Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

La fiesta de la independencia en Costa Rica, 1821 – 1921

2009; Duke University Press; Volume: 89; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2009-065

1527-1900

Michael Goebel,

Politics and Society in Latin America

Once upon a time Costa Rican historiography was infamous for its (self-)congratulatory tone. The country’s position at the colonial periphery, so the classical argument went, had bestowed it with an egalitarian and homogeneous society of farmers, who built a liberal-democratic polity capable of avoiding the bloodshed and authoritarianism of its less fortunate neighbors to the north. As David Díaz Arias’s book shows, the days of this straightforward interpretation are long gone by. His examination of the celebration of Independence Day in the century following 1821 is a valuable addition to a still expanding strand of scholarship, which, stimulated by Hobsbawm and Ranger’s buzzword of the “invention of tradition,” is more interested in the discursive construction of Costa Rican exceptionalism than in the question of whether it was justified or not.Based on government documents from the national archive and newspaper reports, the author outlines in seven chronological chapters how the modernizing state used the celebration of September 15 to legitimize itself by inculcating a sense of patriotic duty in the citizenry. Paradoxically, on that date Costa Ricans do not celebrate “their” independence, but that of the Federal Republic of Central America (dissolved in 1838), first proclaimed in Guatemala. As the author observes, from the late nineteenth century Independence Day has thus been coupled with the commemoration of the more particularly Costa Rican “National Campaign” of 1856, in which a force led by Juan Santamaría, the country’s foremost national hero, had expelled a filibuster incursion from the north. The book, however, gains its coherence from focusing on September 15. Its major strength lies in the detailed analysis of the ceremonial minutiae, stipulated in numerous laws, with which the state exploited the infrastructure and the rituals of the Catholic Church for its own purposes, before secularizing the celebration more fully under the aegis of liberalism from the 1870s. Díaz Arias also shows convincingly how the festivities spread from the elite to the artisans of San José and from the Central Valley to the more remote regions of the country, in a process that was completed only in 1920.Since this is a study of a festivity fostered by the political elite, it comes as no surprise that Díaz Arias’s interpretation is at times skewed toward a top-down approach. No one can seriously deny the pivotal role of the state in Latin America in construing national identities. But until the last chapter, the reader gets little sense of how the participants felt about Costa Rican identity. The popular sectors that eventually seem to have partaken in the festivities are mostly portrayed as passive recipients of a ritual contrived in the corridors of power. In contrast to the author’s argument that the glorification of the National Campaign was merely an extension of the commemoration of Independence Day invented by the elite, the sources cited suggest that Santamaría and his war were a rather more popular affair, which the state might have incorporated into its ceremonial calendar due to pressure from below. Throughout much of the book, ethnicity and class remain abstract categories, rendering anemic the description of the celebration, which sometimes appears as a historical actor in its own right. Incidentally, this lack of contextualization has another detrimental effect: since so little is said about the broader social and cultural history of nineteenth-century Costa Rica and its political protagonists, the book’s readership will most likely be restricted to specialists.The eighth chapter provides partial redemption. Here the author analyzes how the press dealt with the contrasting, yet in other contexts complementary, relationship between Costa Rica and the rest of Central America. On the one hand, Costa Ricans were cast as white, prosperous, peace-loving, studious, and industrious, thus superior to their allegedly hot-tempered indigenous-cum-African neighbors with their penchant for violence. On the other hand, after World War I, September 15 could be evoked to foster a sense of Central American unity in the face of North American imperialism and even to refer to the community of language, culture, and religion with Spain, again in contradistinction to the United States. The reader is thus finally rewarded with getting a sense of the thicker sociocultural flesh grafted onto the institutional skeleton provided by the state’s festive calendar. Had Díaz Arias provided more analysis in this vein, he might have further complicated the traditional interpretation of a largely unchallenged Costa Rican state that, without any problems, imposed its view of a harmonious and homogeneous nation from above. Still, his study is a coherent and for the most part persuasive addition to our understanding of how political elites draw on national symbols to legitimize their power.