Being the onetime home of the United Fruit Company, San Jose feels like a city that has generally been made safe for international capital. Brand logos are proudly displayed on buildings everywhere; Microsoft’s peered into my hotel window. Walls surround almost every building; wrought iron gates, sometimes a couple deep, defended windows and doors. I remember a conversation with someone whose grandmother thought it madness not to have that many protections on a given entry. The money is counted in colones, their name still carrying with them a history of colonialism.
But youngsters frustrated with corporations and colonialism will carve out a neighborhood for themselves in any city, and San Jose is no exception. It was amongst the secondhand boutiques and gelato shops, board game cafés and galleries that I felicitously ran into Stribs, a software usability colleague who was also in town for RightsCon (“the world’s leading summit on human rights in the digital age,” it calls itself). Stribs is a unique bird, a lanky Australian-American fundamentalist escapee who looks rather like Jim Henson’s son Brian.
We went out for dinner at a brewpub, and as we left, a thin young man emerged from the darkness and approached us. In gentle American English less-accented than Stribs’s, he laid out his case. He was a refugee from Nicaragua; his name was Nelson. He had training in online marketing, but appeared to be living on the streets in Costa Rica. He had fled Nicaragua after his friend had been shot by the police beside him. They had been protesting corruption. Did we have any food or any money we could spare?
I was heavily laden with fresh fruit and cheese rolls as a result of losing my mind over the bounty at the farmer’s market earlier that day, and gave him a share, along with all the colones in change I had on me. Please come to RightsCon, I urged him, hardly thinking it through. Even if you can’t get in, hang out outside and tell people your story. I wrote down the address. (I am as unreasonable when it comes to people in need as your golden retriever with any stranger who comes to the door. I realized later it probably didn’t even make sense for him to pay for the bus to the conference center; it was on the periphery of the city, and expensive to get to. He surely had other priorities.)
Fate’s line between those who get in and those who are left out is incomprehensible to me. Dozens of people inside that RightsCon center had similar stories: a background in digital work; a desire to make good change; an encounter with the police that changed their life. I was kind of that kid, drawn in to digital work in ways I hadn’t intended, kept moving by the terrifying adrenaline of being pressed nose-to-nose with an officer in riot gear by a crowd that didn’t know what would happen next.
I was able to enter RightsCon because my company could pay for the badge; because my parents and grandparents paid to ensure I could speak and write in the ways acceptable to American and European capital, and use computers from an early age. Because I held an American passport, the golden ticket whose lack turned away some three hundred people who had already arrived at the airport from Africa and other parts of the global South. Costa Rica’s government made thinly-veiled excuses about bureaucratic hurdles those visa holders did not clear. Those visa holders who for the sake of a single one-week conference had to bring along every important piece of paper generated about them, birth certificates and degrees and family backgrounds, carrying them in a transparent plastic bag to promise that no, they were not using the conference as a premise to infiltrate and stay.
I know. I know. I can enumerate these things, and we’re all tired of enumerating these things, and none of it is right.