For a relatively small and economically insignificant country, Costa Rica has attracted a surprising amount of interest from academic researchers over the last several decades. In an attempt to assess the contribution of Carmen Kordick's The Saints of Progress, it is perhaps useful to understand why this is so. Chief among the reasons for Costa Rica's prominence as a subject of scholarly interest is undoubtedly its seeming exceptionalism in the Central American region. By this we refer to its relative post-war political stability and the viability of its vibrant liberal democracy, in contrast to the other Central American countries with their history of military dictatorship, death squads, corruption, oligarchic rule, guerrilla insurgency and revolutionary struggle in the latter half of the twentieth century, and, with the exception of military dominance, the failure to substantially move beyond this tragic state of affairs in more recent times.
Kordick confronts this notion of Costa Rican exceptionalism, which manifests itself both as a national ideology and in numerous scholarly works, and finds it overstated, if not entirely wrong, and this is one area of her book that needs further discussion. Another subject she introduces, and one that is a significant contribution, I would argue, is the more recent reality of population out-migration to the United States, particularly from rural areas, and the significant socio-economic impacts this is having on Costa Rican society, at least in certain regions. She examines these issues through the microcosm of the canton of Tarrazú in the nation's central coffee-growing region, a canton that the author argues well illustrates the evolution of the country's coffee economy since the late nineteenth century, its role in the political upheaval of 1948, and the phenomenon of out-migration of recent decades. Her research methods included consulting with a wide variety of archival materials, participant observation, anonymous surveys, oral histories and numerous interviews in the canton itself as well as in Paterson, New Jersey, where out-migrants tended to congregate in the United States.
Kordick rightly confronts the myth of Costa Rica as a country historically characterised by a class of smallholder coffee farmers unencumbered by an exploitive oligarchy so characteristic of other Latin American countries, a myth that has been also perpetuated by foreign, largely US, scholars. She documents evidence of the dominance of a large coffee grower and processor over the lives of both smaller growers and landless labourers in her region of study as part of her critique of the smallholder myth. Here, the value of her research is to show how the power of this oligarchic cafetalero class was organised at the local level through monopolisation of the key industrial coffee-processing activity, and also via the provision of credit that smallholders required to survive from one season to the next. The fact that Costa Rica was actually dominated for many decades by a coffee oligarchy is not a novel finding of her study, of course. This has been well documented by studies decades ago, beginning with the early work of Costa Rican economist Rodrigo Facio (1972) and later the pioneering study of the origins of Costa Rica's coffee oligarchy by Samuel Stone (1975), followed by the works of such foreign scholars as Ciro Cardoso (1977), Reinaldo Carcanholo (1981) and Anthony Winson (1989).
The brief but crucial armed struggle in 1948 that resulted in a junta led by José Figueres and the subsequent success of social democratic politics is examined in some depth in Kordick's study, and here she provides some valuable insights into the class dynamics of this period through the lens of Tarrazú politics and local mobilisation. As she argues, landless workers had more affinity to the traditional (oligarchic) party because of its temporary alliance with the communist Vanguardia Popular (Popular Vanguard) party that had mobilised the proletariat in the banana plantations and had secured important social-security legislation by this time. Smallholding coffee growers, on the other hand, wedded to private property relations, favoured movements that challenged the traditional political forces and which were avowedly anti-communist. Kordick provides evidence that contradicts the dominant Costa Rican narrative that characterises this successful struggle against the traditional political status quo as a relatively peaceful political transition. In contrast, she documents the actual violence and death that accompanied the armed struggles of 1948. While she, curiously, characterises the Figueres government that took over after 1948 as ‘conservative’, she later notes that the political forces led by Figueres actually institutionalised the progressive social-security and labour-code reforms of the previous administration. In fact, these measures were part of a social democratic reshaping of Costa Rican society where a much more interventionist state implemented progressive tax legislation and major support for agricultural cooperatives, among other state initiatives. Indeed, what is missing in her coverage of this period is the crucial efforts of Figueres and the junta of 1948 to pass tax legislation that would provide the financial basis for the social and economic reforms they wished to bring in. The coffee oligarchy had historically paid minimal taxes to the state and the ultimately successful battle to impose an ad valorem tax on the revenues of the wealthy coffee processors, the beneficiadores, was a key development of this period that crucially helped fund future reformist initiatives (see Winson, Coffee and Democracy in Modern Costa Rica (St Martin's Press, 1989), Chapter 5). On the other hand, she does provide a convincing explanation for the absence of US intervention at this time to thwart these progressive reforms, noting the propitious geopolitical conjuncture in the brief years after the Second World War before US Cold War politics would engender ongoing US efforts to prop up deeply reactionary and repressive regimes elsewhere in Central America.
Perhaps the most significant contribution of this study is the insight it provides into the more recent role that out-migration and remittances migrants send back home play in changing social relationships in Costa Rican society. Here Kordick provides a valuable discussion of the economic impact of such remittances on the local agrarian structure, showing how it allowed formerly landless families to purchase farms and become smallholders, while the labour-shortage out-migration created for coffee farmers has been filled by the in-migration of relatively impoverished Indigenous Panamanian migrants. In addition, she provides a nuanced examination of how relationships around race and gender are shaped by the migration experience, noting how ‘White’ Costa Rican migrants become non-White ‘Hispanics’ in the United States, for example, and some rural women migrants who gained legal status in the United States and worked there as domestic servants could eventually return and hire domestic servants once back in their home country. In supplementing the earlier macro studies on Costa Rican development and society with in-depth community-based research, and bringing in the contemporary reality of out-migration and analysis of relationships of gender and race, the book makes a solid contribution to understanding this nation's history and contemporary reality.
