Introduction

Summary

This book arose from of a series of observations made while living, working, researching, and sharing conversations with people in Costa Rica. The first of these was that Costa Rica is a nation visibly proud of its shared identity, beautiful scenery, and title as the world's happiest country (Happy Planet Index, 2015). Secondly, in spite of this rhetoric of inclusion, it is possible to see that several groups and communities have been actively excluded from the nation through the use of government policy or because of their nonconformity with wider nationalist ideology, and their existence has been rendered invisible as a result. The third observation was that the nation is also home to a rich body of literature and film which has been largely ignored abroad – and often even within national borders – despite the poignant and challenging cultural and social critiques offered by up authors and film-makers.

National identity is a broad and multifaceted topic, especially in the increasingly globalized world of the twenty-first century, and while marginalization on the basis of skin colour, geographic provenance, gender, or sexuality exists across multiple nation-states, the way it interacts with pre-existing ideas of the nation is often perceived to be specific to each country's history, culture, and ideological rhetoric. While this book therefore discusses ideas of what constitutes the concept of a national identity, how this is (falsely) constructed, and the ways in which it becomes a weapon of exclusion, it also seeks to underline the falsehood of constructing national identity as something rigid and immutable. With a focus on this process of constructed meaning in the Central American nation of Costa Rica and the ways in which nationalist ideals have been bound up in one word – tico – this book also aims to prove the actual fluid, constantly shifting, and plural nature of identity itself.

The Real Academia Española defines the term tico as ‘adj. coloq. costarricense (de -ico, por la abundancia de diminutivos con esta terminación en Costa Rica)’. According to this interpretation, tico is merely the linguistic equivalent to the term costarricense, an appellation that refers to any member of the Costa Rican population. Anecdotal evidence surrounding the first use of the term abounds, with most Costa Ricans believing that a Honduran or Nicaraguan soldier invented it when fighting alongside the Costa Rican army against William Walker in the Central American war of 1857 (Láscaris, 1975, 107).