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Socialist Scenarios, Power, and State Formation in Sandinista
Nicaragua Author(s): Rosario Montoya Source: American Ethnologist,
Vol. 34, No. 1 (Feb., 2007), pp. 71-90Published by: on behalf of
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ROSARIO MONTOYA University of Colorado, Boulder
Socialist scenarios, power, and state formation in Sandinista
Nicaragua
ABSTRACT Drawing on the concept of "scenario," I examine the
ideological construction of an agricultural cooperative in a
"model" village in revolutionary Nicaragua (1979-90). I argue that
the state's modernist project of development placed the burden of
cooperative members' transformation into model revolutionaries on
individual will rather than on national and global
political-economic relations. This resulted in Tulefios' inability
to Live up to Sandinista expectations and authorized the production
of Sandinista and academic discourses that cast these producers as
failed revolutionaries. These discourses helped constitute and
naturalize the vanguardist relationship established by the state's
modernist project between the state and the cooperative sector.
[nation-state formation, revolution, modernism, socialism,
cooperatives, model villages, mystification]
n this article, I examine the cultural politics of socialist
state formation in Sandinista Nicaragua (1979-90). Recent research
on state forma- tion has moved away from Weberian notions of the
state as a ratio- nal bureaucratic institution to emphasize
questions of culture and power in processes of subject formation
(Corrigan and Sayer 1985;
Friedman 2005; Gordillo 2006; Hansen and Stepputat 2001). This
approach examines modern forms of power as based on a
"governmentalization" of society such that human practices become
subject to regulation and nor- malization (Foucault 1983, 1991).
Socialist states offer a different angle for examining such
questions.' Unlike the less visible forms of power in liberal
states whereby subjects come to govern themselves, in socialist
societies crucial forms of power are patently visible through
claims about subjectiv- ity, state legitimacy, and political
culture foregrounded in explicit political projects. As Katherine
Verdery (1991:304-305) argues, in such societies, cul- ture and
language take on particular importance to the state because, unlike
liberal states, socialist states have not benefited from centuries
of gradual development such that subjectification can take place
more through prac- tice than through discourse. The concern of
socialist states with shaping cultural and intellectual production
(Pelley 2002; Verdery 1991), creating communities of moral
discourse (Apter 1995), and fostering technologies of the self in
which subjects come to represent categories of moral exem- plarity
(Anagnost 1997; Rofel 1999) reveals an anxiety over the possibility
for hegemony that is not as apparent in liberal states.
Partly because of this urge to control in socialist states,
scholarship on the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Asia has
regarded such states as primarily oppressive formations, even as
their so-called totalitarian- ism is now widely questioned. Indeed,
the unmet expectations of these social projects likely contributed
to ethnographic studies of socialist so- cieties emphasizing
widespread cynicism and noncompliance or invok- ing frameworks of
resistance (Scott 1985, 1990; see, e.g., Fforde 1987; O'Brien and
Li 2006; Sabel and Stark 1982; Watson 1994; Zweig 1989).2 The case
of Nicaragua is markedly different. Scholarship on the
Sandinista
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 71-90, ISSN 0094-0496,
online ISSN 1548-1425. ? 2007 by the American Anthropological
Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for
permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the
University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website,
http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI:
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American Ethnologist m Volume 34 Number 1 February 2007
revolution was exceptionally enthusiastic and hopeful, even as,
toward the latter part of the 1980s, scholars critiqued cer- tain
aspects of the revolutionary project.3 The Sandinistas' unusual
flexibility and their vision of a "different" kind of
revolution-including a commitment to religious pluralism and
valorization of the "popular"-captured the imagination of writers,
scholars, and activists across the world."4 As an- thropologist
Roger Lancaster wrote in his ethnography of a Managua working-class
neighborhood, "And I can say-like George Orwell writing of
Catalonia-that for the first time in my life, I really believed in
socialism" (1992:9). The demo- cratic impulse that animated the
Sandinista vision also lent the regime exceptional legitimacy and
popularity among or- dinary Nicaraguans, if onlyin critical numbers
until the mid- to late 1980s-even among many who disagreed with or
did not comply with some state policies.5
In this article, I examine the case of an agricultural co-
operative in a model Sandinista community that exhibited widespread
noncompliance with state dictates yet retained strong affective
ties and commitment to the Sandinista state. I examine this problem
by exploring contradictions created for cooperative members by a
Sandinista nation-state imagi- nary ofwhich cooperatives were
supposed to be emblematic. To do so, I extend Verdery's insight on
language and culture in socialist states by examining state
formation through per- formative scenarios. The analysis shows the
workings of the visible forms of power underscored by scholarship
on so- cialism. Yet it also shows that these forms were imbricated
with less visible forms of state power that worked to form the
putative subjects of the Sandinista state and the state's
leadership itself.
In search of the New Man I learned of El Tule in 1989 from a
Spanish internationalist working in southeastern Nicaragua.6 He
referred me to a little book, Esta luz ya no se apaga (Pefia
Baldelomar et al. 1988), which I picked up a few days later in a
bookstore in Man- agua. The book was published by a popular
education center whose staff had worked with Tulefios on various
cultural and development projects during the decade of the
Sandinista revolution (1979-90). From the pages of this book, I
learned of a village rent by interfamilial factionalism throughout
the 20th century, of the fateful arrival in the mid- 1970s of a
group of guerrillas belonging to the Sandinista Front for National
Liberation (FSLN), and of the villagers' awakening to class and
national consciousness and solidarity through their re- lationship
to the guerrillas and, later, to the Sandinista move- ment. After
the revolutionary triumph, so the story went, the villagers became
exemplary revolutionaries in the Sandin- ista movement. Their
exemplaritywas particularly evident in their organization of an
agricultural and cattle-raising coop- erative. According to the
book, the cooperative became the fulcrum for the construction of a
community of class and na-
tion as members worked together and shared the products of their
labor with each other and the Nicaraguan nation.
As I read this story, I was overtaken by the romance of the
revolution. Like many other Latin Americans and people worldwide, I
had been an avid consumer of the utopian sto- ries of a New Society
that Nicaragua exported through print and media images early in the
1980s. By the latter part of that decade, however, I found myself
sharing Nicaraguans' crisis of hope for the revolution. Since 1979,
when the FSLN wrested power from the dictatorship of Anastacio
Somoza, Nicaraguans had faced a war of aggression financed by the
U.S. government and waged by Somocistas and people disaf- fected
with the Sandinista government. By 1989, as I traveled across
central and southern Nicaragua, the suffering caused by the
U.S.-Contra war and the erosion of enthusiasm for the revolution
were palpable.
The story of El Tule's revolutionary redemption seemed to offer
hope just when Nicaraguans most needed it. In the book recounting
their story, Tulefios claimed that the Sandinistas'
consciousness-raising efforts had empowered them to define their
needs, transform their practices ac- cordingly, and begin to
construct Sandinista New Men and Women and the New Nicaragua. The
story suggested that the clarity of purpose Tulefios had attained
had been made possible by the Sandinistas' use of dialogical
pedagogies de- signed to ground their consciousness-raising work in
vil- lagers' own experience and knowledge. It was this knowl- edge
that had been key to Tulefios staying steadfast in the face of
adversity. A few months after I read the story of El Tule, the FSLN
was defeated at the polls and vowed not to retreat but, rather, to
"govern from below." In my mind, re- maining steadfast-and sharing
this village's experience in dialogical pedagogies-became even more
urgent in light of those events as Sandinistas struggled to remain
united and protect the gains of the revolution.
I began fieldwork in El Tule two years after the 1990 San-
dinista electoral defeat.7 Soon, I began to realize that what had
transpired in the village during the revolutionary decade did not
accord with the story I had come to cherish. During my stay in El
Tule, I often felt that the burden of defeat that fell on
Nicaragua's shoulders as a failed symbol of liberation for people
throughout the world had been felt with particu- lar intensity in
this little village. Since the revolution's early days, the village
had received an inordinately hefty share of the burdens of
exemplarity that the state distributed to communities integrated
into the revolutionary process. For El Tule was not just any
Sandinista village: It was a model Sandinista village that had had
a salient role in the social pedagogy of the revolutionary project.
By this I mean that El Tule had been a vanguard village, in which
many of the revolution's projects were first implemented; and it
had been a "showcase" village, promoted by Sandinista organizations
as a representation and an exemplar of the revolutionary project.
As such, it had become a destination for Nicaraguan
12
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Socialist scenarios, power, and state formation in Sandinista
Nicaragua m American Ethnologist
and foreign revolutionary tourists eager to witness radical
social transformation.8
Throughout the revolutionary decade and during its af- termath,
Tulefios' role model was the Socialist New Man, of- ten glossed
simply as the "revolutionary man," icon of class and national
consciousness. Tulefio men and women con- structed their history as
the story of a chain of New Men, strung together through their
martyrdom and heroism. "Our struggle began with the Indian leader
Diriangen," Justino (the village leader) told me the day I met him.
