Porras was overthrown by a coup in 1859 and killed a year later as he attempted to retake power. For the next thirty years, members of Costa Rica’s

Figure 10. Statue of Juan Santamaría in Alajuela, Costa Rica. Santamaría set fire to a building during a battle with William Walker’s forces saving many Coast Ricans. (Image source: Wikimedia.org/Erik Chavarría) coffee elite ruled the country without regard for the interests of anyone but themselves. This was a period of great instability, as the coffee elite did not have any vision for the country beyond the success of their golden beans. Molina and

Palmer observe, “as the country became more complex in every way, such amateur, clannish government was no longer capable of providing coherence and direction to national development” (69). Six different administrations held office from 1870-

1881 with the longest serving leader being Tomás Guardia Gutiérrez (1870-1876 and 1877-1882). Kinney 59

After Guardia Gutiérrez, the next three Costa Rican leaders were authoritarian dictators who had a distinct vision for the country. They wanted to set the country on a pathway towards becoming their version of a modern state. The

“Olympians,” as they were nicknamed, due to their arrogance, included two notable leaders-- Próspero Fernández (1882-1885) and Bernardo Soto (1885-1889). They strengthened political authority, expanded agricultural capitalism, and sought to educate the lower classes. Mandatory education allowed these leaders to spread the values of patriotism, capitalism, science, and hygiene across the country. They tightened administrative control, privatized land, and discouraged activities such as alternative medicine and cockfighting. Both Fernández and Soto, who both served in his predecessor’s cabinet before becoming president, worked to undermine the power of the Catholic Church by nationalizing cemeteries, making divorce legal, and introducing civil marriage. According to Molina and Palmer, the “Olympians’” reforms “deepened a cultural divide, first visible in the 1840s, between comfortably- off urban sectors, with their cosmopolitan and secular politicians and intellectuals, and the mass of the population” (72).

In order to create a “national identity” for Costa Rica, the Olympians reintroduced the citizenship to figures from the past, such as Juan Santamaría, and

La Negrita, whom they made the country’s patron saint. However rather than celebrating the racial identities of these two figures, the Olympians used them as pawns to manufacture an artificial sense of national, ethnic, and cultural Costa Rican unity. The Olympians also fabricated the idea of the superiority of Costa Rica from the rest of Central America by disseminating the “la leyenda blanca” (the White Kinney 60

Legend). The leyenda blanca is a nationalistic narrative that falsely claims Costa

Rica was formed as a country by a group of “white” Hispanic farmers with strong work ethics and peaceful natures. This narrative denies that indigenous people, slaves, immigrants, and others had any role in establishing Costa Rica. The ruling elite celebrated la leyenda and Santamaría as if he had just performed the heroic acts that he had actually completed 30 years earlier and used him “to both fend off

Central American federalism and create consent among the masses for the postcolonial oligarchy” (Sharman 847). The strong relationship the Olympians had with the country’s intellectuals and other politicians allowed their message to be disseminated far and wide and permeate the country. Literature written by the intellectuals, many of whom were also professors, was used in schools to indoctrinate Costa Ricans to la leyenda blanca.

In order to further unite the population and further the spread of their ideas the Olympians made La Negrita the national patroness in order to add a religious element to the idea of national unity and persuade the population to go along with

Figure 11. Basilica of the Virgen of Los Angeles in Cartago, Costa Rica. (Image source: Wikimedia.org) their reforms. The story of La Negrita was coopted as a story that gave religious Kinney 61 credence, or even a divine mandate, to the Olympian’s message, even though as the historian Russell Lohse states, “the popular legend of the apparition of the Virgen de

Los Ángeles openly challenges key tenants of the myths of rural democracy and racial homogeneity” (325). Despite the fact that both its national hero and patron saint were not white, and that many non-white Costa Rican’s contributed to the nation’s founding, the national myth of white identity dominated well into the twentieth century and even persists to this day.

Although the Olympians’ main focus may have been securing la leyenda blanca as the country’s dominant discourse, they were also responsible for allowing foreign entrepreneurs to enter the county and assume a large amount of control over the country’s economy and workforce. While serving as Próspero Fernández’s cabinet minister, Bernardo Soto hired Minor Cooper Keith to construct a railroad uniting the Central Valley with the Atlantic Coast in exchange for 800,000 acres of land adjacent to the tracks and a 99 year lease to own the railway. The proposed rails, however, were to cut through some of Costa Rica’s densest jungle in Limón

Province and the project suffered many setbacks. Keith brought thousands of immigrants to Costa Rica to complete the project. The deal however was very lucrative for Keith, which might be attributed to the fact that in 1883 he married a woman that was Próspero Fernández’s niece and Bernardo Soto’s cousin-in-law.

Keith eventually finished the railway and used the land he received as part of his compensation and his relationship to Costa Rican elites to start the United Fruit

Company and dominate the political and economic landscapes of the country’s Kinney 62

Limón Province for decades and to play a large role in Costa Rica for more than a century.

The Olympians’ dominance began to decline when the Catholic Church expressed its displeasure by backing a non-Olympian candidate named José Joaquín

Rodriguez (1889-1894) in the 1889 elections. Not willing to relinquish power,

Bernardo Soto and his Olympian cohorts committed electoral fraud after it appeared they might lose the election to Joaquín Rodriguez. Soto’s opponents mobilized armed resistance and surrounded the capital. A civil war was averted only because

Soto signed an agreement that allowed Joaquín-Rodriguez to become president.

As the foreign companies grew, the cafetaleros sought to preserve their workforce in the Central Valley and dissuaded workers from migrating to the Limón region for the railroad project. Laborers, who did migrate to Limón, soon found the oppressive climate and dangerous working conditions more than they could handle.

This led Keith to recruit West Indian and other workers to Costa Rica to construct the railroad. Keith allowed his workers to squat on the land along the tracks as long as they would plant banana seedlings and sell their produce to his company. By encouraging his employees to live on company land, Keith could insert himself into many aspects of his workers lives and thus gain much leverage in the employee/worker relationship. The workers were not allowed to move freely about the country. They were confined to the Limón Province and the Province became a

“Caribbean enclave” within Costa Rica, essentially controlled by Keith, with a separate culture, language, religion, and way of life. Kinney 63

Keith’s power in Limón increased in 1899 when he merged his fruit company with a rival company to form the United Fruit Company. Because it is the nature of banana industry to go through boom and bust cycles the country frequently reassessed its relationship with the foreign fruit company. However like a gambler who attempts to double-down to quickly earn back the money he has lost, Costa

Rica left itself at Keith’s mercy to attempt regain financial solvency. Molina and

Palmer note, “United Fruit’s predatory process was itself responsible for this cycle of boom and bust. The profit margins of the company, which operated on an international scale, depended on the exploitation of virgin lands acquired for little or no money. Once the lands were exhausted or invaded by disease, United Fruit simply abandoned them and began cultivation somewhere else” (Molina and Palmer

81). Since Limón was nearly uninhabited at the time of United Fruit’s arrival, the company was granted significant control over the region and the immigrant workforce. The Company controlled almost all aspects of Limón and in order for

Costa Rica to have any control over the workers living there it needed to appease the UFCO. Kinney 64

Figure 12. Carlos Luis Fallas's 1941 novel Mamita Yunai about the challenges working for United Fruit. (Image source: Wikimedia.org)

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

According to Molina and Palmer “the first three decades of the twentieth century were characterized by the erosion of the ideology of progress” (87). In response to the Olympians’ singular vision for the country, a more radical generation emerged that created art and literature and inspired workers to make demands for more rights and better treatment. Citizens no longer accepted the monolithic vision of Costa Rica that the Olympians presented. James Busey calls

Cleto González Víquez (1906-1910 and 1928-1932) and Ricardo Jiménez (1910-

1914, 1924-1928, and 1932-1936) “two giants of Costa Rican politics” because

“during their terms Costa Rica enjoyed a huge upsurge of free expansion, non- violent party competition, and educational and cultural development” (Busey 61).

Both men dramatically improved the country’s infrastructure and educational systems. During this time period, the country’s art community also began to Kinney 65 blossom. Writers like Carmen Lyra, who also founded the country’s first Montessori school, and Carlos Luis Fallas, whose book Mamita Yunai criticized the way the

United Fruit Company treated its employees, were not only influential artists but also active members of the country’s Communist Party. These artists’ work helped galvanize the working-class by encouraging them to speak up against injustices and by inspiring them to form unions and hold strikes if necessary. Costa Rica’s art community, however, remained dominated by Hispanics, and it was their art that received national attention. Works from the West Indian community in Limón and indigenous people still living in the country were not given the recognition they deserved.

The disenfranchisement of Limón and its West Indian population by the

Hispanic majority made the community suspicious of the Communist Party’s desire to help them and relatively few joined the party. The feelings of the West Indian community were reflected in the artistic creations of community members. Near the middle of the century, the Afro-Costa Rican writers Eulalia Bernard and Quince

Duncan (both from Limón) produced works. Bernard’s poems, “Requiem a mi primo jamaiquino,” “My mother and the seawall,” and “Directorio telefónico,” express the Afro-Costa Rican’s struggle to feel at home in a country whose national identity denied their existence. Duncan’s short stories and his novels did not receive the same attention as the works of other Latin American writers but describe the contributions of the West Indian community to the country’s progress and add their stories to the national discourse. Kinney 66

The World War years were turbulent for Costa Rica, and the political scene of

1930s and 1940s was characterized by the struggle between the Communist Party and the newly formed National Republican Party. The Catholic Church remained a formidable presence in the political realm and led the charge against the

Communists’ radical demands. In the 1940 election, the coffee elite favored Rafael

Ángel Guardia (1940-1944) in his challenge to the Communist incumbent. Guardia was elected with over 80 percent of the vote and quickly introduced liberal reforms by increasing workers rights, establishing a minimum wage, securing universal health care, and addressing poverty (Molina and Palmer 106). Unlike his predecessors, he also pledged to develop the Atlantic region that had been essentially abandoned by United Fruit.

The outbreak of the Second World War severely crippled Costa Rica’s agricultural industries and stopped much of Guardia’s progress. Discontent toward the Republican Party spread quickly and the country became polarized once again.

Term limits prevented Guardia from running 1944, and therefore he supported

Teodoro Picado Michalski (1944-1948). Guardia was eligible to run again in 1948 and Picado supported Guardia’s return to power. However this back and forth trading of power made the public suspicious. Allegations of electoral fraud and corruption enraged many Costa Ricans and galvanized support for the opposition.

All of the strife came to a head during the presidential elections of 1948, which featured the candidates Otilio Ulate (1949-1953) and Calderón Guardia. Thousands of citizens claimed they had been denied the chance to vote in the election, and

Congress nullified the election’s results. Before another election could be held, José Kinney 67

Figueres Ferrer (1948-1949, 1953-1958, 1970-1974), a charismatic member of

Costa Rica’s elite who spent two years exiled in Mexico for viciously attacking

Guardia in a radio speech, instigated armed protests that led to a civil war.

Thousands of Costa Ricans’ died in the conflict.

Limón was viewed as a key port and both sides fought to seize the city.

However members of the Limonese West Indian community largely stayed out of the conflict. As Quince Duncan states in El Negro en Costa Rica, “[la comunidad] ha fundado una colonia británica, y quiere mantenerla. Ella es la proyección de sí mismo, el product de su esfuerzo, el símbolo externo de su identidad” [(the community) has founded a British colony and wants to maintain it. She is the projection of themselves, the product of their efforts, the external symbol of their identity] (Meléndez-Chaverri and Duncan). The feelings of alienation that the

Limonese people felt in Costa Rica left them willing to cling to their legal status as

British colonial subjects and avoid participating in the Civil War. As the dominant

Costa Rican national identity continued to systematically diminish and reduce Afro-

Costa Ricans and their contributions, the Limonese people found an identity in an odd nostalgia for Jamaica and its colonial past. Since Jamaican colonial past was different than Costa Rica’s the Limonese people could carve out a unique identity in their new country by celebrating these differences and claiming superiority.

Figueres’ rebels successfully defeated the Costa Rican military in 44 days and almost immediately, the Figueres government started making significant changes.

Most famously, he abolished the country’s military but he also nationalized banks and placed a heavy tax on high earners. For the first time since the 1830s, the Kinney 68 cafeleteros did not control credit in Costa Rica. Figueres reached out to the West

Indian community in Limón that had been essentially abandoned when United Fruit moved its operations to the Pacific Coast. Blacks were granted the right to vote and many West Indians received their citizenship becoming Afro-Costa Ricans. However racism and stereotyping did not end, and the West Indian community in Limón struggled to maintain its identify in the face of a leader who was working to unite the country by eliminating the differences and uniqueness that made Limón’s culture so rich and vibrant. Just as the Olympians had sought to unite the country by assimilation and blurring of differences, Figueres sought to remake Costa Rica as a modern democracy of similarly indistinct ethnic and racial characteristics. He did succeed, like none of his predecessors could, in uniting Limón with the rest of Costa

Rica, but his unification ultimately destroyed the uniqueness of the West Indian community. Blacks were now recognized, at least legally, as Costa Ricans, but the country’s majority did not work to integrate the community and their culture into

Costa Rica, but rather worked to assimilate them to the culture and the country’s national identity.

Many of Figueres’ reforms helped the country and Costa Rica transition into what Molina and Palmer refer to as “The Golden Age of the Middle Class.” The historians state that by 1978, “the average Costa Rican could expect to live to the age of 70, infant mortality was a healthy 20 per thousand live births, and 90 percent of the people over 10 years old were literate. Three quarters of the labor force were covered by Social Security and unemployment hovered at a mere 5 percent” (119).

The coffee industry was strong once again and the economy more stable because of Kinney 69 greater diversity with new agricultural companies and a wider variety of cash crops

(although many crops were controlled by the UFCO and other foreign entities).

Not all Costa Ricans were pleased with Figueres and the new prosperity. The wealthy elite, in particular, was not happy with the president’s bank nationalization or the 10 percent tax on all capital above 50,000 colones. Small producers were also unhappy that they still were forced to compete with the large-scale agricultural operations, many still foreign owned. Banana workers and other wage laborers

“fell victim to the anti-union offensive of the state and of employers, to urban growth and to a new kind of industrialization” (Molina and Palmer 129).

The relative prosperity inspired a growing arts and entertainment community. However, just as colonial artists and the artists of the first few decades of independence had created European-influenced works, the art community of the twentieth century had to wrestle with the increasing penetration of American art and entertainment. By the 1960s, radio and television programs impacted the Costa

Rica arts and entertainment scene. Art and entertainment became more accessible to more of the population, but, as in the heyday of the nineteenth-century cafetaleros, it was mostly an imported, foreign product. More Costa Ricans than even before were getting their entertainment from the United States through the television medium. The University of Costa Rica, in San José, put on theatrical and dance performances, and the state began to financially support the arts, though

“much of it lacked originality” (Molina and Palmer 137). Local art also developed but continued to be dominated by the values of the Central Valley. Artists such as Kinney 70

Fausto Pacheco, for example, created watercolors and oil landscape paintings of adobe houses and rural scenes of the Central Valley.

Some art created by members of the West Indian community did begin to receive attention. In 1941, Carlos Luis Fallas published his book Mamita Yunai.

Although the novel was banned inside of the country until 1970 many foreign readers became aware of the UFCO’s practices in Costa Rica. Mr. Walter Ferguson began playing calypso music in Limón in 1930s, when United Fruit departed for the

Pacific Coast. Although Ferguson composed over 100 calypsos, earning him the nickname “the King of Calypso,” almost none of his music was ever recorded until

1982, when Smithsonian Folk Ways recorded his work. Some of his best known songs “Cabin in the Wata,” “Callaloo,” and “Black Man Food,” describe many aspects of the Afro-Costa Rican experience. By the time Ferguson’s work was recorded and he began receiving international attention, he had mostly retired and was only performing sporadically. By and large, decades after they were in power, the model of “white” Costa Rica imposed by the Olympians was still being used to assimilate members of the West Indian community.

