Global Tourism and Citizenship Claims:

Citizen-Subjects and the State in Costa Rica

Darcie Vandegrift

Drake University, USA

Abstract

As developing nations expand international tourism development, the global promotion and expansion of tourism create contested, fluid citizenship categories. The article uses ethnographic data to explore various ways the state constructs citizen-subjects in the context of international tourism. In contrast, a multi-racial, multi-national group of residents from Costa Rica’s South Caribbean Coast contested state constructions of citizenship that cast citizen-subjects as white, from the Central Valley, and passive.

Both community members and state apparatuses attempted to construct the boundaries of political membership in Costa Rica. Issues of contestation included Costa Rican whiteness, the nature of political stability, and the relationship between economic participation and citizenship.

Introduction

The tourism industry is a growing sector by which Third World governments generate foreign currency. As a development strategy, the tourism destination is more than just flora and fauna, but also people. Through the marketing of its residents to visitors and tourism businesses, states actively construct citizen-subjects, that is, who is (and who is not) a member of the potential ‘host’ nation. In this article, I examine how the Costa

Rican government and residents of a growing Costa Rican tourism destination construct definitions of the Costa Rican citizen-subject in relation to international tourism. The

1 state extends historical exclusionary practices into questions regarding tourism, a quintessential growth industry of the epoch characterized as globalization (Azarya

2004). Costa Rican citizen-subjects are imagined popularly and in official histories as white (Gudmundson 1986; Wherry 2006), pacifist (Biesanz, Biesanz and Biesanz 1999;

Edelman 1999), and residing in the Central Valley or Pacific region (Sharman 2001).

Actual black, white, national and immigrant residents of Puerto Viejo, located on Costa

Rica’s South Caribbean Coast, contest racial and regional exclusions through new contexts created by tourism development.

This article examines how the category of citizen and the benefits of citizenship become highly contested as states and local communities pursue tourism development.

Three important findings emerge. First, states draw on the imaginary of who is and is not a citizen (with resulting cultural and economic privileges) as state mechanisms promote and practice the tourism industry. In Costa Rica, the state projects an international image of its citizens as white and pacifist, with an implied connection between these characteristics. Second, globalized industries unevenly but undoubtedly shape the racialized and class-based power relations embedded in the category of citizenship. Third, excluded subjects participating in tourism draw on the centrality of tourism to development to make demands for inclusion, sometimes successfully challenging state exclusionary practices around citizenship.

Global tourism operates as both a cultural project and economic development strategy in developing nations. Tourism promotion and service provision creates a new context in which debates occur over populations’ legitimate membership in the nation- state. For a country seeking to generate foreign currency through inclusion on global tourism circuits, citizens must be an attractive part of a commodity that appeals to an

2 affluent potential visitor. As First World tourists increasingly travel to Third World locations, unequal power relationships embedded in the tourism experience necessitate

‘a helpful, smiling and servile tourism class, serving the interests and economic preferences of business and local elites’ as well as travelers themselves (Mowforth and

Munt 2001, p. 64). The destination nation-state must construct a desirable space to visit through a performance enacted on a global stage and in relation to other, competing destinations (Sheller and Urry 2004). States promote citizens as desirable workers, companions, and commodities for tourist consumption. Through its a claim of a civilized, low-wage labor force and a safe tourism destination, the state makes a subcontextual pledge to compliance to international economic structures and the hierarchies within these structures (Enloe 1990).

Yet even as a state presents its citizens for global consumption, the category of citizen has multiple meanings in a given locale, reflecting the struggle over what constitutes full membership in society. This struggle includes contests over who is a member with recognized legitimate political agency and who decides the boundaries of inclusion (Taylor and Wilson 2004). Citizenship is more than a seamless, automatic association with the modern nation-state, in which the state confers rights and responsibilities on those born within its territories. Rather, struggles over political agency and belonging must be recognized as located, ‘in the social arena and in social relationships’ (Taylor and Wilson 2004, p. 157). Membership in a political community is determined not just by formal mechanisms such as resource allocation, voting and laws, but also through cultural practices and commodities (Rosaldo 1997). Cultural, like political, citizenship is not something that can just be asserted by disadvantaged subjects. The state as a cultural formation attempts ‘unitary and unifying expression to

3 what are in reality multi-faceted and differential experiences of groups within society’ through constructing citizens as taxpayers, consumers and workers (Ong 1999, pp. 263-

4). In the context of global tourism promotion, citizens are also imagined as commodities, usually docile, friendly, and part of a particular kind of ‘experience.’

As governments attempt to hail affluent tourists to sample experiences different from their own daily lives (Tucker 1997; Urry 1990), the citizen-subjects imagined as part of these experiences do not respond passively to the state’s cultural process of

‘subject-fication’ (Ong 1999). Subjects assert their right to belonging and inclusion, sometimes as they are excluded by state citizenship definitions (Rosaldo 1997; Canclini

2001). Through this argument, I diverge from the argument that economic globalization processes automatically result in the further marginalization of second-class citizens or non-citizens (Brysk and Shafir 2004). Potential citizen-subjects, even as they struggle from the effects of neoliberalism, may also successfully stake claims to resources based on their economic and cultural contributions, arguing that marginalized groups typically excluded from the national imaginary of the ‘citizen’ in effect earn inclusion through participation in tourism.