"Then it was Sandino, who fought against the Yankee occupation. The
Sandinista Front continued that struggle. Here in the com- munity
we have two martyrs and heroes, they were killed by the guardia for
defending us, the poor."'9 As heirs to this revolutionary
tradition, Tulefios felt the onerous weight of historical
responsibility. This was especially so among the men, whom
Sandinista discourse designated as the central political subjects
of the revolution.
By the time I began fieldwork, however, Tulefios were unsure
about how well they had played their role as revo- lutionaries.
When I asked about their lives during the rev- olution, they
delighted in relating tales of exemplarity. Yet when we turned to
critical discussions of the difficulties they had faced during
those years, their memories-recounted nostalgically, as when
reminiscing about other, more dis- tant pasts-seemed to be shadowed
by a discourse about Tulefio backwardness, culpability, failure,
and moral short- comings. In particular, Tulefios directed this
discourse to their performance in the cooperative, an organization
hailed by Sandinistas as the site par excellence of campesino rev-
olutionary consciousness.10 Time and again during my stay in El
Tule, I listened as male villagers castigated themselves and other
villagers for failing to live up to exemplary Sandin- ista
cooperative-member standards. The gap between the ideal and real
actions of flesh-and-blood people haunted my fieldwork as it seemed
to haunt Tulefios' lives. Only later did I understand that my
presumptuous disappointment in their performance reiterated a
discourse that existed beyond El Tule, as part of a web of social
and scholarly discussions about the failings of the revolution's
cooperative project.
Scholarly discussions about the Sandinista cooperative project
began with the assumption that, in terms of its own criteria for
productivity and organization, the project had been disappointing
at best." It was argued that this out- come was attributable in
large measure to campesinos' re- jection (or grudging acceptance)
of the program. Campesino attitudes were, in turn, seen as
resulting from the govern- ment's marginalization of rural
producers in economic plan- ning and decision making. Thus, some
argued that, had campesinos been included in economic decision
making, they would have devised forms of collective organization
that worked for them (Matus Lazo et al. 1990). Others ar- gued that
greater involvement would have given campesinos a better
understanding of the political and economic diffi-
culties the government was facing, and more would have re-
mained loyal to the FSLN and its programs (Coraggio 1986; Fagen
1986). Both these arguments criticized the govern- ment's
exclusionary, even arrogant, policy-making practices. Yet the
second view also contained an implicit critique of campesino
parochialism, voiced by political scientist For- rest D. Colburn in
his discussion of campesino responses to agrarian reform benefits:
"The rural poor narrowly in- terpret their interests, at a cost to
other strata of society" (1989:194). Less subtle arguments along
this line, particu- larly among some Sandinista cadres and leaders,
claimed outright that campesino recalcitrance to cooperative orga-
nization was caused by this sector's "backwardness" and a perceived
individualism rooted in a capitalist consciousness (see, e.g.,
Wheelock 1981). Some of these arguments, in other words, became
discourses that represented campesinos in the familiar modernist
image of rural folk as parochial, dis- trustful, and even
traitorous-incapable of class and na- tional consciousness.12
I propose that these discourses of campesino failure be regarded
as something other than simple descriptions of an empirical
reality. Instead, I suggest they be seen as partici- pating in the
constitution ofa Sandinista scenario of national liberation and
revolutionary state formation that presumed, and created a desire
for, an idealized protagonist in the fig- ure of the New Man. In
developing my argument, I draw on the concept of "scenario" as it
has been articulated by per- formance theorist Diana Taylor (2003).
Taylor defines "sce- nario" as a "paradigmatic setup that relies on
supposedly live participants, structured around a schematic plot,
with an intended, though adaptable end" (2003:13). Scenarios, she
claims, "exist as culturally-specific imaginaries-sets of pos-
sibilities, ways of conceiving conflict, crisis, or resolution-
activated with more or less theatricality" (Taylor 2003:13). As
enacted plots that encode modes of interaction between familiar
characters, scenarios recur across time and contexts and are
reproduced through discourses, stories, writings, and
actions.'3
The setup in Sandinista Nicaragua was structured around a
narrative of national liberation that reactivated a familiar Latin
American scenario-that of indigenous re- sistance to colonialism.14
This narrative told of Nicaragua's historical subjugation by
colonialism, dictatorship, and U.S. imperialism and of Nicaraguans'
struggle and liberation under the leadership of the Sandinista
Front. Liberation, in turn, was framed as a mutually constitutive
process of building the New Man and Woman and the New (socialist)
Nicaragua through forms of representative and participatory
democracy that would allow each social sector to define its own
needs (Hoyt 1997; Vanden and Prevost 1993). It was the role of the
state to lead such a social transition by creating an
organizational framework that would direct this process toward the
goal of social justice. In other words, building the New Nicaragua
entailed creating local scenarios that would
13
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American Ethnologist m Volume 34 Number 1 February 2007
emerge from communities' own analysis and practice, al- beit in
dialogical relation to the master logic of a (socialist) national
revolutionary scenario.15
El Tule as a revolutionary community and its coopera- tive as
the key site of campesino revolutionary practice were two such
local scenarios. Here, I point out various dimen- sions of
performance contained in the concept of "scenario" (Taylor 2003:ch.
1) that are particularly relevant for analyzing the case of El
Tule: First, the concept points to the Sandin- ista framing or
bracketing of the village and its cooperative as revolutionary, in
contrast to other places and practices de- fined as not
revolutionary. Second, given that scenarios, by definition,
preexist any particular rendition of themselves, the concept
acknowledges El Tule's revolutionary organiza- tion and practices
(e.g., cooperative organization) as place- specific iterations of
similar practices ongoing throughout Nicaragua and preexisting in a
Latin American revolutionary tradition. Third, the concept points
to a separation between Tulefios as social actors and as characters
in a revolutionary scenario. As Taylor notes, this distance allows
one "to keep both the social actor and the role in view
simultaneously, and thus recognize the areas of resistance and
tension" (2003:30). Fourth, the concept of scenario invokes a
scene, or physical environment, constructed through "conscious
strategies of display" (Taylor 2003:29). Thus, it highlights the
role of El Tule as a model of revolutionary practice literally on
display for national and international audiences to see and
evaluate.
Taylor's concept of "scenario" is also relevant to this study in
that, by definition, it implicates me, as ethnogra- pher, as a
participant in the events I analyze. Thus, just as scenarios force
the audience to take a position in relation to the action onstage,
so the story of El Tule that I tell here is centrally based on the
position that I adopted in relation to the community during my
research. This aspect of scenarios is entirely consistent with the
ethnographic proposition that the participant-observer is her or
his own research instru- ment. In this article, I use my experience
of disappointment in Tulefios' performance of the cooperative to
gain insight into the dynamics of Sandinista state formation.
I argue that my desire for the New Man, like that of Tulefios,
was created by the seductions of a Sandinista rev- olutionary
scenario that glorified campesino-worker revo- lutionary commitment
as foundational to the emerging na- tional community. It was this
desire that set the stage for the discourse of failure and, through
this discourse, the mys- tification of the state's relationship to
the cooperative sec- tor. For, as I show in subsequent discussion,
the coopera- tive project did not become a site for performing
socialist commitment, as the state (and some campesinos) had ex-
pected. Rather, it became an ideological process by which the
Sandinista state, through no conscious intention of the leadership,
naturalized the patriarchal and vanguardist re- lationship that its
project of national development estab- lished between the state and
campesinos. Such an outcome,
I argue, resulted from contradictions between an idealized
scenario of cooperative solidarity based on Sandinista no- tions of
socialist developmentalism and both campesino interests and
historical consciousness and the logics of an encompassing-and much
more performative-scenario of neocolonial capitalism.
By focusing on the ideological construction of campesino failure
in processes of state formation, I engage with work that sees the
state as necessarily involving the mystification of political
relations (Abrams 1988; Coronil 1997; Mitchell 1991).16 I examine
the production of national subjects (Corrigan and Sayer 1985), not
as passive objects of a state scenario but as often-willing
participants in its construction (Li 2005; Nelson 2004; Nugent
1994; Steppu- tat 2001). My work suggests that inasmuch as
revolutionary states are drawn into modernist, developmentalist
state sce- narios (Scott 1998) and embedded in neocolonial
capitalist relations of power, they, much like liberal capitalist
states, create marginal populations that "are at once considered to
be foundational to particular national identities and ex- cluded
from these same identities by the sorts of disciplinary knowledge
that mark them as racially and civilizationally 'other' " (Das and
Poole 2004:8). Yet I also suggest that it is not just the subjects
of the state who are produced by the power of these scenarios; so
is the state itself. In what follows, I trace the trajectory of
power/knowledge in the relationship be- tween Tulefios, the
Sandinista state, and myself as part of an international audience
to explore a question that speaks to much recent work on
revolutionary state formation and the ideological dimensions of
revolutionary culture (Field 1999; Hale 1994; Rodriguez 1996;
Saldafia-Portillo 2003): How did a state committed to the
liberation of campesinos re-create itself as a patriarchal and
vanguardist formation that rein- scribed a distinction between
itself as a modern(izing) state and backward campesinos?'7
Constructing revolutionary desire El Tule is spread along ten
square kilometers in the south- western department of Rivas.
