SITE MUSEUM FINCA 6
Phone: +506 2100-6000
E-mail: [email protected]
The Site Museum Finca 6 is located in Palmar Sur of Osa, on the road to Sierpe, in the province of Puntarenas, Costa Rica.
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In the decade of the 30’s, the Banana Company started transferring from the Caribbean to the South Pacific of Costa Rica. This transnational company, with plantations in diverse countries, from Honduras to Colombia and Ecuador, abandons the Caribbean amidst countless claims.
In the 20’s, the company started to acquire lands in the southern Region. Its incursion in the South Pacific meant a deep transformation of the region. Owning vast extensions of land, the company took on the territorial planning. As a result of their presence, surged new villages that changed the face of the South Pacific.
The banana enclave was structured administratively and geographically as Divisions, Districts and Fincas. Initially there were three Divisions in the South, which were Quepos, Golfito and Puerto González Víquez. Palmar Sur was a District of the Subdivision of Golfito, and on its turn was divided into twenty fincas (farms). The company named the fincas at Palmar Sur with numbers, 1 to 20. The “finca” was the productive and population unit. Each finca was rectangular and measured 800 acres, of which 20 (some 8 ha), were occupied by the homestead or quadrant: The quadrant was located in a central point of the finca, according to a rational and uniform plan. In each quadrant could in theory live some one hundred fifty workers.
The quadrant was a soccer field surrounded by workers’ dwellings, the houses of the managers, and some intermediate officers, and warehouses. Immediately after the quadrant, began the banana cultivation area. The company used an architecture associated to the banana production and the prevailing climate situation. The “quadrants” gave rise to truly tropical cities immersed in the banana plantation and the jungle. Some 30 years ago the Banana Company disappeared but the towns are there still today, with the same names, the same plazas. Finca 6-11 is one of them.
The banana activity was a vigorous pole of attraction of workforce. Thousands of workers within and outside of the country came to Osa and to other southern cantons of Costa Rica searching for employment. At the beginning it was single men looking for jobs. Gradually entire families and towns were consolidated around the cultivation, processing and export of banana.
The launching of an agro industrial banana project promoted an intense migratory movement summoning peoples from Guanacaste, Puntarenas and the Central Valley, but also from Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama. What started as basically a business and productive process, transformed into a phenomenon of demographic and social character that originated the current populations of Osa, Golfito, Corredores, among others.
Among the arriving groups some counted with experience in banana work, coming from Siquirres, Turrialba, and Limón (Cerdas; 1993). Some poor people of the Central Valley, “meseteños”, were displaced, driven by the economic crisis of the decade of the 30’s, small farmers of peripheral areas and from the South of San José. A letter dated as 1940 and signed by a group of banana workers, reads: “the acute crisis faced by workers there, (…) drove us to move to this zone, where an infernal climate daily ravages our ranks… (and the letter ends saying) … we wish to return to our original homes Signed by 300 meseteño banana workers (Cerdas; 1993).
The letter from a banana worker from la Uruca, San José, written to his wife and children for Christmas of 1956, illustrates the situation of migrants. Its publication was authorized by the sociologist Lorena Salgado Sánchez, which is thanked by the National Museum of Costa Rica. The document is part of a series of anonymous letters from his father Aníbal Salgado. By request of Salgado Sánchez, the original spelling is conserved.
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