In theorizing the relationship between tourism development and constructions of citizenship, I draw on ethnographic inquiry. As I lived Puerto Viejo and worked in its tourism sector as a manager of a small cabina, I completed a series of fieldwork stays between 1991 and 2006 totaling three years. During this time, most intensively during

1997 and 1998, I completed informal and semi-structured interviews with seventy-five residents, as well as ethnographic observation and a two-wave longitudinal survey of business owners in the region. Central to this article, I participated in informal conversations, formal ‘town-hall’ type meetings, and a protest by Puerto Viejo residents

4 in San José in 1998. I further draw on archival sources in Puerto Viejo and San José and a version of the promotional website created the Costa Rican Tourism Institute, a government agency.

The Political Economy of Costa Rican Tourism

Costa Rica has one of the strongest tourism sectors in Latin America, with between 900 thousand and 1.4 million visitors per year between 1998 and 2003, generating between

550 and 940 million US dollars in foreign currency annually during this time ICT 1997;

2004a; Loría and Vargas 2002). Tourism has been Costa Rica’s first or second highest generator of foreign currency since the late 1990s. Despite devastating effects of structural adjustment, Costa Rica’s economy grew during the 1990s largely due to tourism expansion (Campbell 2002). In the late 1990s and early 2000s, tourism accounted for over 20 per cent of total export earnings (ICT 1997; 2004a). It was the only nation in Latin America to not experience a decline in tourism in 2001, despite a general economic downturn in the country and region (Loría and Vargas 2002).

Part of the success of Costa Rica’s tourism sector stems from its international reputation, which the state actively promotes through the Costa Rican Tourism Institute

(Spanish acronym ICT). The ICT has an annual budget of over ten million dollars for international tourism promotion. Tourism serves as a central industry for foreign currency generation, while national and international conservationists view tourism as a way of selling the idea of national parks and environmental issues to the Costa Rican public (Evans 1999). The state promotes tourism in the context of longstanding international pressures to repay foreign debt (Kaye 1994 in Mowforth and Munt 2003, p. 287) and to environmentally protect specific areas (Campbell 2002). Additionally,

5 the private Tourism Chamber of Commerce wields tremendous political power and pushes an agenda of low taxation and mega-resorts (Evans-Prichard 1993).

The reputation of Costa Rica among travelers and travel writers is that of, in the words of Lonely Planet (2006) travel guides, ‘an oasis of calm among its turbulent neighbours.’ The state has an economic interest in promoting its citizens in ways that continue accolades from travel writers that characterize Ticos (a common synonym for

Costa Rican) as friendly, peaceful, and helpful. The state perpetuates historical power configurations that exclude blackness and indigenous identities in the interest of constructing the nation’s citizens as racially homogenous and European.

Puerto Viejo and the South Caribbean Coast

As tourism expands to all corners of the nation, regions and racialized groups excluded from national citizenship narratives have expanded local tourism industries. In Puerto

Viejo de Talamanca, located on the South Caribbean Coast of Costa Rica, the rise of tourism as a significant economic sector has led residents to assert claims in both street protests and casual conversation that black and indigenous Costa Ricans, as well as international residents, deserve resources as citizens. These assertions challenge exclusionist constructs of Costa Rican citizenship, suggesting that an expanding international tourism industry creates a site of negotiation over cultural and political citizenship.

Puerto Viejo is a particularly interesting focal point for examining the relationship between citizenship structures and tourism due to the region’s economic and cultural history vis-à-vis the Costa Rican nation (Palmer 1994; Harpelle 2002). The

South Caribbean Coast, including Puerto Viejo, has the lowest human development score in all of Costa Rica (MIDEPLAN 2000).1 In the national imagination, the area is

6 Afro-Caribbean and liminal, almost separate from, the geographic and social center of national power and privilege (Sharman 2001). Ironically, the South Caribbean is home to hundreds of relatively affluent foreigners and a few affluent black and white Costa

Ricans who own property, many of whom actively work in tourism. In 1998, the population of the town was estimated by the Costa Rican census as approximately 2000.

Through analysis of the 2000 census data (INEC 2004), I estimate that in Puerto Viejo,

26 per cent of census respondents responded to a census ethnicity question as ‘negro’ or

‘afrocostarricense.’ Twenty-four per cent responded as indígena (indigenous), while the remaining 50 per cent labeled themselves ninguno, or ‘none of the above.’2 The census categories imagines whiteness as literally not black or indigenous, the non-‘ethnicity’ of none of the above. The three possible categories overlook the diversity within the ninguno category, which in Puerto Viejo includes European, North

American, Chinese (born in China and in Costa Rica), white Costa Rican, and mestizo

Nicaraguan.

Although no census data can verify local interpretations, the community is locally defined as historically Afro-Caribbean (Palmer 1994), an understanding shared by popular opinion in the Central Valley where the nation’s capital, San José, is located.

The transition to the contemporary period of great diversity in ethnic, racial and national identities resulted from agricultural crisis, globalized travel, improved national transportation infrastructure, and structural adjustment policy. The town’s economy thrived from chocolate production during the mid-twentieth century, but a plant fungus destroyed cocoa farm productivity throughout the area in the 1980s. Afro-Caribbean farmers began to sell land to white Costa Ricans and foreigners. In effect, cocoa producers were hit simultaneously by the cocoa disease and liberal economic

7 globalization ideologies that discouraged bailout of the troubled farms. Throughout the country during the 1980s and 1990s, state institutions stopped offering land redistribution, credit, and technical assistance to anything other than nontraditional exports (Edelman 1999). Farmers in the South Caribbean, as elsewhere in Costa Rica, lost the productive value of their farms; massive land sales resulted as investors and enchanted tourists sought property close to the Caribbean Coast.

