"Over the Rainbow": Migration, Lives and Identifications among U.S. Citizens at Costa Rica, Abstract

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1 Tel Aviv University The Lester and Sally Entine Faculty of Humanities The School of History "Over the Rainbow": Migration, Lives and Identifications among U.S. Citizens at Costa Rica, Abstract This dissertation is submitted for a Ph.D. degree in the University of Tel Aviv By Atalia Shragai The Dissertation was supervised by Prof. Billie Melman Prof. Raanan Rein November 2013

2 This study focuses on U.S. citizens who emigrated to Costa Rica between 1945 and It is the first monograph that considers the U.S. population in Costa Rica during that period in its entirety, rather than sections and fragments of it. It seeks to explore migration, patterns of settlement and the multiple experiences and identifications of U.S. expats in Costa Rica, subjects that have not received scholarly attention. In addition to tracing patterns of migration and the geography of settlement, this study examines the variety of the material culture of the expats: the houses they lived in, the domestic arrangements they formed, and their culinary repertoires. The study further examines U.S. migrants' relationship to nature and their varied usage of land and recoups the history of the civic organizations and institutions they established in their new country. Furthermore, this study seeks to examine the evolution and formation of a wide range of identifications among U.S. citizens vis-à-vis their homeland and their adoptive country and the varied ways in which they have represented and reconstructed their individual histories while placing themselves in the broader context of U.S. presence in Central America in during the Cold War era. 1 Yet the present study is not merely a project of retrieval, attempting to uncover the lives and identifications of the few thousands U.S. citizens in Costa Rica (Costa Rican censuses estimate they numbered between two and three thousands between the 1950s to the 1970s, while U.S. citizens in Costa Rica estimate that there were tens of thousands of them in the 1970s). Rather, its detailed examination of the histories of migrants and settlers makes it possible to reconsider and reinterpret immigration during the second half of the twentieth century. The immigration examined here is unique, first and foremost in its direction from the U.S., a country that has been historically perceived as a haven for immigrants, to a small country, considered to be a classic "sending society". This reversal allows a fresh conceptualization of immigration, settlement and practices of identification among migrants. 1 The usage of the term "identification" calls for attention to the active and dynamic ways in which historical agents, such as migrants, defined and represented themselves, in contrary to "identity", which might imply an immanent and static essence. Roger Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, pp

3 This study also sheds new light on U.S. presence in Central America during the first decades of the Cold War, sometimes described as an "Imperialism after the Empires. 2 This presence in an imperial periphery, geographically and politically close to a global superpower, is examined not from the point of view of the state, the military or of economics, although their respective importance is by no means underplayed, but from that of immigrants and settlers. Put differently, this is a history of belated imperialism "from the bottom up. Its agents are the women and men who settled in Costa Rica: corporate men and Protestant missionaries, employees of the U.S. various governmental agencies associated with the Cold War along with Quakers who left the United States because of their resistance to the Korean War, counterculture refugees who moved during the Vietnam War, retirees, professionals, farmers and U.S. wives of Costa Rican men. Many of these migrants have imagined and configured Costa Rica as an enchanting place, relatively close to home, yet "Over the Rainbow", as one of the informants to this study termed her first impressions of her new country. 3 The study does not solely examine the passage of people but also the flow of material culture - objects and materials - of everyday practices, ideologies of ethnicity, class and gender and social networks from the U.S. to Costa Rica. By scrutinizing these migrations, the study enriches the corpus of research on colonialism in the twentieth century, which does not pay sufficient attention to individual colonial experiences and material culture in territories outside the metropole after World War II and, for that matter, before it. The potential contribution of this study to the three fields of research mentioned above: the history of migration, the social and cultural bottom-up history of U.S. presence in Central America and, more generally, of the late Imperial era, and a material history of colonialism, draws on a broad corpus of oral and written sources. 2 Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University press, 2000; Ronald Robinson, "Imperial Theory and the Question of Imperialism after Empire", The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vo. 12, Is. 2, 1984, pp Interview of the author with Sharon Smith-Wolf, Curridabat, March 12,

