A postcolonial intersectional reading of shifting livelihoods in Talamanca, Costa Rica

Keywords: Livelihoods, intersectionality, coloniality, global lifestyle migration
Session Type: Virtual Paper
Day: Wednesday
Session Start / End Time: 4/7/2021 04:40 PM (Pacific Time (US & Canada)) - 4/7/2021 05:55 PM (Pacific Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 33

Abstract

The arrival of comparatively wealthy tourists and lifestyle-motivated migrants from the Global North to destination sites in Latin America has fundamentally transformed many small agricultural communities in the region to service-based economies over the past few decades. Scholars have explored some of the impacts these transformations have had on local livelihoods, but most studies have subsumed all “locals” into one homogenous group. Drawing from eleven months of mixed-methods fieldwork in 2017-18 including 60 interviews and 250 household surveys, in this paper I demonstrate how livelihood change is differentially impacting local residents according to their positions within intersecting systems of racism, patriarchy, capitalism, and nationalism in Talamanca, Costa Rica. Talamanca is a community of several thousand on the country’s southern Caribbean coast. It is home to a majority Afro-descendant population along with Indigenous Bribri people, Panamanian and Nicaraguan immigrants, Costa Ricans from the interior of the country, and global lifestyle migrants from wealthier countries. Applying a postcolonial intersectional approach (Mollett and Faria 2013) to this case study provides a powerful accounting of how new and emerging livelihood opportunities in the Global South are mediated by intersecting power systems and social difference.