Throughout the 1990s, Puerto Viejo became a town that operated in the interests and tastes of Europeans, white North Americans, and affluent white Costa Ricans. In

1999, the town had no bank, no high school, no health clinic and one tiny hardware store but housed three souvenir shops, three discotheques, as many Italian restaurants, and a surf shop. As foreign-driven building and population growth exploded after 1999, two hardware stores, dvd rental, and a bank have been added. Gradually, business ownership patterns have shifted away from Afro-Costa Ricans, who owned over 30 per cent of small businesses in 1998 but fewer than 15 per cent in 2006 (Author surveys,

1998, 2006).

In the context of a shifting climate of business ownership, Puerto Viejo, like the rest of the South Caribbean, continues as terra incognita for most Costa Ricans, and, by extension, most Costa Rican tourism promotion. Yet the expanding tourism sector has led to collaborations among business owners from all racial groups in the community and including Costa Ricans and transnational residents. Such alliances create constructions of citizenship that challenge dominant notions of the Costa Rican citizen- subject:

• That Costa Rican citizens are white and not from the Caribbean;

8 • That Costa Rican citizens are naturally pacifist and that passivity leads to a high

quality of life through peace and security.

These constitutive elements of the citizen-subject have often been interconnected in national narratives to describe Costa Rica as ‘exceptional’ in terms of racial demographics and tranquility compared to the rest of Central America. For analysis here, I discuss each separately, examining how the state, through tourism promotion, response to public protests, and police-community relations to construct citizenship using these characteristics. In contrast, Puerto Viejo residents, both black and white, Costa Rican and not, reject these exclusionary parameters. Through everyday conversations and protests in the nation’s capital, counter claims to citizenship were made on the basis of Puerto Viejo’s contribution to the tourist economy. Resident demands for state resources and recognition (Fraser 1996) are couched in claims to citizenship.

Citizenship, Race, and Region

Echoing classic popular conceptualizations, state tourism promotion constructs political and cultural citizens as definition, white. For example, one version of the state’s website promotion (ICT 2004b), created earlier this decade by the Costa Rican Tourism

Institute (ICT in Spanish) delineates whose culture and practices constitute typical

‘Tico’ (Costa Rican) practices, staking the boundaries of cultural citizenship. The website section on ‘people’ notes that:

The Ticos, as Costa Ricans are commonly known, are a

mixing of races. Though most of the country’s 3.3 million

inhabitants descend from Spanish immigrants, many

9 families originated in other parts of Europe, Asia, Africa

and, indeed, Central America.

(Paragraph break in the original text) You may be

surprised by the number of fair-skinned people you’ll see

in the country, especially in the Central Valley. In the

lowlands, more people are mestizos -that is mixture of

European and Indigenous blood- whereas most along the

Caribbean coast belong to an African lineage, and much

of the Talamanca Mountain Range is inhabited by full-

blooded Indians of various tribes (ICT 2004b).

The state indicates the tone for racial discourse within the country. On the surface, it is a liberal proclamation of respect for diversity, duly noting the existence of multiple places of origin. Yet the emphasis is clearly on whiteness, with a presumption that tourists are set at ease by the reassurance of the surprisingly fair-skinned citizens.

The nation’s capital, described elsewhere on the website as ‘an area that boasts high standards in education and health,’ and ‘headquarters of the country's government and political life,’ is racialized as white. Whiteness and the country’s economic and political achievements are firmly linked through this website.

The nation’s regions are explicitly racialized in the website text. The country is defined as racially segregated by regions, in which race is a biological category determined by skin color and ‘blood.’ Race is demarcated as fixed categories originating within the heterosexual family as a racialized unit that serves a marker of

10 origin. The website further conflates race and ethnicity while continually asserting to tourists that Costa Rica is European:

Costa Rican culture is in many ways a reflection of its

racial diversity. The predominant influence has long been

European, which is reflected in everything from the

official language -- Spanish -- to the architecture of the

country´s churches and other historic buildings. The

indigenous influence is less apparent, but can be found in

everything from the tortillas that are served with a typical

Costa Rican meal to the handmade ceramics sold at

roadside stands.

The site names the ‘predominant influence’ as European, reflected in the official language and architecture. The website practices state-sponsored blanqueamiento.

Through blanqueamiento, or whitening, the state attempts to erase evidence of black and indigenous identities and influence, a process that Whitten and Torres (1998, pp. 8-

9) argue occurs in the context of both nationalism and acceptance of global hierarchies.

Replicating global and Costa Rican racial hierarchies, the site places black and indigenous people and cultures under erasure. The region where ‘full-blooded Indians’ live is specified to a particular isolated mountain range, locating indigenous peoples outside the realm of the urban or civilized. Their influence is discussed as ‘less apparent’ and found in static manifestations of culture such as ‘the tortillas that are served with a typical Costa Rican meal’ or the ‘handmade ceramics sold at roadside stands.’ Formal legal citizenship may apply equally to all born in Costa Rica, but in the

11 public rituals of presenting the nation to the global traveler, the highest form of citizenship is bestowed to members of European origin families

Alternate constructions of citizenship

However, citizens push back, challenging the official story constructed at visitcostarica.com as well as in localized state responses to demands for resources and recognition. Residents of Puerto Viejo and of larger province of Limón participate in protests against the effects of neoliberal economic policy on the region as well as the neglect and resource extraction the area experienced at the hands of state apparatuses

(Guevara 1997; Tico Times 1999a; 1999b; 2003)

Since the late 1990s, Puerto Viejo residents have complained that the state neglects to send adequate resources to ensure local public safety. In the early months of

1998, Puerto Viejo experienced an increasing number of home robberies. By July 1998, people framed the issue in informal conversations as ‘the security issue’ or ‘the crime problem.’ Residents felt a growing frustration towards the state’s neglect in terms of police response and the perceived judicial indifference to property theft and assault.

