In the October 2003

A Visit to Historic Cartago

Christmas in Costa Rica

Work, an Excerpt from "The Ticos"

Links to previous issues:

July 2003

April 2003

January 2003

October 2002

July 2002

April 2002

Cartago: Full of History and Culture

Cartago, located about 45 minutes east of San José, was Costa Rica's capital city for 300 years. While earthquakes have destroyed many colonial structures, there are still several religiously-significant sites worth visiting.

The most important structure is Cartago's Basilica de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles, which was erected as a monument to the Virgin de Los Angeles, Costa Rica's patron saint, affectionately called La Negrita.

According to legend, the virgin appeared to a peasant girl named Juana Pereira in 1635. Juana was walking through the forest and found a doll sitting on a rock; she picked up the doll, carried it home, and put it away. The following day, she was going to get out the doll to play, but could not find it. She returned to the forest and found that the doll was miraculously in the same place. The same occured the two subsequent days at which point she spoke with the local priest about the occurance. He investigated the circumstances and determined that the doll was, in fact, a saint and that she wanted a church to be constructed on the rock where she had appeared.

The basilica itself is an impressive structure. A shrine to La Negrita is located in the north wing of the church; it is filled with tiny metal arms, legs, hearts and other charms left by people who are grateful to her for her healing power. Another section features school banners and diplomas from others who thank her for helping them graduate from high school or reach other academic goals. Pilgrims touch the original rock, located in an underground chamber with a mural of the forest scene in which the virgin was found. To the south of the building there is a small spring where pilgrims collect water considered holy since it flows from the same rock.

Visitors to Cartago will also enjoy seeing the ruins of a cathedral that, while still under construction, was destroyed by a 1910 earthquake. One popular legend is that the priest in charge of construction was committing adultery, thus did not have the moral authority to build the cathedral.

Christmas in Costa Rica

In a Costa Rican home, what are you most likely to be served for dinner on Christmas?

(a) Roast Beef
(b) Chicken
(c) Pork Roast
(d) Ham

During Christmas week, Costa Ricans eat dozens of:

(a) cookies
(b) tamales
(c) tortillas
(d) bizcochos

Costa Rica's traditional Christmas fruits are:

(a) mangos and jocotes
(b) papayas and mamones
(c) apples and grapes
(d) pineapples and guanabanas

Costa Rican Christmases are full of tradition. Economically, it's the most prosperous time of year because all salaried employees receive an aguinaldo, a bonus equivalent to one-month's salary. Many people use their aguinaldos for big expenses, such as home improvements and appliances. Others spend it on gifts for their families and friends.

While gift-giving is definitely a part of the season, most families tend to give simple gifts, at least when compared to US standards. Some popular items are ceramic decorations, t-shirts, socks, underwear, makeup, shampoo, deodorant, hand lotion, perfume or small articles for the kitchen, such as dishtowels, potholders and aprons, and, of course, toys for the children. Shoppers and street vendors fill up downtown San José, particularly in the area near the central market.

Ticos also wait all year for the season's foods, especially for famed tamales. While tamales nearly always have a corn batter as a base, each family has preferences for fillers. Most have either pork or chicken and rice, then families will choose a few of the following: potatoes, carrots, green beans, raisins, olives, onion, tomate, prunes and hard-boiled eggs. Some families even make tamales stuffed with refried beans. Women of the family general assemble the tamales, which are wrapped in plantain leaves and tied with string. Often the kids will help out with assembly and with tying the bundles shut. After they are tied, the tamales are put in a big pot and cooked over a wood fire. Traditionally families eat tamales during the whole Christmas season, often three meals a day.

Traditional Christmas fruits are apples and grapes, imported from the United States. While now the prices are low enough for fruits to be accessible to the general population, in years past, they were a real luxury.

Families celebrate Christmas with a dinner at midnight on December 24. The most traditional main dish is an oven-baked pork roast. After eating, people exchange Christmas gifts. Traditionally when people accept gifts, they thank the giver profusely but do not open the gift in the giver's presence, something which is considered impolite. This tradition is changing; now it's primarily older people that wait to open their gifts. Festivities usually last almost until dawn. Some families attend mass at midnight, then have Christmas dinner and gift-exchanges. This mass is called "the mass of the rooster" because often roosters begin crowing just after it ends.

Most religious families will have a creche. Traditionally families do not take the creche down until they hold a "rezo del niño", a rosary in honor of the Christ Child for family, friends and neighbors. Often men will attend, but will stay in front of the house, telling jokes and talking among themselves while the women and children pray inside the home. After the rosary, the hosts will serve food, sometimes "gallos" (tortillas topped with meat or with picadillos, chopped vegetables seasoned with meat or sausage) or sometimes bizcochos (corn and cheese crackers), or even tamales.

