The plunge into the world of poverty is palpable. You feel it, as sharply as a sudden dousing of cold water or a plunge into a cold pool. The jolt is particularly strong nowadays because most aspects of our lives are arranged in ways so as to exclude or hide away the discomfort of dealing with the strain and injustice that poverty reminds us of.
Entering La Carpio felt that way… like I was, yet again, plunging into a new world. On my first visit to La Carpio you could see the differences, you could smell and hear the differences… but most of all, you could feel a sharp transition between the twisted dirt roads of the shantytown and the straight, mathematically angled neighborhood roads of the middle-class residential area we’d left. Poverty often has a “you know it when you see it” sort of definition, which is actually quite useful given our mind’s ability to identify differences and contrasts. The material differences are quite marked, and are the first things you notice when entering a shantytown. In Costa Rica, unlike the United States, the racial distinctions are not so clearly marked, so to some degree “race” or “ethnicity” is held constant across differing levels of material affluence. This is not the case with nationality nor birthplace, however, as slums will be disproportionately filled with workers from outside the city and from neighboring countries of poverty. I would later discover this nationalistic split and be reminded again of my tight connection with both Haiti and Nicaragua. Nicaragua had always interested me because I had seen it listed as the “second poorest country in the Western hemisphere after Haiti.” After living 10 years in Haiti and seeing the “poorest (and third most corrupt)” country in the Western hemisphere, I had always been curious to see what the “next step up” looked like. It is a stark contrast, but what demarcates it so clearly as “poor” is the jolting difference between the surrounding affluence, especially in Costa Rica.
At first glance and from a rudimentary knowledge of Nicaragua and Costa Rica’s history, the reasons for the contrast are pretty easy to see. The country of Nicaragua has been wracked by civil unrest, foreign interests pursued violently, degradation of the land, instability of the government, and natural disaster. Their “emergence” from violent civil clashes occurred in the 80’s, as opposed to Costa Rica in the late 40’s. This explains a lot of the material inequity between Costa Rica and Nicaragua.
What gradually becomes apparent, though, are structural reasons La Carpio appears the way it does, as well as symptoms of political economic injustice. Its plight is a combination of meager material capital from the outset and structural oppression from the surrounding society. This has been documented in various ways through interviews, critical reviews of news sources, environmental justice concerns, and most strongly from issues of unequal education and a growing dual labor market pattern.