Between the early 1980s and 2000, the village's population grew
from fewer than 300 to over 400 people distributed between 70-odd
pri- marily male-headed, nuclear-family and two-generation,
extended-family households. Historically, men worked their own or
their wives' lands or both, supplementing subsis- tence agriculture
with wage labor on neighboring estates. Women worked at home at
domestic tasks and tending small farm animals. Only in times of
dire need did women work as domestics in nearby towns and cities.
Community lands include family parcels of between 5 and 40 hectares
and co- operative land received during the Sandinista revolution.
To- day's village boundaries are a product of a history of com-
munity fractures caused by sibling conflict over inheritance land
dating back to the early 1900s.
14
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Socialist scenarios, power, and state formation in Sandinista
Nicaragua m American Ethnologist
Although I did not know it at the time, when I arrived to do
fieldwork in El Tule in 1992, I was participating in a scenario
that had been played out in the village for over 15 years: Middle-
and upper-class outsiders arrive in the vil- lage, engage Tulefios
in political discussion, and incite them to revolutionary practice.
Over the years, revolutionary prac- tice in El Tule varied
according to the changing needs of the revolution. During the
mobilization of the 1970s, engaging in revolutionary practice had
meant becoming combatants or guerrilla support elements. In the
1980s, it meant becoming militants of the Sandinista party,
participants in mass and cultural organizations, and members of
production cooper- atives and collectives and the army. In the
post-Sandinista 1990s, it meant protecting the hard-won gains of
the revolu- tion by remaining organized and actively garnering
support for Sandinista projects.
For most Tulefios, my arrival in the village to study their
involvement in the Sandinista movement seemed initially to repeat,
albeit in the dramatically different conjuncture of the 1990s, the
incitement to revolutionary practice they had come to expect from
middle-class outsiders. That this was a common perspective was
particularly apparent in the initial stages of my research. Thus,
Tulefios were often surprised and disconcerted when I interviewed
them about matters other than their participation in the
revolution. "Don't you want to hear about the revolution?" several
people asked. It was also evident as, time and again, I was
compared with pre- vious visitors: "You are like the Sandinista
schoolteachers," I)ofia Lidia told me, in reference to the
guerrillas who had arrived in El Tule in 1975 disguised as
schoolteachers. "They also visited all the houses, asked things
about the families. They also wanted to find out everything about
the commu- nity." At other times, I was likened to members of
Alforja, a group of popular educators who had worked with Tulefios
during the Sandinista decade. On several occasions, peo- ple
mentioned that Alforja's team leader was a Peruvian-- "like you,"
they would say, indicating they regarded this connection as
significant. A Tulefio friend also told me that he had heard
villagers speculate that, as a Peruvian, I was probably a member of
Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) at- tempting to recruit Tulefios
into the Peruvian revolution. 18 Finally, villagers also referred
to me as a "compafiera inter- nacionalista." Like internationalists
during the revolution, they noted, I tried to help out in various
ways: tutoring schoolchildren, writing project proposals,
conducting his- tory and popular-education workshops, and so on.
Yet I re- sisted this identification, protesting that I was there
to do research, not to provide assistance. The small forms ofassis-
tance I did provide, I repeated over and over to mostly deaf ears,
could not be compared with the support that interna- tionalists had
given Tulefio projects throughout the 1980s.
Yet, as I thought about how Tulefios had positioned me, I
understood that, for them, there was an important common- ality
between myself and other outsiders, whether guerril-
las, popular educators, internationalists, government tech-
nicians, or party cadres. At the time, I thought this com- monality
was our commitment to or interest in the Sandin- ista revolution.
Later I realized it was our stepping into El Tule's scenario such
that we became instruments in the con- struction of a national
desire for New Men and Women. By this I mean that, as Tulefios
correctly perceived, outsiders' incitement-whether recruiting
Tulefios into the revolution, working with them on local
development projects, or inter- viewing them-was aimed at
fulfilling our desire to witness the villagers perform revolution
before our eyes. Our actions reflected, in other words, projections
of revolutionary desire onto Tulefios as "authentic" protagonists
of revolutionary history. Ironically, as an
anthropologist-historian eager to work against a history of
colonialist ethnography, I was blind to the effects of my own and
other outsiders' performance. I had no pretensions to ethnographic
objectivity-not to pos- itivist renditions of this concept anyway.
Yet by regarding my own work as simply that of a committed
researcher, I-like so many before me-misidentified the role I was,
in fact, playing in the Sandinista scenario.19
Scholars of socialist realism have remarked on its mode of
subjectification as based on classifying characters as moral
exemplars in a historical drama (Anagnost 1997:ch. 4; see also
Apter 1995; Field 1999:ch. 2; Rofel 1999:ch. 1, 3).20 The
Sandinista scenario classified campesinos as class and national
revolutionary subjects. In El Tule, the prescrip- tions for
exemplary practice that constituted these posi- tions structured
both outsiders' and villagers' assessment of Tulefio performance.
Most Tuleflo men first conceived of themselves as central
characters in the national drama when FSLN guerrillas entered their
village in 1975 on a recruitment mission. During much of their time
in the village, the guerril- las carried out consciousness-raising
work focused on issues of class and nation. In particular, they
encouraged villagers to think about their poverty and consequent
factional strug- gles over scarce land resources as stemming from
unequal land distribution and hacienda exploitation of their labor.
In this work, the guerrillas were heavily influenced by dia-
logical methodologies then current in Latin American pop- ular
education, particularly by the radical pedagogy of Paulo Freire
(1983). According to Freire, the oppressed possessed the means to
come to know their oppression through knowl- edge of their lives
and their work in and on the world; it was the role of radical
educators to facilitate a dialogue whereby such awareness (or
"consciousness") could be constructed. Justino explained that, in
El Tule, theater-a central method- ology of popular
education-became a means to construct such knowledge by helping
villagers analyze and clarify their situation as campesinos. Thus,
when a group ofTulefios pre- sented plays about their experiences
of oppression to the community, according to Justino, "people
appropriated so much the problem that the sociodrama or playwas
touching on... that people felt represented and sometimes they
even
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American Ethnologist n Volume 34 Number 1 February 2007
interrupted-that's my case, right, that's what [was] happen- ing
to me."
In succeeding years, several Tulefio men went under- ground as
FSLN guerrillas, and the village as a whole became militantly
pro-Sandinista. After the FSLN took power, El Tule became a
vanguard Sandinista community: Among other organizations, the first
agricultural and cattle-raising coop- erative and the first women's
horticultural collective in the department of Rivas were
implemented there (see Montoya 2003). Justino became a regionally
recognized campesino leader. (He went on to become mayor of the
municipality in three elections.) By 1982, Tulefios' reputation had
spread well beyond their region, and their scenario as a model com-
munity was in place.
International and Nicaraguan visitors came to the vil- lage in
large numbers. With each visit, Tulefios (re) activated their local
scenario: They adeptly recounted the story of their village in
versions long and short and showed visi- tors around their (men's)
cooperative and women's collec- tive, their new schoolhouse, health
center and road, and a communal house in which Tulefio villagers
made collec- tive decisions and held events. In so doing, Tulefios
were not merely "putting on" a show, acting as wily villagers who
misled outsiders by presenting an (onstage) surface that hid their
real (offstage) depths. Rather, as exemplary revolution- aries, the
villagers assumed a role in the model village sce- nario that
entailed performing revolution before Nicaraguan and foreign
audiences. Conversely, audiences' roles, partic- ularly those of
foreign audiences, entailed acting as engaged witnesses of
revolution. As Canadian internationalist Chris Brookes wrote in his
book Now We Know the Difference: The People ofNicaragua, "You won't
find [El Tule] on any map of Nicaragua. The little village is
geographically insignificant. But in many ways the whole story of
the Nicaraguan revolu- tion lives here" (1984:48).
Tulefios' understanding of themselves as protagonists in a
national scenario of social and political liberation was clearly
shaped by their position as model revolutionaries who put their
village up for display and who played promi- nent roles in the
cooperative movement and the Sandinista party. Yet a story I heard
from villagers suggests that early in the 1980s, the shape of such
protagonism was more uncer- tain and in flux, foregrounding their
position as campesinos vis-a-vis the state rather than their role
as its representa- tives. As happened in other parts of the
country, just after the 1979 Triumph, Tulefios took over
neighboring land that had belonged to an infamous landowner,
without waiting for directives from the state. Soon after, a
Sandinista official fenced off a portion of that land, effectively
claiming it for himself. Without wasting time, the villagers put to
work the theatrical methodologies they had learned through popular
education, staging a performance of the events in front of the
Ministry of Agriculture. The land was quickly returned to
Tulefios.21 As in the prerevolutionary period, then, in the
early years of the revolution, Tulefios and Sandinistas were
able to coconstruct scenarios for the mutual constitution of state
and civil society.
