Costa Rica’s Inter-American Highway: Building an Inter-American Dream, 1941-44

• In Event: Laboring to Belong: Nationalism, Union Organizing, and Nation Building in the Central American Isthmus

Abstract

Before 1944 one of the most feared places in Costa Rica was the 3,491 meter Cerro de la Muerte. Infamous for its precipitous incline, slick rocks, thick fog, and freezing temperatures, the Cerro had claimed the lives of countless travelers since the colonial period. Undaunted, U.S. engineers and workers would work alongside Costa Rican workers between 1941 and 1944 to build a forty-nine-mile segment of the Inter-American Highway that would in essence “conquer” the Cerro for all future travelers.

The paper I propose to present at LASA2015: Precariedades –Exclusiones – Emergencias, explores how this transnational infrastructure project, provided farmers around the construction site with well-paid labor opportunities in the wake of the Great Depression; a period of economic challenge for coffee farmers. By providing farmers with employment opportunities (and by linking a once isolated region to the capital and its markets), I argue the roadway created an image of the Costa Rican state as a benevolent patriarch and a purveyor of progress. The highway, however, also highlighted the state’s failures, since the U.S. government funded much of the project and U.S. engineers managed its construction. Moreover, the highway showcased political and economic inequities within the Western Hemisphere, as Costa Rican workers were paid considerably less than their U.S. counterparts, a source of labor tension. These pay inequities underscore the distance between the rhetoric of friendly cooperation between the U.S. and Latin America that surrounded this project and the disparate power dynamics that shaped interactions between these two republics.

Author

• Carmen R Kordick, Roosevelt University