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

1. State and Community Formation: El Tule to 1975

39 chapter one State and Community Formation El Tule to 1975 In the late 1870s, Juana Garay, a wealthy landowner from the municipality of Belén, province of Rivas, parceled off a thousand manzanas from her estate of San Marcos and put them up for sale. Garay’s call attracted several interested buyers who were drawn to these lands by its lush forests, abundant fauna, and rich volcanic soils. Also ideal for prospective buyers was the location of this prime site. For despite the difficulty of access to the area, particularly in the winter months when its meandering trails threatened to disappear into the thick flora, the city of Rivas could be reached on horseback in less than a day’s travel. And Jinotepe, the lively market town in neighboring Carazo, lay no more than two days away, even at the easy pace of a horse-drawn carriage. Within a few months, four families from the Villa de Belén, the municipal capital located some seventeen miles south of San Marcos, had purchased and settled on these lands. Three of these families acquired one caballería (64 manzanas) each, and built modest homes of wood and thatch. At the westernmost corner of these lands, Juan Agustín Obando settled with his wife, Isidora Ríos, and their four sons. Catarino Martinez purchased a tract adjacent to Obando’s holdings to the east and north, where he settled with his wife, María Reyes. About half a mile south of the Martinezes’ household, Valerio Reyes, Catarino’s father-in-law, built a home for himself, his son Enrique, and Enrique’s wife, Zoila Carcache. Finally, Dolores Mayorga, married to Zoila’s sister, Mariana, purchased four caballerías to the east of the Reyes family, where he established a prosperous cattle hacienda that he christened Santa Gertrudis. Over time, 40 · Gendered Scenarios of Revolution these families and their descendants spread across the area, forming communities whose shape would change according to the vicissitudes of regional and national politics. One of these communities came to be called El Tule. This chapter traces the relationship between the constitution and transformation of El Tule and broader processes of nation-state formation from the late nineteenth century to 1974. It explores in particular three interrelated aspects of national and local politics. The first concerns the mutually constitutive relationship between formal political and family structures of authority. How did the patriarchal family shape (and how was it in turn shaped by) the concept and practice of political power at all levels—from the village, to the networks of patronage and clientage that spanned the region, to the patrimonial nation-state that in theory embraced the Nicaraguan territory as a whole? The second aspect I explore concerns the divisions and struggles for resources and power among these political and familial formations in the absence of a strong state. How did regional and national-level divisions and struggles manifest themselves at the local level in the patriarchal community structures and relations of El Tule, and how did local struggles in turn shape supralocal political relations? Finally, I examine the mostly elusive search for community and national unity in the context of intra- and interclass struggles, neocolonial nation-state formation , and US imperialism. How were the dynamics of unity and division patterned at community, regional, and national levels? How were they related and under what conditions did each obtain? My goal here is not to offer a history of Nicaraguan state formation in general. Instead my aim is more modest and more specific: to illuminate local and national political structures and dynamics that would be carried into and play out in the Sandinista Revolution; and to shed light on the historical legacies shaping the Sandinista movement and the politicalideological terrain from which the Sandinistas would draw in constructing their version of Nicaraguan history and an attendant vision of revolution as encoded in the Sandinista scenario. Social Geographies The estate of San Marcos, on whose lands the four Beleneño families came to settle in the late 1870s, had been one of several haciendas bequeathed to Juana Garay by her father upon his death in the late nineteenth century. Garay’s estates were spread over vast tracts of land stretching north from El Tule to 1975 · 41 the upper reaches of the department of Rivas to the vicinity of Nandaime, a city located in the neighboring province of Granada...