Molina and Palmer note that “this process [assimilation] of a once distinctive,

Anglophone West Indian culture into the dominant Hispanic mode … led to the decadence of an active and cosmopolitan public sphere created by Afro-Caribbean immigrants in the first three decades of the 20th century, [and] was fomented by people from the highlands [Central Valley] who settled in the zone, by racism, and by the state’s refusal to offer English instruction in public schools” (138). Artists like Quince Duncan, Shirley Campbell, Eulalia Bernard, Delia McDonald, and Kinney 71 intellectuals like Carlos Meléndez and Rina Cáceres Gómez, whose work seeks to recognize the contributions of West Indians to Costa Rica, have been mostly left out of the national discourse and essentially silenced. If these writers wanted their work to be available to a broader audience, they were forced to compose in Spanish, which for many was their second language. Dorothy Mosby, who has written extensively about both Bernard and Duncan, states that these two artists “reveal a continuous play of tensions between affinity for West Indian culture and their national allegiance to Costa Rica” (235). Both of these artists favor the integration of West Indian, and now Afro-Caribbean, culture into the country’s dominant discourse.

In 1980, rising world oil prices and the plummeting of coffee’s value sent

Costa Rica’s economy into financial collapse. The situation was made markedly worse when, in 1983, United Fruit abandoned its Pacific Coast operations.

Widespread political unrest in much of Central America halted regional trade, and refugees streamed into Costa Rica. Deeply in debt, the country sought a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In exchange for the loan, the IMF demanded that Costa Rica take austerity measures such as privatizing state enterprises, cutting public sector employees, and ending agricultural subsidies. The Rodrigo Carazo government (1978-1982) rejected these measures, which would have devastated the county, and ended negotiations with the IMF immediately. When Luis Alberto

Monge (1982-1986) won the presidency, he met with the U.S. president Ronald

Reagan and encouraged the idea that Costa Rica could be seen as an example to other Latin American countries as to how capitalism and democracy can coexist in Kinney 72 the region. Fearing that communism would infiltrate the isthmus; Reagan authorized USAID to begin sending money to Costa Rican private non-governmental organizations. Despite Reagan’s desires, the Costa Rican government refused to allow the U.S. to establish military bases in the country from which to fight the

Nicaraguan Sandinistas. Remarkably, it was Costa Rican president Óscar Arias

Sánchez (1986-1990) who eventually brokered the peace agreement signed by five

Central American leaders that earned him the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize.

The Cold War ended in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed and without the need to fear the spread of Soviet ideals in Central America, the United States sharply reduced aid to Costa Rica. However, over the course of the 1980s and 1990s

Costa Rica’s financial situation had improved remarkably. Molina and Palmer note that, “as the 1990s drew to a close it was clear just how much Costa Rica has changed since the crisis of 1980. In 1987, for the first time in 150 years the value of coffee and banana exports was surpassed, over a sustained period of time, by that of non-traditional exports” (157). Costa Rica was now producing textiles, pineapple, seafood, and even manufacturing electronics for INTEL. The country’s ecotourism industry was also growing rapidly. The economy had become remarkably diverse considering that a mere century ago it had only one cash crop.

Despite the resurgent economy, the local arts lagged behind. Although eight feature films were made in Costa Rica between 1984 and 2004, Molina and Palmer observe, “the rapid penetration of the ‘American way of life’ was assisted by the introduction of cable television in 1981 and subsequent internet access; by the founding of private primary and secondary schools that emphasized the teaching of Kinney 73

English; by the boom in advertising agencies whose styles are copied from Miami; and by the opening of video arcades and video rental shops” (Molina and Palmer

169). As a result of this penetration, American products and values dominate Costa

Rica’s art culture, and it has been difficult for Costa Rican artists to have their work noticed. Writers like Quince Duncan, however, have managed to garner some attention. Duncan received an honorary doctorate from St. Olaf University in 2001, and was appointed the Commissioner for Afro-Descendent Affairs by Costa Rica’s president Luis Guillermo Solís (2014-present) in 2015. Duncan told the Tico-Times, a leading Costa Rican newspaper, “this [his appointment] is the opportunity to actively participate and achieve dreams that we have dreamed” (Dyer, The Tico-

Times).

Despite the passage of time and some progress, Costa Rica has continued to adhere to la leyenda blanca as its national myth, in much the same form as put forth by the Olympians and reinforced by the liberal governments of the twentieth century. The myth has permeated Costa Rican society, economics, and artistic endeavors. Quince Duncan has written about the tight grip this doctrinarian racism has on the country and sees his work as an “attempt to help disarticulate four hundred years of theological, anthropological, sociological, political, philosophical constructions, designed by very brilliant minds of Europe and their U.S. and otherwise located counterparts” (Duncan, “Interview”). Although the country is relatively peaceful and still predominantly made up of people of Hispanic descent, the West Indian and indigenous communities have remained vibrant and strong. As mentioned before, the Commission for Afro-Descendant Affairs is working on 75 Kinney 74 different development projects from rebuilding sewers to job training programs to revitalize Limón and give residents more opportunities. Costa Rica’s future will depend on its ability to adapt in a globalized world. The country has already seen the dangers of allowing foreign enterprises to waste its land and abuse its people, and must look for collaborative arrangements with foreign entities that benefit all

Costa Ricans. The country must continue to provide career paths for its people and foster a healthy and stable middle class, so the young do not leave the country in the numbers we have seen in other Central American nations. The works of writers and artists like Quince Duncan are a very important aspect of how Costa Ricans are crafting for themselves a new and more diverse identity, one that can help the country finally cast off the shackles of its colonial past.

Kinney 75

CHAPTER 3

LIVING IN LIMÓN: UNA CANCIÓN EN LA MADRUGADA/ DAWN’S SONG

THE STORY

“Una canción en la madugrada”/”Dawn’s Song” is the first story in Duncan’s collection of the same name. In it he offers readers a written panoramic landscape of Siquirres. Siquirres is a town located in Costa Rica’s Limón Province along a railroad line that connects the Central Valley to the Caribbean Sea. It is 38 miles from Puerto Limón and 88 miles from the country’s capital city of San José. A majority of the residents of Siquirres are West Indians, but the town is also home to indigenous people and immigrants from other parts of Central America and the

Caribbean. A minority are Costa Rican citizens. The town has an Anglican Church and a Catholic Church. People can be heard speaking a variety of languages in the town’s streets. The story’s protagonists, John and Myra attend the Roman Catholic services, while their children attend Anglican Sunday school. This sort of diversity is common and accepted in Siquirres. New immigrants arrive almost daily and therefore, it is a town of contrasts and a mix of cultures. Duncan’s narrator states that the people live together despite their differences and, “los fieles de las distintas confesiones se miraban con respeto, … la violencia del llano les había enseñado que el respeto mutuo y la tolerancia son virtudes humanas” [the faithful of various denominations looked at each other with respect … for their daily struggle on the plain had taught them that mutual respect and tolerance are human virtues](Duncan Cuentos 17; trans. Duncan Martin-Orgunsola 43). The townspeople Kinney 76 accept the contrasts and cultural differences as part of their lives as immigrants working to make the best lives they can in Costa Rica.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Duncan, Quince. Cuentos Escogidos. San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Costa Rica,

2004. Print.

• Duncan, Quince, and Dellita Martin-Ogunsola. The Best Short Stories of Quince

Duncan. San José: Editorial Costa Rica, 1995. Print.

• Duncan, Quince. Una Canción En La Madrugada. San José: Editorial Costa

Rica, 1970. Print.

KEY EXPRESSIONS AND VOCABULARY

--su piel --las hojas de los plátanos --unas gotas de humanidad --la violencia del llano --una canción en la madrugada --el respeto mutuo y la tolerancia --el pito de la extra --la iglesia anglicana --su finca --el llano era herida

SUMMARY

We meet John and Myra as they are enjoying a few moments of peace in bed before they rise and start their busy days. They live in Siquirres, a town in Limón

Province along the railway line that transports bananas and coffee to the Atlantic

Coast. John goes to work in the fields while his wife Myra stays at home with the children. The story offers readers a series of snapshots of their daily life. Their life is filled with hard work, oppressive heat, and tedious daily routines. However, we also read about John and Myra’s weekends. They go to religious services, have a Kinney 77 swimming date, and dance to calypso, blues, and jazz. Their life is difficult but it is also filled with leisure, romance, and tender moments together. Duncan’s story provides a counter-narrative to the Costa Rican national narrative that has offered

Figure 13.Costa Rica’s Limón Province is highlighted in red. (Image source: wikimedia.org) only a single story of Limonese people. In the dominant history, they are immigrant workers without agency whose lives are nothing but struggles, but in Duncan’s story they are fully human. Their humanity is emphasized by the story’s illustration of the contrasts and complexities of their lives.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND- THE ARRIVAL OF IMMIGRANTS IN LIMÓN

Inhospitable geographic conditions and an oppressive climate left Costa

Rica’s Limón Province sparsely populated until the last few decades of the 19th century. When the first census was taken in 1883, the entire Province, which spans

9,189 km2, had less than 2,000 inhabitants (Harpelle, The West Indians of Costa Rica

10). Beginning around 1870, at the urging of coffee farmers, the Costa Rican government began looking for ways to expand the country’s agricultural industry. Kinney 78

The government determined that coffee trade with European markets would be more efficient and more cost effective if it constructed a 110-mile stretch of railroad connecting the country’s Central Valley to the Limón Province on the Atlantic Coast.

Fearing a worker exodus to Limón Province, the coffee elite encouraged the government to loosen its restrictive immigration laws in order to allow immigrants to complete the railway. The country would then be able to reap the benefits of having a port on the Atlantic Coast, but not threaten the Central Valley’s coffee industry.

The railroad project proved even more difficult than predicted and a series of stops and starts due to financial problems and dangerous working conditions delayed the project. Deeply in debt, Costa Rica hired the American entrepreneur

Henry Meiggs to manage the project. Meiggs had previously managed infrastructure projects in Chile and Peru, but the Costa Rican project presented unique challenges.

By 1874 only 32 kilometers of tracks out of the port city of Limón had been completed at the expense of thousands of immigrant’s lives. These difficulties resulted in bankruptcy for Meiggs’ company. Meiggs’ sudden and untimely death further delayed the project. (The West Indians of Costa Rica 15). The Costa Rican government hired Meiggs’ nephew Minor Cooper Keith to assume control of the project.

The proposed railway would cut through some of the country’s densest and most inhospitable terrain in the Limonese lowlands. The historians Clarence Jones and Paul Morrison found that “construction was interrupted many times because of disease, heavy rains, lack of laborers, and lack of finances—once construction was Kinney 79 suspended for nearly three years while Keith raised more money” (Jones and

Morrison 2). In order to complete this massive and difficult project, Keith recruited more and more immigrant laborers to the Province. The historian Ronald Harpelle noted that “people from the highland regions and the dry Pacific coast region of

Guanacaste understood that the Atlantic coast lowlands were rampant with malaria and yellow fever” (Harpelle The West Indians of Costa Rica 12). According to Jones and Morrison the railroad passed “across the low, swampy, hot, rainy, heavily forested, insect infested and disease ridden lowland, up the deep rugged Reventazón

Valley, over the continental divide at 5137 feet, and down across the Meseta Central to San José” (1). Keith recruited a work force from across the West Indies and as far away as China to complete the project. The historian Rosario-Fernández, however, noted that “la búsqueda [de trabajadores] cesó cuando en la última década del siglo

XIX la Compañía presumió que Los jamaiquinos eran Los mejores para explotar …

Ya en 1927 había en Limón 19,136 jamaiquinos” [the search (for workers) ended when in the last decade of the 19th century the Company presumed that the

Jamaicans were the best to exploit … By 1927 there were already 19,136 Jamaicans in Limón] (1246).

By bringing a large number of workers to the country, Keith could exploit the workers. He began to test prospective workers before hiring them to see if they were physically fit. Rosario-Fernández notes that recruitment tests included “un riguroso examen fisico, el cual pasaban unos veinte de cada cien. Los seleccionados, jóvenes fuertes y sanos, morían por la explotación a la que se sometían sin contratos escritos, víctimas de maltrato y de atrasos del pago” [a rigorous physical exam, Kinney 80 which only twenty out of every one hundred passed. Some of those selected, the strong and healthy young men, died from the exploitation that they endured. Others were not offered written contracts or were often victims of mistreatment, and some were not promptly paid for their work] (1246-1247).

Figure 14. Workers hauling banana by mule in the early 1900’s. (Image source: Library of Congress http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/npcc.20195)

It took almost twenty years to complete the railway. In this time the

Province became a thriving community that was culturally, linguistically, and geographically separate from the rest of Cost Rica. The immigrants brought their religions, foods, languages, styles of architecture, and more, which allowed the region to develop in ways that were much different than the rest of the country. In

El Negro en Costa Rica, Quince Duncan states “la llegada del negro produciría con el tiempo un impacto imborrable en el desarrollo económico de Costa Rica” [in time the arrival of the black population would make a lasting impact on the economic Kinney 81 development of Costa Rica] (Meléndez-Chaverri and Duncan). The region developed as an Afro-Caribbean enclave within a predominately Hispanic Costa Rica.

From 1891 until 1911 43,438 Jamaican immigrants came to Costa Rica

(Rosario-Fernández 1246). The first immigrants settled in the Provincial capital city of Puerto Limón, but others soon spread throughout the Province. By 1927, 57% of

Limón residents were of African descent (Harpelle The West Indians of Costa Rica

18). Keith and the other American and British entrepreneurs preferred to hire

Jamaicans because communication was much easier with them as opposed to the non-English speaking immigrants. Additionally, the historian Carlos Meléndez notes that compared to other immigrant groups, the Jamaicans were able to tolerate the physical demands of working in Limón’s dense jungles. The Jamaicans were also given favorable positions with fruit producing companies because they had experience working on banana plantations.

During the first half of the 20th century the Costa Rican government gave the

United Fruit Company almost complete control of all aspects of Limón Province.

The company built roads, constructed bridges, put up telegraph poles, ran company stores, and constructed worker housing. The government allowed the company to have this power and allowed the large influx of immigrants because it sought the large profits from the growing banana industry. According to Jones and Morrison

“exports from Limón rose from 1,035,000 bunches in 1890 to 3,420,000 stems in

1900 and to 10,166,550 bunches in 1907” (3). The government allowed the fruit companies to control governance and infrastructure creation in Limón so that it could reap tremendous profits without the worry of managing the racially diverse Kinney 82

Province. Costa Rica also needed to placate the fruit companies in hopes that its profits would help the country regain economic solvency. The government was also under significant pressure from the country’s coffee elite to protect their interests as well. The historian Ronald Harpelle explains, “immigration was permitted because the coffee elite did not want [Hispanic] laborers to move to the lowland banana plantations where wages were higher” (Harpelle “The Social and Political”

105). The company used its control of almost all aspects of the region to leverage, subjugate, and exploit its immigrant workforce. Harpelle notes that “Limón was a buffer zone between the Caribbean and Hispanic worlds … a meeting point where cultures collided and most importantly, where West Indians became Afro-Hispanics”

(Harpelle, The West Indians of Costa Rica 4).

The company also used the control it had over many aspects of workers’ lives to create divisions among workers and to prevent them from unifying. Whenever possible, workers of different ethnicities were housed in separate sleeping quarters and given different jobs within the company. By keeping immigrant groups separate, the company could prevent workers from organizing large-scale strikes and protests against unfair conditions. Kinney 83

Figure 15. A Costa Rican banana plantation in the early 1900's. (Image source: Library of Congress/ Wikimedia.org)

In 1883, in order to escape from some of its debt, the country signed the

Soto-Keith contract. This contract gave Keith significant control over not only the railroad project but also much of Limonese land adjacent to the tracks. In exchange for completion of the railroad, Keith was given ownership of the line and 800,000 acres of the land on either side of the tracks for a period of 99 years (Rosario-

Fernández 1248). Even before the project was completed in 1890, Keith had started using the land, as well as the immigrants and their descendants, to grow bananas.

