Limón, Costa Rica is a city shaped by Black labor, extraction, and resistance. While often sidelined in national narratives, it remains the heart of Costa Rica’s Afro-Caribbean population, rooted in late 19th-century migrations of Jamaican and other Caribbean laborers brought to build the Atlantic Railroad and work on U.S.-owned banana plantations. These workers, recruited under exploitative contracts, formed the basis of a Black community that was systematically excluded from citizenship and confined to the country’s economic peripheries. Despite Costa Rica’s multicultural rhetoric, Afro-Caribbean residents of Limón have long been subject to linguistic, spatial, and economic marginalization. Afro-Costa Ricans have resisted this exclusion through grassroots organizing, education, cultural production, and territorial defense. Institutions like the UNIA and the Centro de Mujeres Afrocostarricenses emerged as spaces of political formation and Black feminist advocacy. Artists and intellectuals—such as Eulalia Bernard, Shirley Campbell Barr, and Quince Duncan—have challenged mestizo nationalism through literature that centers race, diaspora, and structural violence. Contemporary artists like Marton Robinson interrogate the nation’s myth of whiteness and mestizaje through conceptual and performance-based work that critiques state-sanctioned erasure. While calypso has been celebrated as a symbol of Afro-Caribbean identity, even that tradition has been folklorized and commodified, divorced from its political origins. Limón remains a critical site for understanding how Black life in Central America is produced through dispossession—and how it continues to contest the terms of national belonging.
BCA is a platform dedicated to amplifying Black Central American history, culture, and scholarship. Through curated content, innovative programming, and collaborative initiatives, we explore the collective memory, cultural and political organizing, and creative place-making practices of Black Central American communities across the isthmus and its diasporas.