4 The core of the research material is based on sixty four semi-structured interviews which I conducted in Costa Rica. The interviews followed the informants' stories but were loose enough not to be dictated by a unified questionnaire. Oral History is a useful methodology in a pioneering research that seeks to expose experiences of individuals who are studied for the first time. Its strength lies in its ability not only to reconstruct events and experiences, but to virtually recoup the construction of individual and collective memories of these experiences and consider how U.S. migrants in Costa Rica interpreted their experiences and endowed them with meanings. Oral History may seem at odds with the study of such agents as U.S. citizens in Costa Rica because it has been commonly applied, at least from the 1960s onward, in studies of non-hegemonic groups, notably working class people, ethnic and political minorities and so forth. 4 Its use in a history of privileged migrants, who are the citizens of the global super power, 5 may challenge conventions and generalizations in the field. The interviewees lived in Costa Rica between 1944 and 1980 and represent a heterogeneity of generations, geographies and cultures. Thirtynine of them are women, and twenty-five - men. The gender bias is apparent in the differences reflected in the life stories between women's and men's experiences of life in Costa Rica, and also in their respective representations of them. As studies of colonialism have suggested, women's colonial narratives are a supplement to hegemonic imperial narratives by men and occasionally subvert them. 6 In addition to the corpus of Oral Histories I made extensive use of letters and diaries written by the settlers. Other primary sources include autobiographies, memoirs and fictional, or semi-fictional, texts written by the settlers. A principal primary source is The Tico Times, the leading English 4 Pau Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (3 nd edition), Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, Sheila Croucher, The Other Side of the Fence: American Migrants in Mexico, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, Billie Melman, "Under the Western Historian's Eyes: Eileen Power and the Early Feminist Encounter with Colonialism", History Workshop Journal, 42, 1996, pp ; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London: Routledge,

5 newspaper in Costa Rica, established by U.S. citizens in 1956 and published between 1956 and 1960 and 1972 and In addition to serving as a source of information about U.S. citizens in Costa Rica, The Tico Times is examined as the dominant public arena of the discourse of U.S citizens in it, and as a vehicle for the formation and cultivation of the imagined community of readers and writers. The wide-ranging corpus of core primary sources, produced by individual settlers, was supplemented by a corpus of sources located at the private archives of various institutions established by U.S. citizens in Costa Rica, including bulletins of their social clubs, programs of the English speaking theatre in San José and cookbooks written by members of the Women's Club in Costa Rica. Official archival sources were collected at the National Archives of the United States (at College Park, MD) and the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., as well as at the National Archive and the National Library of Costa Rica, both in San José. These sources include Costa Rican censuses, applications for residency submitted by U.S. citizens, records of the U.S. Department of State regarding bilateral relations between Costa Rica and the United States and detailed reports of its three consulates in Costa Rica. These sources were used, among other things, for the reconstruction of aggregations of immigrants and patterns of settlement in Chapter one. A sampling of prominent newspapers and magazines in both countries, La Nación in Costa Rica and The New York Times and Time Magazine in the United States, provided information on public events and, more importantly, their representation and impact. One striking example is John F. Kennedy s visit to San José in 1963, which generated mass hysteria. A vast body of secondary literature, in four fields of research, helped locate this study in historiographic and theoretical contexts: the history of U.S. Imperialism in general and its presence in Central America in particular; the historiography on colonial cultures and identifications; studies of immigration, expat communities, trans-nationalism and diasporas, and Costa Rican history, with special emphasis on the role of immigration in nation building and the creation of Costa Rica's national ethos. Cautious and analytical reading of this vast literature significantly contributed to the observations made in my 4

