The Mosquito Coast opens on a May morning in Hatfield, a small, rural town in central Massachusetts. Accompanying his father, Allie, into the nearby city of Northampton on an errand, Charlie Fox fulfills his unending obligation to provide Allie with a captive audience, at whom he might direct his continuous complaints and ravings. Before departing the Polski farm, where he is employed, Allie parks his truck to watch the migrant workers take to the field for asparagus harvesting, referring to them as “savages,” and making patronizing presumptions about their decisions to emigrate. On route to Northampton, Allie denounces what he perceives to be the deterioration of America, lobbing criticism against the government and various facets of society before turning his attentions to finding fault with those individuals he and Charlie encounter. Incensed when a shopkeeper walks away from him when he complains in prejudiced language that he won’t buy a rubber seal made in Japan, Allie’s spirits lift when he and Charlie manage to dissuade a truant officer from looking deeper into Charlie’s absence from school.

While repairing a pump on the farm that afternoon, Allie resumes his criticism of the migrant workers, simultaneously romanticizing their former lives in Central America, yet insisting they were not possessed of the sophistication to appreciate it.