#canibalia

Oscar Figueroa

United Fruit Company headquarters in Puerto Limon, back then and as they stand (unactive) today. The difficult engineering endeavour of building the railroad connecting San José to Puerto Limón in the Caribbean to export coffee to Europe, was even further complicated when the Costa Rica government defaulted on its payments in 1882. In exchange for this, the administration agreed to give Keith 800,000 acres (3,200 km2) of tax-free land along the railroad, plus a 99-year lease on the operation of the train route. The railroad was completed in 1890, but what proved lucrative, was the export of #bananas to the USA and Europe, which Keith planted in his land alongside the rails to provide cheap food for his workers. Merging with others fruit trading corporations, 1899 saw the birth of the #UnitedFruitCompany, whose neo-colonial exploitation and intervention in the whole of Central America to Colombia would be determinant of the politics of the region for the whole of the XXth century.

Highlighting the absences History

Hacking the famous national image "Allegory of the coffee and banana".

Oscar Figueroa, "Panama and Costa Rica railroad drawings made out of Chinese people natural hair", 2015. Coffee trade was 19th century Costa Rica most important economy. In 1871, the government hired businessman Minor Keith to build a route to connect the plantations with the Atlantic, in order to meet the European demand. The construction of the railroad entailed numerous accidents and losses due to the rugged tropical terrain, weather and diseases. Keith recruited then Jamaican workers as well as Chinese, amongst others, in practically indentured labour conditions and died in large amounts. A much invisibilised chapter of history, it is known that Chinese workers came to organise collective suicides as a response to that situation, hanging themselves from their braided pony tail. Knitted in natural hair collected from the Chinese community in CR, Figueroa's work embodies this story in its representation through the architectural, unused railroad remnants which still punctures nowadays landscape and history.

Images of labour: A banana plantation in William Eleroy Curtis' "The Smallest of American Republics" published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in 1887

Joaquín Rodríguez del Paso, "Hotel América - Cheap Labour". Or how under the lush pacified tropical Arcadia laid the exploitation logics of global labour.

"The Hand Car" from Oran, contained in the article "Tropical Journeyings: the Panama Railroad" and published in the 1985 January edition of Harper's New Monthly Magazine. It perfectly condenses the constructed imaginary of Central America: three white executives intent on their conversation, cross the lush tropical vegetation in a hand car, worked by workers whose faces and bodies blur into the dark of the forest. Exotic landscapes and bodies, racial stereotypes, labour hierarchies and mechanical progress. An imaginary forged in colonial relations that still pervade in many discourses and representations of the region.