ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with changes in social relations, settlement patterns and the organization of production in the area from Alajuela city to the western end of the Central Valley. The community or regional level, settlement and generally favorable economic trends tended at first to obscure the inegalitarian aspects of frontier society, and enhanced opportunities for many of the settlers. The differences are no doubt associates with accumulation of movables and immovables during family life–cycles, but this well–known process does not account for all variations in wealth among the population. The credit involves not only a balance of loans minus debts in the probate inventories of the time but also, and most essentially, a socioeconomic as well as personal relationship. The individul cases speak of various types of rural households, from the land–poor ones, which combined small–scale livestock–raising and agriculture, to members of the wealthy, landed elite who also engaged in mercantile activities such as money-lending.