Local business owners had lobbied during the past three years for allocations of police vehicles for the South Caribbean. The local tourism board had financed repairs for two cars, only to have them reassigned by the regional rural guard commander to other districts when they completed repairs. As national and municipal officials ignored the requests and took local police cars, residents blamed government inaction or indifference for rising personal and property crimes.

Throughout the community, complaints circulated about the lack of state response. During July 1998, through local conversations residents framed the state, including police, judges, and legal code, as generally deficient. Frequently, black and

12 white residents of all nationalities engaged a specific naming of the state’s failure to recognize the South Caribbean Coast’s residents. As strategies were suggested in response to the state’s neglect, the exclusion of Puerto Viejo’s residents on the basis of race was frequently named.

As residents became increasingly worried about theft, an Afro-Caribbean business owner locally nicknamed alcalde (town mayor) arranged a meeting to discuss a collective course of action. I will refer to him by this nickname throughout the article.

Members from all segments of the community were invited to discuss ‘the crime problem.’ We met on a Monday afternoon, called together by local chamber of commerce, known by the Spanish acronym CATCAS. Afro-Costa Ricans, white Costa

Ricans, Nicaraguans, Germans, Italians, North Americans, Argentines and Spaniards attended the meeting. Officially, the meeting was about crime. But the gathering opened with a catalog of the known characteristics about the state. Residents attributed the crime wave to a lack of state response. ‘Corruption runs to the highest levels,’ el alcalde announced. ‘You can't be honest and be a politician.’ People nodded throughout the room. ‘Limón is always at the bottom,’ a white Costa Rican called out.

‘The government has forgotten us.’ This recitation of personal experience with Costa

Rican corruption and state neglect of the region echoed what I had heard privately from many in Puerto Viejo.

Like the state, social movements and communities are not internally coherent, but represent a combined set of competing interests and interpretations. Some

Europeans and US-origin immigrants boycotted the meeting and the protests that followed because they dreaded the idea of increased state presence in the South

Caribbean. They were willing to relinquish recognition, rights, and resources of

13 citizenship in order to avoid the required duties such as obeying drug laws or paying taxes. Older Afro-Caribbeans wistfully described to me an era of vigilante justice that they felt operated better than the rural guard. Still other Costa Ricans and foreigners wanted increased private security options. Yet the dominant consensus which emerged from the meeting was to demand better security from the state. El alcalde and other

CATCAS members did not want the situation to pass without action. They quickly organized (and financed) a rental bus to transport protesters to the Ministry of

Security’s headquarters in San José to demand more state resources for local safety.

From the community meeting, residents supported el alcalde’s suggestion that a group travel to the nation’s capital to demand resources from the Ministry of Secuirty.

A protest was planned on the steps of the Ministry’s office. In their anger against the state’s lack of support for Puerto Viejo’s tourism development, the residents proposed perhaps the most quintessential of Costa Rican citizens’ responses to state neglect: protest A joke on a t-shirt sold in the nation’s capital lists ‘huelgas’, striking or picketing, as a national pastime. As part of a political tradition, the use of protest as a tactic demonstrated the residents’ commitment to engaging the state as within the boundaries of the citizen-subject position. The planned act contested the construction of Costa Rican citizens as originating solely in the Central Valley or only of European descent.

In creating a message for the protest, Patterson and other members of the local

Chamber of Commerce created slogans to be painted onto signs, mostly assertions of citizenship which noted the exclusions of the region from state funding and the residents from recognition as Costa Ricans. To the president of the country, a sign accused, ‘Miguel Angel, you are in power because of Limón province. Did you already

14 forget?’ Another threw the nationalist superiority often expressed by Ticos out for ridicule, reading, ‘We want annexation to Panama!’ This comic statement played on recent news that a small town in southern Nicaragua had demanded to be annexed to

Costa Rica. The Nicaraguan demand reinforced Costa Rican national image of a country culturally and economically superior to its neighbors, but the Puerto Viejo placard was an impertinent statement, forcing those who saw it to reconsider the superiority of the state’s ability to meet citizens’ and tourists’ needs.

The slogans reflected an acute knowledge of the history and racialized exclusions of the region. The implication that the president had ‘forgotten’ about

Limón province or the tongue-in-cheek demand to join nearby Panamá emphasized that the region experienced frequent exclusion and neglect by a Costa Rican state that prided itself on its economic and political superiority in Central America. Both signs placed

Puerto Viejo’s residents firmly as citizen-subjects who voted and lived as members of a particular nation. The referents to being forgotten drew on long-standing narratives about regional and racial exclusion.

Other slogans made claims on the basis of Puerto Viejo’s location on global tourism circuits. One read simply, ‘Protection for tourists and the pueblo.’ The signs also accentuated the centrality of the tourist economy. The state’s withholding, or even extracting (in the case of police vehicles rehabilitated at private expense) of resources from the Caribbean tourist town stirred anger from a population that had performed the primary duty of citizenship for a corporatist state: voting for the winning presidential candidate. Within this model, a community that votes for a winner reaps economic development programs, social welfare assistance, and other state resources. The canton in which Puerto Viejo sat voted for the victorious presidential candidate with the

15 highest percentage in the nation just five months before, yet the spoils of political patronage did not arrive. This serious breach of state practices around citizenship was interpreted as another blow in the longstanding attempt to exclude the South Caribbean people from being legitimate members of a Costa Rican political community. An expanding tourism industry created the economic criteria on which the protestors based their argument: Puerto Viejo’s citizen-subjects deserved state resources because tourists were present. The community contested state exclusionary practices because residents participated in the nation’s political activities (elections) and economic development.

