This is a brash, even daring, book, in which Lowell Gudmundson takes issue with just about every previous study of Costa Rican history. He challenges particularly what he calls the rural democratic or rural egalitarian model as the key to understanding the Costa Rican past, asserting that it is only a myth and demonstrating statistically its lack of connection with reality. The author is very persuasive, because he writes with confidence and brilliance. As historiography, the book is outstanding; from the standpoint of methodology, there are shortcomings.
Making a strong revisionist statement, in a somewhat combative tone, Gudmundson must anticipate rebuttal. He concedes that myth contains its “grain of truth” (p. 24), but does not expand on this qualification and, by completely debunking the myth, leaves himself little room for maneuver. Basing his argument on data from the precoffee era, showing patterns of land use and settlement and the nature of the population by income, occupation, and sex, Gudmundson ignores the larger and comparative Costa Rican context marked by such factors as poverty, isolation, scarcity of labor, nonviolence, and lack of repression. Gudmundson’s data may answer the “rural” aspect of the model he has created for himself, but he has not dealt adequately with the “democratic” or “egalitarian” components. As such he has made an argument that covers part of the question about Costa Rican character, but in reaching a conclusion that encompasses the whole diminishes the effectiveness of his work. Having made his stand, Gudmundson must proclaim that the interpretations of Costa Rican history by such distinct elements as Marxist writers and liberal reformers are wrong, saying to the former that the coffee economy could not destroy what never existed and to the latter that one cannot restore what never was.
This is a scholar’s book that makes heavy demands on the reader. Because it is intelligent and provocative, it will stimulate a great deal of work in Costa Rican history and historiography and will itself occupy a central place in the literature.
