Bilingüismo político: afrocaribeñas en el estado blanco y multicultural costarricense (1978-2017)

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the political interventions of Black women, West Indian descendants, who have been engaging with State politics in Costa Rica for the past forty years. From a Black feminist approach, I answer the following questions: 1) Why, when and how do Afro-Costa Rican women decide to engage in formal politics? 2) For Afro-Costa Rican women and their Black community, what are the effects of being part of the State? Situated within the field of studies of Black movements and the Multicultural State, Women in State politics and the history of the Afro Caribbean community in Costa Rica, I offer an intersectional, historical, ethnographic, critical discursive analysis of Black women in State Politics. I argue that Afro- Costa Rican women experiences and choices in formal politics derive from, and transform, the cultural and political trajectory and struggle for social justice of their Afro(circun)Caribbean community. Their political practice also exceeds and complicates previous critiques of cooptation or absorption of the so-called minorities in the State, and of the emergence of a Black elite and establishment. Building from what the poet and political figure Eulalia Bernard Little once described in her poem “Bilingual Economy” (1978) as the challenges of being Black and demanding equality in an imagined White and exceptional democracy, I analyze Afro-Costa Rican women’s political practice in terms of “political bilingualism.” Through a close reading of the written and embodied archives of their institutional(ized) politics, I identify a complex and sometimes ambivalent tradition of code switching. From “one national language,” they serve as Costa Rican politicians and claim their right to perform politics in conditions of citizenship equal to other politicians. They also appear to celebrate Costa Rican (White) democratic values. From “other intersectional language," they speak as Black women who are also interconnected...