Reasserting citizenship through protest

Even as the group attempted to rearticulate the dominant definition of the citizen- subject as white and Central Valley-based, the state responded to the protestors’ journey to the San Jose government office. The police treated the multinational, multiracial group of protestors differently than others who petitioned the state from the sidewalks of the nation’s capital. El alcalde reported to us as the bus carried us to the protest that the Minster of Security tried to dissuade the group from going to the capital and had ignored previous requests to address the security issue. ‘I told him he could forget his private meeting. “I’m bringing four busloads of people to your office tomorrow.”’ (We laughed, as we barely filled one bus.) Despite frequent protests by white Costa Rican farmers, civil servants, and concerned citizens that occurred without intervention and sometimes with the support of the police and cabinet officials (Edelman 1999, p.

259f31), the police detained our busload of protestors between the Limon lowlands and the Central Valley highlands. As we stopped at a scheduled meal break, several police cars and trucks from the Ministry of Security pulled up behind the bus, indicating that

16 we were clearly under surveillance, our bus recognized among the many parked in the lot outside the restaurant. The stopping point, right before we began the assent into the highlands, demarcated the racialized divide as presented on the ICT tourism website, where the Afro-Caribbean, immigrant, and indigenous Eastern lowlands meet the white

Tico Central Valley.

While detaining us, uniformed police demanded immigration papers of almost all the protestors, an intimidation tactic against resident immigrants. However, black

Costa Ricans were scrutinized as well. In challenging the validity of everyone’s presence in the country, these provincial police officers transmitted a message echoed in the tactical maneuvers established to block the protestors’ journey: those riding the bus were not legitimate candidates to make demands on the state.

The police detained the protestors without explanation and ordered the bus to return to Puerto Viejo. El alcalde departed immediately to negotiate our release so we might continue to our appointment with the Ministry. The police held us on the bus for over two hours in a parking lot off the highway to the nation’s capital. As we sat on the bus, riders expressed opposition to returning to Puerto Viejo, and el alcalde obtained our release in front of a radio reporter who arrived on the scene and reported live.

Curiously, Central Valley newspapers later reporting on the protest did not mention the detention at all.

Finally, the group was released, and we arrived in San José. Again at the

Ministry, the police threatened to perform immigration checks. Despite the attempt to prevent the protestors’ arrival to capital city, the Minister of Security met with two

Puerto Viejo leaders and promised to send increased staff and equipment to the community’s rural guard. Through the detention and constant threats of further

17 scrutiny, the state attempted to reinforce the dominant construction of Costa Rican citizens as white and from the Central Valley. However, residents (both Costa Rican and not) reasserted their legitimacy as protestors, demanding state resources spent on security for both local protection and further tourism development.

Citizen-Subjects and Security

No small part of Costa Rica’s popularity as a tourist destination stems from its reputation as a politically stable oasis in Central America . Costa Rica has no army, allowing relatively high social expenditures on education and health care. As a result,

Costa Rica as a nation enjoys a high ranking on the United Nation’s Human

Development Index. The funds diverted from militarization also allows for investment in a natural parks infrastructure that draws tourists (Campbell 2002). Tourism as an economic development strategy in Costa Rica includes extensive government incentives for investors and state investment in infrastructure to support tourism (Honey 1999).

Although the narrative of Costa Rican exceptionalism (in a region of violence and turmoil) has been critiqued and debated (Lara 1995; Edelman 1999), the nation’s tourism industry depends on it. Unlike the megaresorts and beach-oriented tourism of

Mexico and the Caribbean, Costa Rica markets itself to a niche of small-scale, ecotourism (although beaches, package tours and resorts most certainly exist). Such

‘alternative’ tourism is embedded in the same global economic system as mass tourism, but involves distinct processes of transforming feelings and experiences into aesthetic objects and commodities (Mowforth and Munt 2003, p. 59). To venture individually into rural, unknown communities to enjoy Costa Rican flora and fauna, tourists must be assured that the nation’s citizens will provide a necessary ingredient of safety and friendliness.

18 Through its website visitcostarica.com, the Costa Rica Tourism Institute (ICT) presents general information about the country which links security to Costa Rican citizens’ nature, placing the following statement in the website section on ‘culture and heritage’:

An important aspect of Costa Rica´s cultural heritage is

their love of peace and democracy. Ticos like to point out

that their nation is the exception in Latin America, where

military dictatorships long dominated politics.

(Paragraph break in original text) They can boast of

having more than one hundred years of democratic

tradition, and almost half a century without an army. The

army was abolished in 1948, and the money the country

saves by not having a military is invested in improving

the standard of living for Costa Ricans, which has

fostered the social harmony that makes it such a pleasant

country to visit (ICT 2004b).

The Costa Rican citizen on the website is one that embraces the culture of the market. Omitted are the huelgas (strikes) the public claims-making that occurs monthly on the streets of San José and province capitals. Instead, the ICT website promises on the ‘about Costa Rica’ page, ‘the quality and cost of labor, make Costa

Rica an ideal place to establish commercial operations.’ The state presents a citizen- subject integrated into the national development project of creating a pleasant stay for tourists and potential investors.

