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Here we see Juan Varela and his young family. They are what you might call a peasant family in the Costa Rican countryside (1930s) At that time, with their parents’ permission, teenagers could legally marry at age 16 years and girls at age 14 years. Many peasants in Costa Rica at that time never wore shoes their entire lives. This was especially the case of the women. Costa Rica was south of the area to the north dominated by one of the great Amer-Indian civilization--the Maya. The regions between the southern Maya borders and Costa Rica were not empty lands. They were populated by other established and formidable indigenous groups (such as the Lenca and Chorotega) with their own fiercely defended territories and cultural identities. And the Maya never developed centralized organization that would allow them to build large armies capable of overwhelming less-civilied indigenous tribes outside of their cultural zone. In addition, the Maya agrarian economy was highly specialized Pushing further south would have required drastic changes to their agricultural practices. After thg Spanish conquest , the peasantry in areas to the north was dominated by Amer-Indian people. The Costa Ricane peasantry was more European, primarily Spanish. Notice what might be called a cowboy hat, that is also something that you do not see commonly among the Amer-Indian peaantry in Mexico and northern Central America.
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