Indigenous Constituents in the White Republic: Costa Rica, 1910–40

Mamita Yunai is the best known Costa Rican novel ever written. Published in 1941, the novel opened with the narrator, a member of the Communist party, traveling to a faraway indigenous region (Talamanca) to prevent the shameless electoral fraud that government officials orchestrated among the Indians for every Presidential election. The novel’s author, Carlos Luis Fallas, painted the Talamancan Indians in a bad light, not only as illiterate and extremely poor, but also as sly and greedy. There, government officials exercised absolute power over the Indians and paid their votes with small food rations and abundant alcohol.

Fallas’ decision to underscore the Indians’ electioneering (even in those negative terms) was an exceptional one. At the time Costa Rica considered itself a white republic where practically no Indians survived. Up to this day, however, few scholars had followed on Fallas’ lead. In fact, it remains a common assumption, even in scholarly works, that in Costa Rica the Indians started to vote only in the 1990s.

In this paper I examine the electoral system that Fallas denounced, but argue that his portrayal was inaccurate. For one thing, government officials did not control the system but had to negotiate with indigenous leaders. For another thing, the Indians were not selling their votes cheaply but tried to advance their own political agenda, including their lands’ defense against international companies and non-indigenous settlers. In this way, the Indians from Talamanca used the electoral system to carve a space for themselves within this “white” republic.