As Tulefios became more integrated into the state, and as the
state consolidated and came under siege by Contra forces, however,
the possibilities for such emergent revolu- tionary scenarios began
closing off. These dynamics of state formation were exemplified
particularly clearly by Tulefios' work as dramatic performers in
support of the Sandinista state. In 1981, a group of Tulefio men
created a theater group they named Frente Sur (Southern Front).
Frente Sur became one of the founding members of a campesino
theater and cultural organization (Movimiento de Expresi6n
Artistica y Teatral, MECATE) that worked closely with the Ministry
of Education in support of the revolution. The group's signa- ture
play, an hour-long rendition of their history-Historia de una
decisi6n (History of a decision)-told of Tulefios' "awakening" to
class consciousness and of their decision to commit to the
revolutionary struggle. In line with the role of campesinos in the
Sandinista national scenario, the play ex- emplified Tulefios'
revolutionary commitment through their participation in production
cooperatives.22
As with other revolutionary theater groups, Frente Sur performed
its story in barracks and workplaces, at national commemorative
events and even international festivals. In 1981, the village
hosted an international theater festival at- tended by high-level
government officials, including then- president Daniel Ortega's
wife, Rosario Murillo. Soon af- ter, Frente Sur was invited to
stage El Tule's history in the country's National Theater, formerly
the exclusive domain of Nicaraguan elites. These experiences were
particularly formative of Tulefios' subjectivities as model
revolutionar- ies with a key role to play in Nicaragua's scenario
for na- tional liberation. As Justino commented, "It was as if they
put you on an elevator and raised you all the way up ... then El
Tule was not only known to insiders, but also to the out- side. The
Vice-Minister of Culture of Cuba already speaks of El Tule; El Tule
appears constantly in the newspapers and all that."23 In succeeding
years, illustrated versions of Tulefios' story put together from
photographs and villagers' drawings and testimonies were
disseminated in Nicaragua and abroad through books and pamphlets
published by Al- forja and a Sandinista publishing house. Through
circula- tion of their story, Tulefios came to represent the
"authentic" Nicaraguan rural poor, protagonists of the nation's
histori- cal struggle against oppression in the Sandinista national
scenario.
Tulefios' dramatic workwas partly a response to the San- dinista
call for the participation of popular sectors in the crafting of a
national revolutionary identity (see Montoya 1995). As committed
Sandinistas, Tulefios also felt called to use their work for
agitational objectives through their par- ticipation in MECATE,
which was linked to the state's pro- paganda apparatus. "We were
clear that Frente Sur was a
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Socialist scenarios, power, and state formation in Sandinista
Nicaragua n American Ethnologist
combat group, that it was not a group of guerrilla combat, but
of ideological combat," Justino explained.24
In Historia de una decisi6n, Tulefios happily found com- munity
and communion through sharing their labor and haivests with each
other and with the nation. But, as I show below, the actual events
that took place in the cooperative du ring the Sandinista decade
suggest a more conflicted real- ity. In this reality, Historia de
una decisi6n was less a faithful representation of Tulefios' past
than a site for Tulefio revo- lutionary desire, in which the New
Man as model coopera- tive worker was an increasingly frustrated
project. In other words, at some point, the scenario of model
revolutionaries depicted in Historia de una decisi6n was no longer
emer- gent from villagers' experiences. Rather, it became a fixed
representation performed as an obligation of membership in MECATE
as a parastatal organization and out of loyalty to the FSLN. The
conflicted position of those involved in Frente Sur as
representatives of the Sandinista state, on the one hand, and as
members of and activists on behalf of the campesino class, on the
other hand, created a tension in Tulefios' sense of their roles in
the revolution that I could still identify in the 1990s. This
tension was expressed particularly clearly as a n ambivalence
toward the story of the cooperative: Did the st:ory of Historia de
una decisi6n represent Tulefios as social actors or as characters
of the Sandinista scenario?
Producing the cooperative scenario On taking power, the FSLN
proclaimed its commitment to a society shaped by ordinary
Nicaraguans through participa- tory democracy. Yet it is possible
to discern two conceptions within the party and broader Sandinista
movement of what such a scenario would entail in practice. One
conception un- derstood the revolution as a social project that
would favor the popular classes and whose shape would emerge
through mass participation in forms of representative and
participa- tory democracy. This entailed the creation of spaces for
di- alogical exchange in which the mutual construction of state and
civil society could take place.25 The second, orthodox, socialist
conception was associated with the FSLN's high- est political body,
the National Directorate, and the political line of the Sandinista
party (although not necessarily of in- dividual party members).
According to this view, Nicaragua was a society in transition to
socialism with the FSLN as its vanguard. The FSLN's vision of the
vanguard, however, differed from the authoritarian Leninist
conception. Thus, rather than implementing a proletarian program
conceived a priori by the leadership, the party aimed to create a
political program that would encompass the sum of the aspirations
of the heterogenous popular sectors, as expressed through their
mass organizations. Because of its emphasis on par- ticipatory
democracy, then, the FSLN also incorporated no- tions of popular
democracy into their more orthodox vision of socialism. Yet,
through time, it became clear that lead-
ers oriented by this perspective tended to see the political
process as a site at which, with the guidance of an enlight- ened
leadership, the population would arrive at a "correct"
understanding of their situation and interests.26 At the be-
ginning of the 1980s, however, these differences were not so
apparent. Indeed, most Sandinistas initially embraced the
leadership's scripting of participatory democracy as ex- pressed in
its particular mode of reorganizing the society and economy. It was
in this context that El Tule's cooperative developed.
El Tule's cooperative was organized in 1979. Beginning in 1981,
as part of the government's agrarian reform pol- icy, most of the
former hacienda land in the vicinity of El Tule was converted into
agricultural and cattle-raising coop- eratives known as
Cooperativas Agropecuarias Sandinistas (CAS). The state dictated
that, under this modality of coop- erative, land would be held in
common, production carried out collectively, and salaries and
produce distributed equally among organization members. Goods
produced above lo- cal consumption requirements were to be sold to
a gov- ernment organization that purchased and distributed food-
stuffs. Some goods were allowed to be sold in the market.
Cooperative organization was an important part of the FSLN's
economic project, which, during the first six years, proposed the
gradual erosion of individual production in favor of large-scale
associative forms compatible with a so- cialized economy. The FSLN
regarded a highly capital- and technological-intensive economic
model of agroexport pro- duction as the way to accelerate
Nicaragua's transition to so- cialism. This model was in line with
the modernist develop- mentalism undergirding 20th-century
socialist scenarios of social and economic progress; it also
responded to the prac- tical necessity of reproducing a national
agroexport econ- omy based on large estates. Pronouncing the state
the "cen- tre of accumulation" (Irvin 1983) in charge of
investment, finance, and commerce, the leadership turned Somoza's
confiscated estates (20% of the country's arable land) into state
farms. The Sandinistas' privileging of economies of scale, their
need for foreign exchange, and an emphasis on national unity
stemming from the broad-based alliance that brought them to power
also prompted the leadership to sup- port non-Somocista segments of
the agroexport elite. The same logic led to the promotion of CAS.
Sandinistas thought that CAS not only would secure employment and
income for large numbers of previously land-poor campesinos but
also would allow for the use of technologies requiring capital in-
vestments beyond small producers' reach (Jonakin 1994:64). Until
1985, most campesinos who received land from the state were
required to organize as cooperatives.
Throughout the time I spent in El Tule, villagers praised
cooperative labor organization: "Cooperative work is very nice,"
Manuel claimed, "because we work together and then we share our
harvest." Most Tulefio men and women de- scribed the ideals behind
cooperatives in terms drawn from
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American Ethnologist m Volume 34 Number 1 February 2007
Sandinista discourse, which characterized cooperatives as
morally superior to individual household production: "Indi-
vidualism is selfish" and "That is capitalism," people would say.27
Many also expressed their pride in cooperatives as pil- lars of the
revolution, noting their pivotal role in government efforts to
achieve self-sufficiency in food crops.
Sandinista discourse about the formative role of cooper- atives
for revolutionaries and revolutionary nation-building also
structured Tulefios' relationship with Alforja's popu- lar
educators. Like most groups involved in the Sandin- ista movement,
Alforja accepted the national scenario pro- posed by the leadership
as a starting point for its work with campesinos. During much of
the 1980s, Alforja worked through the Ministry of Education in
support of cooperative organization primarily (but not exclusively)
in El Tule. In line with dialogical methods, an important part
ofAlforja's work involved providing contexts such as workshops and
group discussions in which Tulefios could reflect on cooperative
production. Alforja stressed Tulefios' need to learn to work with
others by doing the work and by reflecting on, and pos- ing
solutions-as a group-to problems that emerged in the process.
