West Indians of Costa Rica PDF Download

Author: Ronald N. Harpelle
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773521623
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Harpelle (history, Lakehead U.) examines the migration of Caribbean people of African descent to the Hispanic-dominated, "white-settler" society of Costa Rica from 1900 to 1950, and the gradual ethnic transformation of this group into Afro-Costa Ricans. Coverage includes the expansion of the Costa Rican banana industry and the rise of the West Indian labor force; the emergence of the young Jamaican activist, Marcus Garvey; the post-WWI period of heightened unrest; attempts by Costa Rican governments, organizations and individuals to destroy the West Indian community; the eventual integration of West Indians into Costa Rican society in the 1940s and early-1950s; and the eventual formation of the Afro-Costa Rican identity. Distributed in the US by Cornell University Services. c. Book News Inc.

Author: Ronald N. Harpelle
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 9780773522817
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
A detailed social history of an ethnic minority's adaptation to life in Central America during the first half of the twentieth century.

Author: Aviva Chomsky
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780807119792
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
In the late nineteenth century, several U.S.-based companies, which merged into the United Fruit Company in 1899, began to build railroads and cultivate bananas in Costa Rica's Atlantic Coast province of Limon, recruiting mainly Jamaican workers. The society that developed in Limon was an English-speaking enclave of white North American managers and black West Indian workers, with a culture and history distinct from that of the rest of Costa Rica. This detailed and informative study of the banana industry on Costa Rica's Atlantic Coast, focusing on the lives of the industry's workers, explains why the United Fruit Company was never able to maintain the kind of social and economic control it sought over its workers and how the workers managed to create a vibrant alternative social and economic system around the plantation. West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870-1940 is among the first studies of the social history of multinational corporations and makes a significant contribution to current scholarship on plantation societies and labor systems, the history of medicine, the social and labor history of Central America, and Afro-Caribbean history.

Author: Ronald N. Harpelle
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773569057
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Harpelle focuses on Caribbean migrants and their adaptation to life in a Hispanic society, particularly in Limón, where cultures and economies often clashed. Dealing with such issues as Garveyism, Afro-Christian religious beliefs, and class divisions within the West Indian community, The West Indians of Costa Rica sheds light on a community that has been ignored by most historians and on events that define the parameters of the modern Afro-Costa Rican identity, revealing the complexity of a community in transition. Harpelle shows that the men and women who ventured to Costa Rica in search of opportunities in the banana industry arrived as West Indian sojourners but became Afro-Costa Ricans. The West Indians of Costa Rica is a story about choices: who made them, when, how, and what the consequences were.

Author: Dorothy E. Mosby
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817313494
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Quince Duncan is a comprehensive study of the published short stories and novels of Costa Rica’s first novelist of African descent and one of the nation’s most esteemed contemporary writers. The grandson of Jamaican and Barbadian immigrants to Limón, Quince Duncan (b. 1940) incorporates personal memories into stories about first generation Afro–West Indian immigrants and their descendants in Costa Rica. Duncan’s novels, short stories, recompilations of oral literature, and essays intimately convey the challenges of Afro–West Indian contract laborers and the struggles of their descendants to be recognized as citizens of the nation they helped bring into modernity. Through his storytelling, Duncan has become an important literary and cultural presence in a country that forged its national identity around the leyenda blanca (white legend) of a rural democracy established by a homogeneous group of white, Catholic, and Spanish peasants. By presenting legends and stories of Limón Province as well as discussing the complex issues of identity, citizenship, belonging, and cultural exile, Duncan has written the story of West Indian migration into the official literary discourse of Costa Rica. His novels Hombres curtidos (1970) and Los cuatro espejos (1973) in particular portray the Afro–West Indian community in Limón and the cultural intolerance encountered by those of African-Caribbean descent who migrated to San José. Because his work follows the historical trajectory from the first West Indian laborers to the contemporary concerns of Afro–Costa Rican people, Duncan is as much a cultural critic and sociologist as he is a novelist. In Quince Duncan, Dorothy E. Mosby combines biographical information on Duncan with geographic and cultural context for the analysis of his works, along with plot summaries and thematic discussions particularly helpful to readers new to Duncan.

Author: Thomas Athol Joyce
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108063756
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
Published in 1916, this highly illustrated textbook summarises Central American and West Indian archaeology for non-specialists and future investigators.

Author: Dorothy E. Mosby
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826264026
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
"With the current growth of interest in Afro-Hispanic and Afro-Latin American cultural and literary studies, this book will be essential for courses in Latin American and Caribbean literature, comparative studies, diaspora studies, history, cultural studies, and the literature of migration."--BOOK JACKET.

Author: Ingo S. Wehrtmann
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402082789
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
Life began in the sea, and even today most of the deep diversity of the planet is marine. This is often forgotten, especially in tropical countries like Costa Rica, renowned for their rain forests and the multitude of life forms found therein. Thus this book focusing on marine diversity of Costa Rica is particularly welcome. How many marine species are there in Costa Rica? The authors report a total of 6,777 species, or 3. 5% of the world’s total. Yet the vast majority of marine species have yet to be formally described. Recent estimates of the numbers of species on coral reefs range from 1–9 million, so that the true number of marine species in Costa Rica is certainly far higher. In some groups the numbers are likely to be vastly higher because to date they have been so little studied. Only one species of nematode is reported, despite the fact that it has been said that nematodes are the most diverse of all marine groups. In better studied groups such as mollusks and crustaceans, reported numbers are in the thousands, but even in these groups many species remain to be described. Indeed the task of describing marine species is daunting – if there really are about 9 million marine species and Costa Rica has 3. 5% of them, then the total number would be over 300,000. Clearly, so much remains to be done that new approaches are needed. Genetic methods have en- mous promise in this regard.

Author: Watt Stewart
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Minor Cooper Keith was an American who, pursuing personal wealth, helped to develop a small country. Keith made a fortune in Costa Rica, built its railroads, was chief collector of its archaeological treasures. As a founder of the United Fruit Company, he introduced the banana as a staple on the world market. In 1871, after graduation from a Brooklyn high school and a successful year herding his own cattle on an island off Texas, he went to work for his brother in Costa Rica. He died on his family estate on Long Island in 1929. The greatest drama in his life was the building of the railroad -- greatest, too, in the economic life of that Central American republic. The bridge over the Birris, a fine structure for its day -- 300 feet at its highest point above the river, 600 feet long -- was the difficult final link. In 1890 on the initial run, the engineer approaching the bridge, fearing it would collapse, refused to continue. Keith, seizing the American flag, mounted the cowcatcher. When the intrepid contractor showed such courage, where was the engineer who would hesitate further? The bridge was crossed; the line, twenty years abuilding, became a reality. - Back of jacket.

Author: Glenn A. Chambers
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807137480
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Glenn A. Chambers examines the West Indian immigrant community in Honduras through the development of the country's fruit industry, revealing that West Indians fought to maintain their identities as workers, Protestants, blacks, and English speakers in the midst of popular Latin American nationalistic notions of mestizaje, or mixed-race identity.