Italian Costa Ricans start point Italy
Italian Costa Ricans (Italian: italo-costaricani; Spanish: ítalo-costarricenses) are Costa Rican-born citizens who are fully or partially of Italian descent, whose ancestors were Italians who emigrated to Costa Rica during the Italian diaspora, or Italian-born people in Costa Rica. Most of them reside in San Vito, the capital city of the Coto Brus Canton. Both Italians and their descendants are referred to in the country as tútiles. There were over 380,000 Costa Ricans of Italian descent, corresponding to about 7.5% of Costa Rica's population, while there were around 2,300 Italian citizens.History
After Christopher Columbus's discovery of Costa Rica in 1502, only a few Italians—initially mostly from the Republic of Genoa—moved to live in the Costa Rica region. The italo-costarican historian Rita Bariatti named Girolamo Benzomi, Stefano Corti, Antonio Chapui, Jose Lombardo, Francesco Granado, and Benito Valerino are between those who created important families in colonial Costa Rica. In the 1883 census of Costa Rica there were only 63 Italian citizens and most of them lived in the San José area, but soon in 1888 there were 1,433 Italians working mainly in the creation of new railways.
In 1888, the railroad brought in laborers from Italy as an alternative workforce. The harsh work conditions prompted them to leave the railroad project although many remained in Costa Rica, settling in a government-sponsored colony known as San Vito in the Southern Pacific region.
However, one third of those Italian workers of the railways remained in Costa Rica and created a small but important community.In the 1920s and 1930s, the Italian community grew in importance, even because some Italo-costaricans reached top levels in the political arena. Julio Acosta García, a descendant from a Genoese family in San Jose since colonial times, served as President of Costa Rica from 1920 to 1924. In 1939 there were nearly 15,000 Italians resident in Costa Rica and many suffered persecutions during World War IIIn 1952, there was an influx of Italian immigrants, mainly farmers, who arrived in San Vito armed with tractors and other farm machinery, and began to farm the land intensively and to raise cattle. An Italian organization for agricultural colonization purchased 10,000 hectares of land from the government of Costa Rica.Indeed in the 1950s a group of 500 Italian colonists settled in the area of San Vito (that received this name as an homage to San Vito, an Italian saint).In 1952, in the midst of the post-war socio-economic crisis in Europe, the two brothers Ugo and Vito Sansonetti organised a group of Italian pioneers from 40 different places, from Trieste to Taranto, and including a handful from Istria (Istrian Italians) and Dalmatia (Dalmatian Italians), with the latter arriving during the Istrian-Dalmatian exodus.
This Italian immigration is a typical example of directed agricultural colonisation, similar in many ways to the process in other places in Latin America. The European immigrants were helped by the Comité Intergubernamental para las Migraciones Europeas (CIME), (Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration).
Vito Sansonetti, a seaman by profession, was the founder of the colonising company which he named Sociedad Italiana de Colonización Agricola (SICA), (Italian Agricultural Colonisation Society), and was in charge of negotiations with the Costa Rican authorities represented by the Instituto de Tierras y Colonización (ITCO) (Institute of Land and Colonisation).
San Vito is the only place in Costa Rica (other than some small communities) in which the teaching of the Italian language is compulsory in the educational system, and promoted by the Ministerio de Educación Pública (Ministry of Public Education) in order to preserve Italian customs and traditions. Additionally there is an Italian cultural center in San Vito, as well as several Italian restaurants. The Italian language is still usually spoken only by the older citizens of San Vito, even if many young people have some superficial knowledge.
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