Fallas Sibaja, Carlos Luis (1909–1966)

Carlos Luis Fallas Sibaja (b. 21 January 1909; d. 6 May 1966), the best-known and most widely translated Costa Rican author, primarily through his classic work Mamita Yunai (1941). Fallas was an indefatigable labor organizer and politician who played a key role in the formation of the Communist Party in 1931 and in the Atlantic Coast banana workers' strike of 1934. Often writing from an autobiographical perspective in his novels, Fallas had worked as a youth of sixteen in the banana plantations of Límon province and on the docks of the port of Limón, loading the fruit. He knew firsthand the oppressive and absurd conditions suffered by local residents at the hands of the United Fruit Company and corrupt local politicians.

Fallas returned to his native Alajuela in the Central Highlands in 1931 and joined in the newly formed Communist Party as a leader of his fellow shoemakers in that city. The court system "exiled" him to Limón in 1933 for an incendiary speech; he then took up the task of organizing the banana workers, whose 1934 strike was by far the largest labor mobilization in Costa Rican history to that date. He was imprisoned briefly but later served as national deputy (1944–1948) before assuming a major military leadership role on the losing side of the 1948 civil war. He was again jailed and spent a year in prison, being the last prisoner released owing to his refusal to request a pardon from the Figueres-led junta. Over the next nearly twenty years Fallas led the fight to regain formal political rights for the defeated Communist Party, serving finally as regidor of the San José municipal government (1966).

Although he completed only eight years of formal schooling, Fallas could count on a rich store of life experiences. His Mamita Yunai emerged from a report on the manipulation of the 1940 presidential voting in the Talamanca region in far southeastern Costa Rica. Likewise, his other major novels (Marcos Ramírez, 1952; Gente y gentecillas, 1947) are based on working-class life in his home town. Fallas received recognition abroad for his literary achievements long before local cultural authorities would challenge political conventions at home. Mamita Yunai was widely read, and the novel Marcos Ramírez won a William Faulkner Foundation Prize in 1963. Fallas was officially declared Benemérito de la Patria on 14 November 1967, but his life and work still remain polemical subjects in Costa Rica.

See alsoCommunism; Costa Rica; Fruit Industry; Labor Movements; Literature: Spanish America.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Basic sources on Fallas include Marielos Aguilar, Carlos Luis Fallas: Su época y sus luchas (1983); and Victor Manuel Arroyo, Carlos Luis Fallas (1977).

Additional Bibliography

Molina Jiménez, Ivan. Ensayos políticos. San José: Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 2000.

Ortíz Ortíz, María Salavadora. "La novela de plantación bananera centroamericana: Espacio de reconstrucción de la memoria." Casa de las Américas 213 (October-December 1998): 24-36.

                                 Lowell Gudmundson