Early twentieth-century Costa Rican economists racialized black migrant labor as degenerating the nation

Evidence

In Costa Rica in 1926, for example, Noam Chomsky points out that local economists complained of fruit-exporting enterprises importing too many black workers who were “darkening the racial composition of the country,” introducing disease, criminality, and “mesticiz[ing] our race, which is already darkening,” while sending their savings back to Jamaica at the cost to Costa Rica. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1150

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the general ‘immodesty’/moral-panic-adjacent pattern of nationalist anxieties projecting onto a designated other — same scapegoating logic as sumptuary panics.
• SHARE: Send to any Latin Americanist or economic-historian friend working on banana republics or labor migration.