Discursive Representations of the Indigenous Peoples in Costa Rica: An Analysis Through the Social Network Facebook

Sumario: Introduction This article critically discusses the main thematic cores in the discourses generated on Facebook by non-indigenous Costa Ricans about indigenous communities. Objective The objective is to identify and analyze the dominant discourses about this population in Costa Rica. Method To this purpose and using the Corpus-assisted discourse techniques, comments made by non-indigenous individuals to Facebook news about indigenous issues were collected and analyzed. Results The analysis shows that the discourse about indigenous issues in Costa Rica is influenced by four cores of speaker intentionality that are considered prejudicial to the social representation of indigenous population. Conclusion It can be concluded that, in fact, there is an integration of indigenous culture at a discourse level within the imaginary of Costa Rican identity; however, this image is the assimilation of a discourse built from otherness. Therefore, it keeps the symbolic inheritance from the colonization ideology that created it.