Contesting the Origins of Costa Rica’s Welfare State. A Review of Iván Molina Jiménez's <em>Los Pasados de la Memoria: El Origen de la Reforma Social en Costa Rica (1938-1943)</em> (Costa Rica: Editorial U Nacional, 2008)

Authors

  • Jeremy Rayner The Graduate Center, CUNY

Keywords:

social reform, welfare state

Abstract

Los Pasados de la Memoria is a critical intervention in the historiography of the reforma social by one of Costa Rica’s most important contemporary historians. The importance of these reforms in establishing a foundation for Costa Rica’s substantial achievements in human welfare in the decades that followed, together with the unlikely political coalition that supported them, makes the history of the reforma social a fascinating and broadly relevant topic. The emphasis of the book, however, is on the historiographical question of how a set of competing narratives have been advanced to claim authorship of these reforms for particular actors, producing, Molina argues, a historiographical tradition that greatly exaggerates the role of certain individual protagonists while misrepresenting their motives and under-emphasizing the broader context of electoral competition and economic crisis. The book therefore speaks both to the historical question of the origins of the reforms and to the historiographical (but also highly political) question of how historical knowledge about them has been produced.

Author Biography

Jeremy Rayner, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Jeremy Rayner es candidato a doctor en antropología en el Centro Graduado de CUNY (New York). Su tesis trata sobre el neoliberalismo, la ciudadanía y los movimientos sociales en Costa Rica, y está basada en dos años de trabajo con los movimientos que se opusieron al tratado de libre comercio Centroamericano.

Published

2010-04-01

How to Cite

Rayner, J. (2010). Contesting the Origins of Costa Rica’s Welfare State. A Review of Iván Molina Jiménez’s <em>Los Pasados de la Memoria: El Origen de la Reforma Social en Costa Rica (1938-1943)</em> (Costa Rica: Editorial U Nacional, 2008). A Contracorriente: Una Revista De Estudios Latinoamericanos, 7(3), 579–587. Retrieved from https://acontracorriente.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/acontracorriente/article/view/569

Issue

Section

Reviews: Politics, Ideology, and Social Movements