The historiography on the construction and development of the Costa Rican nation-state, Liberal elite, and export economy is extensive, with Víctor Acuña Ortega, Iván Molina Jiménez, and Steven Palmer among the field's chief figures. Since 2002 David Díaz Arias has contributed several monographs and articles to the Spanish-language historiography. These deal with both elite and popular imaginings of the Costa Rican nation since the 1820s, with patriotic traditions intended to cultivate certain kinds of national identities, and with earlier phases of the Costa Rican historiography itself. Rooted in the theoretical perspectives of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's edited volume The Invention of Tradition (1983) and Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), Díaz Arias's pathbreaking monograph discussed here focuses on the development of independence day festivities and discourses from Costa Rica's independence in 1821 to the centennial in 1921. Contrary to Héctor Pérez-Brignoli's claim that Costa Rica enjoyed “early formation into a nation-state” based on its geographical isolation from the rest of Central America and its early success with coffee exports (A Brief History of Central America [1989], p. 93), Díaz Arias argues that it took many decades for a coherent celebration of September 15th to be established, for the celebration to become predominantly secular under state control, and for it to involve the popular classes in a meaningful way. Furthermore, he argues that elite discourses about independence and Costa Rican national identity remained fragmented into the early twentieth century. In part this was due to the ambiguous nature of separation from Spain. No war for independence occurred in Costa Rica, and the date of September 15, 1821 was determined by events in Mexico, to which Central America was appended from 1821 until 1823 when the United Provinces of Central America were founded. Costa Rica separated from that entity in the late 1830s, but the pull of an isthmian identity complicated national identity and independence celebrations as late as the 1910s, sparked then by the U.S. occupation of Nicaragua. Díaz Arias challenges Palmer's view of the Central American campaign against U.S. filibusterer William Walker in the 1850s as crucial to the development of Costa Rican national identity due to its status as a surrogate war of independence. Instead, he argues that by the time that campaign was enshrined in national ritual and memory in the 1890s, the September 15th celebrations had gained coherence and continuity, so much so that they gave credibility and meaning to the new memorialization of the heroes of the 1850s. Further, he argues that the national elite elaborated a proud discourse of peaceful, bloodless independence before the 1850s, and that at times the campaign against Walker strengthened that discourse, cast as the legitimate defense of the orderly, hardworking, peace-loving, progressive, and homogeneous (i.e., white) nation launched in 1821. When Costa Rica was cast in these terms, it was generally positioned against the rest of Central America.
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May 5, 2018
Philip A D’Agati 
Open Access