6 own study. It specifically helped contextualize the migration of U.S. Citizens to Costa Rica and locate their lives in the broader political and cultural processes that unfolded in the Americas and globally after World War II. At the same time, the study clearly demonstrates the unique characteristics of the migration and settlement considered here. Moreover, it indicates new directions for the examination of the flow of people, objects and ideas between places and cultures during the period discussed here. The study is divided into three parts. It begins with a consideration of the individual immigrant, moves on to consider the U.S. home and surroundings in Costa Rica then discusses the communities of U.S. citizens. Part One focuses on the passage from the United States to Costa Rica, patterns of settlement and the construction of passage stories. Chapter One contextualizes the migration of U.S. citizens to Costa Rica and is based on statistics in order to construct a collective profile of migration from The United States to Costa Rica. The chapter examines the motives for leaving the U.S. and choosing Costa Rica and traces continuities and changes in patterns of migration and settlements from the 1950s to the 1970s. Chapter Two considers the settlers' complex and ambivalent relationship with Costa Rican nature, and is based on autobiographies, memories, and letters of U.S. men and women who lived in the Costa Rican countryside. The chapter examines practices and representations of life in the Costa Rican rain forests and seashore as a reenactment of the conquest of the U.S. frontier in the nineteenth century, in a different historical and geographical context. The chapter proceeds to examine the conceptualization of nature and gender among U.S. men and women in the Costa Rican frontier and unpacks the dichotomy in some of the historiography between men and nature on the one hand and women and domesticity on the other. The chapter also traces the shift in the use of land around the mid 1970s, from capitalist development to paternalistic conservation and demonstrates to what extent nature served as a crucial component of the settlers process of identification vis-à-vis their homeland and adoptive country. Chapter Three focuses almost exclusively on oral histories and portrays the life cycle of U.S. citizens in Costa Rica. Their life stories reveal how they constructed their role and constituted 5

7 themselves - through the use of myths, stories from the history of the United States and images of its popular culture - as protagonists, witnesses or victims in the history of imperialism and conquests in the Americas. The dominant narrative device in their life stories is an emphasis on the allegedly unintentional and accidental nature of immigration, including attributing it to fate. The strategy of narrating an "accidental migration" and representing it as "anti-migration" is ascribed mainly to growing discontent in Costa Rica in regards U.S. immigrants and their taking over of land from the late 1970s onward. This study pays special attention to material culture as both shaping and constituting individual and collective identifications and representing them. Thus Part Two focuses on everything 'within and outside what people at particular times considered private or called "home."' 7 Chapter Four concentrates on the U.S. home in Costa Rica. It deals with the architecture of U.S. dwellings in Costa Rica and with the "things that matter" (Daniel Miller's term), 8 i.e., domestic objects whose value surpasses their functionality and use and that are loaded with symbolic and emotional meanings. By tracing personal inventories drawing on the migrants' memories, the chapter investigates the creation of identifications based on people's relationships to their objects and examines the influence of these objects on the migrants surroundings and their self-images, with respect to gender, class, and ethnicity. Chapter Five traces the changes and modifications of domestic arrangements and gender roles imported from the United States yet shaped by habits and lives in Costa Rica. The chapter stresses the efforts to maintain domestic arrangements of the white middle class home in the U.S., especially with respect to women's roles, and the crucial influence of Costa Rican institution and practices - mainly the presence of domestic servants and live-in china (nanny), who served as child carers - on women's roles and identification. The chapter considers alternative domestic arrangements and 7 Ann Laura Stoler, Intimidation of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen, Ann Laura Stoler (ed.), Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, Durham and London: Duke University press, 2006, p Daniel Miller, "Why Some Things Matter", Daniel Miller (ed.), Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp

