In his latest edited volume, Iván Molina, along with his nine collaborators, has provided ten perspectives on Costa Rica's transition from colony to republic. Most of the articles in this collection center their analysis on the period between the 1780s and the 1840s. Molina's prologue outlines his desire to counter renditions of the late colonial and early national period that have suggested an egalitarian agrarian past. He accomplishes this goal: the volume's authors consider from different vantage points how socioeconomic divisions, racial hierarchies, rural-urban frictions, gendered inequities, and regional tensions shaped the state-building project in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Several articles will be of considerable interest to Costa Ricanists. Scholars interested in poverty and racial inequities will find much to consider in Chapters 2 and 3, written by Andrea Montero Mora and Elizet Payne Iglesias. Together these authors provide a thoughtful analysis of how changing demographics, Independence, and the inauguration of coffee reshaped broader class relations in Costa Rica and indigenous communities and rights. Political historians will want to consider Carlos Humberto Cascante Segura's fascinating analysis of how elites in the first half of the nineteenth century developed a foreign policy strategy focused on preserving or expanding the national territory.
Ana María Botey Sobrado's broad examination of public health considers early colonial concerns over the spread of communicable diseases that devastated indigenous communities, as well as the development of a smallpox vaccination campaign in the late colonial era. She concludes by briefly outlining the development of the nation's socialized healthcare system, after she delves into early national efforts to provide health care to poorer urbanites. Given the COVID-19 pandemic, this chapter will likely be of interest not only to historians. The book's final chapter, by Molina, considers the role that public schools, the establishment of printing presses, and broadening consumer power played in the development of a literate Costa Rican citizenry.
In this collection's largest contribution is provided by Eugenia Rodríguez Sáenz's analysis of the early Republican period in which she focuses on how Costa Rican women used the courts to secure protections from abusive husbands. Rodríguez's research suggests that while patriarchy was reinforced through both the secular and ecclesiastical courts, women repeatedly used these same courts to question physical abuse and economic neglect by their husbands, in what she defines as Costa Rica's first feminine rebellion against domestic violence. This chapter contributes to a broader field of analysis over how Independence and Republicanism reshaped the position of women in Latin American society.
Latin Americanists interested in gendered dynamics in the post-colonial era will find insights in Rodríguez's work. Sadly, most of the chapters in this volume will be of limited interest to scholars outside of Costa Rica. Given that so many of these articles place heavy emphasis on the years in which Costa Rica was joined with the rest of the isthmus in the Federal Republic of Central America, it is surprising that these scholars give almost no consideration to Nicaraguan, Guatemalan, or other isthmian perspectives. A broader Central American examination would have helped these authors better frame how Costa Rican political, economic, social, demographic, and cultural transformations fit into a broader series of changes in the region. These scholars might have benefited from considering the approach so skillfully taken by Patricia Fumero Vargas in Festejos y símbolos: el primer Centenario de la Independencia de Centroamérica (2021; reviewed in The Americas, July 2022).
That said, Molina and his collaborators deserve praise for compiling a well-researched, tightly written, and thematically unified collection of articles in time for Costa Rica's 2021 Bicentennial. Given the global pandemic that shut down archives and limited travel, this work is a testament to these historians’ commitment to drawing attention to the bicentennial. Perhaps, a hundred years from now, scholars of Costa Rica will consider this feat as they reflect on the 2121 tricentennial.