Keith allowed some of his workers to squat on this land so they could cultivate bananas for the company. The Soto-Keith contract yielded Keith even more political, economic, and social control over the region than he already had. Without federal oversight, the company often delayed distributing paychecks or distributed coupons instead of paychecks that could only be redeemed at the company-run commissary. The company discouraged organization by firing striking workers or Kinney 84 by recruiting new immigrants to take their positions (often paying the new workers less money). Due to its immense power, influence, and control, the United Fruit

Company was given the nickname “El Pulpo”/ “The Octopus” and company’s ruthlessness became well known throughout Central America (Rosario-Fernández

1248).

Initially the Limonese immigrants considered themselves temporary workers. The majority intended to leave Costa Rica once they have saved some money. The Costa Rican government saw the influx of foreign-born workers as temporary as well, and immigrants were not offered citizenship until the last half of the 19th century. Quince Duncan said that “la idea del inmigrante fue simplemente la de acumular algún dinero y regresar disfrutarla en Jamaica” [the idea of the immigrant was simply that of accumulating some money and returning to enjoy it in

Jamaica] (Meléndez-Chaverri and Duncan). The immigrants did not plan to stay in

Costa Rica and this led them to work to preserve their own culture and resist integration and assimilation. English and Jamaican Patois were the Province’s most common languages. Jamaicans attended Anglican churches that were staffed by

Jamaican clergy while children attended Sunday school to learn their religions’ tenets. Parents taught their children Jamaican cultural norms so that they would be prepared to enter Jamaican society when they moved back to the island.

Feelings of temporality were increased by feelings of superiority that many

Jamaicans harbored relative to the local Costa Ricans. Citizenship was not something the majority of Jamaicans wanted because many Jamaicans saw themselves as superior to the Hispanic majority on account of their affiliation to the Kinney 85

British crown. All of these factors--geographic, ethnocentric, linguistic, or otherwise--kept Limón separated from the rest of Costa Rica. Living in this way not only brings the tremendous rewards of holding to traditional values and ways of living, but also the burden of trying to establish an identity and live in isolation amongst competing cultures. These feelings of temporality, which led Jamaicans to preserve their home cultures rather than assimilate, not only contributed to the uniqueness of Limón, but also dramatically impacted second and third generation immigrants. Subsequent generations were affected because most Jamaicans never retuned home and these subsequent generations became, as Harpelle states,

“prisoners of both worlds trapped between two cultures” (Harpelle The West

Indians of Costa Rica 4). They were a group living far from Jamaica that was not accepted to Costa Rican society.

ANALYSIS

We meet John and Myra while they are still in bed whispering sweet nothings to one another. John asks Myra if she loves him like a star they both can see from their bed. She responds, “como esa estrella no … te quiero mucho más” [no, not like that star. I love you much more] (Duncan, Cuentos 15; trans. Duncan and Martin-

Orgunsola 37). In painting the scene the narrator describes the natural world around their home mentioning the cocoa tree, the banana, chayote, breadfruit trees, yucca, and ñampi (Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 39). The narrator states that, for the couple, Siquirres will return to being a town, but for now, “es pintura, pintura negra que se mece … es una canción en la madrugada” [it is a portrait, a black Kinney 86 portrait that rocks … it is a song at dawn] (Duncan, Cuentos 16; trans. Duncan and

Martin-Orgunsola 37). In a few minutes the couple will rise from bed and begin their routine. This is an intimate scene that lets readers into the couple’s bedroom and allows them to hear the couple’s personal conversation.

After describing the peace of the night and early dawn, the narrator describes days. The days are so hot and dry “que sume la conciencia en un sopor” [that they plunge the conscience into a stupor] (Duncan, Cuentos 15; Duncan and Martin-

Orgunsola 37). The weather is “searing” and “scorching” yet also “crystalline.”

Readers gain a sense of the land’s simultaneous rugged harshness and peaceful beauty. With these descriptions Duncan shows that John and Myra’s lives are complex. Their lives are not always easy, but they are not filled only with sorrow and constant suffering. Their lives, like the lives of all humans, but especially immigrants, are filled with competing interests and confusing contradictions. They suffer at times but have hope that their suffering is not in vain. They are focused on building a better life for themselves and their family. By exposing these contrasts,

Duncan allows these characters to transcend simple victimhood. The writer Delia

Martin-Orgunsola states, “the author extends this symbolic chart of opposites to the natural world, for the banana tree, cocoa plants, machete, and swamp are associated with pain, lack of fulfillment, futility, and danger, while distant objects like sky, stars, moonlight, and clouds suggest joys, hopes, and dreams” (22). John and Myra are victims of the rugged terrain and the harsh working conditions of their daily life, but Kinney 87 they are also a family that is close knit, full of love, and seeking the best life possible.

Figure 16. A Limonese family photographed near the end of the 19th century. (Image source: Museo Nacional de Costa Rica- Wikimedia.org)

Duncan compares the lovers, John and Myra, to the land where they live.

Their lives, like the lives of many immigrants, are fractured and split. They live in

Costa Rica but it is not their home. They are Costa Rican yet they are not citizens.

Sometimes these contrasts make sense to John but other times they confuse him.

The historian Dorothy Mosby states that West Indian immigrants of the second generation were for a long time a people with out a recognized identity noting,

“They are not Costa Rican. They are not Jamaican. Great Britain does not recognize them as citizens” (4). Duncan’s story confirms that even though their identity is fractured and changing they are still very much human beings. They are more than the color of their skin or their immigrant statuses. While they are alone, in bed, the narrator states, “no se distingue el color de su piel, sus figuras, tendidas boca arriba como dos gotas de humanidad” [You can not identify the color of their skin; Kinney 88 sprawled on their backs like two drops of humanity](Duncan, Cuentos 15; trans.

Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 37). The characters cease to be only black or only immigrants; they are much more.

At the end of the story, while John and his wife are dancing at a club, John thinks about his wife’s Roman Catholicism. John finds the religion puzzling because it “les prohíbe a los niños jugar trompo los domingos, pero en cambio tolera el baile”

[prohibits children from spinning tops on Sundays, but on the other hand tolerates dancing] (Duncan, Cuentos 19; trans. Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 47). John does not dwell on contradictions like these; rather he accepts them as a normal part of his life. He and Myra resist allowing themselves to be consumed neither by the contradictions nor by the confusion that surrounds them. As the writer Paulette

Ramsey says, “their positive relationship shows the ability of various members of a marginalized group to transcend mere existence and to create an inner life that contests socio-historic conditions (35). They put up with the anguish of their daily lives and enjoy brief moments of relief as they keep striving for the better future they hope they are working towards.

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Figure 17. A Calypso band in Limón. (Image source: wikimedia.org)

Duncan personifies the Siquirres sun. The sun becomes one of the story’s characters. As John walks to work in the fields, the narrator tells us that the sun, “se abrió paso entre las hojas de los platános para contemplar al hombre en su trabajo, enfocándole sus rayos con tal furia que se diría que intentaba fulminar de una buena vez toda la vida humana, y extirpar al hombre del llano” [opened up a path through the leaves of the banana tree in order to spy on man at labor, focusing its rays on him with such relentless fury that one could say it was trying to burn up all human life once and for all and wipe it off the plain] (Duncan, Cuentos 17; trans. Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 41). During their afternoon date, John’s and Myra set up shrimp traps and go swimming in a stream “cargando la luz cristalina de la pasada aurora, se escurría hacia el verdoso Pacuare” [bearing the crystalline light from the past dawn…(that) scurried towards the greenish-looking water of the Pacuare

River](Duncan, Cuentos 18; trans. Duncan and Martin-Orgusola 45). As they swim, the leaves of the trees overhead catch the sun’s burning rays and ““las hojas dejaban paso de cuando a los rayos que danzaban entonces en el agua” [the leaves let the Kinney 90 sunrays pass through from time to time and made them dance playfully on the water’s surface] (Duncan, Cuentos 19; trans. Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 45).

Duncan makes the sun seems complex, simple, harsh and beautiful all the same times. It “espia” [spies], “escurría” [scurries], “impone” [imposes], and “palpita”

[throbs]. As the narrator states, “todo en el llano era herida” [everything on the plain was an open wound] (Duncan, Cuentos 17; trans. Duncan and Martin-

Orgunsola 41). The story reveals the vulnerability and perseverance of Limón’s inhabitants. John and Myra’s lives are at the mercy of the environment and the weather yet they find ways to transcend these conditions and make the best of their lots in life by accepting their new environment while at the same time holding on to each other and not forgetting their own traditions and cultures.

Like all immigrants, John and Myra cannot resist assimilation completely.

This is especially apparent later in the story when the family attends Sunday religious services. John is not religious but his wife Myra is Roman Catholic.

Although her use of the Jamaican patois expression “Cho” earlier is the story reveals her Jamaican heritage, she attends the Roman Catholic Church instead of the

Anglican Church frequented by a majority of those of Jamaican heritage (Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 41). John and Myra attend the Catholic worship service while their two children are sent to the Anglican Sunday School class. Duncan’s story complicates the dominant Costa Rican narrative that establishes Costa Rica as a

Catholic country. We learn that in Limón there is religious diversity. This diversity reveals the attempts at survival of the immigrants. John and Myra assimilate in some ways, for example, by attending the Catholic worship service but hold on to Kinney 91 their traditions by sending their children to the Anglican schools for their religious education. Duncan’s portrays conflicts with historical accounts that often neglect the reality of life for immigrants who are forced to adapt and survive while at the same time they work to preserve their identity by maintaining their old way of life in whatever ways they can.

It is this struggle for life that connects the residents of Siquirres. They are first and second generation immigrants who are not citizens of Costa Rica. They are trapped between two worlds. Their identities are not fixed. They are being created, formed and reformed. John and Myra were living alone as temporary workers far from the home they once knew, or perhaps they never knew. For them, the struggle to gain an identity is a difficult one in a land like Limón, where cultures collide and blend at the same time. This struggle binds John and Myra together and allows them to create a community in the foreign land. It also threatens to pull them apart if they do not find ways to navigate their new environment and stay together.

It is important to note that the bulk of this story is set during the weekend, a time of leisure for the working couple. American history books tend to focus on the

United Fruit Company and the enterprises of other foreign investors, but Duncan’s story shows us there was more to life in Limón. The workers enjoy their weekends.

Work is only small part of John’s life. The early dawn and Sundays offer him small breaks from the company’s demands and the backbreaking work. Duncan’s story humanizes that which history books have neglected, stereotyped, or caricatured.

History has been kind to Minor Cooper Keith, as his name appears in most of them, but we rarely learn the names of the thousands of immigrants he hired and the work Kinney 92 they did to advance Costa Rica. “Una canción en la madrugada” shows us what daily life was like in Limón Province from the immigrant’s viewpoint. The dance club that the couple visits at the end of the story is filled with white, black and mulatto men and women. The jukebox plays calypsos, boleros, and “a veces una pieza sicodélica y alguna pareja que se luce” [sometimes a psychedelic number is played and some couples really gets down] (Duncan, Cuentos 19; trans. Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola

46). The narrator tells us that “Juan y Myra preferían los blues, acaso porque su cadenciosa tristeza se expresa con más fidelidad la alegría de vivir sobrepuesta al dolor de siglos del negro” [John and Myra prefer the blues, perhaps because it faithfully expresses in its rhythmic sadness the joy living triumphantly through their centuries-old pain of blackness] (Duncan, Cuentos 19; trans. Duncan and Martin-

Orgunsola 47). The residents of Siquirres respect each other because they are living this life together that, like all of our lives, is sometimes pleasant and sometimes painful. We no longer only see John and Myra as simple victims of the exploitative banana company or as individuals abandoned by their host government without a country to call home. Although these are parts of their identity, they are not the only parts. The main narrative is now theirs. When Myra responds that she loves

John more than that star, he tells her “entonces me querés tanto como yo te quiero”

[then you love me much as love you] (Duncan, Cuentos 15; trans. Duncan and

Martin-Orgunsola 37). It is through these intimate encounters that we are privileged to know John and Myra as complex humans, and it is this intimacy that allows us to see them as more than simple victims of the oppressive climate or as Kinney 93 desperate immigrants. We see them as humans, like us, who struggle, love, and live their lives.

TEACHING SUGGESTIONS

Asking students to read “Una canción” can provide them a glimpse of what life was like for the Jamaican immigrants living in Limón at the end of the nineteenth century. When discussing the specific history of the region, it is important to keep the discussion framed around the lives of John and Myra and the comparisons and contrasts that can be observed between common culture and individual culture.

Their feelings of temporality should be addressed and a conversation that focuses on life in Limón for John and Myra will allow teachers to direct a meaningful conversation that encourages students to place their ethnocentricity aside and consider the complexities of identity, culture, religion, and language. Students can consider what life is like for immigrants and identify their specific challenges and the ways they respond to these challenges. Students can also consider their own lives and identities and relate them back to the story’s characters.

After reading the story, students could be asked to identify words that they feel accurately describe the Limón Province as seen through John’s and Myra’s points of view. As the students share individual vocabulary words and phrases, the teacher could arrange contrasting words on the board to illustrate the contrasts that

Duncan emphasizes. A map of the Province could be shown and the towns, river, and other landmarks mentioned in the story could be identified. The teacher could ask questions such as where did they feel joy or where did they experience stress and Kinney 94

Limón’s geography can be taught in the context of the fictional events that occur there and the emotions the characters experience in these locales. In this way the geography becomes more than a set of knowledge bits but a way for students to connect on a basic level with the experiences of the story’s main characters.

Ultimately, it is important that the teacher allows students a glimpse of the life of the immigrant in Siquirres. Minor Keith, the railroad, and the United Fruit

Company should be discussed, but emphasis should be placed on the complex identities and the humanity of immigrants and their descendants. Costa Rica’s dominant national narrative should be problematized so as to allow students to see the complexities of identity and differences that exist within national borders. After discussing the characters, students could create their own list of vocabulary items to identify how they feel about living in their own city, country, or region. Students will probably find this task difficult, but it may allow them to begin to encounter the complexities of their lives and associations with the places where they live. In light of the story, student can address how they manage to exist in lives that are sometimes harsh and cruel and at other times peaceful and happy. The similarities and dissimilarities of their lives and the characters’ lives can be examined.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. What are the difficulties of living in Siquirres? What are the pleasures of living there?

2. How do John and Myra deal with life’s difficulties and challenges?

3. Where does John work? How does he get to work? What is his job like? Kinney 95

4. Why do John and Myra send their children to the Anglican Sunday School while they attend the Roman Catholic service?

5. In what ways was life hard for John and Myra? It what ways was their life kind to them?

6. What may be the purposes and effects of the use of personification in the description of the landscape and setting?

7. How does the relationship of John and Myra relate to the relationship between the immigrants and Costa Ricans, Jamaica and Costa Rica, and Afro-Jamaican-English culture and Hispanic culture?

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CHAPTER 4

FIGHTING IN LIMÓN: UN REGALO PARA LA ABUELA/ A GIFT FOR GRANDMA

THE STORY

At the beginning of the story “A gift for Grandma”/”Un regalo para la abuela” from the Una canción en la madrugada collection, the narrator announces that the people of Estrada have just heard that rebel forces have captured the port city of

Limón. The townspeople, the narrators notes, are waiting “saltan los corazones de los habitantes” [with hearts in their mouths] for the rebels to arrive in Estrada and begin recruiting soldiers, soliciting support, and fighting governmental troops in the region (Duncan, Cuentos 25; trans. Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 59). Cocobello is afraid when he hears the whistle of the soldiers’ train arriving in the station because

“de repente estaba en medio de una revolución, cuya causa no comprendía, y cuyas consecuencias eran de temerse” [suddenly, he (Cocobello) was

Figure 18. A Costa Rican passenger train in 1910. (Image source: Library of Congress/Wikimedia.org)

Kinney 97 in the middle of a revolution whose cause he did not understand and whose consequences were to be feared] (Duncan, Cuentos 25; trans. Duncan and Martin-

Orgunsola 59). Cocobello and his wife Ruby know it is only a matter of time before the soldiers arrive at their house and enlist their five sons. Like the majority of

Limón residents, Ruby and Cocobello do not feel this Civil War is their war to fight.

