Voices of Play: Miskitu Children's Speech and Song on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua

6. Subjectivity and Citizenship in Institutional Performances

137 Salve a ti Nicaragua en tu suelo Ya no ruge la voz del cañón Ni se tiñe con sangre de hermanos Tu glorioso pendón bicolor Brille hermosa la paz en tu cielo Nada empaña tu gloria inmortal Que el trabajo es tu digno laurel y el honor es tu enseña triunfal! Hail to you Nicaragua in your soil. The voice of the canon no longer roars, Neither does the blood of brothers tinge Your glorious bicolor pennant. Let the peace shine beautifully in your sky. Nothing tarnishes your immortal glory. Work is your noble laurel And honor is your triumphant ensign! These verses of Nicaragua’s national anthem are intoned by schoolchildren across Nicaragua at least once a week. On an island fifty-two miles away from the mainland, in the margins of an autonomous region that has always been a contested zone among nation-states, children’s patriotic performances may be especially important for socializing national sentiments of belonging.1 At both public and private schools on Corn Island, students Chapter Six Subjectivity and Citizenship in Institutional Performances 138 · Voices of Play began the day once or twice a week with an outdoor assembly in which they formed lines divided by grade, classroom, and gender. Teachers demanded a stance of grave respect (not always fulfilled) as students ritually enacted their national belonging through a flag-hoisting ceremony and a performance of the national anthem, complete with salute. The youngest students, many of whom had limited competence in Spanish, watched the older ones for signals on how to extend the right arm in a straight diagonal against the chest, and when to move the saluting arm down to slap the leg in a final gesture of performance. Even for Spanish-speaking children, the formal language of the anthem may not have been entirely intelligible, and children performed their own idiosyncratic versions. The quotidian performance of the national anthem, repeated countless times in a student’s life, naturalizes not only a national identification but also identifications of gender and academic rank, made visible in the disciplined rows of children. Schoolchildren become not merely Nicaraguans but also male or female Nicaraguans. In this formation of national subjectivity , academic rank takes precedence over age, and this rank often followspatternsofsocioeconomicinequality .Childrenfrompoor,less-educated families often progress less quickly, and poor Miskitu children are especially likely to start school late and attend sporadically. At the largest public primary school on Corn Island, named after the Nicaraguan general who led the annexation of the Atlantic Coast in 1894, a first-grade class included a thirteen-year-old Miskitu boy. As he stood in line, towering over his classmates , during the performance of the national anthem, it was difficult to imagine that his formation of national identity was identical to that of more affluent, academically advanced island children. The preceding chapters of this book have shown how Miskitu children’s subjectivities emerged from informal play and performance enacted largely in mixed-age peer groups. The focus on children’s informal interaction is essential for understanding how senses of similarity and difference emerge in multilayered subjectivities and how children actively participate in the construction of their social worlds. However, children’s subjectivities are also shaped by institutional structures and staged performances, such as schoolchildren ’s performances of the national anthem. These more constrained contexts of socialization often entail programmatic ideologies of belonging . Children’s public performances point in two directions: inward, through the intended transformation of children’s subjectivities, and outward, through representing forms of collective belonging such as citizenship. Citizenship has conventionally been viewed in terms of the relation between individuals or groups and the state. Far from being accessible to Institutional Performances · 139 all, modern forms of citizenship have often excluded segments of society based on ideologies of race, class, and gender. Through struggles against Latin American dictatorships in the latter decades of the twentieth century , expanding segments of society adapted the language of citizenship and rights to create new visions of political participation. Recent work on Latin American social movements has shown that the “politics of belonging”—the crux of debates over citizenship—is not restricted to state institutions and processes but, rather, involves a range of social relations (Postero 2006; Dagnino 2003). Struggles over citizenship also go beyond the demand for equal rights to emphasize the “cultural dimension, incorporating contemporary concerns with subjectivities, identities, and the...