19 The historical events in which Costa Rica ended military presence is extended into a characteristic of Costa Rican citizens themselves, a ‘love of peace and democracy’ which creates ‘social harmony.’ In another section of the site, entitled,

‘People,’ the text - geared at tourists, not investors per se- links the notion of security with a promise of a high-quality, low-cost labor force. Ultimately, the website’s offer of security is displayed to reassure tourists and foreign investors, with text reading, ‘The country's strategic position, in the heart of the western hemisphere, the Government's positive attitude towards foreign investment, its infrastructure, access to international markets, and labor quality and cost, make Costa Rica an ideal place to establish commercial operations (ICT 2004b).’ Its citizens, imagined in this state performance as labor of quality and low cost, clearly part of the West, and part of a state policy of pro-foreign investment, are offered as part of the security constructed by the state to invite tourists to visit.

The overtures towards security, including lack of war, political stability, and a pro-business climate are not foolish or superfluous gestures. Performing ‘security’ to tourists is essential for tourism development. Tourist opinion websites and guidebooks for any location frequently inform tourists of the safety of a location. After two college students was murdered in 2000 and when squatters seized absentee US landowner property in 1998, US visitors expressed trepidation about travel to Costa Rica. Also, in an era of economic hardship created by neoliberal economic policy, crime has been on the rise in Costa Rica and Central America generally (Nefer Muñoz 2000), requiring even more reassurance and explicit linkages between friendly (non-threatening) citizens and an inviting tourism destination.

Rearticulating the citizenship-tourism-security link

20 In the ICT website, the state asserts security through the passivity, Western-orientation, and labor-friendly attributes of the nation and its citizens. The link between security and tourism, however, is not seamlessly controlled by the state. Through the 1998 private discussions of rising crime, the local meeting described in the previous section, and the eventual protest in San José, the gap was recognized between state promises of security and actual climate for tourists and citizens. Residents of Puerto Viejo used the articulated need for security for tourism to hold the state accountable for a scarcity of state resources locally. The protests, in which black and white Costa Ricans and foreign nationals suggested transferring citizenship (‘We want annexation…) because of a lack of security turned the state’s website claim of a secure nation on its head. In protestors’ analysis, the state denied the nation security through refusal to protect residents (and tourists) from violence and property loss, as well as through the polices’ practices of extracting local resources and detaining citizen protestors.

The security protest of July 1998 challenged the link between citizen passivity or docility and the existence of security in the country. Unlike international tourism promotion which promised security because of friendly, helpful Ticos, the protestors demanded security through community organizing and protest. Stability for the tourist and the pueblo was not achieved because of ‘natural’ tendencies or European-descent homogeneity, but rather by multiracial, multinational collective action. Even as the police, through the act of detention, reinforced a construction of citizenship as white and passive, the protestors’ arrival to the Ministry of Security in San José reconfigured citizenship as a multiracial and activist subject position.

Conclusion

21 The residents protested in front of the Minister of Security’s building to demand increased resources for the community and improved judicial response. At the earliest monitoring two months later, the Ministry had complied with the timetable it had set, offering more police patrolling the streets and improved vehicle transportation for the police. The state denied protestors membership in the Costa Rican political community through detaining the bus (the detention, one of the police later described, came from higher authorities) and scrutinizing individuals’ legal documents. On the streets of San

José, as the protest ensued in front of the Ministry of Security, the group successfully demanded a citizen’s right of protest.

Tourism promotion and economic development creates practices around citizenship. States draw on the imaginary citizen-subject (with resulting cultural and economic benefits of citizenship) in the making of a tourism industry. The expansion of international tourism in Costa Rica creates avenues for the state to further define its citizens as white and passive. As in other arenas, the state is not a cohesive, unified entity in its attempts to situate citizens in a national development agenda. In meeting the protestors’ demands, the state had to imagine its citizens outside of old criteria of national origin and racialized categories. It had to conceptualize tourist towns and tourist citizens as more than the Costa Rican described on the website, ‘well-educated and hard working people, who are quick with a handshake and a smile.’

Subjects excluded by state definitions of citizenship draw from the discourse of tourism’s centrality to development. The importance of Puerto Viejo as a tourist destination created unintended results. A multiracial, multinational group of people from an historically marginalized region demanded a new construction of citizenship.

Although tourism is propelled by globalization, the meanings and strategies deployed

22 by ‘host’ communities create more than just a passive receptacle for state development strategies and transnational tourist fantasies. In the case of Puerto Viejo, residents used importance on global tourism circuits as a way to make claims about racist and regional exclusion. Thus, tourism (and probably other industries), do not create automatic relationships between citizenship and racialization or political consciousness. The outcomes, like all relationships between states and citizens, are unstable and contested.

The protestors included Puerto Viejo residents who were not property owners or direct beneficiaries of tourism, but the tactics they used are not equally available to all. Many who are second-class or non-citizens (Brysk and Shafir 2004) cannot couch citizenship claims in the language afforded to the Puerto Viejo protestors.

The community’s emergence as a tourist destination created an opportunity to rupture the nexus connecting whiteness, security and citizenship. A community that cannot provide evidence of contribution to tourism– either economic or political – cannot make claims in such a way. The presence of a transnational tourism industry shapes the possibility of citizenship claims.

