Building the Meeting House in Monteverde, early 1950's
Here in Buel’s Gore, Vermont heavy, humid heat was chased away by cool, dry air. Not before a clash, though: rolling, roiling clouds scattered rain, sometimes gently, sometimes in fierce bursts. Today there is more cloud than blue, and clouds are swift, so sunlight appears and disappears, skittering across tittering leaves. Green pasture brightens and darkens; the rushing sound of wind in trees rises and falls as though the forest is inhaling and exhaling.
Below is the third post based on my reflections after attending the July 2011 Whole Measures Workshop at Knoll farm, co-sponsored by the Interaction Institute for Social Change and Center for Whole Communities. These initial posts are an exercise in using the Whole Communities map approach flexibly, as a tool for exploring contrast/difference in a specific community or organization rather than applying already drafted framework. By my using a mapping process rather than a finished map, I hope to gain a better understanding of a particular place, Monteverde, Costa Rica. I have also introduced a diachronic dimension by producing a series of maps that inform the structure of a current map. Click here to read the previous post, Mapping Monteverde Over Time: Before 1951. Please note that what I write not only has the limits of the mapping frame I am using, but also likely has errors and dubious interpretation of events — I am working from my notoriously wandering memory as I do this exercise quickly. I will do my best to factcheck and make corrections as I need to, and anyone who reads this blog and is familiar with Monteverde is welcome to comment and correct.
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Monteverde was named in 1951 after the first North American Quaker settlers arrived. While on the one hand this marks the emergence of “Monteverde” as an identifiable place, it also unfolds over the existent society and ecology before 1951. The Quaker story begins when twelve young men from Fairhope Alabama, members of the Religious Society of Friends, were imprisoned for refusing to register for the draft at the start of the Korean conflict. This decision was based on the Quaker peace testimony. After serving six months of a year-long jail sentence, these young men and members of their families decided to leave the United States, which they saw as increasingly militarized. In 1948 Costa Rica abolished its army, setting the stage for a long period of peace and investments in education, health and its national park system. For the Quaker families, abolishing its military made Costa Rica appear to be a place compatible with their peace testimony.
pasture beside Meeting House
The Quakers found a large parcel of land, approximately 1500 hectares (3,700 hundred acres [I need to check this figure]). The land was located in the Costa Rican highlands and touched the continental divide on the Pacific Slope and slipped down to a bumpy plateau. They were not far as the crow flies from the volcano Arenal and the adjacent Lake Arenal located on the Atlantic Slope.
There were two important elements to this land purchase that relate to the social ecological landscape that I described in my previous post. The only reason the Quaker families were able to purchase such a large parcel was because the Guacimal Land Company had purchased many smaller parcels from squatter/homesteaders. This is a version of the repeating pattern of the patron/campesino relationship. The Quaker’s themselves were dependent on a benefactor, Hubert Mendenhall, one of the men who decided to move to Costa Rica. Mendenhall had the capital to make the initial investment, and most of the other families were initially indebted to him. So, the Quakers entrance into the landscape had elements of the campesino/patrón relationship, both in terms of the external relationship of the community as a whole to local farmers (a new large landowner in contrast to landless and land poor) and internal to the community (individual Quaker families having a kind of paternalistic connection to Mendenhall). This internal relationship was to play itself out with a profound impact on the surrounding communities, but that is the subject of another post. Below is my initial rejiggering of a conceptual map that reflects the unfolding changes that the Quaker settlers brought.
The vertical axis remains the same as my earlier map — land and people — while the horizontal axis shifts from a fundamental contrast of patron/campesino to Quaker/Tico (Tico being what Costa Ricans call themselves). The patron/campesino pattern continues, or is nested, within the Tico side of the map.
road to Monteverde in the early days
What the Quakers found was largely a landscape of pasture cleared for cattle and wild monte, uncleared forest. The land they purchased included an area high on the continental divide — a dripping, dense cloud forest— and land 1,000 feet below in a dryer “rain shadow” forest. The higher elevation land included a large tract of primary forest. The Quakers were not intending to be subsistence farmers, but they faced a major obstacle to developing a cash crop: there was no nearby market. Located between 4,000 and 6,000 feet at the end of a road that was at times impassible, and with neighbors who were largely subsistence farmers, Monteverde was a challenge for the new immigrants wanting to develop a cash economy. In the end, dairy farming and cheese making was the agreed upon solution: existing beef-cattle pastures were there, and cheese was a value-added product that could keep long enough to get off the mountain to market in San José, the capital city of Costa Rica. The settlers lived in tents the first years, and then built first their Meeting House (a place for religious worship, meeting for the business of organizing and managing the community, and eventually the school) and then individual homes. There was also the need to build the cheese factory, which also required building a hydroelectric plant to power the facility. Eventually this plant provided electricity to the new homes.
electric and telephone lines
The settlers also used the electric poles to string a simple phone network that allowed everyone to communicate by phone internally. The phone would ring in each household on every call, and each household had a distinctive sequence of rings that was signal for pick-up. Community-wide calls had a unique “general ring.” To ensure both potable water and a regular flow for the hydroelectric plant, the settlers set aside 500 hectares of their new land for watershed protection, naming this parcel, Bosque Eterno (Eternal Forest). While each homestead was subdivided from the original parcel, Bosque Eterno was commonly owned in the form of a stock-holding company. The cheese factory was also organized in this way.
delivering milk to the cheese factory
As the Productores Moneteverde (the cheese-making stock-holding company) became more and more successful, establishing a market throughout Costa Rica, the Quakers dairy farmers could not meet the demand for milk production. This provided an opportunity for nearby Costa Rican “Tico” farmers to shift from subsistence and cattle to dairy farming. For some this meant entering a cash economy for the first time.
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My next post will map the shifts that this new social-ecological territory created.
