This book studies Tarrazú, a coffee-producing valley in Costa Rica that, its author laments, receives far too little attention from historians. To fill this void, Kordick combines a political history of the decades before and after the 1948 civil war with a sociology of local groups’ faith in a nationalist narrative that exalts progress—and provides Kordick with the title of her book. In her hands, the study of Tarrazú becomes a vehicle to question the nationalist interpretations of Costa Rican exceptionalism that emphasize its egalitarianism, democratic development, and “whiteness.”

The first two chapters examine the settlement of Tarrazú early in the nineteenth century. Chapter 2 examines how a patriarchal social order reinforced gender and class inequalities. Her discussion of the state's prosecution of illegal distilleries in this chapter is novel and informative.

Kordick's book dedicates Chapters 3 and 4 to the political history of the 1930s and 1940s, a focus that leads her to question how democratic Costa Rica has been. These chapters show how police arbitrariness and election-related harassment and acts of fraud led to the formation of a hostile opposition movement to President Rafael Angel Calderòn Guardia (1940-44) and President Teodoro Picado (1944-48). As Kordick reminds us, it was in Tarrazú that José Figueres had his finca and recruited fighters for his rebellion. Kordick echoes modern scholarship in finding that the confrontation and violence that culminated in the 1948 civil war are inconsistent with nationalist narratives about the peace-loving nature of Costa Ricans. She notes that many locals felt betrayed when Figueres became leader of a de facto junta instead of turning power over to the opposition candidate, Otilio Ulate Blanco, who apparently won the 1948 election against Calderòn Guardia. But dating the establishment of democracy to 1948, as Kordick does (4-5), is controversial. This interpretation curiously ignores, among other things, the postwar exclusion from power of the formerly governing National Republicans and their communist allies until at least a decade later.

Another three chapters examine Tarrazú as a “hub of immigration,” which is perhaps the most interesting part of Kordick's book. These chapters draw on more than 130 interviews from the region, mostly in Costa Rica and also in New Jersey, where some of her informants settled. She explains how the postwar development of cooperatives to market coffee and the spread of social services for which the country is famed increased incomes for many in Tarrazú. But for many landless peasants it was immigration to the United States that generated the remittances that would lead to increases in their living standard. She makes a good point, too, when she notes that remittances led to the purchase of land to grow coffee, even though coffee had become less profitable by the end of the twentieth century. Another insight is that the arrival of “darker” immigrants from Nicaragua and Panama to harvest coffee curiously reinforced Costa Rican myths about its “whiteness.” That Nicaraguans and Panamanians came from countries with different histories and cultures, she notes, led locals to interpret their own progress as the outcome of a singular and exceptional history.

Kordick's book provides yet more evidence that traditional accounts of Costa Rican history are empirically hollow. But her critique sounds dated. By the last third of the twentieth century, the “new historians” of the 1970s and 1980s in Costa Rica had already found the traditionalist narrative wanting. Also, the use of a well-worn critique is not an entirely convincing way of weaving political history and sociology. Connecting two rather different topics with a negative story line is distracting, even if provocative. Each requires a more detailed treatment that would uncover the new facts and more systematic interpretation that are missing from Kordick's book.