They are not citizens and they feel disenfranchised from the country’s political life.

They have no motivation to enter this conflict and they see both the governmental armies and rebel forces as enemies. Their only objectives are to stay out of the conflict, keep their sons from being conscripted, and get the soldiers to leave.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Duncan, Quince. Cuentos Escogidos. San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Costa Rica,

2004. Print.

• Duncan, Quince, and Dellita Martin-Ogunsola. The Best Short Stories of Quince

Duncan. San José: Editorial Costa Rica, 1995. Print.

• Duncan, Quince. Una Canción En La Madrugada. San José: Editorial Costa

Rica, 1970. Print.

KEY EXPRESSIONS AND VOCABULARY

--las fuerzas revolucionarias --la nacionalidad antillana --temblaba de miedo --expropiar el ferrocarril --luchar en una guerra --bajo el gobierno liberal --mentir --le dieron un regalo --vinieron los soldados --se oyen gritos extraños --unos calzones y medias de seda

Kinney 98

SUMMARY

When rebel troops arrive in Estrada to conscript able-bodied soldiers among the town’s West Indian community, Cocobello and Ruby are understandably nervous. Governmental forces have previously visited the town looking to conscript and gain support for their side during Costa Rica’s Civil War in 1948 and the couple fears that the rebels will force their sons to fight in a war that is not theirs. Like most West Indians, who had always remained separate from the country’s Hispanic majority, Cocobello and Ruby did not feel an allegiance to either side. In order to trick the soldiers who visit their home, Cocobello dresses up as “granny”. He puts stocking on and stuffs pillows under his shirt. Although the rebels do not recruit

Cocobello and Ruby’s sons because they are not at home, the soldiers become quite smitten with “granny” and before they depart give “her” a gift that reveals the soldiers’ ulterior motives.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND--THE COSTA RICAN CIVIL WAR OF 1948

The story is set in 1948 against the backdrop of Costa Rica’s 44-day-long Civil

War that was sparked by a disputed presidential election between Former President

Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardiá (1940-1944) and Otilio Ulate Blanco (1949-1953).

Amid the outrage and the panic of the election, the agricultural entrepreneur, José

Figures Ferrer, who had already expressed displeasure with the country’s political course, formed a rebel army and launched an attack against the government.

Kinney 99

Figure 19. Map of Costa Rica's Provinces. (Image source: Wikimedia.org)

The city of Puerto Limón was a key city for both the governmental and rebel forces, and both sides fought hard to capture it. However, feeling abandoned by successive Costa Rican governments and their policies that showed them little regard, the Limonese citizens did not want to join the fight. The historian Dorothy

Mosby, notes that the majority of blacks living in Limón did not pledge allegiance to either the rebel side led by José Figures or President Calderón Guardía’s governmental military forces (87). The West Indian community felt that the Costa

Rican government had always treated them as if they were a “necessary problem” that needed to be alternately controlled or tolerated. When immigrant labor was needed for construction of the railroad, and later, to produce, harvest, and export fruit, immigration laws were permissive or not enforced. However, when the economy slowed and the Hispanic majority needed work, legislation restricted black workers living and working in the country. The Civil War was just another time Kinney 100 when the country needed them, but the Limonese community did not feel they had anything to gain by participating in the fight.

The West Indian community had endured a long history of Costa Rican immigration laws that were constantly being written and revised in order to keep immigrants from full inclusion. In 1862, the government passed the Ley de Bases y

Colonización (Law of Settlement and Colonization) that prevented blacks and

Chinese from immigrating into the country. This law was later amended when workers were needed to build the railway. However even with the legal change, the government reserved the right to control and regulate immigration and did so based on the current state of the economy and in order to answer the demands of the country’s elites. When the banana industry boomed in the 1920s and Hispanic

Latinos rushed to Limón for work, the government passed legislation aimed at stricter immigration control.

The government’s rhetoric and legislation became increasingly hostile towards the West Indian community in the years leading up to the Civil War. In

1930 a new law demanded that new immigrants pay 1000 colones in cash to the

Figure 20. A twenty colón coin. (Image source: wikimedia.org) Kinney 101 government in order to enter the country and that foreigners wishing to leave the country first obtain permission from the Governor (Harpelle “The Social and

Political” 109). Additionally, West Indian squatters who had been occupying land along the coasts, as well as easements along roads and railways that remained within the public domain were charged two colones per year by the government for each hectare occupied (Harpelle “The Social and Political” 108). The United Fruit

Company also charged these squatters 1 colon per year in an arrangement that allowed the immigrants to farm the land only if they agreed to sell their produce to the UFCO. In 1936, President León Cortés Castro (1936-1940) called for a census of all public land and required occupants of government land to sign a 15-year lease

(Harpelle “The Social and Political” 108). Once the lease was up the land was put up for auction and sold to the highest bidder without any compensation for the farmer who had worked the land for the previous fifteen years (Harpelle “The Social and

Political” 108).

These laws revealed the government’s desire to increase its control of Limón as the United Fruit Company began to move its operations from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific Coast in the late 1920s. As UFCO gradually pulled out of the region, the government inserted itself in order to maintain control of the immigrant and second and third generations who where living there. The West Indian community was already struggling with how to preserve their community as jobs with the fruit company disappeared and the government entered and attempted “to denigrate and preferably eliminate the vestiges of their cultural identity” (Harpelle “The Social and

Political” 109). Immigrants were forced to obtain a series of identification cards Kinney 102 that would allow the government to better keep track, and target, them. Successive laws were passed that forced them to obtain three governmental cards: a cédula de identidad, a carnet de extranjero and later a cédula de residencia. Immigrants who visited governmental offices to register for these identification cards often were assessed fines for immigrating illegally and other alleged infractions (Harpelle “The

Social and Political” 109). The poorest, of course, were unable to pay for the required identification and became potential targets for harassment. Additionally, according to Harpelle, “as early as 1930, small farmers complained that the [United

Fruit] company was removing the telegraph lines, rails, and the bridges on which remote West Indian communities depended” (Harpelle “The Social and Political”

109). By the time Civil War broke out, many of the West Indian community had already left Limón. Harpelle notes “a United Fruit manager in Limón estimated that between January 1940 and July 1941, 4,400 people left the region for the [Panama]

Canal Zone and that 80% or them were male laborers. (Harpelle “The Social and

Political” 111). The West Indian community was forced to reassess its association with Costa Rica, and this disenfranchisement led community members to believe that not much would change for them regardless of who was in power. The reluctance of the West Indian community to choose a side during the Civil War illustrates the way they viewed their place in Costa Rica. They did not feel an allegiance towards either side because of the way they had been treated throughout the course of their history in the country.

By the time the rebel forces won the war in 1949, the junta government, headed by José Figueres Ferrer (1948-1949, 1953-1958, 1970-1974) had repealed Kinney 103 the law that prohibited blacks from working the Pacific zone and made changes to discriminatory policies in favor of integrating blacks into Costa Rica as citizens. For the first time blacks and women were given the right to vote and a new constitution was being written that, at least in words, brought changes for Costa Rica’s minority population. In light of the treatment of West Indians prior to 1948, Figueres’ good will must be questioned, and according to historian Ronald Harpelle, “Figueres merely recognized that the children of West Indian immigrants had become a new electoral base and he took advantage of the situation” (Harpelle “The Social and

Political” 103). Although it cannot be said that these new laws changed the hearts of minds of all who were used to the old ways, these policies certainly changed the way in which Afro-Costa Ricans were discussed in political discourse. More importantly, with new opportunities for work and education and the ability to move throughout the country and take different types of employment, Limonese people of West

Indian descent began the process of becoming Costa Ricans, changing the Province forever.

ANALYSIS

The story’s narrator asks two rhetorical questions criticizing the townspeople’s fear and nervousness about the rebel troops’ arrival in Limón. He asks “¿Por qué? ¿Desde cuándo habían perdido los negros la nacionalidad antillana”

[Why? Since when had black people lost their Antillean citizenship] (Duncan,

Cuentos 26; trans. Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 61). These two questions take readers outside of the story in order to make the point that the Costa Rican rebels Kinney 104 are in Limón looking for support among Afro-Costa Ricans who have no desire to participate in a war they do not feel will change anything for them. Readers are invited to consider this situation from the perspective of people of West Indian descent living and working in a country that is not their own. They are a people who for eighty years have been excluded from political participation in Costa Rica. The narrator reminds readers that they are not Costa Rican, they are Caribbean, and asks them to consider what they have to gain by entering this conflict. At the time of this civil war members of the West Indian community were used to being mistreated or recruited to perform labor that was difficult by the United Fruit

Company, but this community was certainly not used to being recruited to do unpleasant work by the county’s Hispanic majority. The narrator reminds readers that since their arrival in the late 1800s the West Indian community living in Limón was separate from the rest of the country and often neglected and ignored by the government.

In order to avoid their sons’ conscription, Cocobello decides to perform the same trick he had successfully executed when the governmental soldiers arrived a few days before. He decides to dress up in woman’s clothes to play “grandma.” He shaves his face, puts on cotton stockings, and ties a handkerchief over his hair. He stuffs cushions under his wife’s shirt that he has put on in order to fool the troops.

When the soldiers enter Cocobello and Ruby’s house without so much as a knock,

Ruby and Cocobello play their parts perfectly. Ruby responds with feigned ignorance to the soldiers’ questions as “Granny” waits in the bedroom. The rebel soldiers call Ruby “Negrita” [brown sugar and black gal] but then acknowledge that Kinney 105 the Costa Rican government had exploited her and they make promises to help her

(Duncan, Cuentos 26; trans. Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 61). She purposely muddles her Spanish and uses the Jamaican expression “Cho,” playing to the soldiers’ racism and condescension in order to get them to leave her home. She plays to the identity that has been imposed upon her and tells the soldiers, “mí no entiende esta cosa bien” [I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout dis mess] (Duncan, Cuentos 26; trans. Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 61). Later, Ruby uses gender stereotypes to her favor. Historian Ronald Harpelle notes, “as in other societies, woman were more vulnerable because of the limitations society imposed on their mobility, opportunities for employment, and general independence” (Harpelle “The Social and Political” 114). Ruby rises above victimhood by displaying that she not only recognizes the soldiers’ mistreatment of her but also by possessing the agency to resist them and use society’s mistreatment of her to defend herself. She is clever enough to outsmart the troops by playing to their racism, sexism, and stereotypes.

This scene is interrupted by an airplane-flying overhead that fire upon the land below. The soldiers turn to leave but say they will be back later to spend the night in Ruby and Cocobello’s house. The soldiers fire on the aircraft and two bullets shot from the plane “a los pies de doña Ruby, se incrustaron en el suelo un par de balas” [dug into the floor right at Ruby’s feet] (Duncan, Cuentos 27; trans.

Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 63). A while later the soldiers’ return after looting a local store. The narrator states that “los soldados se encariñaron con la viejecita”

[the soldiers fall in love with Grandma] (Duncan, Cuentos 27; trans. Duncan and

Martin-Orgunsola 65). They promise her a pension and say that “los negros de la Kinney 106 costa ya no serían explotados, como lo fueron bajo el gobierno liberal que las fuerzas revolucionarias estaban derrumbando” [black people on the coast would not be exploited any longer, like they had been under the liberals that the rebel forces were overthrowing] (Duncan, Cuentos 27; trans. Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 64).

They promise to expropriate the railroad and give it to the blacks. Before they leave, the soldiers present “Granny” with a gift and instruct Cocobello not to open it until after they leave. Cocobello agrees to these terms and accepts the gift.

Duncan’s story gives agency to Cocobello and Ruby and portrays the soldiers as guileless and barbaric. It is clear by their actions that their promises are meaningless. That night, as the narrator states, the townspeople can hear the soldiers talking loudly in their barracks about the town’s women in “gritos extraños a la región algunos salvajes para la pobladores de Estrada” [shouts that are strange to this region, some too savage for the tastes of Estrada’s inhabitants] (Duncan,

Cuentos 28; trans. Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 65). One soldier says, “Sí…son gente limpia de veras” [yeah, they’re really clean people] (Duncan, Cuentos 28; trans.

Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 65). Another says, “¿quién quiere trabajar para mantener negritos” [who wanna work to take care of a bunch of lil’ pickaninneys]

(Duncan, Cuentos 28; trans. Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 65). The soldiers’ true intentions are revealed and the racist attitudes they have towards the townspeople are confirmed.

In this story, Duncan gives us another version of a historical narrative that might state that soldiers came to Limón and objectified and raped women. In this version, the soldiers are the savages that are outsmarted by the civil townspeople. Kinney 107

The townspeople rise above their victimhood. Duncan seems to be responding to the racism that is a part of Costa Rica’s leyenda blanca. By creating the characters

Ruby and Cocobello, Duncan gives voice to the faceless and nameless victims of the soldiers’ racism. In this way, readers are not simply allowed to see the people of

Limón as victims but as humans with agency that outsmart and resist the soldiers’ invasion. They are more than simple victims of the war’s violence. They actively defend their families and trick the soldiers.

At the end of the story Cocobello opens the soldiers’ gift. They have given him woman’s underwear and silk stockings. Cocobello immediately thinks about his sons and the narrator states, he “se echa de reír” [is laughing to keep from crying], but he abruptly stops laughing and says “todo está bien como lo estuvo ayer” [life is just as fine as it was yesterday] (Duncan, Cuentos 28; trans. Duncan and Martin-

Orgunola 65). For Cocobello and the people of Limón nothing has changed. Even though he and Ruby have successfully avoided their sons’ conscription, they know that their status in the country remains the same. The raging war means little to them and family preservation is their only goal. The soldiers’ promises and efforts to recruit fighters among the people of Limón who have been the victims of racism, denied citizenship, and generally treated as inferior is amusing, pathetic, and utterly offensive to Ruby and Cocobello.

TEACHING SUGGESTIONS

“A gift for grandma”/ “Un regalo para la abuela” allows students to view the

Costa Rican civil war from the viewpoint of a family caught within a battle that they Kinney 108 care little about. Many high school students will be able to identify with the feelings of Cocobello and Ruby, who do not want to join either side of the war. In my experience many American students are suspicious of the motives and effectiveness of government. Additionally, students have grown weary of the seemingly endless conflicts our country engages in in the Middle East. These students are not insensitive or apathetic but rather puzzled by the increasing polarization of the

American two-party system that seems unable to reach consensus and address large national and international problems. Ruby and Cocobello are not apathetic either.

Although they feel powerless to effect change and feel disenfranchised from the country’s political structures, they are willing to take extreme risks to survive and preserve their family unit.

There are many questions that students can be asked to consider that will allow them to assume Ruby and Cocobello’s points of view. What choices are Ruby and Cocobello given as the bullets pierced the floors of their home, anti-aircraft missiles fly over their town, and soldiers enter their home? How scary must it be that these soldiers enter their home without knocking or asking for permission to enter? Although the specifics of the Costa Rican Civil War are important and should be addressed, this story seems to lend itself to a broader discussion about those in our societies who suffer injustice, exploitation, racism, sexism, poverty, and other conditions that prevent them from achieving their fullest human potential. The way war effects innocent people and can severely damage families and communities can be considered. Kinney 109

Figure 21. A cartoon published in Diario de Costa Rican in 1923. (Image source: The Costa Rican Reader)

Gender is another of the story’s theme that could spark a valuable classroom discussion. Along with the short story, a political cartoon by Paco Hernández called

“Woman’s vote- the Day That They Get It” could be shown in class and discussed.

