Category: Culture

One of the highlights for me of our trip to the La Fortuna area over the last week was a visit to the Maléku people of northern Costa Rica.

Costa Rica has several rich indigenous cultures. The Maléku are the northernmost indigenous people in the country, and while the smallest group, numerically speaking, they have managed to protect their language and culture to an amazing degree.

In this post I would like to share with you a bit of background about the Maléku language and its larger linguistic context.

A bit of background on language families

Human languages can be understood metaphorically as being like human families: they descend from common ancestors. So for instance, Spanish, Italian, and French are all modern “descendants” of spoken Latin. Little dialectal changes piled up over the years as Latin speakers spread out, and eventually people at the margins of the expansion could no longer understand each other easily. At that point what were once dialects became distinct but related languages.

Here’s a map which gives an approximate idea of the distribution of the world’s language families as they stand today. Estimates vary, but there are certainly at least a few hundred distinct families (comprising perhaps seven thousand individual languages):

The Chibchan languages

Maléku is a member of an interesting family called Chibchan. There are many Chibchan languages spread across central and South America. Today, Chibchan languages are or were spoken in Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela. Maléku is listed in the map below by another name, Guatuso, which is still sometimes encountered. Rama and Pech are the only Chibchan languages spoken further north than Maléku. It is believed that the Chibchan languages originated in South America and moved north.

Maléku today

There are three Maléku towns today, Tonjibe, Margarita, and El Sol. We passed briefly through Margarita on our way in to Tonjibe, but we did not visit El Sol.

In fact, the Maléku cultural area is much bigger than just these small towns; in an unfortunately familiar story, much of their land has fallen into non-Maléku hands via sometimes shady dealings. Their stories detail a much larger area, including the Arenal volcano and the area around what is now La Fortuna, as well as the Río Negro river basin area. You can read a brief account by the Maléku of their territory and attempts to regain and reforest it here.

Even our brief visit was sufficient to see that the language is still spoken, even though most people there also speak Spanish (and some speak some English).

The language has been well documented compared to other Chibchan languages. The linguist Adolfo Constenla Umaña specialized in Chibchan languages of Costa Rica, and Maléku in particular, for decades. His work at the University of Costa Rica (UCR) has continued in the wake of his unfortunate death in 2013 — extensive resources on the language have been published online as part of the Dipalicori Project at UCR. There are a whole range of contents there, from illustrated plant dictionaries…

…to diagrams of how traditional Maléku houses are made:

…to graphic novels about some of the darker periods of Maléku history.

How to Visit the Maléku

If you are in the area and would like to meet the Maléku you can check out their web page here:

They’re also on Facebook, and you can reach them on WhatsApp at +506 8890 6509.

It is impossible to understand Central American history without paying attention to coffee. I learned this when I lived in El Salvador, where the ruling class (known as the “fourteen families”) consolidated economic and political power through the coffee economy. Shortly after independence, the legislature abolished communally held lands, stripping Indigenous communities of their ability to sustain themselves through farming and making vast plots of land available for purchase by the oligarchs. This process produced a gulf between the wealthy few and the impoverished many, a foundational inequality in Salvadoran society. In the decades since then, this inequitable distribution of land has fueled civil war, organized crime, and rampant violence. It is also a primary factor that has pushed over 1 million Salvadorans to migrate to the United States in search of better opportunities for their families. I have often wondered how different El Salvador’s history would have been if land had been distributed more equally.

On our recent visit to Finca Life in Cañitas (a nearby town), I felt like I got to see some glimpses into such an alternate history. Finca Life is part of a local coffee-growing collective called Café Monteverde. When it was founded in 1989, several participating families pooled their small land holdings to work collectively. At first they produced both dairy products and coffee, but later they consolidated to focus on coffee production and have demonstrated a great deal of savvy to grow their business. They have opened coffee shops in high-traffic spots in local towns where they sell coffee exclusively made from their product. My husband, a serious coffee fan, says the coffee they sell there ranks among the best he has ever had. During the pandemic, they set up an online store to sell their coffee and other merchandise, and today they still send out coffee shipments internationally each week. They now also offer coffee tours for coffee aficionados.

For over 25 years, Café Monteverde has been a model that has allowed the member families to sustain themselves. Today, the business continues to grow. They have purchased other local coffee farms when they went up for sale, incorporating new families into the co-operative. This keeps land ownership in the community rather than having it be bought up by investors from outside of the zone. Today, 21 families are members of the collective.

{{IMG_5176 – bins of coffee beans}}

This is a very different story of coffee production from what I saw in El Salvador. I am not a scholar of Costa Rica, so I still have much to learn about Costa Rican history. But from the little I have learned so far, it is clear that the Costa Rican government over the years made important decisions that have made it possible for small-scale farmers like Finca Life to flourish. After a brief but bloody civil war, the country abolished the military in 1948. With the funds freed up by this decision, the government invested in health and education, creating a universal health care system and funding free public education through university. This use of government funds has provided a stable and peaceful society where projects like collective coffee production can thrive.

