The Creation of Tiquicidad

Biesanz et al. assert (1999, 6) that the ticos ‘share a sense of national identity. They believe they have a unique way of life and a distinctive national character’. This belief is deeply rooted in the historical narratives which have been disseminated in Costa Rica about the foundations of the modern-day nation. Leonard Bird claims (1984, 11) that the indigenous peoples inhabiting the land which now constitutes Costa Rica were largely driven out by the Spanish conquerors. Thus, he argues (1984, 11), the colonizers who eventually settled there permanently were exclusively European farmers and smallholders who lived in egalitarian communities. John Bell also states (1996, 5) that Costa Rica's land was run as an agrarian democracy under colonial rule. Indeed, because of this lack of large-scale agriculture, Bird asserts that during the colonial period, ‘Costa Rica had been the poorest and most backward province in the “Kingdom” of Guatemala’ (1984, 32). This has led Biesanz et al. to insist that this ‘official’ version of Costa Rica's history ‘has … long served as the unifying myth of the nation and is still taught in schools and repeated in patriotic speeches’ (1999, 13). Vargas Chang and González Vásquez also contend that ‘dentro del marco de la identidad cultural la población muestra tener conciencia de un pasado de determinados ancestros y devenir histórico “común”’ (1981, 12–13). This narrative of a common, European, ancestry, which both Bird's and Bell's works have assumed as a historical truth – and which has been disseminated and perpetuated throughout the history of the nation – is, however, far more complex and contested than these readings denote. As Vargas Chang and González Vásquez point out: ‘al costarricense se le ha impuesto una falsa conciencia basada en una supuesta ascendencia española relativamente pura que niega los verdaderos antepasados (esto se nota por ejemplo en cierta propaganda turística sobre el país)’ (1981, 12–13; emphasis my own). It is these true roots which are often hidden in modern-day Costa Rica in favour of the homogeneous ideal.

Despite the falsehood of Costa Rica's repetition of this ancestral myth, then, it became the foundation for the unified nation in the 1870s when Costa Rica's post-independence nation-building project got under way (Cuevas Molina, 1999 and Biesanz et al., 1999).