Cultural citizenship (Rosaldo 1997) emphasizes the gap between formal citizenship, which is unevenly extended to Afro-Costa Ricans in Puerto Viejo, and cultural practices. Through the public rituals such as taking police service out of the region and the website that promised tourists a ‘surprisingly light-skinned’ population, the state denied Afro-Costa Ricans cultural citizenship formal citizenship. In the late

1990s, the tourist sector experienced continued growth and Afro-Costa Rican culture became a tourist attraction in itself. Black Costa Ricans and allied others created a competing public ritual of protest, often deployed in Costa Rican, to assert that they, too, must be considered cultural citizens.

23 Globalized industries unfold in real places, in specific nation-states. Thus, these industries shape and are shaped by the racialized and class-based power relations embedded in the category of national citizenship. A growing body of literature argues that citizenship is transformed by globalization to the extent that post-national citizenship formations emerge, such as transnational citizenship (Faist 2000; Fouron and Schiller 2001), global citizenship (Heater 2002, Dower 2003). In this article, I argue that globalization also transforms citizenship in a national context as well.

Tourism, immigration, travel and arrival force the state to reconceptualize political membership. Tourism development became a vehicle to assert that Puerto Viejo could no longer be excluded from the imagined community of Costa Rica. Without tourism, the security issue could have been more easily dismissed as a local problem not worthy of state attention. With the potential threat to European and North American visitors’ safety, Puerto Viejo’s residents were able to reframe the issue as a legitimate need of

Costa Ricans for resources to further the nation’s economy, even as they contradicted how the state defined citizens and tourism development.

A state can no longer envision only on the native born to participate in territorial development schemes. Tourism brings this globalization effect into ever-sharper focus.

In Puerto Viejo, tourists become immigrants, and not just European and North

American tourists. As Afro-Costa Rican descendents of Jamaican guest workers become ‘hosts’, they are joined by Nicaraguans, North Americans, Europeans, and others, who blur the boundaries between host and guest, traveler and native (Sheller and

Urry 2004, pp. 5-6).

Blurred boundaries open up space for historically marginalized groups, the ones excluded on the website as non-citizens, to assert citizenship. These assertions go

24 beyond the traditional discourse of citizenship as political rights to economic, social and cultural practices (Alvarez, Dagnino and Esocbar 1998). Puerto Viejo, part of a region so long seen as the hinterland of indigenous and black ‘others’, has integrated itself into the global economy as an international tourist destination to the point that the state can no longer ignore demands for resources. Residents of Puerto Viejo, holders of myriad passports and assorted official travel documents, imagine their destinies intertwined with the state’s to the extent that they petition the state see them as at least in part Costa

Rican, citizens with the right to protest and demand influence over state expenditures, judicial conduct, and policing strategies. Refuting the racist notions that Ticos are by definition white and therefore passive, these are not the demands of the outsider, the visitor or the temporary resident. These are not the kinds of requests that the state grants to non-citizens. Tourism and immigration, key forms of mobility expanded in an age of globalized capital, require states to reconsider the most fundamental aspects of national citizenship. Sometimes the reconsiderations result in the same exclusions and genuflections to international capital. At other moments, the previous definitions are cracked apart, leaving possibility for new formations of the citizen-subject.

25 References

ALVAREZ, SONIA, DAGNINO, EVELINA and ESCOBAR, ARTURO 1998

‘Introduction: the cultural and political in Latin American social movements’, in

Sonia Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino and Arturo Escobar (eds), Culture of Politics,

Politics of Culture: Reinvisioning Latin American Social Movements, Boulder,

CO: Westview Press, pp. 1-29

AZARYA, VICTOR 2004 ‘Globalization and international tourism in developing

countries: marginality as a commercial commodity’, Current Sociology, vol. 52,

no. 6, pp. 949-968

BIESANZ, MAVIS, BIESANZ, RICHARD AND KAREN Z. BIESANZ 1999 The

Ticos: Culture and Social Change in Costa Rica, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner

Publishers

BRYSK, ALISON and SHAFIR, GERSON 2004 ‘Introduction: globalization and the

citizenship gap’, in Alison Brysk and Gerson Shafir (eds), People Out of Place:

Globalization, Human Rights, and the Citizenship Gap, New York, NY:

Routledge, pp. 3-10

CAMPBELL, LISA 2002 ‘Conservation narratives in Costa Rica: conflict and co-

existence’, Development and Change, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 29-56

CANCLINI, NÉSTOR GARCIA 2001 Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and

Multicultural Conflicts, Translated and introduction by George Yúdice,

Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press

DOWER, NIGEL 2003 An Introduction to Global Citizenship, Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press

26 EDELMAN, MARC 1999 Peasants against Globalization: Rural Social Movements in

Costa Rica, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press

ENLOE, CYNTHIA 1990 Bananas, Beaches, and Bombs: Making Feminist Sense of

International Politics, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press

EVANS-PRICHARD, DIERDRE 1993 ‘Mobilization of tourism in Costa Rica’, Annals

of Tourism Research, vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 778-9

EVANS, STERLING 1999 The Green Republic: A Conservation History of Costa

Rica, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press

FAIST, THOMAS 2000 ‘Transnationalization in international migration: implications

for the study of citizenship and culture’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 23, no.