Work (Excerpted from "The Ticos")

Some Costa Ricans still fit the image of the "simple peasants" whom the national anthem extols as the typical sons of their noble fatherland. Campesinos are still praised in official speeches as the backbone of the country-and perhaps rightly so. When we ask rural Ticos how they amuse themselves, the most frequent answer is "work." In her unpublished journal of a year in a rural highland area in the early 1990s, Sandra Shaw says, "We have never seen people work so hard." Her Tico neighbors would, if necessary, work from dawn to dusk and beyond, in organized fashion, like an assembly line when building a road or like automatons as their machetes flashed unceasingly in the cane field. "They never complain except perhaps to say with a smile, Muy duro [very hard]."

Many Ticos say, nonetheless, that most of their compatriots are lazy and inefficient. "Nicaraguan immigrants now harvest most of our coffee and sugar," they point out. They are especially critical of urban Costa Ricans, who, they note, are encouraged to work as little as possible by the fact that many jobs are obtained, and presumably kept, more through connections than merit; by state paternalism, which makes it expensive to fire an incompetent worker; by professional guilds that restrict competition; and by the numerous holidays that Ticos are very reluctant to give up. The director of the movie 1492, filmed in Costa Rica, was puzzled when local extras, even after signing contracts for the twelve-hour days normal in filmmaking, refused to work such long hours. And a Costa Rican businessman complains, "Mediocrity prevails in every profession. On almost any legal document, for instance, you can expect at least one major error." In our experience, he is correct.

Still, few Ticos rate their jobs only according to income and prestige; nor are these always necessary or sufficient work incentives. Also important is how interesting a job is, how competent one feels in meeting challenges, and whether one is salaried, paid hourly, or self-employed. An elderly mason we met showed evident pride in his skill at making and painting tombs, and a young farmer bragged about his skill in driving muddy roads. Self-employed farmers, fishermen, taxi drivers, seamstresses, pulpería owners, and private sector artisans and professionals frequently work ten- to fifteen-hour days and take pride in the amount and quality of their work.

The Labor Code and Social Guarantees of 1943 tacitly acknowledged that labor relations in city and country alike were becoming more impersonal, based increasingly on formal contracts. Although both originated with President Calderón Guardia (1940-1944), they were greatly expanded and strengthened under PLN administrations. They "are in a large degree responsible for the social peace that the country has enjoyed for the last 40 years," wrote Tico Times editor Dery Dyer in 1994.

In return for full-time work (five days a week for eight hours a day or six hours for rural peons) employees today are supposed to receive not only a minimum wage and social security benefits (health care, disability benefits, and pensions) paid for mostly by their employers but also a large Christmas bonus and substantial severance pay if fired after working three months or more. The Ministry of Labor and the Social Security Fund are quick to investigate workers' complaints.

Pregnant women and new mothers are entitled to four months off with pay and an hour a day for breast-feeding.

Many employers, however, fail to comply with these requirements, and not all workers dare to complain. Many say they fear losing their jobs or can not take time off to file a complaint. This is especially true, says a Labor Ministry inspector, of the young, poorly educated single mothers who account for two out of five textile workers. They often work long hours at below minimum wage. They can't afford to quit, and it takes time, money, and baby-sitters to pursue a complaint or look for another job.

Unions have existed since 1916, when European immigrants organized artisans in Puntarenas. In 1921 the new General Confederation of Workers called a general strike that achieved an eight-hour day and a 40 percent pay hike for many workers, but it was soon absorbed into Jorge Volio's ill-fated Reformist Party.

The new communist Bloc of Workers and Peasants won some concessions for banana workers in a 1934 strike. Ever since then employers-and many workers as well-have labeled almost any union activity as communist-inspired. Fear of communism continue to divide workers and weaken the labor movement.

This is especially true in the private sector, where in 1995 unions represented only one worker in sixteen as compared to three out of five public employees. (Four out of five strikes between 1988 and 1993 involved public employees) One reason is a widespread distrust of private-sector unions: many workers see union officials as corrupt and self-seeking, likely to make secret deals with owners and managers. Those who do join private-sector unions tend to prefer small single-industry unions over confederations, which they consider too impersonal and unaccountable.

Fear of reprisal against organizers also discourages union membership. "Anyone suspected of wanting to start a union would be fired right away," says a textile worker: we have heard similar comments from many others. Even the once-strong banana workers' unions have collapsed.