The cartoon appeared in Diario de Costa Rica on July 15, 1923, when woman’s suffrage was being discussed as a possible electoral reform. (The cartoon is reprinted in The Costa Rican Reader, published in 2004 by Duke University Press and edited by Steven Palmer et al.) The cartoon depicts a reversal of traditional husband and wife household chores and gender roles. Although the cartoon takes the focus away from the Afro-Caribbean people, it could spark important discussions that might allow students to consider how political decisions can affect the social status and the self-esteem of those who live within a society. The cartoon could also be related to the importance of gender in “A Gift for Grandma.” In the story, it is the woman, Ruby, who successfully fools the soldiers when they question her. It is also “Grandma” who gains favor with the soldiers. The soldiers seek to Kinney 110 exploit the women and possibly abuse them sexually, but in the end it is Ruby and

Cocobello as “Granny” who successfully get the soldiers to leave their home.

In addition to the political cartoon, the first-person narrative written by

María E. Robles Solano could add to this lesson. Her non-fiction piece “Memories of

Girlhood in ’48,” also printed in The Costa Rican Reader, offers her recollections of the beginning of the Civil War. Robles Solano includes a memory of listening to events unfold on radio while huddled up with a group of girls at the home of an older bedridden woman everyone called “Auntie”. Before the military police arrive at the house, one of the girls tells Auntie to play dead so that the police would think they are holding a wake for a dead woman and leave them alone. This again shows the cleverness and quick thinking of the West Indian women.

Finally, Duncan’s story could be used to acknowledge those without a voice in the United States as well. There seem to be many ways to relate the story’s events to students’ lives. Political participation, military recruitment and the draft, gender issues in the military and social and economic life, the right to vote, and many other issues could be addressed. The point of view in Duncan’s story could perhaps add to a discussion about war, gender, and politics in our student’s lives.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Why were Ruby and Cocobello (and the rest of the people in the town) so frightened by the soldiers’ arrival? Kinney 111

2. When the train whistle announces the soldier’s arrival, the narrator asked the question, “since when have the black people lost the Antillean citizenship?” Why does the narrator ask this? What is meant by this question?

3. What promises did the rebel soldiers make to Cocobello? Why do they make such promises? What are their intentions?

4. At the end of the story the soldiers can be heard discussing the women of Estrada and Cocobello discovers that the soldiers have given him underpants and silk stockings. Why did the soldiers give “Granny” these gifts? What did the soldiers say about the town’s women? What are the implications? Why wasn’t Ruby raped?

5. Is what ways could you compare the Costa Rican Civil War with the United States’

Civil War? What role did black people play in the US Civil War? Were they given any promises? Were those promises fulfilled? What does the contemporary situation of most African-Americans suggest in that respect?

Kinney 112

CHAPTER 5

PLAYING IN LIMÓN: EL PARTIDO/ GO-O-O-O-AL!

THE STORY

The startling first sentence in the story “Go-o-oal,” from the collection La

Rebellion Pocomía, evokes Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The narrator, Melico, proclaims

“comer o no comer. Ese es ni más ni menos el problems real” [to eat or not to eat.

No more, no less. That’s the real question] (Duncan, Cuentos 81; trans. Duncan and

Martin-Orgunsola 165). In Shakespeare’s play the issue is whether to avenge a great injustice or to quietly bear the shame of inaction, to kill the criminal or to kill oneself. Duncan’s narrator adapts Prince Hamlet’s question to the dilemmas faced by Melico, a person of a much different socioeconomic status. Melico is broke and his coach will only loan him money if his soccer team wins the championship.

Hamlet’s questions may be valid for a member of the royal family, who has the power and the resources to take action against offenses but the situation is very different for a black-skinned Costa Rican teetering on the edge of starvation.

Melico’s question is practical, basic, direct, and as he says, it is the “real question.”

And whereas Prince Hamlet can change and play with his identity at will, Melico’s identity has not been his own to shape. He says that his identity has mostly been assigned to him by other people who have called him an “afrolatindígena, negro entre blancos, blanco indio entre los negros, blanquinegro entre los indígenas y en todo casos, ser subdesarrollado, muerto de hambre” [Afrolatin-indigene, black among whites, white Indian among blacks, white Negro among indigenous people, but in any case, underdeveloped, a bum] (Duncan, Cuentos 81; trans. Duncan and Kinney 113

Martin-Orgunsola 165). These labels, of course, have been assigned to him because of his skin color and the color of the skin of those around him. The way that others identify him is relative to a range of perceptions of skin color that leaves him with no choice of self-determination.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Duncan, Quince. Cuentos Escogidos. San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Costa Rica,

2004. Print.

• Duncan, Quince, and Dellita Martin-Ogunsola. The Best Short Stories of Quince

Duncan. San José: Editorial Costa Rica, 1995. Print.

• Duncan, Quince. La Rebelión Pocomía Y Otros Relatos. San José, Costa Rica:

Editorial Costa Rica, 1976. Print.

KEY EXPRESSIONS AND VOCABULARY

--afrolatindígena --unos cobardes --un equipo novato --el árbitro --luchando por definirse --la sangre le hervía --el campeonato --la pelota penetraba la meta --el portero --el blanquinegro entre los indígenas

SUMMARY

Melico Perez and his teammates have an important soccer match against the mighty Saprissa team. They are a team of rookies who stand little chance against their stronger and more experienced opponents. To make matters worse, their starting goalie is injured and cannot play. All of this has led Melico to doubt his team’s chances. However Melico desperately needs a win. He needs money and if Kinney 114 his team wins his coach will lend him the money he needs to buy food. More importantly, however, he is seeking to define himself as a player and to establish himself as a winner in a country that has assigned his identity to him as an inferior human simply because of the color of his skin. Melico is Afro-Costa Rican and when he steps onto the pitch a fan shouts a racist statement at him. Melico immediately thinks of his family and their time together at his recent wedding, where his family had a racially charged argument. He thinks of his prostitute sister, who asked if

Melico’s blond haired and blue-eyed bride knows that he is black. He thinks of his sister Rita, who quickly jumped to his defense by saying he is not black but rather colored. A win would allow Melico to alter his identity and be more that just the color of his skin. He believes he would become a winner, a champion, and a man respected for his own actions and able to shape his own identity.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND—RACE AND IDENTITY IN THE POST CIVIL WAR

LIMÓN

After the 1948 Civil War, Limón Province rapidly changed. According to the historians Iván Molina and Stephen Palmer, “the period after 1950 saw the gradual assimilation of a once distinctive, Anglophone West Indian culture into the dominant Hispanic mode” (137). As the Costa Rican government inserted itself more and more in Limón, much of the region’s identity was lost. In El Negro en

Costa Rica, Carlos Meléndez and Quince Duncan mentions the rebel leader, José

Figueres’, arrival in Limón. They say that Figueres “llega a Limón y recorre los pueblos hablando en inglés, besando a los niños negros, bailando con las negras” Kinney 115

[arrives in Limón and tours the towns speaking English, kissing babies, and dancing with West Indian women] (Meléndez-Chaverri and Duncan). Never before had a

Costa Rican president done these things, and for the first time the country is interested in the West Indians. It was a sign of the coming changes for Limón

Province. Eventually, this acknowledgement and attention severely damaged the

West Indian community. The Afro-Costa Rican poet Eulalia Bernard said that “the boom in nationalist policies began, seeking to marginalize all Afro-Caribbean cultural expression, the language, the religion, the lodges, dance, music … We suffered a dreadful cultural imperialism from the interior of the country (qtd. in

Molina and Palmer 137). The Costa Rican government had no intention of integrating the West Indian community and worked to assimilate the community by prohibiting English language instruction in schools and pushing Limonese people to become citizens. A widening culture divide that existed within the West Indian community itself assisted the government’s actions. Some members favored citizenship and jumped at the chance to assimilate. Many, especially younger people, moved to San José for work or school and take advantage of opportunities their parents and grandparents never had. Older Limonese residents were left to take care of grandchildren and attempt to hold onto their community as it unraveled.

In order to understand Limón’s drastic post Civil War transformation, we must go back to the 1920s, to the high point of banana production in the Province.

Although Afro-Caribbeans had been living and working in Limón since 1871, it was in 1927 when the topic of race first began to dominate Costa Rican politics. Harpelle Kinney 116 states, “the success of the banana industry in Limón and growing shortages of accessible land in the highlands combined to attract Hispanics to the region. By the early 1920s there was a steady migration of unemployed landless peasants to Limón from the highland region” (Harpelle “The Social and Political” 105). When the 1927 census revealed that “over 21,000 people of African descent lived in the country” a majority of the country’s Hispanic population demanded that the government make changes to its immigration policies (Harpelle “The Social and Political” 105).

Hispanic workers that arrived in Limón looking for work became angry when they found that the company often gave the preferred jobs to Jamaican immigrants and their descendants because they spoke English and were familiar with banana production. The government began responding to the country’s increased racial tensions and pressure put on them by the Hispanic majority with legislation

(Harpelle “The Social and Political” 105). Quotas on the number of foreign-born workers that could be hired were instituted and segregated work crews were mandated.

In El Negro en Costa Rica, Duncan discusses the feeling of superiority of many

Jamaican immigrants. These feelings allowed them to maintain their identity in a country that treated them as inferiors but also increased racial tensions. The

Jamaicans’ status as British subjects, the fact that they were generally more educated than Costa Rica’s Hispanic population, and their knowledge of the English language contributed to this mindset. In spite of these feelings of superiority, the people of West Indian descent living in Costa Rica faced great adversity and racism from the Hispanic majority, who had their own feelings of superiority and Kinney 117 entitlement. Quince Duncan states, “la estratificación social era tal que los de piel más clara tendrían siempre una posición superior” [the social stratification was such that those with lighter skin would always have better positions] (Meléndez-

Chaverri and Duncan). The ethnocentrism of Jamaicans was matched by the

Latino’s own discriminatory attitudes. Since colonial days, the country’s Latino population assimilated Eurocentric perceptions of race. This Eurocentrism was expressed and reinforced by the country’s laws targeting people of West Indian descent. Harpelle states, “People of African descent were described as ‘pedantic’ and ‘stupid’ and some influential Costa Ricans advocated sterilizing the entire community to prevent its spread” (Harpelle “The Social and Political” 104).

Although the Black and Latino populations did interact, geographical separation and cultural differences made interracial marriage rare. Duncan states, “casarse con una persona blanca era casi una traición para los negros Limonese” [marrying a white person was almost considered treason by the Limonese blacks] (Meléndez-Chaverri and Duncan). However, for others, marrying a person with a lighter skin color was called “whitening” and was encouraged as a way for offspring to have a better life in the country. Racial tension existed in Limón for many reasons and had a lasting impact on the region and its inhabitants. However these racial problems did not just occur between Hispanics and the West Indian population.

Racial tensions also existed among members of the West Indian community itself. The tensions often grew worse as other events occurred in the region. None of these events enflamed racial tensions worse than when the United Fruit Company abandoned Limón in the late 1920s and moved almost all of its operations to the Kinney 118

Pacific Coast. Thousands of West Indians began to reconsider their future in Costa

Rica and worked to survive as jobs became scarce. As the subsequent generations moved throughout the country and pursued higher education and entered different industries, interracial marriages became more common. However, lingering racist attitudes made life difficult for interracial couples and their offspring to establish their own identities. According to Harpelle, “West Indians in Costa Rica struggled to preserve their community while the government’s objective was to denigrate and preferably eliminate the vestiges of their cultural identity” (Harpelle “The Social and

Political” 110). Some Costa Rican leaders encouraged West Indians to seek citizenship and believed that by becoming citizens Afro-Costa Ricans would receive the same rights and treatment as the Latinos. Many older community members fought to preserve old identities while younger members of the Limonese community opted for citizenship and left the region for San José or other countries.

According to Harpelle, “in San José, by 1950, between 70% and 80% of all the people designated as Negros or Mulattos had opted for citizenship. In comparison, only seven percent of their peers in Limón had opted for citizenship during the same period” (Harpelle “The Social and Political” 113). As the government and community leaders convinced more and more West Indians to become Afro-Costa

Ricans the cultural divide grew larger in the Limonese community. Community leaders berated community members who resisted becoming citizens and accused them of living up to the stereotypes held by the Hispanic majority. Harpelle states

“unfortunately, the decision to become a Costa Rican citizen helped alienate West

Indians from their own community and did not necessarily produce the desired Kinney 119 result [of having the same rights as the Hispanic community]” (Harpelle “The Social and Political” 115). West Indians who remained in Limón had resigned themselves to make the best of a bad situation and do what they could to preserve their community.

ANALYSIS

When Prince Hamlet, son of a King, reaches his point of despair, he has choices that allow him to decide his destiny. However, Melico is not a Prince. He is a soccer player for Sonora, and he believes that by winning this important soccer match against the mighty team from Saprissa his life will dramatically change.

Melico is in need of some money and had made a deal with his coach Aleluya

Rodriguez. If Sonora wins the championship series, Rodriguez will pay Melico ten thousand pesos. However, they are a rookie team and their starting goalie is injured and unable to play. Melico’s lack of confidence is palpable.

As the players take their positions, a fan yells, “Marvin … liquide a ese negro;”

Figure 22. Joel Campbell (left) celebrates after scoring the first goal for the Costa Rican national team in their 2014 World Cup match against Uruguay. (Image source: Danilo Borges/Wikimedia.org) Kinney 120

[Marvin, stomp that nigger] (Duncan, Cuentos 83; trans. Duncan and Martin-

Orgunsola 171). Melico does not respond, but rather thinks “probablemente me liquidan … porque después de este partido quién sabe” [they probably will (stomp me), because after this game who knows] (Duncan, Cuentos 83; trans. Duncan and

Martin-Orgunsola 171). It is clear that this is not just a soccer match. Melico hopes that a win will elevate him financially and help him establish a new identity.

However the burden of the racism that he has suffered has left him with little self- confidence or hope for lasting change. Winning the match seems unlikely.

Melico’s teammate Guabo has also struggled to define his existence. He too has had his identity established by others and he has discovered that the central question is one of survival. Melico states that, “Guabo era trágico, y la tragedia de existir envolvía a ambos hombres;” [Guabo was tragic, and the tragedy of his existence involved both men] (Duncan, Cuentos 82; trans. Duncan and Martin-

Orgunsola 167). After the President of their Club gives them a pep talk and the substitute goalie offers some last minute advice the match begins.

The narrator tells us that Melico wishes his brother Martin was in attendance and that Melico laments the fact that his sister Aracely was in the crowd instead.

Melico says that he hates Aracely. She was a successful prostitute due to the fact that, according to Melico, “era negra, y precisamente por eso, exótica en una sociedad de blancos. En tal factor residía su éxito” [she was black, and precisely because of that, exotic to a society of whites. Her success rested on such] (Duncan,

Cuentos 84; trans. Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 171). Her skin color has brought her success in the sex industry while Melico’s skin color has brought him suffering. Kinney 121

Melico’s dislike of his adopted sister had been recently reconfirmed at his own wedding reception. While his family is celebrating his marriage to a blond, blue- eyed woman Aracely arrives uninvited. Melico’s other sister Rita confronts Aracely who angrily justifies her arrival by saying, “solo vine a conocer a la mujer de mi hermano. Me contaron que era rubia y con ojos azules, y no lo quise creer. ¿Ella sabe que é les negro” [I only came to meet my brothuhs wife. They told me she was blond with blue eyes, but me I didn’t want to believe it. Don’t she know he black]

(Duncan, Cuentos 84; trans. Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 174). Furiously, Rita defends Melico saying that he is not black. She tells her stepsister that one grandfather is Irish and the other British. Aracely refuses to back down and refers to her brother’s new wife as an ugly Indian with dyed hair adding, “debe tener las tetas postizas” [she probably got false titties too] (Duncan, Cuentos 84; trans.

Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 172). At this, Melico rises and pulls his sister away from the table. As he pushes her out she vows to attend his upcoming match and cheer for the opposing team. Rita leans over and tells Guabo that her mother made such a mistake in marrying a Negro because she was almost white.

Dorothy Mosby observes that this altercation “touches on issues of class, color, and the racial ideology of mejorando la raza or “improving the race” by choosing mates of lighter skin color” (36). The siblings have different parents and therefore diverse racial make-ups. They use these differences to insult one another and lobby for power within the family unit. Although they say they hate each other

Aracely comes to the match and even thanks the Virgin of Los Angeles, and the end of the story, for the team’s victory. Through this ironic situation of racism between Kinney 122 a brother and sister, Duncan is illustrating the complexity of race in Costa Rican society. By framing the conflict within one family he stresses the absurdity of racism.