Implicitly, then, the methodology of Alforja made a distinction
between two communicative systems (Taylor 2003:31-32) at work in
the cooperative scenario it was help- ing construct: embodiment and
telling. As in other social- ist societies (Anagnost 1997; Apter
1995; Verdery 1991), lan- guage became key to transforming
consciousness in El Tule. For, although the New Man would be
constructed by ingrain- ing a new cooperative work practice, this
process required the support of a discourse that the villagers
would elaborate on the basis of their own experiences.
Tulefio men were members of several cooperatives in the vicinity
of El Tule. Yet for its "model" cooperative-which the popular
educators referred to as "the central organism of the community"
(Comunidad de Cantimplora 1983:27)28_ Alforja chose an organization
whose members included the higher-ranked members of the Reyes
family, the commu- nity's dominant and most active Sandinista
family. Within El Tule, Alforja set up a hierarchy of scenarios for
performing revolution, with this cooperative at the pinnacle,
presenting the most revolutionary performance. This cooperative was
followed in the hierarchy by the women's collective and, be- low,
other lesser organizations and the home. Implicit here was a theory
of social change whereby an unenlightened and passive (and
feminized) audience learned from, and im- itated, the enlightened,
exemplary performance of the New Man. That Sandinismo also posited
some, primarily male- gendered, places as more revolutionary than
others suggests that the leadership's understanding of
revolutionary change assumed a similar dynamic for the country as a
whole: Those being formed as New Men and Women in workplaces and
revolutionary organizations and at the war front would serve as
examples for others to imitate. Eventually, the entire na- tion
would perform revolution as the everyday.
Anagnost 1997 and Rofel 1999 have pointed to the prac- tice of
"speaking bitterness" as a technology for construct- ing socialist
subjects in Mao's China. In El Tule, social- ist self-construction
was carried out through a discursive elaboration of the cooperative
as the central scenario for Tulefios' revolutionary transformation.
This discursive elab- oration took place in 1983, during a two-week
workshop on "cultural-historical recuperation" facilitated by
Alforja. Alforja's workshops were supposed to be designed accord-
ing to principles common to the philosophy, theory, and methodology
of popular education in Latin America at the time. This approach
meant assisting Tulefios in researching their village's history,
"diagnosing" their current situation, and, on the basis of this
knowledge, proposing ways to move forward.
My interviews and the materials generated in the work- shop,
however, reveal that the workshop did not engage par- ticipants in
exploratory research from which local knowl- edge could emerge.
Rather, as in other socialist societies in which putative
presocialist histories and cultural forms were used to justify
socialist organization and practices (Abrahams and Bukurura 1993;
Cheater 1993; Grillo 1993; Pelley 2002), Alforja and Tulefios used
the materials adduced through community reflection to arrive at
predetermined conclusions that echoed Sandinista discourse on
coopera- tives as instantiations of campesinos' class and national
in- terests. For example, in their transcriptions of workshop tes-
timonies, Alforja workers chose to highlight comments that
described the need for cooperative organization as based on the
need for unity among the poor.29 As "evidence" of this need,
workshop testimonies discuss the puntero system that existed in
some haciendas at which Tulefios had worked in the days of
Somoza:
The patr6n [boss] would come and look at us and choose the
strongest one and they would call him: "look, we're going to pay
you 3 c6rdobas, but we're going to give you 2 varas less, you're
going to have 8 varas in width and the others 10, but you [have to]
work a lot so they will follow, and if anyone leaves at 11 am. and
[doesn't finish], I won't pay them for their work." They did not
say this [openly], but that was their intention. [Alforja, Programa
Coordinado de Educaci6n Popular n.d.:8]
The discursive link between the puntero system and the
cooperative appears in another testimony transcribed in the
workshop materials: After describing an experience with the puntero
system in which three exhausted coworkers fainted, a villager says,
"That's when we made the decision. That's when we started talking
about the cooperative. Then it was not [the Sandinistas] talking
[about cooperatives], it was us" (Alforja, Programa Coordinado de
Educaci6n Pop- ular n.d.:8). Once this discursive link was made,
most of the discussion turned to how best to make such
organizations work for the campesinos and the nation.
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Socialist scenarios, power, and state formation in Sandinista
Nicaragua * American Ethnologist
In drawing attention to this discursive process of em- bedding
the cooperative in a predetermined village teleol- ogy,; I do not
mean to claim that Tulefios' reconstruction of their history of
exploitation served to confirm their decision to organize as
cooperatives. As James Paul Gee points out, th ere is no such thing
as "thinking for oneself" outside of "the groups and institutions
within which we are socialized to interpret certain types of words
and worlds in certain ways" (1988:209-210). There is also no "pure"
campesino discourse or "correct" organizational form that follows
from any par- ticular history. In this sense, the Sandinista
scenario of coop- erative organization (had it not been a
requirement for ob- taining land) was a reasonable starting point
for campesino production. Yet missing from Alforja's methodology
was the very heart of dialogy: a process of dialogue and critical
re- flection on practice that potentially generates new knowl- edge
and understanding for teachers and students. Indeed, by 1983, El
Tule's cooperative was having serious difficulties that were not
helped by the lack of critical discussion about cooperatives-or
this modality of cooperative-as organiza- tional forms for this
community at this time-in short, by the dogmatism of modernist
state development that precluded openness to different
possibilities, to different scenarios.
Rather than the dialogical emergence of a New Man, the workshop
worked as a desire-creating apparatus for the heroic Old Man
(Rodriguez 1996:pt. 2) of a prescripted mod- ernist scenario of
socialist production. In this way, Alforja's methodology reproduced
the patriarchal elitism of orthodox sectors of the revolutionary
leadership, enacting a pedagog- ical split between people and state
and the "banking" edu- cation (Freire 1983) that dialogical
pedagogies repudiated.30 That Alforja and Tulefios played
leadership roles in state de- velopment projects was probably not
incidental to this out- come. The result was the sacrifice of the
potential for an emergent campesino scenario of socialist rural
production.
(De) constructing "failure" The cooperative was organized in
1979 with 37 members from different village families, a large
number of whom were members of the Reyes family, the politically
dominant fam- ily in the village. The organization's performance,
however, did not conform to the expected scenario of class and na-
tional unity. After a few years, the cooperative had failed to
consistently deliver its products to the state and repeatedly
defaulted on its credit loans. It had also been reduced in
membership to 11 men, all of them siblings and close in- laws of
the Reyes family, working mostly independently of each other. By
the end of the 1980s, most cooperatives in the village and its
surrounding area had followed a similar trajectory.31'
For many Tuleflo cooperative members, the failure of their
organization represented the loss of a dream for which they felt
responsible, and more than a tinge of defeat and
self-deprecation colored their assessment of what had hap-
pened. Documents from workshops conducted through 1986 and my
interviews in 1992-93 with over 70 percent of village adults
provide evidence of Tulefios' recurrent strug- gles with the same
problems.32 Almost every person I inter- viewed believed that
cooperatives were "better" than indi- vidual work but "only if
there was unity among members." "For me," a cooperative member
noted, "we human beings don't get close to each other when we are
told that they are distributing sugared water. We get close when we
are told that what they are giving [us] is bitter" In the end, that
is, Tulefios had failed to become the altruistic New Men they had
envisioned in their more utopian moments. In a con- versation I had
with Justino about these issues, he candidly and regretfully
concluded that CAS and the ideals these cooperatives presumably
embodied were doomed in El Tule.
The one that goes to cut the cattle fodder doesn't have the
opportunity to do anything except cut one more grass stem, but the
one that goes to the market has a lot of advantage-only to win, and
not to lose, because if he sold [the product] cheaper than the
market price, he tells you the truth, "I sold it cheaper," but if
the price was higher [than members thought], he doesn't come back
and tell you the price was higher. And also if he takes 10,000
bananas, he says he is taking 8,000. However you cut it, he wins.
And so he buys any bottle of booze, any pack of cigarettes,
whatever, and he doesn't remember about the one that is cutting the
fodder. So it is as if you see more clearly the reality of the
world, the reality of society, inside a cooperative. Supposedly,
with this new model ofproduction, with a new model ofsociety...
that is what [we] attempted to express with the cooperative here,
[but] we didn't achieve much-I'd say [we achieved] nothing.
Following, I offer a reading of what happened in the co-
operative that does not reduce Tulefio noncompliance with state
dictates to a lack of class and national consciousness. My
explanation focuses not on villagers' intentions in the abstract
but, rather, on the disjuncture between, on the one hand, the
expectation of class unity and devotion to a na- tional community
entailed in the Sandinista revolutionary scenario and, on the other
hand, the local, national, and global contexts of power that
produced cooperative mem- bers as social actors in the 1980s.
Viewing the cooperative as a scenario in which social actors are
distinct from characters helps sustain the focus on this
disjuncture.