Private-sector workers increasingly prefer solidarista associations to unions. Described by founder Alberto Martén in 1947 as a Costa Rican solution to labor problems, these are basically savings and loan associations financed by payroll deductions and encouraged by employers as well as foreign lenders. In the private sector solidaristas far outnumber union members. Although many workers appreciate the low-interest loans, critics charge that solidarismo, while remaining firmly under management control, misleads workers into thinking they will eventually share the business's profits.

Far better financed and more effective than labor unions or solidarismo in promoting their member's interests are the twenty-two colegios (guilds) of professionals: lawyers, doctors, architects, dentists, journalists, engineers, accountants, and others. Colegios have the legal right not only to regulate who may practice their profession but also, in may cases, to sell special stamps that must be affixed to contracts.

Estimates of the unemployment rate in the 1990s varied between 4 and 7 percent: some estimates do not count those who give up looking for work that suits them. Economists agree, though, that the underemployed-those who work fewer hours than they would like to or in jobs not up to their qualifications-are far more numerous and have been since at least the 1940s.

Among the underemployed are many of those who work in the "informal economy", an estimated 22 percent of the labor force (1995) not officially recognized and hence not even minimally protected by labor laws. Their numbers have greatly increased since the crisis of the early 1980s. They range from self-employed street vendors, unlicensed ("pirate") taxi drivers, garbage-dump scavengers, and drug dealers to those who shine shoes, guard cars, or bag and carry groceries at supermarkets for tips. Hormigas ("ants") make regular trips to Panama, Miami, or free-trade zones such as Golfito, bringing back untaxed goods to sell to friends and coworkers. Many work for family-owned pulperías (corner stores), small construction sites or farms, or as maids and baby-sitters for less than the minimum wage and without their employers paying the required social security taxes. Workers outnumber jobs, and many willingly accept such terms. Says a small farmer, "I need peons much of the time, but I can't afford to pay minimum wage and social security. So I don't hire anyone who insists on them."

Female heads of households, who need work that can be combined with caring for small children, make up a large share of this sector. So do children, many of them school dropouts; those between ages twelve and nineteen make up one-eighth of the total labor force; thousands more are even younger.

Many with regular jobs moonlight; a civil servant or teacher may sell clothing or raffle tickets to neighbors and colleagues; a secretary or store clerk may be an after-hours call girl. A popular term for the attempt to make ends meet by looking for small jobs on the side, even if they pay poorly, is camaronear. A camarón is literally a shrimp. One man shrugged, "It's small, but it's better than nothing. People shrimping in a river don't find a lot in any one place, but one here, another there." Many of those without regular jobs do nothing but camaronear. We know one who works as a free-lance karate teacher, massage therapist, carpenter, and bartender.

In a university professor's office a graduate student told us about the increase since 1980 in the number of Ticos who polaquear (peddle) things to people in homes and offices, often on credit. (The verb comes from polaco, the term for Eastern European Jewish immigrants of the 1920s and 1930s who made a living by peddling door-to-door.) While we talked, one student brought in a painting he hoped to sell to the professor; another peddled coffeemakers. Meanwhile, the professor touted her own new book to everyone who entered. Many of the new polacos-with no ethnic implications-are middle-class people whose salaries buy less with devaluation and inflation.

One big business is clearly not "on the books"-the laundering of drug money, which may involve hundreds of millions of dollars annually. It is widely believed that this money is used to build hotels, malls, and urban residential complexes. Money laundering is said to be easier since the government relaxed currency regulations under structural adjustment. The laws make it difficult to prove guilt, and by mid-1995 only two persons had been convicted.

In the formal economy, even in businesses managed by Ticos, culture shock-on both sides-can impede productivity. Many textile workers feel that they are treated like machinery: Each stage of operations in making an article of apparel is regulated by whistles, conversation is prohibited, and managers rarely mix with workers even during coffee breaks. Managers find it hard to convince workers of the need for discipline, punctuality, and precision. A former director of the Chamber of Textiles says, "In the international market half a centimeter is half a centimeter; sometimes a whole shipment is returned because it is off just a tiny bit."

The Chamber of Textiles has proposed conferences to teach foreign investors how Costa Rican culture affects work. Sensitive about personal dignity, Ticos are not ready to admit mistakes or to forgive a scolding or correction made in the presence of others. They want to be recognized as individuals with the courteous rituals common among Ticos. They want above all to quedar bien, to make a good impression in the face-to-face encounter of the moment even if it means pretending to understand an unclear directive or promising to fulfill it when they know they can't or won't. One saves face for an employee by asking matter-of-factly, "It's not finished yet, no?" rather than "Haven't you finished it yet?" But this works better with a single employee than in a factory where the work of many must be coordinated.