Gendered Scenarios of Revolution: Making New Men and New Women in Nicaragua, 1975–2000

3. Ambivalent Revolutionaries: Class, Nation, and Campesino Politics

95 chapter three Ambivalent Revolutionaries Class, Nation, and Campesino Politics Following the 1979 Sandinista triumph, during the state-building phase of the revolution, the Sandinistas began implementing a project of economic transformation that in its essence reproduced elites’ historical infatuation with masculinist notions of modern, large-scale development. The Sandinistas proposed that, in this phase, the New Man would be constituted through his integration into the organizations of the revolution. For campesino men, this meant organizing into cooperatives, privileged sites for the formation of a revolutionary consciousness in the Sandinista scenario. In a 1988 book on campesino leaders published by a Sandinista publishing house, El Tule’s Justino was quoted as saying, “In production, [people] produce to feed their stomach and those of their families, not due to consciousness but rather to the need to survive. But [when one] understands better the situation or the process one is living, one begins to develop consciousness”—that is, one “no longer thinks at the individual level, but rather that one has to produce for other people: one has to produce for the workers, one has to produce for the teachers, one has to produce for the technicians” (Peña Baldelomar et al. 1988, 56). Justino’s statement, made from within the role of New Man, foregrounds the Sandinista call for class and national solidarity as essential to constituting the Sandinista scenario. He suggests that expressing solidarity in this context entails a stance of generosity, collectivism, perhaps even sacrifice for the larger good. Yet as intentions turned to practice, Justino’s desire for the New Man would not be fulfilled, at least not in the ways suggested by the Sandinista scenario. 96 · Gendered Scenarios of Revolution This chapter explores the history of El Tule’s cooperative, focusing on the difficulties Tuleños experienced performing class and national solidarity as defined by Sandinista policy. I argue that the challenges Tuleños experienced living up to the figure of the New Man lay in the discrepancy between the idealized role they were asked to play in the Sandinista scenario and the realities of their roles as social actors in a specific cultural-historical Figure 3.1. Tuleño men working together in the María Mercedes Avendaño cooperative. The caption reads “The most important thing was to form the cooperative so that we would be given the land to work it collectively and plant basic grains to meet the needs of our community and our people.” Drawn by Tuleños during the CulturalHistorical Recuperation Workshop led by the CEP-Alforja team in October 1983. From Esta es nuestra historia (San José, Costa Rica: Centro de Estudios y Publicaciones Alforja, 1985b). Class, Nation, and Campesino Politics · 97 context. Specifically, their difficulties lay in a conflict between a modernist agrarian project centered around large-scale, state-controlled collectivized agriculture, and campesino social and economic organization and tradition of family economic autonomy. I show that, far from becoming a site for class and national solidarity, this agrarian project, as expressed in El Tule’s cooperative, exacerbated intraclass divisions and reproduced historically patriarchal relationships between the state and campesinos. Villagers’ predicament in the cooperative was not limited to Tuleños but was widespread across the country. Examining this problem is important because, as Saldaña-Portillo (2003, 112–113) notes, campesinos were not only at the center of the Sandinista revolutionary imagination but also were those whose actions in the economic front and vis-à-vis the Contra War determined the fate of the revolution. Indeed, as this chapter will show, the difficulties campesinos experienced created a dynamic between themselves and the state that changed, and ultimately contributed to, the unraveling of the Sandinista project as represented in the revolutionary scenario. The case of El Tule’s cooperative points up the importance of exploring a question that speaks to much recent work on revolutionary state formation and the ideological dimensions of revolutionary culture (Saldaña-Portillo 2003; Field 1999; Hale 1994; Rodríguez 1996): How did a state committed to the liberation of campesinos re-create itself as a patriarchal formation vis-à-vis the supposed protagonists of the revolution? Recent scholarship has shown (Abrams 1988; Anagnost 1997; Coronil 1997; Mitchell 1991) that the state, as a power-laden cultural process, necessarily involves the mystification of political relations to both state and nonstate subjects. I argue, in this light, that it was the Sandinista leadership’s ideological immersion...