Costa Rica Welcomes U.S. Migrants to a Cold War Paradise

Cold War Paradise delves deeply into the histories of a small group of people: U.S. expatriates in Costa Rica in the decades after World War II. Yet historian Atalia Shragai successfully plumbs their stories to reveal a lot about the Cold War U.S. and global orders, and the nature of particular U.S. cultures, identities, and ideologies that unite government representatives and political dissidents.

The several thousand or more U.S. citizens who chose to settle in Costa Rica from the 1940s to the 1970s considered themselves a diverse group, though Shragai carefully outlines the ideas and characteristics that they shared. The earliest group consisted primarily of staff affiliated with the U.S. Embassy and its growing programs in the country, employees of U.S.-based businesses like United Fruit, and their families. They were followed by counter-cultural dissidents, from Quakers opposing the Korean War in the 1950s to hippies establishing communes, anti-war veterans and protesters, and artists in the 1970s. The Costa Rican government encouraged U.S. investors and retirees to the country with generous benefits, at least until the late 1970s when an economic crisis and investor scandals brought something of a backlash.

Only a small number of these migrants were direct government employees: Shragai notes that U.S. formal and informal empire relied as much on unofficial agents as on civil servants. But all brought implicit and explicit economic, political, and cultural agendas that shaped their interactions with the country and its people. They tended to view Costa Rica as a kind of blank slate upon which to create and live out their very U.S.-American vision of freedom and progress. Both those who represented the U.S. government and those who rejected it shared a colonizer’s sense of cultural superiority and saw themselves as agents of modernity in a country that epitomized backward, primitive nature. Migrants’ attachment to U.S. material culture melded with their belief in their mission to bring capitalist modernity and consumption to a backward people. Even as they rejected mainstream trappings of post-war consumption like cars and industrial agriculture, counter-culturalists were just as committed to turning Costa Rica into their own utopia with brown rice and granola.

But Costa Rica also appealed precisely for what it shared with the United States, including well-functioning state and social welfare institutions, and an ideology of whiteness. While migrants may have critiqued, sought to improve, or reveled in what they saw as the country’s pristine nature, they were reassured that unlike elsewhere in Latin America, this nature was welcoming rather than hostile. All of them seemed blissfully unaware of the global immigration order that allowed them to be welcome “guests” in Costa Rica even as refugees, workers, and immigrants from poor, formerly colonized, or racialized countries were locked inside their own borders. In fact, even long-term residents did not consider themselves “immigrants” in Costa Rica, likely associating the term with the very different circumstances most transmigrants had historically and continued to face.

The book makes extensive use of migrants’ oral histories, and Shragai sensitively reports and analyzes her informants’ expressions of their own experiences. The unequal relations between the United States and Costa Rica, the Cold War context, and more distant historical touchstones including European colonialism and nineteenth-century U.S. westward expansion all contribute to the geopolitical and cultural milieu that shapes their actions and their stories. Migrants generally appeared oblivious to the economic and political privilege that they carried with them to Costa Rica, and commented frequently on how welcome they felt there. They resorted to colonialist clichés in describing the “virgin” land, the paradisiacal nature, and the innocent “natives” apparently eagerly awaiting their arrival. They described themselves as pioneers bringing technology and productivity to a passive and underdeveloped land and people.

The specific context of the Cold War layered over these deeper-rooted structural and cultural factors. World War II significantly increased U.S. influence in Costa Rica, as the United States funded the country’s military and used its facilities, replaced Europeans as the major market for the country’s biggest export, coffee, took control of utilities and raw materials like rubber, and built the Pan American Highway through the country. On the cultural/ideological front, the Cold War United States sought to promote the superiority of capitalism over communism in all spheres. Capitalist production would bring a consumer paradise, technological advances, private home ownership, appliances, and women’s liberation. Even the counter-culturalists imbibed many aspects of these beliefs.

Many of the migrants considered themselves middle class by U.S. standards, but in the Costa Rican context their economic status rose considerably—another aspect of their experience that reflected the global order that migrants downplayed in highlighting their own agency. Land, labor, and the cost of living in Costa Rica were “cheap,” and middle class U.S. citizens as well as wealthy investors were welcomed, because of inequalities in global political and economic power.

These factors intersected in particular ways for U.S. women. Many arrived in the first generation as the wives of government and business officials, or Costa Rican men who had taken advantage of the GI Bill to study in the United States after serving in the U.S. military in World War II. Hemmed in by the country’s more conservative gender ideologies, they founded the U.S. Women’s Club both to foster an expat identity and community, and as an adventure in philanthropy and uplift towards supposedly backward Costa Ricans by “spreading the US way of life” (132). The availability of low-cost domestic help compensated for the lack of “electronic servants” (appliances) by then common in middle class U.S. homes. The generation of the 1970s brought a more explicitly feminist consciousness, but still immersed in a class privilege that found liberation by contracting out domestic work.

While Shragai addresses issues of race in her story, some aspects receive less attention. U.S. immigrants were welcomed, she argues, in part because they were white, and served to bolster Costa Rica’s self-image as a white country (despite a significant non-white and mixed-race population). Yet she does not question the overwhelming whiteness of those U.S. Americans in every category of migrants to Costa Rica. For all her attention to how they self-fashioned their identities, there is surprisingly little mention of their whiteness. Nor does she discuss Costa Rica’s large English-speaking Black immigration, of West Indian workers on United Fruit Company plantations, or the country’s racially restrictive immigration laws. Costa Rica ceased issuing visas to Black migrants in 1934, and barred entry by executive decree in 1942, just as it pulled closer to the United States during World War II.¹ Yet Black West Indians had come to Costa Rica explicitly at the behest of the U.S. company, and their presence and experience in Costa Rica is inextricably tied with that of the white U.S. presence.

Shragai’s main arguments center on the concept of “identity work”—the ways that migrants’ understanding and articulation of their migrant experiences reveal their fashioning of their own identities. The concept proves useful in her analysis of the oral histories, and opens multiple doors for innovative and revealing analysis of her informants’ testimonies. At times, though, the concept feels a bit over-used. Instead of using her analysis to suggest new ways of thinking about larger issues of, say, Cold War politics or the rise of consumer culture in the United States, these were brought in merely as backdrops for learning more about individual migrants’ identity work. I would have also liked to know what these migrants’ experiences can reveal about some of the larger themes Shragai uses so adroitly to contextualize and analyze the migrants.

Author Biography

Aviva Chomsky is professor of history and coordinator of Latin American Studies at Salem State University in Salem, MA, United States. Her books include West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica (Baton Rouge, LA, 1996), Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class (Durham, NC, 2008), Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal (Boston, MA, 2014), and Central America’s Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration (Boston, MA, 2021).

Footnotes