Let me begin with the problem of unity among the ini- tial
cooperative members. As in the rest of the country, some problems
derived from an incompatibility between coop- erative and household
production principles characteristic of campesino society.33 This
incompatibility fueled prob- lems associated with a lack of
internal democracy stemming
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American Ethnologist m Volume 34 Number 1 February 2007
from a second common feature of campesino society: the dominance
of one family group. Yet, rather than work- ing through these
problems by addressing campesino re- alities, the state imposed an
inflexible model of cooper- ative organization that remained fixed
until 1986. As the following example demonstrates, Tulefios had
particular dif- ficulty accommodating this model's stipulation that
mem- bership be restricted to adult heads of families and its de-
mand for collectivization of all aspects of production and
distribution.34
From the outset, members of the Reyes family, who owned land
independently of cooperative holdings, were unable to invest fully
in the cooperative, as they needed to spend some of their time
teaching their children to tend their family lands. By contrast,
several members unrelated to the Reyes owned little or no land and
so placed all their effort in working cooperative lands. These men
resented the uneven- ness in members' participation, particularly
because Reyes members used the state's stipulation for equal
distribution of produce to insist on remunerating members equally
regard- less of work time invested. Nonfamily members who had put
in their full share of work were left feeling abused, particu-
larly if the season's harvest could not adequately sustain all
members' families. These political problems only aggravated
members' dissatisfaction with other aspects of cooperative
organization, such as its incapacity to absorb the labor of their
entire families and the consequent loss of resources, and the
difficulty it posed for transferring agricultural skills to the
next generation.35 As a result, many non-Reyes mem- bers left the
organization. Others managed to exchange their membership for a
piece of cooperative land to be held (in- formally) as individual
property. With these defections, the Reyes were freed to organize
aspects of production not con- trolled by the state as they saw
fit. Nonetheless, their behav- ior incurred the resentment of
non-Reyes members and fed community criticism of the Reyes's
failure to live up to their revolutionary commitments.
Ironically, the roots of these divisive dynamics lay in the
continued presence of conditions that had historically fueled
campesino competition and conflict and that cooper- ative
organization was intended to eliminate. For example, some
cooperative members chose to benefit their families at the expense
of other members of their cooperative (and of the organization as a
whole) because of the insecurity of tenure on cooperative lands in
the face of the U.S. economic blockade and Contra military
aggression toward the Sandin- ista state. This problem became clear
to me in a discussion with Tulefio members of a neighboring
cooperative who, to my consternation, had dismantled portions of
the former hacienda house-which was now the cooperative's adminis-
trative headquarter-to use the bricks to improve their own homes.
When I asked one of the members about this, he stated that, "if the
[previous] owners take back the land, we at least improved our
houses."36 In short, although in the
abstract villagers were committed to the benefit of all coop-
erative members, they were unable to consistently uphold this
position once embroiled in decisions that affected their
households' and extended families' economies. No doubt, historical
scenarios of patriarchal economic responsibility and kin solidarity
in the context of scarce resources under- lay Tulefios' competitive
behavior. Yet, while these very ma- terial dynamics were playing
out within, and undermining, the cooperative scenario, Sandinista
discourse insisted on reducing such pressures to a matter of
consciousness.
By affecting members' commitment to the coopera- tive, the
problem of land insecurity also affected, by ex- tension, their
ability to keep their commitments to the state-notably, to produce
a surplus for state distribution and consistently pay back the
government's generous credit loans. This problem, however, was not
only an effect of U.S. economic blockade and Contra military
aggression but also of the very patriarchal relationship that the
Sandinista state established with the cooperative sector. Jos6
voiced a key complaint of cooperative members: "There was an
insecu- rity about the land because I couldn't bequeath it to my
chil- dren." The issue of ownership also came up in the comments of
Carlos, who suggested that the cooperative re-created a familiar
situation from prerevolutionary days: "We didn't like it because
[the government] seemed like a patr6n telling us what to do and
where to sell our harvest. It didn't feel like the land was ours."
That is, like the landowner of prerevolu- tionary days, who put
limits to sharecroppers' autonomy by claiming part of their
production, the state offered land to the cooperative but (in
theory) did not allow the members to freely control its
products.
The Sandinista state's policies with regard to the dis- position
of cooperative production changed throughout the decade of the
1980s and varied according to the product. These policies also
varied according to the FSLN's changing ability to shield Nicaragua
from larger neocolonial scenarios characterized by unequal terms of
trade. Until 1985, the state attempted to control the distribution
of foodstuffs and pro- tect producers from fluctuating world market
prices by fixing prices and becoming the single largest legal
purchaser of ba- sic grains such as rice and sorghum, the two most
important crops in El Tule. Although at some points the prices of
some products kept up with production costs, on the whole, prices
were low, as the state attempted to secure the loyalty of urban
populations by providing them with inexpensive foodstuffs.
Campesinos in El Tule and elsewhere, thus, exercised their agency
by decreasing their productivity.37 Others sold their surplus grain
in parallel (black) markets, which increasingly became the dominant
force in fixing prices for crops (and other items).
Because official producer prices were insulated from in-
ternational markets, these developments only deepened the downward
spiral in producers' purchasing power and en- couraged black-market
transactions. The black market was
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Socialist scenarios, power, and state formation in Sandinista
Nicaragua m American Ethnologist
fur ther fueled by the government's decision to issue checks in
payment for campesino crops. For many, particularly those without
means of transportation, this bureaucratic proce- du re was unduly
cumbersome. In El Tule, some claimed that the bank sometimes lacked
the funds to cash their checks or that it forced them to accept
payment in parts, probably to avoid depleting its reserves. In
response to its inability to control the revolutionary scenario
vis-a-vis capitalist mar- kets, in 1985 the government initiated a
series of reforms th at included ending food subsidies and
liberalizing the sale of basic grains. This led to renewed
production by both coop- eratives and smallholders. But rising
inflation in consumer goods, particularly from 1987 to 1989,
undermined much of the benefit campesinos derived from this change
in eco- nomic policy (Spoor 1995:ch. 4).
Tulefios' responses to state agricultural policy should be read
not only in light of Sandinista-campesino relations, but also, more
broadly, in light of campesinos' historically sub- ordinate
position vis-a-vis the Nicaraguan state. For, despite the
leadership's supposed commitment to a scenario shaped from below,
its vision of campesino interests as shaped by the Sandinista
scenario led it to reproduce traditional pa- triarchal scenarios of
state-campesino relations by single- handedly designing the
revolution's macroproject and re- sisting campesino input. Perhaps
this accounts partly for Tulefios' response to one of the most
significant changes in- stituted by the Sandinista government on
coming to power, namely, the liberal disbursement of credit for
cooperatives and small producers. At the end of agricultural cycles
fi- nanced by these credit funds, Tuleflo members repeatedly opted
to increase their buying power by using these funds for purposes
other than agriculture rather than for loan re- payment and
reinvestment in the cooperative. As they soon learned to expect
from a paternalist Sandinista state, their debts were canceled, and
defaulting on payments did not jeopardize future loans. As in the
rest of the country, this ex- perience with the government's
lenient provision of credit, along with the lack of accountability
requested from them in paying their debts, poised Tulefios to act
toward the state as they would a bountiful father who gave without
expecta- tion of return or, worse, an employer who set him- or
herself up to be taken advantage of. These actions, moreover, were
reinforced by the very language of the Sandinista scenario, which
stressed that campesinos, as an exploited class prior to the
revolution, were owed these benefits. As Daniel told me, people in
those days often remarked that "we worked enough under Somoza. Now
we want to be given what is ours."38
Aside from contradicting the Sandinistas' ethical com- mitment
to participatory politics-the supposed corner- stone of the
Sandinista scenario-the government's top- down leadership in
economic policy resulted in other, po- litically costly, policies
that demobilized the population and undermined support for the
revolution. The demand
for cooperative organization as a prerequisite for receiving
land, for example, created feelings of betrayal among many
campesinos whose social visions were grounded in histor- ical
desires for autonomy through their own plots of land. (Given most
Tulefios' investment in the Sandinista scenario of socialist
transformation, however, this desire was voiced only reluctantly
and mainly by the few villagers not commit- ted to the FSLN.) The
government's underrepresentation of campesinos in the process of
price formation of basic grains also created problems, such as
calculating production costs for agricultural products on the basis
of technological lev- els to which most campesinos (and many CAS)
did not have access (Spoor 1995:4). Onlylarge producers benefited
as a re- sult. In the meantime, the government's need for capital
led it to court agrarian elites through preferential credit and tax
incentives, at the expense of small cultivators. These prac- tices
partially offset the government's efforts to increase the social
wage through the provision of schooling, health care, and the
like."39 In short, the state's investment in a scenario grounded in
a modernist version of agroexport capitalism produced a masculinist
certainty in a vision that dehistori- cized and devalued campesino
desires and distorted the San- dinista politics of dialogy.