2, pp. 189-222

FOURON, GEORGES and SCHILLER, NINA G. 2001 ‘All in the family: gender,

transnational migration, and the nation-state’, Identities, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 539-

582

FRASER, NANCY 1996 Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the

‘Postsocialist’ Condition, New York, NY: Routledge

GUEVARA M., JOSE DAVID 1997, ‘Limón, epicentro de la pobreza’, La Nación, 23

March, A2

GUDMUNSON, LOWELL 1986 Costa Rica Before Coffee: Society and Economy on

the Eve of the Export Boom, Baton Rouge, LA: Lousiana State University Press

HARPELLE, RONALD 2002 The West Indians of Costa Rica: Race Class and the

Integration of an Ethnic Minority, Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queens

University Press

27 HEATER, DEREK 2002 World Citizenship: Cosmopolitan Thinking and Its Opponents,

London: Continuum

HONEY, MARTHA 1999 Ecotourism and Sustainable Development: Who Owns

Paradise? Washington, DC: Island Press

INSTITUTO COSTARRICENSE DE TURISMO (ICT) 1997 Anuario San José, Costa

Rica: ICT

-- 2004a Anuario Preliminar San José, Costa Rica: ICT

-- 2004b ‘Costa Rica: No Artificial Ingredients’, www.visitcostarica.com, accessed

June 2004, cached pages available from author

INSTITUTO NACIONAL DE ESTADÍSTICA Y CENSO (INEC) 2004 ‘Censo de

población 2000’ http://www.inec.go.cr/, accessed May 2006

KAYE, MICHAEL 1994 ‘Costa Rica at the crossroads: mass development or nature-

based tourism?’ in A Call for an International Dialogue on the Future of Costa

Rica Tourism, San José: mailing list on Internet

LARA, SILVIA with BARRY, TOM and SIMONSON, PETER 1995 Inside Costa

Rica, Albuquerque, NM: Interhemispheric Resource Center

LONELY PLANET 2006 ‘Costa Rica Travel Information’

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/worldguide/destinations/central-america/costa-rica,

accessed August 2006

LORÍA, MIGUEL and VARGAS JUAN RAFAEL 2002 ‘Costa Rica: situación

economíca y prospectos’, Inter-American Development Bank, accessed May

2006 at http://www.iadb.org/regions/re2/sep/cr-sep.htm

28 MINISTERIO DE PLANIFICACIÓN NACIONAL Y POLÍTICA ECONÓMICA

(MIDEPLAN) 2000 ‘Costa Rica: índice de desarrollo social distrital según:

cantones, distritos, población y extensión’, Government report, accessed in

MIDEPLAN office August 1998

MOWFORTH, MARTIN and MUNT, IAN 2003 Tourism and Sustainability, 2nd edn,

London: Routledge

NÉFER MUÑOZ, ALEJANDRO. 2000. ‘The most violent area in the Americas.’ The

Tico Times, 18 August, section 1, p. 9

ONG, AIWA 1999 ‘Cultural citizenship as subject-making: immigrants negotiate

racial and cultural boundaries in the United States’, in Rodolfo D. Torres, Louis F.

Mirón, and Jonathan Xavier Inda (eds), Race, Identity, and Citizenship, London:

Blackwell, pp. 262-294

PALMER, PAULA 1994 ‘Wa’Apin Man’: La historia de la costa talamanqueña de

Costa Rica, según sus protagonistas San José, Costa Rica: Editorial de la

Universidad de Costa Rica

ROSALDO, RENATO 1997 ‘Cultural citizenship, inequality, and multiculturalism’ in

William V. Flores and Rina Benmayor (eds), Latino Cultural Citizenship:

Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, pp. 27-38

SHARMAN, RUSSELL L. 2001 ‘The Caribbean carretera: race, space and social

liminality in Costa Rica’, Bulletin of Latin American Research vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 46-

62

SHELLER, MIMI and URRY, JOHN 2004 ‘Places to play, places in play’, in Mimi

Sheller and John Urry (eds), Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play,

London: Routledge, pp. 1-10

29 TAYLOR, LUCY and WILSON, FIONA 2004 ‘The messiness of everyday life:

exploring key themes in Latin American citizenship studies introduction’,

Bulletin of Latin American Research, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 154-164

TICO TIMES 2003 ‘Limón union workers go on strike’ 19 September, accessed online

September 2006 at

http://www.ticotimes.net/dailyarchive/2003_09/Week3/09_16_03.htm#story_one1

-- 1999a ‘Unrest in Limón’, 7 May, p. 5

-- 1999b ‘Government promises to keep protesters at bay’ 14 May p. 2

TUCKER, HAZEL 1997 ‘The ideal village: interactions through tourism in Central

Anatolia’, Simone Abram, Jacqueline Waldren and Donald V.L. Macleod (eds),

Tourists and Tourism: Identifying with People and Places, Oxford: Berg, pp.

107-28

URRY, JOHN 1990 The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies,

London: Sage

WHERRY, FREDERICK 2006 ‘The nation-state, identity management, and

indigenous crafts: constructing markets and opportunities in northwest Costa

Rica’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 124-152

WHITTEN, NORMAN and TORRES, ARLENE 1998 ‘General introduction: to forge

the future in the fires of the past’, Norman Whitten and Arlene Torres (eds),

Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean, Volume I, Bloomington, IN:

Indiana University Press, pp. 3-33

30 1 The index considered ‘educational infrastructure, access to special education programs, deaths of children age 0-5 as a percentage of total deaths, percentage of children not enrolled in first grade on time, average monthly electricity consumption, percentage of children born to single mothers, and the social development index rating of the entire canton in which the district was located.’

2 The census did not collect data on race between 1920 and 2000; however, I calculated the reported ethnic (étnia) responses for Puerto Viejo’s canton of Cahuita, of which the Puerto Viejo area is slightly less than half the total population. This is the smallest geographic unit available from published data.