Near the end of the game Melico receives a pass from his friend Guabo and goes on to score the winning goal. His teammates raise him onto their shoulders and carry him off the field as he shouts, “¡Ganamos, ganamos!” [We won! We won!]

(Duncan, Cuentos 86; trans. Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 173). When he makes his way outside of the stadium, his sister Aracely is waiting to hug him. They embrace

Figure 23. El Estadio Nacional de Costa Rica opened in 2011 and replaced the original national stadium that was built in 1924. The Costa Rican National Soccer Team plays its home games in this stadium. (Image source: Wikimedia.org) and he can hear her thanking the La Negrita for answering her prayers. Dorothy

Mosby says Aracely was praying to the nation’s patron saint, “the dark-skinned

Virgin of Los Angeles, also called “La Negrita” (“the Black One”) to intervene so that her brother’s team would triumph in their match” (37). Despite the fact that she said she was going to cheer for Saprissa, she is actually very happy for her brother’s victory which further emphasizes the complexities of race, family, and identity. Kinney 123

TEACHING SUGGESTIONS

Duncan’s story avoids stereotypes by placing the racial conflict within a family unit. Within this family, race is a contentious issue. The argument between

Rita and Aracely at Melico’s wedding reception, for example, seems vicious. Melico’s adopted sister Aracely is black and criticizes Melico for marrying an Indian woman.

Their other sister Rita denies Melico’s blackness and curses their mother for marrying a black man after their father died. Duncan problematizes the issues of race by showing that racism has as many forms as there are races.

Many classroom discussions could be initiated to discuss how race affects identity. One way a discussion could be started is by assigning each student to represent the point of view of different characters in the story. Students should consider the point of views of Melico, Guabo, Rita, Aracely, a member of the opposing team, or even the coach. During a discussion students should respond based on how they feel their assigned character will respond. It this way the classroom discussions will not include the sentence starter “I think” which could be offensive and ignite anger. By instructing students to assume the viewpoint of characters, the text can be the guide for the discussion as opposed to already established beliefs and feelings about race and identity. Students would move from expressing their own opinions and thoughts as outsiders and approach the discussion from the viewpoint of one of the story’s insiders.

In this story, Duncan once again provides a counter narrative to Costa Rica’s foundational myth. He challenges the Eurocentric visions of the country and its racial demographics. By replacing Prince Hamlet’s question with Melico’s, Duncan Kinney 124 suggests a change in perspective from Eurocentric to Afrocentric. Duncan also challenges the foundational myth when he has his narrator describe Guabo and

Melico’s vain efforts to establish their identities. Dorothy Mosby sums up the struggles of Duncan’s characters by saying, “the voices that surface in his prose not only face dilemmas that lead them to question their identity, but they also engage with questioning the construction and stability of the multiple identities as Costa

Rican, as Afro-Costa Rican, as an Afro-descendent, as a man or woman” (179).

Duncan’s characters challenge these myths and give voice to all who have been silenced by them. By problematizing the ideas of race and identity Duncan brings the African-descendent Costa Ricans into the national discourse. The white-black dichotomy is revealed as simplistic and inaccurate by Duncan’s characters that, within their own family, experience the complexity of both race and identity. He critiques the way identity can be assigned to persons without agency to create and define an identity for themselves.

Another classroom activity that asks the students to examine some quotes in the story could lead to a very fruitful discussion. Quotations such as “comer o no comer” [to eat or not to eat] (Duncan, Cuentos 81; trans. Duncan and Martin-

Orgunsola 165) “otros definieron mi ser” [others defined my being] (Duncan,

Cuentos 81; Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 165) “porque él estaba perdiendo la vida.

Yo le estoy pidiendo un dinero para salvar mi futuro” [because he was losin’ his life.

I’m askin’ him for money to save mine] (Duncan, Cuentos 81; trans. Duncan and

Martin-Orgunsola 167) “Guabo era trágico, y la tragedia de existir envolvía a ambos hombres” [Guabo was tragic and the tragedy of his existence involved both men] Kinney 125

Duncan, Cuentos 82; Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 167) “Era negra, y precisamente por eso, éxotica en una sociedad de blancos” [She was black, and precisely because of that exotic in a society of whites] (Duncan, Cuentos 84; trans. Duncan and Martin-

Orgunsola 171) could lead to discussions about race and identity that allow students to examine their complexities and question how identity is sometimes created by others and forced upon another.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. What is Melico’s identity? How has he formed this identity? What is Aracely’s identity? How has she formed it? How do the soccer fans treat Melico? How do white men treat Aracely?

2. What do the members of Melico´s family think of his wife? Why do they think that way? What is the effect of the wedding scene on the reader? Does Duncan manage to make readers think of their own families through such a situation? Why? Can the reader identify in some way with the experience of characters that argue at the wedding?

3. After he hears someone in the crowd say, “stomp that nigger,”- Melico thinks,

“They probably will …. because after this game who knows.” Why do you think

Melico reacts this way? Why doesn’t he react with anger? Why does he question the future? Why does he say, “who knows”? What does that question indicate regarding his attitudes toward the future and his own ability to determine his destiny?

4. What does Rita mean when she says, “Mama made such a stupid mistake in marrying a Negro when Daddy died? She was almost white.” Kinney 126

5. Aracely says she is going to cheer for Saprissa, but at the end of the game she is outside the stadium crying while waiting to kiss Melico. Why did she change her allegiance?

6. What is the reason for Duncan creating a situation of racism among the members of a family? What does that suggest? Can a member of a family consider him/herself racially superior to other members of the same family? How does that situation constitute a comment on the wider problem of racism among the unrelated people of different races?

Kinney 127

CHAPTER 6

WORKING IN LIMÓN: “LA LEYENDA DE JOSÉ GORDON”/ “THE LEGEND OF JOE GORDON”

THE STORY

The story begins as Joe Gordon, a Jamaican fruit company employee, is being fired by his manager, Mr. Brutt. During the meeting Brutt asks Gordon to explain “el problema en La Finca Doce” [the trouble in field number twelve] (Duncan, Cuentos

104; trans. Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 215). Gordon tells Brutt that Milton, a fellow worker, could have died if he had not pushed the full banana cart off the tracks. Brutt, however, is unconcerned about his employee. He is concerned about the lost profits. He fires Gordon and asks, “¿sabe cuánto cuestan los racimos que se perdieron” [do you know how much those bunches of bananas we lost are worth]

(Duncan, Cuentos 104; trans. Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 215)? Gordon leaves the office humiliated and angered at the banana official’s admission that his co- worker’s life was worth less than a cartload of bananas. Instead of going away quietly, Gordon vows to seek revenge by wreaking havoc upon the fruit company and disrupting its operations. He commits acts of sabotage against company officials. He steals from the company commissary and delivers the goods to poor families. Stories of Joe Gordon’s actions are told throughout the region, and Gordon soon becomes a larger than life folk hero. The legends of his exploits allow the West

Indian community a way of communicating the fruit company’s evils with a West

Indian hero as protagonist and aggressor. The stories give agency to a community the fruit company has consistently subjugated. Kinney 128

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Duncan, Quince. Cuentos Escogidos. San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Costa Rica,

2004. Print.

• Duncan, Quince, and Dellita Martin-Ogunsola. The Best Short Stories of Quince

Duncan. San José: Editorial Costa Rica, 1995. Print.

• Duncan, Quince. La Rebelión Pocomía Y Otros Relatos. San José, Costa Rica:

Editorial Costa Rica, 1976. Print.

KEY EXPRESSIONS AND VOCABULARY

--la figura descollante del bananero --el calor de la finca era insoportable --causó disturbios en la Finca Doce --diez tarros de agua --los racimos que se perdieron --atándole a un árbol --está despedido --le obedecían ciegamente --la vida de un compañero --préstamos para apuros médicos --la lucha contra la adversidad --su sangre fertilizó la tierra --despedirse y desaparecer para siempre

SUMMARY

Joe Gordon is fired by a fruit company for releasing the brakes on full banana cart that was about to crush a fellow worker, a man, that was caught hanging from the tracks. Gordon’s boss, Mr Brutt, does not care about the worker. He is enraged at the profits lost due to Gordon’s action. Gordon leaves Brutt’s office defeated but resolved to seek vengeance against his former employer, who values a cartload of bananas more that he does a human life. From that moment on, Gordon vandalizes company buildings and plays jokes on company employees. He steals from the company store and gives the goods to poor families. Gordon’s actions, and the Kinney 129 company’s inability to apprehend him, allow him to become legendary in Limón.

Stories of his deeds reach mythical status. It is unclear who eventually kills Gordon, but tales of his ability to wreak havoc on the giant fruit producer are told throughout the community for generations, inspiring them and showing them that injustice can be challenged.

Figure 24. Map of Costa Rica's Atlantic Zone showing the railway that connected Puerto Limón with the exiting line. (Image source: Charles Koch “Jamaican Blacks and Their Descendants In Costa Rica”) Kinney 130

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND—LIFE AS AN EMPLOYEE OF THE UNITED FRUIT

COMPANY

In March of 1899 Minor C. Keith’s Tropical Trading Company merged with

Andrew Preston’s Boston Fruit Company to form the United Fruit Company (UFCO).

Keith had been experimenting with banana cultivation since he arrived in Costa Rica to manage the construction of a railroad connecting the Central Valley to the

Atlantic Coast. By the time of the company’s formation, Keith had already been producing the fruit for a few decades. The immigrant workers that Keith had recruited to the country for the railroad project had been planting banana seedlings along the 800,000 acres of land Keith had been given by the Costa Rican government. According to Ronald Harpelle, “Costa Rican governments encouraged banana production as a means of rapid economic development and as an effort to establish firm control over an isolated part of the country” (Harpelle “Racism and

Nationalism” 31). The Costa Rican government “also approved several measures to settle workers on small farms in order to keep them from leaving the country”

Figure 25. Workers in Costa Rican cutting bananas from trees. (Image source: Library of Congress/ Frank and Francis Carpenter Collection) Kinney 131 during the frequent stoppages in the railroad’s construction (Koch 339). Limón

Province soon became one of the world’s top producing banana regions, bringing

Costa Rica some wealth.

The UFCO was able to exert much control over its workers. The Costa Rican government allowed the Company to control most aspects of Limón Province. UFCO owned the railroad, the bananas, the land, as well as shipping vessels. The government was always suspicious of the foreign entrepreneurs, the imperialist powers they represented, and the company’s growing West Indian workforce, but

Costa Rica was dependent on the profits UFCO brought to the country and therefore mostly tolerated its foreign workforce. The country’s Hispanic majority did not always agree with its government’s decisions and this fact created significant tension. Commenting on the political and economic divisions of the country, the historian Avi Chomsky notes that “In the Costa Rican case, where both capital and labor were divided between foreign and national sources, conservatives tried to rally nationalist workers against the West Indians, while radicals tried to rally anti- imperialists of all classes against the Company” (13). This situation created almost constant problems between the country and the foreign businesses, but especially between the different factions of workers who were often at the mercy of both the

Company and the government. Another historian, Rosario-Fernández notes that,

“en el discurso oficial, la inmigración negra aparece claramente como ‘un problema’ que debe tolerarse en aras del desarrollo de los trabajos del ferrocarril y, posteriormente, de la compañía bananera” [in the official discourse, the immigration of black laborers appears clearly as a ‘problem’ that should be tolerated for the Kinney 132 development of the railway and, later, for the success of the banana company]

(1250).

UFCO had many ways of maintaining its workforce and keeping them compliant. First-generation immigrants lived in the company barracks and were dependent on the Company for many of their basic necessities. Groceries and other supplies could be purchased from the company’s commissary and most workers depended on the Company for much more that just their paychecks. Residents of

Limón relied on the UFCO for health care, infrastructure improvements, and other social services. By monopolizing the supply of the basic necessities, UFCO amassed a great deal of control over its workforce, making it difficult for workers to protest injustice or unfair working conditions.

In order to further control laborers the UFCO also exploited natural allegiances and divisions that were fostered by ethnocentric prejudices that existed among different employee groups. Workers from different ethnic groups served on separate work crews and performed separate jobs. The Company not only separated Blacks and Hispanics, but as Rosario-Fernández notes, it also formed divisions between Caribbean workers. The Company, “definió diferencias jerárquicas, que variaban los grados de explotación del trabajador según su procedencia; por ejemplo, los trinitarios se catalogaban como perezosos; Los jamaiquinos, con buen nivel educativo y respetuosos del orden, por lo cual se concentraron en trabajos suaves; y Los caribeños francófonos se considerable viciosos” [defined hierarchical divisions that exploited workers in a variety of ways according to where they were from; for example, the company referred to Kinney 133

Trinitarians as lazy, the Jamaicans were known as well-educated and respectful, which often afforded them the best jobs, and the French-speaking Caribbeans were considered depraved] (1255-1256). These divisions not only allowed the UFCO to better control its workforce and prevent workers from organizing, but it pitted ethnic groups against one another and allowed existing stereotypes to grow. Since it was commonly believed that Jamaican workers were preferred by UFCO executives and foremen, and a fact that they tended to hold better positions in the

UFCO than workers, many UFCO workers resented the Jamaicans. This dissuaded many Jamaicans from speaking out against their employer and joining strikes. They were the largest immigrant group working for the UFCO in Costa Rica, but they were often reluctant to do anything that might jeopardize the relatively preferred positions they held at the UFCO.

Despite all of the UFCO’s efforts to prevent its workers from banding together, many laborers, including some Jamaican workers, did manage to form their own labor unions. The Artisans and Laborers Union of Costa Rica was the first such union established by the West Indian community (Harpelle “Racism and

Nationalism” 26). This union’s first significant confrontation with the UFCO occurred in 1910 when UFCO asked its workers to take a 12-cent reduction in pay to compensate for a banana tax that the Costa Rican government had demanded in its new contract with UFCO. In response to the threat of a strike, the Company sent recruiters out across the Caribbean to search for replacement workers that would undermine the effectiveness of any strike. Workers from the island of St. Kitts were brought to Costa Rica. However, upon arriving they learned of the impending strike Kinney 134 and the labor dispute and became angry at their being used as strike breakers, but also because they were offered less pay than the striking workers. Their anger led to riots that disrupted work and set the stage for the long line of labor disputes between UFCO and its workers. The Company’s practice of keeping a surplus of workers on hand to respond to strikes was particularly troublesome and left workers defenseless to do anything other than meet the Company’s often harsh and unfair demands. Avi Chomsky notes that “the defeat of the strike, and the deportation and defection of many of its leaders, made West Indians painfully aware of their extreme vulnerability in Costa Rica. Losses such as these, and West Indians’ recognition of the need for allies in high places, played a significant role in the community’s growing conservatism in coming decades” (21). Although the workers often suffered due to the Company’s unfair tactics, they feared that speaking out against their employers could make their situations worse and put their jobs at risk.

In order to further discourage workers from protesting conditions, the

Company blacklisted workers that caused problems. Harpelle notes “United Fruit was always on guard against troublemakers. The Company circulated descriptions and even photos of blacklisted individuals. To be blacklisted by the Company made it extremely difficult to find employment anywhere along the Atlantic coast between

Belize and Colombia” (Harpelle “Racism and Nationalism” 31). The St. Kitts affair illustrates the power that UFCO commanded in the region. Whether it be against the

Costa Rican government or the workers themselves, the Company had a way of protecting its interests, usually at the expense or peril of the West Indian workers and their families. Kinney 135

In the early 1930s, the Company and the government began negotiating a new contract. The Costa Rican government hoped the new contract would allow national producers to control some Limonese land and improve the country’s worsening economic position. After 1920 banana production in Limón began to decline. Years of large-scale planting were beginning to take its toll on many acres of land on the country’s Atlantic side and disease was infecting banana crops and spreading throughout the region. Furthermore, the Great Depression stagnated international markets and much of the country’s Hispanic majority blamed the West

Indian community for the country’s economic problems. This majority wanted the new contract to place limits on the Company’s hiring of West Indians even though, as Harpelle observes, “The Congressional deputies found United Fruit to be in violation of virtually every clause in the [previous] contract … [and] found that

UFCO had not met its commitment to plant more land or to grant additional contracts to private planters” (Harpelle “Racism and Nationalism” 40). The Kinney 136 growing economic problems intensified racial conflicts in Limón and “even though

West Indians suffered as much as anyone during the industry’s decline in Limón, they were identified as part of the problem” (Harpelle “Racism and Nationalism”

40).