It must be recognized that Nicaragua's neocolonial economy and
the overwhelming pressures of the war con- strained Sandinista
options.40 Nonetheless, only a strong ideological investment in a
modernist vision of develop- ment, one that contradicted campesino
desires, can explain how the leadership remained blind to campesino
discon- tent for so long. Indeed, although campesinos were clam-
oring for greater participation in economic policy forma- tion as
early as 1981 (Matus Lazo et al. 1990:148), their demands did not
register with the leadership until the middle of the decade. By
then, campesinos were mili- tantly claiming their rights to
individual property and to greater autonomy in cooperatives through
their mass or- ganization, the Uni6n Nacional de Agricultores y
Ganaderos (UNAG). Campesinos' ability to pressure the state through
UNAG was consistent with the revolution's goal of em- powering
disenfranchised Nicaraguans. Indeed, it evidences participatory
democracy at work. However, other forms of campesino resistance
that were damning to the state had also become patent: Campesinos
were withdrawing from production and cooperatives and defecting to
the Contra guerrillas.
In response, the government began a series of policy changes in
1985. One significant change was accelerating the pace of land
distribution, especially of individual holdings. This gesture,
however, was widely interpreted by campesinos as a measure forced
on an unwilling leadership by the U.S.- Contra war. Other changes
included giving greater opera- tional autonomy to cooperatives and
largely ending market intervention. Despite these reforms, serious
critiques of the revolution's economic project from within
Sandinismo did
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American Ethnologist "
Volume 34 Number 1 February 2007
not emerge until the end of the decade (Spoor 1995:56).41 By
then, powerfully performative scenarios of neocolonial cap- italism
combined with military aggression to ensure their enforcement had
undermined much of the revolutionary impulse for the would-be
Sandinista scenario.
For most Tulefios, who benefited greatly from the revo- lution
and were deeply bound to it affectively, coming to see the state
and, especially, the national leadership of the San- dinista Front
as something more complicated than simple allies and benefactors
was a slow process, full of pain and ambivalence. In October 2000,
I had a conversation with Jorge, a member of the cooperative since
its inception, in which he discussed how campesinos were both
benefited and harmed by the Sandinista government. His views sup-
ported other Tulefios' opinion that the village had, on the whole,
done well by the revolution, particularly in the early 1980s.
Jorge's comments are framed in the context of the land and the
education Tulefios received from the government, on the one hand,
and their conscription into the war, on the other hand:
In my judgement I think that at one moment, from 79 to 84,
really we were spoiled. Already in 1985 one felt that one was
spoiled but that they they pinch you [te pellizcan], right, and
sometimes because of the affection [carifio] that you feel and that
they feel for you, you don't feel the pain when they pinch you....
At the beginning you don't feel it, you start feeling it partially.
It is not the same when I go to the funeral in another village of a
friend that died, than when the pinch is harder because it has to
be my son. Or it has to be a family member. Then, it puts pressure,
the war pressures the government to have to bring together
affection and pinching.
Jorge's words express a characteristic Janus-faced patri- archal
view of the government as both an oppressive and a giving father.
His views both support and complicate Jeffrey L. Gould's claim that
campesinos who, like Tulefios, had a history of activism prior to
or during the revolution largely viewed the Sandinistas as
"sincere, if occasionally misguided allies" (1988:282). Gould's
discussion of campesinos' views of the FSLN was a response to
Colburn's assertion that campesinos he spoke to questioned the
benefits they had derived from the Sandinista agrarian reform,
asking, "What good is a land reform if you have to sell your crops
to the government at a low price?" (1988:101). Gould's argument was
primarily based on interviews with campesino activists who had been
proletarianized prior to 1979. By contrast, in El Tule, most
campesinos were smallholders. Despite these differences, Tulefios'
overall assessment of the Sandinista agrarian reform leads me to
concur with Gould that, regard- less of specific complaints, most
campesinos never ques- tioned the validity of land distribution and
that distribution did transform rural social conditions. I also
concur with him that a more appropriate question to ask is why, in
the face
of economic disasters, so many rural Nicaraguans contin- ued to
participate in the revolution (and, indeed, support the FSLN).
Gould's response is not only that many campesinos, es- pecially
the landless, benefited from the agrarian reform but also that, by
the middle of the decade, campesinos did, in- deed, have a voice in
government policy through UNAG. Although this is true, the
dominance of government de- cree in what was supposed to have been
a scenario shaped from below was not easily transformed. For, the
potential that may have existed in a context of peace to address
the problems in the Sandinistas' modernist scenario was effec-
tively destroyed by the exigencies of the U.S.-Contra war. It is in
this context that I read Tulefios' noncompliance with state policy
not as a product of an ahistorical individual- ist consciousness or
an inability to comprehend the idea of the nation, as implied in
critiques of peasant parochial- ism or even as the FSLN's inability
to effectively communi- cate its predicament.42 Rather, I see it as
consistent with the subordinate position campesinos, in fact,
occupied in the revolutionary polity. Indeed, viewed from within
the sce- nario motivating Tulefios' responses, noncompliance did
not constitute a failure at all but, rather, a means to secure
campesinos' ability to meet their responsibilities as family
patriarchs and kin-group members. Their actions also reveal an
evolving view of the Sandinista state from a campesino ally to a
patriarchal, albeit also paternalist, organization of power that,
in the name of the nation, could both love and pinch them.
Saldafia-Portillo argues that "Sandinista agricultural policy
was ... a regime of subjection: its intention was to produce a
model subject in agriculture, one with a revo- lutionary
consciousness that would benefit the citizen and the nation"
(2003:112). This policy assumed that, once en- lightened,
campesinos would leave behind the (feminized) particularity of
their own reality and preexisting affiliations to embrace a
universal (masculine) subject of revolution, a self-determining
ahistorical hero that, at great cost to him- self and his people,
would sacrifice himself to work in soli- darity with other
campesinos and with the nation (Saldafia- Portillo 2003:ch. 3, 4).
As I have shown, such a modernist scenario of state-building,
particularly in a neocolonial, war- torn context, produced roles
that were increasingly at odds with campesino realities and
historical consciousness and that Tulefios found impossible to
fulfill. The role of the state in producing such a situation,
however, was rendered invisible by the very discourse of socialist
achievement- becoming the New Man. For the desire the Sandinistas
cre- ated for the New Man mystified state-campesino relations by
assuming a state that primarily represented campesino interests.
Thus, they failed to recognize that the national sce- nario they
had constructed prefigured, by its continued eco- nomic and power
inequalities, the inevitability of campesino noncompliance.
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Socialist scenarios, power, and state formation in Sandinista
Nicaragua n American Ethnologist
Situating knowledges and power in the revolution
When I began writing my dissertation shortly after I returned
from Nicaragua, I was vexed by the problem of writing the chapter
about the cooperative with respect and sensitivity. Indeed, I
postponed writing that chapter until the very end because I
hesitated to confront a story that I-like Tulefios
themselves-believed they had spoiled by their lack of con-
sciousness. Only after extensive, focused reflection was I able to
bring back to mind a conversation I had had with a group of Tulefio
men, the significance of which I did not understand at the time.
These men had attempted to im- press on me that their failure to
unite around the coop- erative project did not reflect an
incapacity for solidarity. They pointed, instead, to different
organizational possibil- ities that they thought would work for
them. In particular, they felt that, although producer autonomy was
essential, so, too, was uniting as a class for credit and
commercializa- tion. Recollecting this conversation allowed me to
see that during my stay in El Tule, villagers had been searching
for an explanation for their actions that did not center on their
in- capacity for solidarity but, rather, focused on the conditions
under which different forms of solidarity were possible.43 In so
doing, Tulefios were attempting to define their interests on the
basis of the particularities of their situation, rather than on
abstract notions of class and national interests.
Ironically, the villagers' impulse to define themselves by
drawing on their own knowledge and experiences-the heart of
dialogical methodologies-had been suppressed by a cooperative
scenario that did not make room for alter- native interpretations.
The dominance of this scenario also accounted for my inability to
hear what the villagers were saying. More generally, I could not
understand that Tulefios were operating according to two
contradictory frameworks: that of patriarch and kinsman and that of
aspiring New Man. Thus, I was unable to hear their explanations of
their noncompliance as anything more than insufficient
intentionality-much as they themselves seemed to regard it.44 I
realized, too, that our views were not innocent of our own
politics: The possibility of Tulefios recasting their anal- ysis
had been blunted by the will to Sandinista power that inhered in
the village's position as a model community that both depended on
the Sandinista state and was part of San- dinista state governance.
The will to Sandinista power also accounted for my own inability to
recognize obvious prob- lems with the revolutionary project. Not
until a few years after the 1990 electoral defeat of the
Sandinistas, during a period of self-criticism, were Tulefios able
to confront the contradictions in the Sandinista scenario and the
leader- ship's claims to represent the poor. Likewise, it was only
then that I recognized that the Sandinista scenario that I had so
cherished was not an emergent scenario of national libera- tion
but, rather, more a product of modernist state scripting.
