After Revolution: Mapping Gender and Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Nicaragua

2. Negotiating Spaces: The Gendered Politics of Location

23 Chapter Two NEGOTIATING SPACES The Gendered Politics of Location NI C A R A G UA was at the center of international attention when the revolutionary struggle of the 1970s led into the Sandinista decade of the 1980s. In the social imagination of that decade, especially in the United States, the Central American nation loomed large. When I gave a talk drawing on my preliminary research at an anthropology conference in 1990, a man asked me what was the population of Nicaragua. When I replied that it was a little over three million people, he responded quickly, “I find that hard to believe.” Like many who depend on the mass media to frame their views of the world, this man’s understanding of Nicaragua as a key focus of U.S. concern—particularly at the time of its landmark presidential election—contributed to a sense that it must have more people and take up more space on the globe. In contrast, when I returned home from a research trip in 1996 and told a colleague about the political campaigns of the numerous candidates in that year’s less-watched election (he too asked 24 A F T E R R E V O L U T I O N about the size of the population, which had risen to almost four million), he commented that it sounded like “a tempest in a teapot.” Clearly, Nicaragua had diminished in perceived size and importance from the days when it was the imminent danger in “our backyard.” Over the last ten years I have reflected on the ways in which research conducted in Nicaragua is framed by external constructions of the country and, more generally, on the ways in which history alters the politics of location . I have approached my work as a multi-sited ethnography that travels across borders and looks at processes that link local contexts and world systems (Marcus 1998). At this remove from the field experience, these concerns have produced a shift in the analytic orientation of my work. This chapter takes as its point of departure gendered negotiations over social space in Nicaragua, as I explore some of the tensions in a view that attends to both political economy and cultural politics. A number of subjects introduced here, including the urban cooperatives and social movements that were central to my research, are discussed in greater detail in later chapters. In the two that follow most immediately, I consider claims to social space more specifically in Managua and in one of its barrios. Nicaraguan Revolutionary Claims Negotiating social, political, and economic space, literally and figuratively, has special resonance in Nicaragua. Two decades ago, the culmination of the struggle against the long-standing Somoza dictatorship led to the emergence of a revolutionary government that laid claim to political space formerly held by a small elite. The Sandinistas transformed the rural landholding system, urban manufacturing, and the distribution of goods and services so that those who formerly had been disenfranchised gained access for the first time to economic openings for a respectable livelihood. Moreover , the social space that was won through the struggle was shared by new players in the Nicaraguan setting, including peasants, low-income urban dwellers, youth, and, significant to this analysis, women.1 Women were active participants in the Nicaraguan revolution and in the decade of Sandinista government. They became increasingly active in the grassroots, “sectoral”2 organizations of Sandinista workers in rural and urban areas during the late 1980s. Although women confronted growing demands on their time in and out of the home during this period, they also Negotiating Spaces 25 found openings to examine their individual and collective gender subordination (Pérez Alemán 1992: 250). Women leaders emerged from the Rural Workers Association (atc) and the Sandinista Workers Confederation (cst), for example, who would later help to build an independent feminist movement (Criquillon 1995). The mass women’s organization formed by the fsln before the Sandinistas ’ victory has been known since 1979 as the Nicaraguan Women’s Association “Luisa Amanda Espinosa,” or amnlae, named for the first woman to have fallen in combat. The association offered support to women in the popular sectors, encouraging their political and economic participation while conforming to fsln priorities. Under pressure from diverse groups of women, the fsln and amnlae responded to calls for an end to gender inequalities . In 1987, the fsln issued...