In 1934 more than 10,000 plantation workers participated in the largest strike in the country’s history. According to Harpelle, “the strike [against UFCO] was organized by the Sindicato de Trabajadores del Atlántico which was a union dominated by Hispanics and the Communist Party” (Harpelle “Racism and

Nationalism” 43). Reports state that few West Indians participated in this strike which Rosario-Fernández attributes to two reasons: “su condición de pequeños y

Figure 26. Marcus Garvey in 1924. (Image source: U.S. Library of Congress, George Grantham Bain Collection) medianos productores que se prejudicaban con la huelga, y su condición de extranjeros” [their (West Indians) status as small and medium-sized fruit producers that meant they themselves would be hurt by the strike and their status as foreigners” (1256). In short, the West Indian community was being scapegoated for Kinney 137 the near monopoly that UFCO had in Limón and the country’s growing Anti-

Imperialistic spirit. However, this same community was unwilling to participate in large-scale strikes against the Company because they had little to gain and much to lose in speaking out against their employers.

There was, however, one man who found a way of speaking out against the company and successfully uniting the West Indian community. This man was

Marcus Garvey. Garvey arrived in Limón in 1910 and took a job as a timekeeper for

UFCO. Harpelle states that the experience of Garvey in Limón “offers one of the best illustrations of how the West Indians could be a self-regulating entity whose internal dynamics were a function of the community’s relationship with Costa Rica and the United Fruit Company” (Harpelle “Racism and Nationalism” 32). Shortly after his arrival, Garvey became the owner and editor of a local newspaper called

The Nation. In the pages of The Nation, Garvey challenged community leaders to be more forceful in demanding an end to injustices being committed against community members by the government and corporations. Garvey defended members of the community who had joined sects and non-conformist churches. He also organized a workers’ union called the United Negro Improvement Association

(UNIA). However Garvey’s work for greater autonomy and worker rights were not met with universal praise. Some members of the West Indian elite were critical of

Garvey. They believed that any attempts at change first needed their approval.

Garvey was undeterred and expanded his criticisms and demands. Garvey criticized a “white” fire department in Limón that had saved the house of a light-skinned resident but was unable stop the blaze from destroying several West Indian owned Kinney 138 businesses. A few days later, firefighters, angered by Garvey’s accusations, vandalized The Nation’s offices and destroyed its printing press. Garvey took a damaged part to the UFCO owned repair shop but the manager refused to make the repair. The power of the UFCO was once again on display. The Company had effectively silenced Garvey by shutting down The Nation. Garvey witnessed first hand the difficult relationship between the West Indian community, the county’s

Hispanic majority, and the fruit company. The community depended so heavily on the UFCO for its livelihood that community leaders resisted doing anything that could put this relationship in jeopardy. The feelings of helplessness that this sort of arrangement brought were difficult to overcome, and the fractions within the West

Indian community weakened and ultimately kept it at the Company’s mercy.

However, according to Rosario-Fernández and Harpelle, Garvey’s work was successful in many ways. He succeeded in uniting the West Indian community by

“inspiraba a los negros a rechazar el complejo psicológico de una autoestima lastimada y destacaba a los valores y dignidad de su cultura, por lo cual pronto representó una amenaza para los países y empresarios que formentaban el racismo y la explotación basada en la diferencia étnica” [inspiring the West Indians to reject the psychological complex of a damaged self-esteem and to emphasize their worth as well as the dignity of their cultures which until then had been the basis of the racism and exploitation of their ethnic diversity] (Rosario-Fernández 1264).

According to Harpelle, “The Caribbean Coast of Central American became one of the most important regions of UNIA activity outside of the United States and was a powerful force in the local West Indian community even after the organization’s Kinney 139 demise elsewhere (Harpelle “Racism and Nationalism” 44). The spirit of Garveryism remained strong for many years. Garvey’s return visits to Limón would generate mass followings and UNIA’s publication, The Negro World, was widely distributed throughout the region. Joining UNIA required three conditions. One must be a person of ‘good character’, pay dues, and be a member of the ‘negro race’. This group allowed West Indians to bond together outside of the workplace that so often pitted them against one another and amplified their difference for the Company’s gain.

Figure 27. Jamaican Banana workers in 1894. (Image source: David Buffum. A New England farmer in Jamaica. New England Magazine, Dec. 1894)

Limón and its people suffered an enormous blow in 1934 when Costa Rica signed a new contract with United Fruit. A key component of the new contract was a provision that granted [UFCO] permission to farm 3,000 hectares of land on the

Pacific coast (Harpelle “The Social and Political” 107). However, a stipulation prohibited UFCO from hiring African-descendent workers for any operations occurring along the Pacific coast. Harpelle notes that “critics feared that West

Indian workers would migrate to the other side of the country where they would Kinney 140

‘Africanize’ yet another part of the national territory” (Harpelle “The Social and

Political” 106). Without the need to keep a workforce in Limón, the UFCO halted many infrastructure projects and eliminated social services that the company provided the community, such as health care.

The company’s abandonment of Limón allowed the Costa Rican government to assume a greater presence in the Province. The government began to implement a series of reforms in taxation, education, land ownership, and labor. “As a community,” Harpelle notes, the West Indians had little to gain and much to lose from the government presence in Limón” (Harpelle “The Social and Political” 108)

“The government closed English schools, pushed farmers off their land, and deported West Indians in order to purge the province of Limón of people who were not citizens, but who belonged to a well established immigrant community”

(Harpelle “Racism and Nationalism” 29). UFCO’s withdrawal from Limón brought a series of unjust and discriminatory new regulations and taxes that made things more difficult for the community and ultimately caused it to lose much of its unique cultural identity. Many of the government’s policies were designed to force West

Indians to assimilate into Hispanic society or to leave the country. According to government records, the population of people of African-descent decreased 29% between the 1927 and 1950 censuses (Harpelle “The Social and Political” 111).

African-descendent Costa Ricans began leaving Limón for better opportunities in

San José and beyond, changing Limón Province forever.

Kinney 141

ANALYSIS

Gordon’s first attack was on the Company’s administrative offices. He tied up a secretary and made him wait for his boss in his underwear. Later, Gordon tied this same secretary to a tree with his hands above his head and his feet stuck into an anthill. The story’s narrator is careful to explain that “fue su único acto de cruledad, al punto de que años después el pueblo discutió acaloradamente si se incluía o no en la antología de hechos que conformaban la Leyenda de José Gordon” [it (this act) was his (Gordon’s) only act of cruelty, to the point where years later the town would heatedly discuss whether or not this incident could be included in the anthology of deeds that constituted the Legend of Joe Gordon] (Duncan, Cuentos 108; trans.

Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 225). This interjection makes readers aware of the active role of the community in writing their own story and developing lore of their own that will be disseminated and transmitted to future generations. It becomes clear that the townspeople crafted this legend themselves and wanted to make certain to cast Gordon in the most positive light. Through Joe Gordon they are able to tell their story, and give their version of the plight of Untied Fruit workers. The legend gives the people of Limón their own protagonist, who takes on the giant fruit company.

Along with his disruptions of the Company’s business, Gordon becomes a

Robin Hood figure by charging goods and food at the company commissary and distributing them to poor families. Even though Gordon is a fictional character whose story is being rewritten and revised by other literary characters, his existence in Duncan’s work is an attempt to give hope of change to a real community Kinney 142 of readers and to demonstrate that West Indians can create and recreate their own roles and identities. The legend allows the fictional community to communicate the evils of UFCO throughout the region and be united by the anger they share. The narrator states, “José Gordon no consideraba al secretario un enemigo, ni a él ni a ninguno de los seres concretos que dirigían la finca. El enemigo se fue perfilando como un ememigo abstracto que producía banano con sangre“ [Joe Gordon did not consider the secretary to be the enemy, neither he nor any of the concrete beings who ran the plantation. The enemy was slowly revealing itself as the abstract force that produced bananas with blood] (Duncan, Cuentos 108; trans. Duncan and

Martin-Orgunsola 225). The legend was made general enough so that all West

Indian banana workers could relate to it and adapt the stories to fit their specific lives.

As the story continues Joe Gordon’s legend status grows. Stories of Gordon’s actions become more and more impressive. Gordon becomes more than just a strong, mischievous, and courageous man. He becomes a man with supernatural abilities and spiritual powers. Biblical references are added to his legend giving him a Christ-like status, and Gordon is heard declaring himself immortal by promising to rise again after his death. A man witnesses Gordon walk through fire and come away unharmed and his good deeds are referred to as miracles. As Gordon’s fame spreads and his stories become more impressive, Mr. Brutt becomes fearful of direct retaliation. Brutt notices that Gordon’s “la voz de José se había convertido en palabras de mando y todos le obedicían ciegamente y sin protesta” [words had turned into commands and that everyone was blindly obeying him without Kinney 143 question] (Duncan, Cuentos 109; trans. Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 227). Just as the African-American folk hero John Henry has become a symbol of human perseverance in the face of threats of machines on the livelihood of workers, Gordon becomes a symbol of courage, strength, and even moral character who is finally able to take on the ruthless and inhumane company.

One day Gordon does decide to seek vengeance on Brutt. Gordon enters the

Zone where “los altos empleados de la Compañía que vivían aparte para no contaminarse del aire espeso del vulgo” [the Company VPs lived apart from the common lot so as not to contaminate themselves] (Duncan, Cuentos 110; trans.

Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 221; Duncan). Gordon sneaks up on Mr. Brutt, who is eating breakfast. His [Brutt’s] hands, the narrator notes are [tomando sus libertades” [taking liberties upon the maid] (Duncan, Cuentos 111; trans. Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 221). Gordon forces Brutt to open up the safe containing

IOUs written by workers who had asked for advances to pay for medical expenses and “otros apuros semejantes” [other things of that nature] (Duncan, Cuentos 111; trans. Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 233). Gordon tears up all the slips of paper and instructs Brutt to place the shreds into envelopes marked with each employee’s name effectively canceling their debts to the Company. Duncan’s story features a folk hero who successfully takes on the United Fruit Company, albeit in a fictional world, and wins.

In the end the Banana Company triples the price on Gordon’s head in order to incentivize his capture. Additional police are brought to Limón to try to stop him and employees mentioning Gordon’s name are severely punished. Their daily wages Kinney 144 are lowered and they are required to continue working in torrential rains. Gordon remains undeterred. His ability to avoid arrest emboldens him to make more demands upon the company. He demands that workers receive company stock. He even suggests that all company officials give up their possessions and live like their workers. When the discord reaches fever pitch, Mr. Brutt decides to leave the city and spend the weekend at the beach with his pay clerk. Mr. Brutt orders four of his strongest West Indian employees to pull his cart out of town, while he and his clerk, dressed in all white, sit in the back smoking pipes. As they are traveling Gordon jumps into the roadway and stops their cart. He hits Brutt and his clerk and orders them to undress. Gordon tells the four men pulling the cart to put on Brutt and his clerk’s white clothes and to climb into the cart’s seats. Brutt grabs his pistol and fires at Gordon but misses. Gordon walks towards Brutt with his shotgun pointed at him and a desperate Brutt offers to give Gordon whatever he wants and says, “le daré dinero para que regrese a Jamaica”[I’ll give you money to go back to Jamaica]

(Duncan, Cuentos 115; trans. Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 241). Gordon then humiliates Brutt and his pay clerk by forcing them to pull the cart back into town with the four workers in the seats.

Shortly thereafter Brutt is replaced by a new, and more ruthless, superintendent. This superintendent fills the streets with police and warns the townspeople not to accept any food or supplies from Gordon. The Banana Company becomes frustrated at its inability to catch Gordon and it decides to make life harder and harder on the workers. The superintendent organizes the “la más sangrienta batida de su historia” [bloodiest search party in its [Limón’s] history] (Duncan, Kinney 145

Cuentos 116; trans. Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 243). Company directors offer a large sum of money for his capture. Defiantly Gordon proclaims, “la Compañía

Bananera era una soga al pescuezo que nunca acaba de ahogar a sus víctimas, pero que jamás dejaba de apretar” [the Banana Company was the noose around their neck that never quite killed it victims, but that had never stopped choking either]

(Duncan, Cuentos 114; trans. Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 239). It is unclear who actually kills Gordon. Rumors spread that identified many suspects--Gordon’s wife,

“un negro claro qué quería regresar a su tierra” [a light-skinned Negro who wanted to go back to his country], and a “el hombre bajito” [little yellow man] (Duncan,

Cuentos 116-117; trans. Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 245). Even as Gordon’s body lay in the street, the narrator states that no black person would dare bury him because everyone was waiting for his resurrection. Four Latino policemen carry his body away. As they are carrying him, Gordon sneezes and it is said that pieces of his flesh and blood fertilize the plantation for years to come. It is certain that his legend is cemented into the region’s folklore and it is clear that Gordon will not be forgotten.

TEACHING SUGGESTIONS FOR LA LEYENDA DE JOSÉ GORDON

The transformation of the story of Joe Gordon into a legend was a mechanism that the workers used to deal, at least psychologically, with the struggles of their lives and the injustice of their employer. The legend brings them together and allows them to express their anger at the Company but also to share stories in which

Gordon, one of their own, makes life hard for Company administrators. Kinney 146

Duncan’s story is a retelling of a poem, “The Outlaw,” written by the poet

Alderman Johnson Rhoden. Rhoden himself was a Jamaican immigrant to Limón.

Most of Rhoden’s work is inaccessible or has been destroyed, and only part of “The

Outlaw” has been preserved. Duncan’s story is an important retelling of the historical experiences of immigrant workers abused by transnational corporations that will keep their story alive for future generations.

Duncan’s story can be effectively used in the American high school classroom because students generally respond favorably to characters that “steal from the rich and give to the poor” and resist oppression. In order to introduce the story, the teacher can compare Joe Gordon to Robin Hood and John Henry. A discussion on the purpose of folk heroes and legends, and their relation to history, would also be important. This can allow students to discuss how cultural products are created and how they become part of a cultural or a national identity. Students may already be familiar with these folk heroes and therefore ready to learn about the “Jamaican

Robin Hood.” In order to prepare students for a teacher-led discussion, it may be helpful to first put them into groups and ask them to compare and contrast their common folk heroes with Joe Gordon. By asking students to organize their thoughts and prepare to discuss the similarities and differences among folk heroes, they will be able to relate to Gordon and understand the cultural importance of legends.

Although some specific historical information about the United Fruit

Company will provide the necessary context for the story, it will be more important to get students to examine the realities of workers who gave everything and traveled far from home to find work. The topic of immigration is an important one Kinney 147 that touches almost every American community. Many students will say that immigrant workers choose their own destiny and that no one forces them to leave their home and work. It will be helpful to ask students if slaves came to the United

States of their own free will, so that they can understand the similarities of both situations and examine immigration motives more deeply. The students’ narrow view of the world may be based on the faulty assumption that everyone has plenty of possibilities within their own countries and that the United Fruit Company was mostly good for the West Indian immigrants. Marcus Garvey could be offered as an example of a worker who encountered difficulty. It is important to note that he encouraged workers to endure the difficulties of the Company and continue working so as to earn the necessary funds to return to African and start their own businesses.

Asking students to comment on the United Fruit Company’s habit of changing the conditions and terms of employment at a moment’s notice could lead to a powerful discussion. Other discussions might invite students to see themselves as a banana worker and consider how they might react if they were not paid promptly for a week of work or if they were forced to endure dangerous working conditions. The teacher might even ask students how they would react if they faced the difficulties many immigrants encounter.

