Caribe de Esteban Ramírez, una excusa visual para la marginalización del afrocostarricense

Abstract

In recent decades, the Caribbean Space and the figure of the Afro-Costa Rican have become a creative seed that could well be interpreted as  a celebration of the symbols of an oppressed space and ethnicity. A detailed study shows, however, that the proposals are nothing more than anecdotal, stereotypical, exotic. This supposed insertion of the Caribbean and Afro-Costa Rican rather excludes and eliminates any real insertion, thus consolidating the traditional hegemonic discourses on which the Central Valley’s nationalism is founded, presenting other spaces as exotic and foreign. Esteban Ramirez’s Caribe (2004) is written under this assumption, depicting the Caribbean as an exotic space and those who live there as nothing more than foreigners, external to any real, inclusive national discourse. This essay looks at how the introduction of the Caribbean and Afro-Costa Ricans in a situation that portrays them as part of the homeland and a disjunctive view of the Caribbean as both idyllic and barbaric reconstructs a sense of exoticism that demonstrates a fragmented contemporaneity. Through a fetishization of the Caribbean, the lines of hegemony related to the ethnic debate and national identity are repositioned to create what Jerome Branche (1999) called a “new consensus or ‘definition’ of reality ultimately aimed at maintaining the status quo” of the dominant class (Negrismo: hibridez cultural, 485).