BORUCA MASKS

Today numbering about 2,000 and mostly confined to the Boruca Indian Reservation, there was a time when their ancestors ruled most of Costa Rica's Southern Pacific coast, from Quepos to Panama and including the Osa Peninsula.

Their language, while still extant, is nearly extinct and only a small handful of people remain fluent in it.

Spanish is now the dominant, soon to be only, language.

Most of these indians make their living with small-scale agriculture and selling decorative art masks and crafts like woven products.

As you can see from the graphic, these masks are of fearsome creatures and date back to Costa Rica's colonial period when Spaniards ruled.

Danza de los Diablitos

After Christopher Columbus landed along the southern Caribbean coast near what is now Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica, the Spanish colonized Costa Rica.

It was not a happy union, as evidenced by the report of one of its early Spanish governors to the Crown that Costa Rica “[is] the poorest and most miserable Spanish colony in all Americas.”

Indeed, it was not. Unlike the Conquistadores who found vast Mayan gold in Mexico and Inca gold in Peru, the soldiers-explorers dispatched to Costa Rica found little more than unbaptized indigenous groups who they assumed worshiped the Devil (sp. "Diablos" or "Diablitos").

Over time, the struggle became stylized in art, the "Dance of the Little Devils", where the Spanish, with their superior weaponry, are symbolized as a bull ("Toro") and the Borucas, wearing masks,are fierce native animals that ultimate defeat the oppressors.

The "Danza de los Diablitos" has today become part of a three day fiesta that brings in the New Year at midnight December 31.

Traditionally, church bells toll just before the celebration begins, marking the death of the old year.

Then, men, wearing the ceremonial masks, come to the village center where they meet one of them dressed in a costume and mask of a bull. At first, the dancers taunt and harass the bull but, one-by-one, it hunts down and kills all of them (ending the final day of the celebration), symbolizing their relentless subjugation at the hands of the Spanish.

But, one-after-another, the villagers are resurrected and a new character to this morality play is introduced, the Dog ("Perro").

As the last resurrection occurs, the men and their "dog" hunt down the Toro and despite the pleas of mercy from female (men dressed as women) "diablitos", the Toro is taken to the local river where his costume is taken off and burned in symbolic victory over the Spaniards.

Today, there are a number of tours and groups that take Costa Rica tourists to the tiny Borucan village.

There, you'll find a tiny thatch-roofed museum and places to buy balsa or cedar masks as well as woven products and other things.

And, if you travel Costa Rica over the New Year, take in the Danza de los Diablitos!

About Bartering

One of the distasteful characteristics of some tourists is their temptation to drive down the prices of masks or other items when in indigenous communities.

Don't!

The prices at which their masks and woven products are offered is far lower than what you'll pay at a retail store or art shop anywhere in the country.

Borucas have been taken advantage of for centuries.

Enough is enough.

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