The government also enacted specific policies related to coffee production and land ownership. A government agency was established in 1933 to regulate coffee production and help small-scale farmers compete with large-scale producers and millers who were fixing the price to try to drive out competition. Today, this agency ensures that producers receive 80% of the FOB price (the market value of goods at the point where they are exported from an economy). A land-reform law passed in 1961 worked to curb large-scale land ownership and to integrate farmers into national development; for coffee producers, this led to the creation of farm cooperatives like Finca Life. This is not to say that the coffee industry in Costa Rica is without problems. Across the country, coffee pickers – often migrant workers from Nicaragua and Panama – still work long days for relatively little pay. And land ownership in Costa Rica is by no means egalitarian; indigenous communities especially face many challenges in recovering ownership and access to land that is legally theirs.

But the model of Café Monteverde is still one to follow. It has had many benefits for the wider community beyond the member families. The collective regularly hosts free community activities like a film screening and Children’s Day celebration that we attended. They provide free educational programming to local and national schools, as well as internship opportunities for students. Along with other providers of coffee tours in the region, they donate $1 per tour participant to a local community development fund. Over the last 4 years, they collectively donated $250,000!

In addition to being good neighbors, Café Monteverde also takes seriously their responsibility for the land. At Finca Life, 50% of the land remains under forest. The rest is used for coffee production, vegetable gardens, and raising animals like goats and chickens who produce milk, cheese, and eggs. These food ingredients are used to prepare delicious meals that they serve to visitors in their educational programs and on the coffee tours. They have also moved away from using chemical fertilizers and pesticides and are instead relying on natural products that they produce themselves. They work with the ingredients at their disposal: leaf mulch from the forests, animal droppings, and the husks produced in coffee production, composting these ingredients down into a concentrated and nitrogen-rich fertilizer which they then “steep” in large vats of water to create natural fertilizer. They even have a small lab where they collaborate with researchers to study the micro-organisms in the soil so that they can learn which ones are most beneficial and how to use them to control pests.

Visiting Finca Life and learning about Café Monteverde has allowed me to imagine another possible world in much more concrete and detailed ways. I hope that sharing this story inspires you too!

I thought I would share some pictures and thoughts about our recent experience of Independence Day or Día de la Independencia here in Monteverde.

History

As it is in much of Latin America, Independence Day is celebrated on the 15th of September. Interestingly, that date is actually the date of independence of all of Central America from Spain in 1821. This includes Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua (not Panama, which was part of Colombia until 1903).

In the early 19th century, Spain had been having plenty of trouble with political stability in its own right — various uprisings and eventually Napoleon’s older brother Joseph being placed on the Spanish throne in 1808. So various regions in Central (and South) America issued its declaration of independence: (Acta de Independencia Centroamericana).

At the time, Guatemala was the most powerful of the Central American provinces, and the plan was to form a Central American Federation, rather along the model of the United States (so each of what is now Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica would have been states in the federation). A long story ensued, but eventually the various countries went their separate ways. Costa Rica was the last to formally declare independence, on October 29, 1821.

Nonetheless, September 15th remains the date that is commemorated throughout Central America as Independence Day.

Independence Eve: Lanterns, dancing, and music

Independence Day celebrations in Monteverde actually start the evening of September 14th, with a parade of school children carrying lanterns (faroles in Spanish) through Santa Elena. The lanterns are handmade and made from recycled materials.

Preparations begin long before the 14th (we often heard drummers banging away as the practiced around town). At the local high school gym, there was an activity put together for kids to make their own faroles. Traditionally the faroles depicted a fairly small set of national symbols: horses, ox carts, and various animals. I really enjoyed seeing how creative people got with their faroles, I wish I had taken more pictures of them! But here are a few to give you an idea.

Our daughter made this very nifty ocelot:

Some of the faroles we saw were rather amazing. For instance this rather astonishing bus with a functioning front door and luggage compartment!:

Here is a cool scene of two marimba players. (The marimba is the national instrument of Costa Rica, and is popular throughout Central America.)

The parade wove around town and ended up back at the highschool, where various dance groups performed. Here are some pictures of the dancers:

Independence Day Parade: School bands, dancing, and more music!

The next morning we got up early did headed back into Sta Elena for Independence Day proper! These people take Independence Day seriously, folks.

The parade was early in the day (in an attempt to beat the heat and/or rain). We got lucky as the weather was very nice. The parade takes quite a while, as every school in the area comes through, and most of them perform a musical number with more dancing!

And last but not least came the Monteverde Circus, who did some very impressive juggling, stiltwalking, and unicycling.