Discourse and the production of territorial hegemony: Indigenous peoples, the United Fruit Company and the capitalist state in Costa Rica, 1872–1916

Abstract

This paper examines the relation between discourse about Indigenous peoples, and the hegemonic consolidation of capitalist state spaces in early twentieth-century Costa Rica. It argues that colonial rationalities towards Indigenous inhabitants resulted in unstable deployments of the Indigenous subject as part of the nation, yet excluded from its capitalist spaces. This instability reflected the unstable nature of state territorialization itself. The state deployed spatial forms meant to encourage capitalist accumulation, and develop its frontier spaces, yet at the same time, saw its sovereign authority challenged by the United Fruit Company (UFC). This paper considers the brief creation of an Indigenous reserve by the UFC and the Costa Rican state in 1916, and suggests that this was a moment in which the relation between political space and Indigenous peoples became temporarily settled. Further, the paper argues that this process reflected the hegemonic consolidation of capitalist state spaces, even if the political status of Indigenous peoples remained fundamentally unresolved. The liminal position of the Indigenous populations—both part of, yet separate from the spatiality of the nation—is a condition of Costa Rica's Indigenous peoples that still exists today.