En solitario

Vesuvius, are you a ghost, or the symbols of light, or a fantasy host? - Sufjan Stevens The immaculate and classically forsaken Costa Rican heartland, lost amid those chanting mermaids from the past, has reconquered its place in our small-town politics. But, where is the heartland in Costa Rica? Is it by the coastline, or is it in our overwhelmed and neglected suburbs? No. In our country, the definition of heartland runs deep inside the veins of our doctrinal vision of society. The heartland is not even an ideology: it is that thread that ties the affluent and conservative suburbs around western San José, the more intra-urbanized and impoverished boroughs on the Central Valley and the rural and completely peripheral neighborhoods along our coasts. It is a state of mind, which transcends all socioeconomic patterns and that underscores the still deeply-rooted Latin American social conservatism, especially in a country as ours, where the “evangelical effect” in politics was growing...