A report developed by BBC World states that the educational level of Costa Ricans is among the highest of the continent, and that its inhabitants feel closer to Europe than to their neighbors. Myths and realities.

Costa Rica is known as the “Central American Switzerland” and their people are usually accused by other Central Americans of feeling closer to Europeans than to their fellow Central Americans.

Truth be told, in certain areas, such as health and education, their indicators are closer to the developed world than to the reality of most Central American countries.

For instance, in 2003, Costa Rica was number 32 in the global Index of Human Development of the United Nations.

And even though the country dropped to place 69 in 2016, it still is far ahead to El Salvador (117), Nicaragua (124), Guatemala (125) and Honduras (130).

A good reason is that the Costa Rican identity was strongly built in opposition to the identity of other Central Americans, pointing out their differences.

“Indeed, it is an identity built against the mirror of the rest of Central American”, said Ivan Molina, Historian of the University of Costa Rica, to BBC.

“However, this is not something purely imaginary”, insists the author of “Costarricense por dicha: identidad nacional y cambio cultural en Costa Rica durante los siglos XIX y XX”.

For Molina, this differentiation has “a series of foundations basis, both in the institutional level and in the economic and social processes level” that, as a matter of fact, offer a positive model of civility and resources investment for the rest of the region.

Even though the historian also acknowledges the idea of Costa Rica as a different country “it has served as basis for certain prejudices Costa Ricans hold against other Central Americans”.

One of these prejudices is racial, which still shows certain rejection expressions against migrant who arrived from Nicaragua.

And for a long time, the country also explained its difference using the idea of a “White Costa Rica”.

“Costa Rica is, as we can see, the least populated of the five countries, but, it is also the best administrated and more peaceful country”, used to say the French corvette captain, Maussion de Candé. “This is easily explained by its geographic position and the absence of mulattos and color people, which is almost exclusively white”, said de Candé, quoted by Ronald Soto-Quirós in his text “Imagining a white race nation in Costa Rica: 1821-1914”.

The researcher of the University of Bordeaux , the weight of racial theories lead the intellectual class of the country to come up with a “white race” idea to place the Costa Rican population among the civilized nations.

But, according to Soto-Quirós, that idea did not fit the ethnic reality of Costa Rica back then. And recent genetic studies have confirmed that Costa Rica’s population is mostly mixed-race.

“The problem is that here, in Costa Rica, people and historians have been too chauvinists, always trying to make it clear that Tico’s are very white”, said Dr. Ramiro Barrantes, researcher of the Center of Cellular and Molecular Biology of the University of Costa Rica (UCR). “And we are quite white, but also are Nicaraguans”, he explains.

As a matter of fact, to the surprise of Ticos, certain researchers have found a lower percentage of “white blood” among them than among the population of Nicaragua.

In the article “Interethnic admixture and the evolution of Latin American populations”, published in 2014 by the magazine Genetics and Molecular Biology, Francisco Salzano and Mónica Sans review a study that says that Nicaraguans have 69% European heritage, 11% Native American, and 20% African. On the other hand, Costa Ricans have from 67% to 58% European heritage, 29% to 38% Native American and 4% African.

Nevertheless, Dr. Norberto Baldi, from the Anthropology School of the UCR, states that these results depend on the sample and the genetic markers applied for the analysis. “There always are variants, even within one country, as families and ethnic groups come together”, he says to BBC World.

“One thing that is clear is that Costa Ricans have always thought of ourselves whiter than other Central Americans, and that turned out to be a myth”, says the researcher.

Curiously, the last researches of Barrantes seem to suggest that the main difference between Ticos and the rest of Central American might be a significant Asian component in their average genetic heritage.

“No one thought this could be something to pay attention to, but looking over the electoral register, I realized that there are at least 5% of Chinese surnames in Costa Rica”, explains the scientist.

“History books have always showed the central plateau as a place of white people, of Europeans, and appearances did not say that”, says Barrantes. And, according to his research, even though there are differences per region, in average, 14.6% of the Costa Rican heritage is black, 5.8% Asian, 33% Native American, and only 45% is European.  The conclusion is that this country’s population is not that different from the population of other Latin American countries.

“Maybe the percentage of Native American heritage is larger in Guatemala”, he says. And, probably Honduras has a larger black heritage.

But, as Baldi remakrs, this would also apply to specific territories of Costa Rica, such as Limon, its largest port in the Caribbean. “We are all mixed, in different proportions”, says the UCR anthropologist.

Baldi thinks that if Costa Ricans tend to believe that they are way whiter than Nicaraguans, it is because most of the Nicas migrants come from certain geographic areas or economic classes that are not necessarily representative of Nicaragua’s population.

Nonetheless, dynamics such as migration are precisely what makes a country’s genetic heritage to constantly evolve in time.

“Costa Rica is the largest recipient of migrants from the entire region”, he says. “For that reason, the average Costa Rican today is very different to the average Costa Rican from 50 years ago”, he tells BBC.

Molina believes that, behind the reasons of this migration lies a story that can explain why Costa Rica is different. And this is something that Ticos are becoming increasingly aware of.

“There was a time in which, in order to explain the differences, there was a racial explanation. In other words, the idea that “Costa Rica is different because it is white””, says Molina. “However, with the development of social sciences, a critic to this kind of explanations has been developed, as well as the suggestion of new explanations”, he adds.

The historian points out that, even though every country in Central America developed agro-export economies, while most of them used debt laborers systems or other forms of workforce coercion, Costa Rica did so using a system based on small and medium coffee producers. “And while throughout Central America there is a prevalence of presidential regimes, Costa Rica is the only country that, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is moving towards a functional democracy,” he adds.

This probably explains why, according to Latinobarómetro, Costa Rica is the only country in the region where the majority of the population does not say they are willing to accept an undemocratic government if it solves problems.

For Molina, however, the clearest example of why Costa Rica is different is that the country invests almost five times more in the education of its inhabitants than its Central American neighbors.“You can see here a very clear difference in how Costa Rica sees development compared to its neighbors on the isthmus,” he says.

And Dr. Barrantes insists on the same thing.“With what is correlated the best situation in Costa Rica is with education: there is no doubt that the education system in Costa Rica got to first alphabetize all its people,” he tells BBC Mundo. “It has nothing to do with race,” is his conclusion.

*This article is published in the context of Centroamérica Cuenta, a literature and thought festival that takes place in Managua, Nicaragua, between May 22 and 26, and in which BBC Mundo offers the workshop “Myths and Realities Of digital journalism

Source: La Nación