It all started
with the country itself, Nicaragua as an assailant of bad-guy Latin American
nations like Columbia and a nation that doesn’t respect Costa Rican borders.
They just walk across, as my abuelo tico says. Those others are reliant on the
drug trade and many are “dangerous” when they cross over. What happens when
Nicaraguans begin their lives in Costa Rica did not connect exactly with the
political problems that my grandparents see with the nation to the north
itself. They seemed too distracted by other issues, a list that began with
mooching. This is a reoccurring topic for me, one that my abuela tica describes
as something that will always be around now on. She was focusing on how they
make for crowded schools and more impoverished Costa Ricans when they start
working here as low-skill laborers. Clearly, this represents the same
contradiction that exists in the States with Mexican immigrants who do hard
work but are scorned all the while. My abuelo jumped in about higher taxes
because of more social needs for poor immigrants, which is also comparable to
higher health-care costs that result from immigrants who take advantage of E.R.
services in the States without paying the bill. These are simply realities for
Costa Ricans, but they show a deeper characteristic of tico culture that seems
to embrace heritage. When Nicaraguans come and work in low-wage agriculture,
they diminish the identity that this culture once held high in small-scale
farming. When my grandparents express their disdain for these immigrants and
the issues they fuel, they are speaking within a context that they do not
perceive because it is so embedded for them. It is not base ignorance or
arrogance as it appears on the surface.
Booth’s Quest for Democracy article hit home
while I was in Nicaragua. A value-system based on social equality and the
equitable distribution of wealth was not to be found. This difference is
reflected by what Linda mentioned before we left – that Costa Ricans hide
poverty while Nicaraguans do not. It is clear that one culture is offended when
the other is not. Having only visited a tourist destination, I observed that
hotel environs in prime vacation zones stand out among other buildings in an
almost ostentatious way in Costa Rica and Nicaragua both. I was not expecting
as many waiters, attendants, dealers, etc. to speak English, but, on the whole,
I found that the two countries are similar in this regard. More than anything,
I was struck by the portrayal of Catholicism on our tour in Granada, one that
very well validated the all-powerful influence of religious institutions as
seen in readings like The True History of
Chocolate. There appears a clear difference between the historical view of
Catholic faith in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, perhaps because of the different
initial conditions of the two nations (more or less Native peoples, more or
less Spanish acceptance by Natives). These qualities between the two nations
led me to consider how base my previous ideas about Central America had been.
It is, from afar, easy to categorize nations of such a compact region into
standardized categories, especially of tourism and poverty. The distinctiveness
of each nation in Latin America is all the more clear to me now, and I also
think that there are still many small cultural differences between the two
countries that affect the peoples’ interpretation of one another, which I
cannot understand for obvious reasons.
That concept of
micro-distinction within regions can be difficult to grasp in a frame of
agriculture, tropical fruits nonetheless! That’s because Central American countries all share a historic
dependence on export commodities, Costa Rica included. After a little research,
I found that a huge distinction does exist on a very micro level. Politics and
outbreaks of disease in the 1900s kept banana production low in Nicaragua. The
Somoza family, who had discovered that coffee and cattle were more profitable
than bananas, refused to give United States banana companies the free reign
that they enjoyed throughout much of Latin America, exacerbating issues with
disease and cultivation. This is a simple fact but one that likely changed the
Nicaraguan perception of bananas as a staple in their economic system, and
their cultural heritage as a result. While I did not observe the effects of
these facts in the presentation and sale of bananas or any other food in
Nicaragua, fundamental similarities in basic meals between the two countries
did stand out – rice, beans, plantains, and fruit juice. I would like to visit
a banana plantation in Nicaragua, if there is an accessible one, to compare to
the one we visited in Limon. Perhaps there are differences with the harvesting
of this fruit just as there are with coffee between Brazil and Costa Rica. I
think that in the U.S. I would like to convince my mom to use bananas more
often in her recipes. The fruit seems to prevail throughout Latin American
cultures, Nicaraguan or not, in culinary avenues that consumers in the States
would rarely consider. I think I could bring a new appreciation for this simple
fruit back home, not just a better idea of the political history of the
valuable export commodity it has become.
Here in my kitchen, the principal fruit for breakfast and overall is the banana (those aren't plantains), symbolically on top!
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