8 new gender perceptions, influenced by the Women's Liberation and Counterculture movements in the U.S. and transported to Costa Rica in the 1970s, such as communes, that were also uniquely refashioned by migrants' lives in Costa Rica. Chapter Six considers the adaptation of culinary repertoires that were brought from the U.S. It examines differences in practices of food consumption between the United States and Costa Rica and their influence on methods of food gathering and perceptions regarding gender, class and ethnicity. The chapter considers the hybrid repertoire of cooking and eating that evolved among the settlers, such as Counterculture cooking of rain forest roots, or Midwestern recipes that, due to a shortage in supply, made use of wild animals instead of beef. The representation of a distinct food culture of U.S. women in Costa Rica is examined through their collected recipes. Part Three focuses on Clubland: the dense net of civic social organizations founded and operated by U.S. citizens in the Central Valley of Costa Rica. As clubs, these organizations served as instruments of inclusion and exclusion, based on gender, class, ethnicity and national origin. They formed distinctions not only between U.S. citizens and others but also, and more crucially, within and among members of the U.S. community itself, thus enhancing heterogeneities in an imperial settlement. Chapter Seven scrutinizes social and philanthropic clubs. It also examines the Tico Times as a "textual club of readers and writers. In accordance with the current literature on civic organizations in colonies and imperial systems, this study examines U.S. Clubland neither as an alien body, nor as a foreign enclave, but as a dynamic framework that has mediated between homeland heritage and the new habitat and circumstances of life in it. This mediation responded to the members' needs, while at the same time striving to monitor and set the norms for an appropriate acculturation. Chapter Eight highlights two social forms in which the adaptation of U.S. culture involved spectacularization of U.S. self-fashioning: the "Little Theatre Group and the Fourth of July festivals and picnic. The chapter includes the first reconstruction of the LTG repertoire between 1949 and 1979, a repertoire based on revivals of Broadway, Off Broadway and West End shows. It then evaluates the wholesale adaptation of 7

9 a metropolitan repertoire that left little room for local influence. The second part of the chapter traces the invention of the Fourth of July tradition in Costa Rica. The event, first celebrated on 1949, sought to create "a little piece of the United States", a traditional celebration in the style of little- town in the United States, combined with Costa Rican images and representations. The diversity and variety of passage and settlement histories presented here, both individual and collective, attest to the fluidity and flexibility of the migrants experiences. The houses they constructed and meticulously decorated, the biographies of their material objects, their domestic arrangements, the distinct culinary repertoires they have adopted and invented and the inclusiveness and exclusiveness of their social organizations, were all derived from their U.S. background and their lives in Costa Rica. That was the "small change in their pocket", which they used interchangeably for self-fashioning and self- definition. 9 Notwithstanding this variety, the history of U.S. citizens in Costa Rica during the period under discussion is more than the sum-total of their individual experiences and their multiple memories of them. This history suggests reconsidering and perhaps revising assumptions about changes that occurred during the core-era of the Cold War in U.S. culture and in world politics. First is the change in patterns of immigration and the emergence of what I have termed "diverse immigration. The inability to detach themselves from the United States, or the reluctance to do so, coupled with a lack of desire or necessity to be integrated in Costa Rica, caused migrants to disown their status and image as migrants. Many of them perceived themselves as individuals who lived outside of their homeland for many years sometimes for life. Political, diplomatic, and cultural circumstances certainly influenced their identification as U.S. citizens in Costa Rica during the Cold War. However, contrary to my initial assumption, the national component did not dominate the migrants' self-identification. They tended to identify themselves neither as "U.S. citizens" nor as "Costa Ricans" exclusively, but as both - or 9 This image of self-identification is borrowed from Jeffrey Lesser, Raanan Rein, "Challenging Particularities: Jews as Lens on Latin American Ethnicity", Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, Vol. 1, no. 2, September 2006, pp

10 neither. Those who identified themselves with both nations, developed nonhyphenated selves, that were not "American-Costa Ricans", but "Americans" in "Costa Rica. Others have stressed their lack of identification with a nationstate, living between different nations, expressing foreignness and alienation as the predominant component of their identification. Some ignored the national factor altogether, in favor of an identification based on ethnicity, class, gender, life style, ideologies and a relation to nature. Above all, it was the tension between places and registers of time that manifested itself in every aspect of their lives. In accordance with the conventions of travel writing, journeys and change of place were perceived by the migrants as a passage in time as well "crossing the border into the past", as Néstor García Canclini have described it. 10 The tension thus generated habits and self-identifications that blended notions of progress and tradition, of innovation and antiquity. Identifications, as this study has also demonstrated, were embodied in objects, things that were carried away from the homeland to the adoptive country, were left behind or were embraced in the new places. Tracing the biographies of people and objects helped shed new light not only on processes of migrations but also on lives lived through things, 11 in the late Imperial era and the time of transition in global migration. 10 Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (translated by Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. Lopez), Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995, p The idea of people's living through their things and the social life of things themselves is taken from Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996; Arjun Appadurai (ed.) The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press,