“Turn Right at the Red House: Direcciones”
- Rachel Jeong
- Jul 18, 2024
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 20, 2024
SOCIOLOGY, Philosophy, Neurology
An article by Rachel Jeong
Congratulations! We are happy to inform you of your acceptance to your new part-time job.
You may start your first mail delivery with a “Mrs. Rita.”
Los Direcciones:
“Drive until you see the old fig tree of San Pedro. Turn left, and you’ll see the woman in front of her brother’s Toyota. Then, after 30 metres, turn right at the red house.”
To navigate the streets of Costa Rica, you’d have to be a “mind reader, . . . a historian and a detective.”1
The first time I ever learned about Costa Rica’s lack of addresses was through the New Yorker’s documentary Direcciones, by María Luisa Santos and Carlo Nasisse. It was in period four Spanish class, and I was overwhelmed.
Although the navigation system in Costa Rica causes numerous issues, like your resignation after your first day, filmmaker Santos beautifully unfolds its hidden yet significant humanity.
The Costa Rican navigation system is comprised of reference points–landmarks or distinct places that are common to that neighborhood. This automatically means that everything exists within relation to another; the reference-point system recognizes that our existence is tied to another one’s existence. Santos explains that the inter-reliance and interrelatedness of each spot forms a city grid that simulates a mangrove’s tree’s roots.
It seems a law of nature.
When I think about just how much of nature is placed upon the law of interconnectedness, of inter-reliance, I can’t help but think about the United States. Contrary to Costa Rica’s generally collectivist society, America has evolved to exist with hyper-individualism, an ironically-collective social mindset where individuals act as “disparate entities rather than primarily as members of collectives or groups,” according to Zachary A. Casey of Rhodes College. 2
Does that make it unnatural?
Casey states that America’s hyper-individualism is “rooted in the particularly ‘American’ notions of ‘Manifest Destiny’ and ‘Rugged Individualism’ that characterized the popular ‘American’ ethos of the late 18th and 19th centuries.”3 Both Manifest Destiny and Rugged Individualism plant the idea that the self is responsible for working hard, persevering, and creating the lives they want, void of help from government or social bodies they don’t choose themselves.4 Of course, then hyper-individualism can be tied to our nation’s capitalist beginnings–entities of individuals acting separately, the self-made man, wealth concentrated for the social Darwinists.
Hyper-individualism has created a sense of disregard for the collective community. It seems to increase as technological and industrial development increases. To me, it has shaped the American view of what authority figures should be like;5 exacerbated disregard for the disproportionate effects of the climate crisis; and created a sense of wariness towards others of different beliefs or communities. There is a slight drop in humanity. Context affects perspective, and this hyper-magnification of the self affects the scale and relative position at which other entities exist in our minds. It’s hard to rely on each other as equally-sized roots supporting the same tree when we believe all we need is our own hard, perseverant work to singularly run into the ground. We need no reference points.
On the other hand, for Santos, her reference points might have been the Super Aguimar, or the Church of Escazu. Upon her entrevista con el historian and architect Andres Fernandez, Santos uncovers how the system holds a certain aesthetic quality. Although 10289 Court street may sound like poetry to some, Fernandez would think otherwise. He anxiously says, avidly rubbing his knuckles together, “because, doesn't it sound so beautiful to say…‘From the tied-up donkey, 200 meters?’”
“Eso es poesía.”
In the film, Santos moves to recite her own poemas de la historia de su vida, las poemas de su infancia. In one of her poems, she describes the old fig tree of San Pedro, which exists in “limbo.” It was used as a universal reference point in her neighborhood, until it died in 1991. And, beautifully, although a new tree was carefully replanted in its place, the landscape still will never return to its original.
What’s incredibly special, however, is how Maria Luisa Santos uses the word “hiraeth,” C&C’s July submissions prompt. What she describes next is this melancholic feeling impossible to encapsulate through words, except through different languages: saudade, dor, sehnsucht, morrina.
She feels hiraeth for the old fig tree of San Pedro, for the depth that 8 numerical GPS coordinates take away from the intertwined addresses. Ram Subramanian of the Brennan Center for Justice explains how U.S. prisoners’ individualities are replaced by serial numbers upon becoming incarcerated.6 There is something dehumanizing about numbers.
The United States’s housing units, specifically those of the suburbs, simulate the individualized nature of families, and the individuals inside of each. Suburban houses seem detached, indifferent, and enjoy a private, peaceful quality.7 Communal housing is often seen as a last resort, not a desired goal. Addresses in America are numerical, mass produced, and can exist on their own. The system’s individualistic, industrial nature lacks the complex, deep mangrove roots of the Costa Rican reference-point addresses.
For Santos, the address system in Costa Rica is about holding something meaningful throughout generations, for enabling hiraeth for her potential great granddaughter.
For Santos’s grandmother, it’s about pain. It’s about using the address of something that no longer exists to convey the memory of stolen belongings, of something beautiful.
For Santos, the Costa Rican address system is about connecting the past and the present and future generations, one reference point at a time. We can see communal understanding and memory--something shared--is valued much more in Costa Rica than in the United States, where foundational political philosophy declares individual property.8
I can’t imagine a world without addresses.
In attempting to learn more about this system, I found just a few scholalry articles on its peculiarity (partly due to my Googling skills). But it’s the fact that a world sin numerical addresses exists normally that makes me realize just how many different things, like the overlooked green street signs or being bilingual, mold our worldview.
We all differ in our perception, and different things impact perception.
Perhaps this is why our experiences are so vast across the world. Perhaps this is why there is a spectrum of the human experience.
Santos indicates that her grandmother’s addresses will probably be lost with her generation. Y al final, that “awakens a loneliness” in her. She brings up the hippocampus, the part of the brain that houses our memories and ability to navigate: “scientists have begun to believe that our ability to find and remember paths allowed us to develop the neurological system required for memory.”
“Es dificil imaginar una vida sin memorias, una existencia sin un pasado.”
It’s hard to imagine a life without memories, an existence without a past.
Yet at the end of the day, somehow, nature is within us. Somehow, like with the monarch butterflies, it’ll tell our generation and generations to come, how to not get lost. No matter which neighborhood in the world, we'll know. We’ll somehow know to turn right at the red house--a home we never knew.
Watch the documentary here:
Access the story behind the film here:
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