Colonial Life
Scarcity of labor and lack of mineral wealth meant that Costa Rica, late to join its isthmus neighbors in the colonial process, remained a poor and somewhat marginal backwater throughout this period.
In place of the huge haciendas and plantations found under the feudal el latifundio system elsewhere in South and Central America - which depended on a large exploitable workforce – in Costa Rica, family-managed, small-scale subsistence farming became the norm. Spanish settlers were generally forced to clear plots and till the soils themselves (in 1719 the governor himself reports having to sow and reap his own crops or otherwise starve), living in small agricultural communities, largely isolated from each other by the difficult terrain and climate and lack of transportation systems.
In this sense the aforementioned ‘leyenda blanca’ contained some element of truth, although the notion of a ‘rural egalitarianism of the poor’ was the result of a mass destruction of the native population, rather than any lack of indigenous civilization.
Also contradictory to Costa Rica’s homogenizing narrative of ‘equality’ was the existence of a burgeoning slave trade. Black slaves were imported from Africa and the Caribbean to augment the dwindling labor supply. The slave trade was most active between 1690 and 1730, with most slaves working on the cacao plantations near the Atlantic coast town of Matina. Slavery in Costa Rica however was never as brutal as in other colonial areas, the region’s poverty making slaves a valuable investment. Most were eventually able to purchase their freedom, over time becoming ethnically and socially incorporated through mestizaje, or racial mixing.
Throughout the 17th and early 18th centuries the population of Costa Rica remained small and the lifestyle humble. In fact by 1709 Spanish money had become so scarce that settlers had resorted to using cacao beans as currency, like the Chorotegas hundreds of years earlier. When Volcán Irazu erupted in 1723, covering Cartago with ashes, reports reveal that the capital consisted of only seventy adobe houses, two churches and two chapels.
Remote, isolated and largely forgotten by the ‘Mother Country’, colonial Costa Rica was seen as the poor sister, or ‘Cinderella’, of its neighbors. However, this left it largely free from the intrusion of the Guatemalan authorities, for the most part autonomous and self-sufficient in its poverty, allowing it to develop its own rural political character, distinctly different from that of surrounding regions.
The one area that did not follow this pattern through the colonial period was the Nicoya Peninsula and what is now Guanacaste. At this time the area came under the separate jurisdiction of Nicaragua and vast cattle ranches, haciendas, arose on its semi-arid plains, made possible by a larger indigenous workforce and the extensive exploitation of imported black labor. The cattle ranching economy and subsequent growth of a defined, class-based society still persist today. Guanacaste did not become part of Costa Rica until 1825, after Independence, this was not officialized until 1858 when the San Juan River was agreed upon as the new boundary between the two countries.
In this sense the aforementioned ‘leyenda blanca’ contained some element of truth, although the notion of a ‘rural egalitarianism of the poor’ was the result of a mass destruction of the native population, rather than any lack of indigenous civilization.
Also contradictory to Costa Rica’s homogenizing narrative of ‘equality’ was the existence of a burgeoning slave trade. Black slaves were imported from Africa and the Caribbean to augment the dwindling labor supply. The slave trade was most active between 1690 and 1730, with most slaves working on the cacao plantations near the Atlantic coast town of Matina. Slavery in Costa Rica however was never as brutal as in other colonial areas, the region’s poverty making slaves a valuable investment. Most were eventually able to purchase their freedom, over time becoming ethnically and socially incorporated through mestizaje, or racial mixing.
Throughout the 17th and early 18th centuries the population of Costa Rica remained small and the lifestyle humble. In fact by 1709 Spanish money had become so scarce that settlers had resorted to using cacao beans as currency, like the Chorotegas hundreds of years earlier. When Volcán Irazu erupted in 1723, covering Cartago with ashes, reports reveal that the capital consisted of only seventy adobe houses, two churches and two chapels.
Remote, isolated and largely forgotten by the ‘Mother Country’, colonial Costa Rica was seen as the poor sister, or ‘Cinderella’, of its neighbors. However, this left it largely free from the intrusion of the Guatemalan authorities, for the most part autonomous and self-sufficient in its poverty, allowing it to develop its own rural political character, distinctly different from that of surrounding regions.
The one area that did not follow this pattern through the colonial period was the Nicoya Peninsula and what is now Guanacaste. At this time the area came under the separate jurisdiction of Nicaragua and vast cattle ranches, haciendas, arose on its semi-arid plains, made possible by a larger indigenous workforce and the extensive exploitation of imported black labor. The cattle ranching economy and subsequent growth of a defined, class-based society still persist today. Guanacaste did not become part of Costa Rica until 1825, after Independence, this was not officialized until 1858 when the San Juan River was agreed upon as the new boundary between the two countries.