Indeed, I realized then that the campesinos' responses to co-
operative policy revealed not a lack of class consciousness but,
rather, an acute awareness of their position vis-h-vis the state
and, more specifically, vis-a-vis a state unable to break out of
the neocolonial grip. I recognized, too, that my own romantic
attachments to the Sandinista vision of the revolu- tion had led me
to perform the very antidialogical, uncritical colonialist
ethnography that I had repudiated, for my role, too, had been
scripted.
My interpretation of the Sandinista state's vision of the
cooperatives also rests on these dynamics of power and knowledge.
The Sandinista cooperative scenario created a contradiction between
social actors and characters as it put the burden of transformation
on individual will rather than on wider sets of national and global
political-economic rela- tions. In the process, campesinos' agency
was dehistoricized and their experience devalued. Yet given the
Sandinistas' ideological immersion in modernist socialist
scenarios, they were unable to acknowledge that the conditions of
possibil- ity for their scenario of class and national
consciousness did not exist during most of the 1980s among
cooperativized campesinos. More to the point, these conditions
could not exist if the Sandinistas were to lead a state whose
forma- tion was inspired by modernist scenarios of development
that-exacerbated by neocolonial constraints and a war of
aggression-hinged largely on the subordination and, in some cases,
exploitation, of campesinos.
Fernando Coronil argues that the state is not the mask that
prevents our seeing political practice for what it is (1997:114),
as Phillip Abrams (1988) claims. Rather, "it is the practice of
masking and the masking of practice as dual as- pects of the
historical process through which states are con- stituted" (Coronil
1997:114). The case of El Tule supports Coronil's argument, yet it
raises questions about the use of the concept of "masking" to
analyze a process that is not fueled by intentionality or
subterfuge-as Coronil himself makes clear. As I have shown through
the concept of "sce- nario," like the campesinos, the Sandinistas,
too, were caught in imaginaries that had unintended yet very real
effects of power.45 Thus, despite the Sandinistas' best intentions,
co- operative organization and its construction as a scenario of
class and national consciousness worked as a technology for
maintaining a patriarchal-and vanguardist-relationship between the
state and campesinos, as it placed Tulefios in a position of never
living up to the state's and their own ex- pectations. Indeed, the
campesinos' inability to live up to Sandinista expectations, their
discourse of failure, and their continued but failed intention to
rectify this behavior were built into what increasingly became a
pedagogical relation- ship between a self-identified modernizing
state and "back- ward" campesinos. The discourse of failure
elaborated and reproduced by some Sandinistas and academics alike,
rather than simply pointing to an empirical reality out in the
world, was part of the process of constituting and naturalizing
this
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American Ethnologist * Volume 34 Number 1 February 2007
relationship. Through a kind of perverse logic, these dynam- ics
ensured that the state's vanguardist position vis-a-vis the
peasantry would be upheld.
Notes
Acknowledgments. The following institutions supported the
fieldwork on which this article is based: the Social Science
Research Council; National Science Foundation; Wenner-Gren
Foundation; Rackham School of Graduate Studies, University of
Michigan; and the Faculty Research and Creative Activities Fund at
Western Michi- gan University. Initial versions of this argument
were formulated with the support of a Charlotte Newcombe
dissertation-writing fel- lowship; Woodrow Wilson National
Fellowship foundation; a resi- dent fellowship from the Kellogg
Institute for International Studies, Notre Dame University; and a
Carley J. Hunt postdoctoral fellow- ship, Wenner-Gren Foundation
for Anthropological Research. I es- pecially want to thank Janise
Hurtig, Lessie Jo Frazier, Ellen Moodie, and Bilinda Straight for
their generosity in commenting on various drafts and Fernando
Coronil for his comments on earlier versions of this article and
support of the project of which it is a part. Florence Babb, Les
Field, Jon Jonakin, Karen Kampwirth, Michael Schroeder, and an
anonymous reviewer also provided insightful comments. Names of
people and the community have been changed to protect Tulefios'
privacy.
1. See Verdery 1991 for an argument about the problems asso-
ciated with using only a Foucauldian notion of modern power to
analyze socialist societies and for a broader argument about forms
of power in these societies.
2. Some of these analyses are theoretically sophisticated, qual-
ifying or going beyond the problematic concept of "resistance" as
proposed by James Scott (1985, 1990). For critiques of this
concept, see Abu-Lughod 1990, Turton 1986, and Mitchell 1990. See
White 1986 for a critique of the use of the concept of "everyday
peasant resistance" to analyze socialist contexts. From a very
different per- spective, Humphrey 1994 critiques the use of the
concept of "hidden transcripts" in the analysis of socialist
societies.
3. See Babb 2001:ch. 1 for a discussion of the many writers and
scholars-including anthropologists-who were inspired and
transformed by the Sandinista revolution. See, for example, Dashti
1994; Field 1999; Gordon 1988; Hale 1994; Higgins and Coen 1992;
Lancaster 1988, 1992; and Montoya 1996. Writing in the aftermath of
revolution, and despite a more critical perspective afforded by
hindsight, Florence Babb (2001:10) credits the revolution with in-
troducing forms of democracy that became part of the Nicaraguan
political landscape.
4. For my interpretation of Sandinista forms of democracy, see
N. 25. For references that document Sandinista democracy in the
educational, artistic, and cultural realms, see N. 30. The
difference is striking between these works and those documenting
the top- down methods used in places such as Cuba (Fagen 1969), the
Soviet Union (Kenez 1985), and China (Yu 1964).
5. In 1990, the Sandinista party was voted out of power, which
devolved to a coalition of 14 U.S.-supported parties. As I show in
this article, by the end of the 1980s, Nicaraguans had many reasons
to be unhappy with the Sandinistas. Yet many observers agree that a
large portion of the populationvoted against the Sandinistas to
bring an end to the U.S.-funded and orchestrated Contra war, which
had inflicted enormous human and economic costs. According to this
perspective, which I share, a vote against the Sandinistas did not
in all cases reflect the regime's loss of legitimacy. In the
aftermath of the revolution, the Sandinista party remained the
single largest political party in the country. For a useful
discussion on the complexity of
issues of state legitimacy, see Hann 1993:11-14. For an analysis
of socialist state processes of legitimation in socialist Romania,
see Verdery 1991.
6. Internationalist is a term that refers to foreign nationals
work- ing (or engaging in combat) in solidarity with a
revolutionary movement.
7. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork and oral historical
research in El Tule from June 1992 to August 1993, in March 1995,
in July 1997, and in September and October 2000. Most of the
sources on which I have drawn for this study were collected in the
course of this research and are, thus, conditioned by that time and
context and by my interpretations. These sources were part of a
broader set of fieldwork materials, including a survey on political
opinions and class, familial, and gender ideologies with over 70
percent of village adults; hundreds of hours of taped and untaped
interviews on these and other topics with men and women of a range
of ages; oral historical and life-history interviews; and
participant-observation materials recorded in my field notes.
8. Scholars of socialism have often claimed that the govern-
ments of socialist countries restricted foreign visitors to "model"
institutions (collectives, factories, etc.). This claim does not
apply to Nicaragua, where large numbers of internationalists were
fully integrated into the revolution, living in the country for
years at a time. The claim is also problematic, as Lisa Rofel
argues, because "it assumes that they [visitors] could find an
unmediated voice ... if only they were given sufficient freedom"
(1999:291). I also wish to distance my characterization of
revolutionary tourists from that of scholars like Paul Hollander
(1997). Hollander argues that left- wing Western intellectuals'
blindness to the pitfalls of revolutionary regimes has been rooted
in alienation from their own secularizing societies, which pushes
them to search for community, meaning, and purpose in idealized
societies. Their political views, rather than reality, he argues,
shape what they encounter in socialist societies. Hollander fails,
however, to apply a similar analysis to apologists of capitalist
systems, as if their views are transparent representations of
reality. Perhaps his inability to be critical of his own
ideological lenses accounts for why he finds no merit in critiques
of Euro-U.S. societies and praise for certain aspects of
revolutionary societies.
9. The term guardia refers to the dictator Somoza's repressive
force, the National Guard. In the 1990s, the term was also
sometimes used by Nicaraguans to refer to the Contra guerrillas, as
many had been former National Guard members.
10. I use the term campesino-roughly "rural producer"-instead of
the more commonly used term peasant to avoid anachronistic and
culturally misplaced connotations stemming from the Euro- pean
feudal origin of the latter term.
11. A study conducted in the mid-1980s suggested that cooper-
atives' performance was very uneven (Centro de Investigaci6n de la
Reforma Agraria [CIERA] 1985). Yet a review of the literature for
this period finds a heavy emphasis on cooperatives' myriad prob-
lems in organization, production, delivery of products to the
state, and loan repayment (see, e.g., Cort6s 1987; Matus Lazo et
al. 1990; Ortega 1987; Porras 1987). A study by Jon Jonakin
(199