The Ruins of the Enclave: Simultaneity and Agrarian Change in Palmar Sur, Costa Rica

ABSTRACT

This article proposes the use of ruins and rubble as entry points to the study of agrarian change. Drawing from peasants’ collective memories of the so-called “abandonment of the banana company” in Palmar Sur, Costa Rica and the observation of ruined spaces and objects, this article argues that ruins and rubble allow us to see the spatial simultaneity of different temporalities in processes of agrarian change, aspects often obscured in linear transition narratives. This approach uses ruins and ruination as a lens for asking a different type of agrarian question: What does agrarian change look like after capitalist destruction has already taken place? In ruined spaces and objects we find both the materiality of crisis and oblivion as well as places of reappropriation and autonomy that guide the political possibilities for making ruined spaces livable.

KEYWORDS:

• Ruins
• agrarian change
• banana enclave
• Costa Rica

Acknowledgements

This article was possible thanks to the generous and enriching encounters with the members of the peasant organizations of Palmar Sur. I am also grateful to Andrés León Araya, with whom I had the first conversations about ruins and ruination, Dylan Harris and Joshua Mullenite, editors of this special issue, and the three anonymous reviewers for their generous comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Where I did intermittent ethnographic fieldwork between January 2017 and June 2019 as part of an University of Costa Rica action-research project studying conflicts for land. I did participant observation in three “Fincas” (post-banana company communities), conducted semi-structured interviews and facilitated workshops on national laws, land titling reforms, social cartography and collective memory using a popular education pedagogy. Although I interviewed government officials and cooperative members, most of my informants were organized peasants from the three Fincas I did research on. All the testimonies shared here were translated from Spanish by me, and the informants have been given pseudonyms. See Guillén-Araya, Mora-Calderón, and Morales-Nuñez (2019).

2 According to Kevin Coleman (2018, 60), the term “banana republic” conjures “a small Central American country, prone to military coups and presidents who carry on lusty affairs only to be toppled by the more powerful banana-company executives who rule them? Or perhaps, one’s own country, ruled by a corrupt plutocracy that is bought and sold by multinational corporations bent on pushing aside local businesses, exploiting their own workers, and racking up public debts for private profits?”.

3 A “cuadrante” is the human settlement inside every “Finca” of the banana plantation.

4 Alonso-Fradejas et al. (2016) describe oil palm is a flex crop because of its multiple and contested uses as food, feed, fuel, and industrial material.

5 Gordillo’s (2014) topographies of oblivion are inspired by Paul Connerton’s book How Modernity Forgets, where he coined the idea of topographies of forgetting.

6 I am paying attention here to Donald Moore (1998) critique of accounts of resistance as something that inhabits a different realm from power or that is beyond it.