El Sur: Where Local is trying to Find a Home in a Global World

Connor Harron

Situated in the foothills of the Central Pacific, El Sur is a small community of agriculturalists living on the northern edge of Carara National Park, Costa Rica. We visited the town in order to get a taste of Costa Rica pre Huggie Billboard signs and Nativa resort communities, where the only sign of tico’s (Costa Ricans) can be found in the kitchen or maintenance facilities. In El Sur everyone is local, and several of the families are related. The village consists of several family homes, a community center where everyone shares their meals together, a church, one school (with nine students), a pulperia or general store complete with a rustic pool table where nightly games can be shared with the local population of giant moths and disco-teca music, and a generous set of accommodations for visitors called Eco Sur. El Sur has been around for generations, and the families there were almost all subsistence farmers. That is until the creation of Carara National Park.

During the formation of Costa Rica’s National Park system much of the land needed in order to create these reserves had to be taken from people who already inhabited them. El Sur was one of them. A large portion of El Sur’s agricultural land used to grow sustenance crops were designated as National Park, no say was given to the community in this process, and to my awareness no compensation has yet to be given. However, the people at El Sur have dealt with hardships before, and while some families left, those who stayed tried to make the best of things by growing new crops that could better suit the communities diminished lands. But along with the creation of the National Park came the animals, and many crops were destroyed by grazing omnivores seeking food that El Sur sought to claim. These animals, under new laws were protected from the community, and killing ones that attacked their crops was forbidden. So again this sustainable community was thwarted in their attempts to preserve their way of life, and in the name of preservation.

Once again more families left in order to find an easier way of life. However, those who stayed desired more then ever to preserve their community so that their children and their children’s children would have the chance to live as purely as they felt they had. In a last ditch attempt to generate enough communal income to support their needs, El Sur created a partnership with an NGO called Global Aware in order to create Eco Sur. This partnership has provided El Sur with a tourism industry which acts to give people like us the chance to see how real tico’s live (d?) and an idea of what it takes to be part of a cooperative community.

During our short stay we had the opportunity to eat as a community with these people. We went to school with their children, taught them about the environment, learned that they were already more connected to the forest than we could have imagined, and planted trees together as a group. We saw their sugar cane plantation and witnessed first hand the ox driven process of extracting the sweet liquid from the stalk, and then the 10 hour process of boiling down and extracting the “good stuff” before tasting and buying much of their days work. In El Sur the excess sugar product is used to feed the pigs, and the leftover stalk acts as the only organic fertilizer they use/need to create some of the finest brown sugar that has ever met my palate.

In a world dominated by globalization El Sur has managed, at least for now, to take ownership of their land and preserve their way of life while still interacting with the outside world. Many places have not been so fortunate, and in a place like Costa Rica where tourism competes for the title as the nations largest economic sector, Americanization is everywhere. There is a fine line to play when integrating societies so that we can maintain our cultural identity while interacting on a multi-international scale. I have heard one of the greatest atrocities of the 21st century being described as “the sense of being homeless in your own home.” This is something that many tico’s are experiencing on a daily basis and will be a major struggle for Costa Rica in this century, but I believe that places such as El Sur are examples of good partnerships that can develop without the marginalization of locals. If Costa Ricans can take back ownership of their development and industries, they may be able to preserve a semblance of what was the Green Republic while creating a society that is more “glocal” than the corporate dream of expanding the Great Wall of condominiums and McMansions unbroken from the Baja peninsula, to Costa Rica and beyond.