A Magical Journey
I got my first guitar from a classmate in 1967 at age 17 in my last high school year at Liceo Vargas Calvo high school in San José, Costa Rica. I paid thirty colones (around five or six dollars) and…
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Country: Costa Rica
Making A Difference: Repatriating Photographs
I first learned of the United Fruit Company’s operations in Colombia, like many people, when I read Gabriel García Márquez’s 100 Years of Solitude and its description of the 1928 massacre of banana workers in Santa Marta. A few years later, I was researching United Fruit for my dissertation, and was met with a wall of silence when I tried to contact the company to gain access to its records. Several other scholars including Philippe …
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Revolution by Osmosis: A 60s Remembrance
I grew up in the peaceful paradise of Costa Rica. I can picture myself as a 13-year-old in 1960, a rebellious teenager with little self-esteem growing up in the exuberant tropical landscape surrounded by mountains, volcanoes and the sea. The big commotions of the 1960s that would shake the world did not reach us. The first tremors that heralded in the Cuban revolution, student movements, Vietnam and the feminist movement …
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My Hometown in Costa Rica: Carrying Out the 60s Vision
I served in the Peace Corps in Costa Rica from 1988-1990 as a soil conservation volunteer, one of only four serving there at the time out of over 200 volunteers. I was asked to do this work based on my Master’s degree in Soil Physics from the University of Massachusetts, which I had earned a few months before. My assignment was to a neighborhood that was fairly well-developed economically. I lived in Matinilla, a rural …
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Hurricane Isolated Villagers, but Solidarity Joined Them, and Us
“Where was the school?” I asked the teacher. He threw a small stone to the middle of the Savegre River,around 150 feet out. “Over there, over there was my school,” Marco Alvarez…
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