Duncan’s story will allow students to see things from the viewpoint of the

West Indians. They came for jobs, but did they expect everything else they received? Did they predict that the Company would often be late with their paychecks and offer them coupons for the Company commissary in lieu of cash payments? How should a worker react if he was fired for saving a fellow employee Kinney 148 from dying? Did they expect the bitter racism they would endure? What options did they have if they became fed up with the Company or damaged company property to save a fellow worker? An answer to this last question triggers the start of the legend of Joe Gordon and sums up its entire message. Joe Gordon embodies the strength and power that the immigrant workforce wishes it could have. Because Gordon valued the life of his fellow employee more than a commodity he was fired. However, Duncan’s story affirms that Gordon and the other employees are not victims.

This story provides students an opportunity to place themselves in this historical time period and consider the different points of view represented in the story. Students can consider the roles of Gordon, Brutt, Gordon’s wife, the Banana

Company secretary, a fellow worker, or John Bigs (the man who owns the land that

Gordon sharecrops) just to name a few. It would be valuable to have students

“assume” the roles of one of these characters and express their viewpoint about the issues the story presents. For example, a teacher could create groups of 3 students in which one student pretends he is Gordon, the other that he is Mr. Brutt, and the third student can pretend he is either the pay clerk or the secretary. The teacher could then ask students to discuss how they would react to the scenarios presented in the story. For example, the teacher states that the banana company has just raised the bounty on Gordon’s head and has formally warned townspeople not to accept any gifts from the bandit/outlaw and invite the students to predict how the character they were assigned will react. What would their character do? What would he or she say? Gordon’s wife, for example, might decide to go to the Kinney 149 commissary and tell other workers the whereabouts of her husband in order to end this whole ordeal, or she might cover for her husband and support him as he seeks his revenge. Although the discussion might diverge from the story line and become quite hypothetical, it will require students to fill in the gaps of knowledge the story does not reveal. It will be a valuable activity to get students to consider the multiple perspectives present in the story. The students might even become personally invested in “their” character and deeply consider the character’s reactions.

Another lesson could center on a cartoon that appeared in Costa Rica’s El

Diario newspaper that depicts a United Fruit Company official talking to his workers, who appear as skeletons. In the cartoon, the houses of the workers are shown in the background. A crevice in the earth separates the housing area from where the official is addressing the workers. A speech bubble above the official’s head reads, “that which I can’t understand is why you all complain about your living

Figure 28. A Oklahoman mother and her children photographed in 1936 during the Great Depression. (Image source: Dorothea Lange Library of Congress) Kinney 150 conditions” (El Diario). This cartoon could be used to provide closure to the lesson centering on the story of Joe Gordon. Students could discuss the meaning of the cartoon and the official’s comment or even write about the cartoon as an assignment. The assignment would allow teachers to assess the cognitive and affective learning that a student has achieved. Do the students understand the conflict between the workers and the official? Why do the workers appear as skeletons? What does the crevice represent?

A final teaching suggestion for this story will allow students to compare U.S. history with Costa Rican history. Students could be asked to compare the workers who left Oklahoma to find work in California during the Great Depression with West

Indian workers who left their homes for Costa Rica. Both groups of workers faced somewhat similar challenges as they attempted to find a better life in a new place.

In order to allow students to connect the lives of the migrant workers who came to the western coast of the United States during the Great Depression with West Indian workers who arrived in Costa Rica, students could be shown photos taken by

Dorothea Lange or shown clips from the movie The Grapes of Wrath. The United

States Federal Government financed Lange’s work, and many of Lange’s photos are a part of the public domain and therefore easily accessible on the Internet. Lange’s photos show migrants and remarkably capture the stress, anxiety, fatigue, and a wide-array of emotions on the faces of her subjects. Her photos also reveal the humanity and ability of people to persevere despite difficult conditions. Students should be asked to write sentences, or even a list of words, in Spanish, about these photos. Then students could write sentences or words about Joe Gordon’s legend. Kinney 151

Depending on the level of the students, the students may produce very basic or somewhat complex sentences or words that could then be shared and discussed further. Some topics that could be addressed are the fight against adversity that both the American migrants and Joe Gordon faced. In Duncan’s story, Gordon returns to his small farm after being fired and the narrator notes that “Gordon había estado limpiando el terreno toda la mañana, volteándo, machete veloz, hacha hábil, y el pico y la pala que abren venas cuadradas sobre la piel fresca de la tierra y recogen su sudor abundante y sus lágrimas y los excrementos del reino animal. La lucha contra la adversidad, la sed del hombre, la legítima defensa de las bestias y la serpiente herida” [Gordon had been cleaning off the land all morning long, turning it over –swift machete, nimble hoe, pick and shovel that opened up square veins in the tender skin of the land—and caught his abundant sweat and tears and excrement from the animal world. The battle against adversity, man’s thirst, his legitimate defense against wild animals and the wounded serpent] (Duncan, Cuentos 106; trans. Duncan and Martin-Orgunsola 219). The ability of the human spirit to endure and persevere in spite of such difficulty can be highlighted.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS FOR LA LEYENDA DE JOSÉ GORDON

1. Who is Jose Gordon’s employer? Why is he fired from his job? Do you agree with

Mr. Brutt’s decision to fire him? Are such decisions exaggerations of fiction or do they happen in real life?

2. What does Joe Gordon do that angers the Banana Company? How does the

Banana Company respond to Gordon’s actions? Kinney 152

3. What are Gordon’s demands? How does he want the United Fruit Company to change its ways? Do you think the Company will agree to any of these changes?

4. Near the end of the story, Gordon surprises Mr. Brutt and his pay clerk on the road to the beach. Four black workers are pulling their cart. What do you think of what Gordon does? Why does he do it? Is this an exaggeration or distortion of the actual actions of officials of transnational corporations? What is Duncan alluding to by means of that imagery?

5. In the end Joe Gordon is killed. Who kills him and why? Also, the narrator tells us that the pieces of himself that he sneezed out “fertilized the Big Plantation for a long time.” What does this mean? What kind of storytelling does this constitute? How is this kind of story related to other traditions of storytelling?

6. Are there any similarities between the story of Joe Gordon and American superheroes? What roles or activities do superheroes perform in American films, comics, and other media? Are they concerned with matters of injustice and the abuses of the strong and the rich against the common people? Kinney 153

CONCLUSION

We are more mobile than ever before and with this mobility comes the need to interact with people that speak different languages, practice different religions, have different histories, have be exposed to different art, eat different foods, dress differently, have different customs, and come from different cultures. Our cities and towns are becoming increasingly diverse and filled with citizens who are different from us. This mobility and the diversity it has created is the result of many factors.

International travel is easier than ever before. National borders have become more porous for the sake of increasing commerce. Social media has made it easier to meet and communicate with people from around the globe and these relationships often lead to face-to-face meetings. Much of this mobility is also the result conflict.

Refugees fleeing civil wars and violence are leaving their home countries in large numbers. The United States, Canada, and European countries accept refugees from

Burma, Syria, and other countries. Others, many of who are unaccompanied children, who are fleeing gangs and persecution in Central and South America and

Mexico, enter the U.S. each day.

All of this mobility means that living in today’s world requires us to be aware of cultures other than our own and to be able to interact, work, and live with many different people. For language teachers the question we must ask ourselves is are we preparing our students to be able to do these things? It is not enough to be simply aware of this mobility and growing diversity. We must teach our students to be able to function across many cultures. As stated in this thesis, this awareness and intercultural competence has not yet been achieved in American high schools. Like Kinney 154 many adults in this country, many young people are fearful of those who are of different than us. Despite being a nation of immigrants, the United States is still a place where anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies are common and even rationalized as being national security measures. Cities and towns have banned burkas, burning the Qur’an has become a regular occurrence, students chant “U.S.A.” in the stands when their team of predominately white players is competing against a team made up of Hispanic players, ordinances that require citizens to carry proof of citizenship are common, undocumented immigrants are mistreated in many ways. As governments and citizens seek to preserve their myths of a national culture, conflict, stereotyping, and discrimination are rationalized as methods of effective governance and in the interest of national security. We see political leaders attempting to conflate patriotism and nationalism with fear and anger, as the

Olympians did in Costa Rica, to gain votes and political favor. Immigrant communities have become targets for citizens filled with hatred and vitriol who seek to respond to acts of terrorism by destroying mosques, preventing undocumented pregnant women from receiving prenatal care, and supporting deportations that separate parents from their children.

American children learn from what they see adults doing and from what they hear them saying. Teachers can help counter the angry rhetoric of the media and political campaigns so as to make our country a better place for all. We must consider the role that we can play in teaching our students to develop empathy and to consider the ways in which a multiplicity of cultures can enrich one’s own country despite much of the world’s socio-political problems. We must take risks Kinney 155 and address somewhat controversial topics in skillful ways and find ways to teach about these topics while avoiding angry and polarizing debates. We must begin to bring more depth to our discussions regarding problems in the world. We must help our students to understand other histories, help them become aware of different art, and allow them to see other viewpoints. In this thesis I have tried to offer one way of giving students a better understanding of the world through examining the literature, art, and history of Costa Rica. Many more lessons like these can be developed that focus on different countries and different regions.

Teachers can produce teaching materials that address other parts of the world and other people.

The implications of changing the way we “teach culture” are many. If we set our goals of foreign language education towards leading students to be interculturaly competent, we must dramatically reimagine what we are currently doing in our classrooms. We must find ways to give our students encounters with real or fictional members of another culture so as to personalize discussions about other people and places. If we want to solve the problems that accompany the world’s new mobility, we must allow our students to relate to other people and places by encouraging them to assume the other’s points of view. If we seek out literature and other authentic sources that can be integrated into our exiting curriculum, we can begin to change the way our students see the world. If we want to improve the world and the ability of its citizens to get along, we cannot keep our cultural lessons focused on only teaching “fun facts” about other places and peoples.

We need to find voices that are underrepresented and provide non-Eurocentric Kinney 156 visions of the world so students can compare these visions with the Eurocentric visions they get from so many other sources.

At the end of my interview with Quince Duncan, I asked him for advice regarding my concerns about teaching culture in the foreign language classroom. I asked him what should be a teacher’s guiding principles when “teaching culture” and he said, “Give great emphasis on the positive elements. Encourage your students to go beyond tolerance. The powerful tolerates the weak. Invite them to respect other cultures, and to achieve this, teach with respect. Bid them to go even further, to overcome ethnocentrism and to appreciate the other’s cultural viewpoint, although one may not be in total appreciation of that perspective. This of course can only be achieved with knowledge of the culture under scrutiny, and with a better understanding the bell of appreciation may ring. This of course should be the final goal” (Duncan, “Interview”). Let’s work to give our students this better understanding of the world and its people so that the appreciation bells can ring!

Kinney 157

APPENDIX: AN INTERVIEW WITH QUINCE DUNCAN

1. What is your definition of culture and what does it mean to teach culture?

QD: Culture in its broader sense, is all meaningful human activity. It is the way in which we conduct our lives, the way in which we identify ourselves, the way through which we communicate and the reality we create in our relation to others. A by reality I mean those agreements we have in relation to our personal and collective environment. Our common lore. This of course, includes language and art.

2. Can you describe your experiences teaching culture to young people and in the field of education?

QD: This question is complex and would demand a long essay. My endeavor was always to let them understand that, for example, each language gives us a different way of thinking, a fresh perspective on life. Each culture enriches our lives, since we broaden our slant on life.

3. What are the main goals/intended outcomes of the Del olvido a la memoria series?

QD: Not withstanding the overwhelming evidence of African and Afro-descendent presence in the area, the official historical memory of our past has been nurtured by silences, a few disperse hints plagued with racial bias and imprecisions presented as morally correct truisms. Classic Central American historians rather chose to ignore the subject. Kinney 158

Del Olvido a la Memoria was designed as a contribution to the change of Central

American’s view in general and of the Afro descendants’ understanding of the history of their region, in relation to their own origins, places of dwelling, working conditions, and cultural creation. Hopefully, by such means, we will strengthen the concept of cultural diversity and the appreciation of the cultural contributions of people of African Descent in Central America.

4. The Del olivdo a la memoria series was directed at teachers in order to encourage them to teach about the contributions of Africans and their descendants in Central America from the colonial period until the present day in a new way. Do you feel teachers have been receptive to the texts and have changed the course of their teaching?

Most definitely. We have had a very warm reception throughout the area, through workshops and lectures conducted in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua,

Costa Rica and Panama, sponsored by governments and universities.

5. What obstacles/difficulties have you encountered attempting to make these changes?

QD: Well, doctrinarian racism has a very tight grip on our culture. Mind you, this is an attempt to help disarticulate four hundred years of theological, anthropological, sociological, political, philosophical constructions, designed by very brilliant minds of Europe and their U.S. and otherwise located counterparts. How in God’s creation do you cope with this system? Yet if Benkos Biojo and Queen Nanny of old, and if Kinney 159

Garvey, Martin Luther King, and Mandela in our times face these tremendous powers and overcome, leading us steps ahead, we cannot dwell on the obstacles and difficulties of our times, be they as usual, theological, anthropological, sociological, political or philosophical. We just carry on, that’s all.

6. What was the process like for deciding what to include and what to leave out of the Del olvido a la memoria series?

QD: We first held a Central American consultation with representatives of organizations, with the support of UNESCO, an activity that I coordinated. We then, under the leadership of Dr. Rina Cáceres, managed to get investigators to donate articles according to their area of research. Dr. Cáceres then did the editing.

7. In a video interview with UNA Mirada you mentioned that many of the texts used in primary schools contain racist elements. Are these texts still being used?

QD: Unfortunately, yes.

8. In the teaching guide for the Del olvido a la memoria series you wrote of the harm in omitting the contributions of marginalized people in a region’s history and the failure to teach about these people and their contributions is schools. Can you further explain this harm?

QD: Given a biased view of the history of a people deprives them of self-pride and hinder the country´s possibility to enhance its democracy, and to take advantage of Kinney 160 its diversity. Marcus Garvey said that a people without knowledge of their history is like a tree without roots.

9. My colleagues and I often discussion the roles of language and culture in the foreign language classroom. What are your thoughts on the connection between language and culture?

QD: Language is an expression of a culture. One cannot really master a language without the comprehension of the culture, the matrix. This has been a source of misunderstanding. If you teach language separate from its matrix, you are cannot expect your students to be functional in the new language.

10. Many teachers here in the United States do not feel qualified to teach about the cultures of the world because they have not visited the locations or have not had any experiences from which to teach. What advice do you have for these teachers?

QD: Watch LA [Latin American] movies.- Read LA novels and short stories. Listen to

LA music. Come visit. It’s so easy.

11. As an educator and a fiction writer do you ever work to educate with your fiction or do you keep these two roles separated?

QD: I write because I cannot do otherwise. To me, writing is consubstantial to being.

Education is optional, it’s the next best thing I can do for a living, since in L.A. it is very difficult to live on writing. Kinney 161

12. When deciding which aspects of a culture to teach, what should be a teacher’s guiding principles?

QD: Give great emphasis on the positive elements. Encourage your students to go beyond tolerance. The powerful tolerates the weak. Invite them to respect other cultures, and to achieve this teach with respect. Bid them to go even further, to overcome ethnocentrism and to appreciate the other’s cultural viewpoint, although one may not be in total appreciation of that perspective. This of course can only be achieved with knowledge of the culture under scrutiny, and with a better understanding the bell of appreciation may ring. This of course should be the final goal.

13. Would you like to see more of your work anthologized and/or translated so that more will become aware of the role of immigrants and their descendants in Costa Rica?

QD: Of course. This is a legitimate aspiration of all authors.

14. How has your work confronted racism and stereotypes that Africans and their descendants have faced in Central America? As you write your fiction is confronting this issue a conscious effort?

QD: Yes, I once said that I intended to be a voice coming from Afrodescendants themselves. I have tried to pronounce our own word. Kinney 162

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