After Revolution: Mapping Gender and Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Nicaragua, and: Still Fighting: The Nicaraguan Women's Movement, 1977-2000 (review)

While Nicaragua no longer seems to be in the public eye, these two books show why it still should be. The changes and transformations that the country has undergone over the last 25 years merit our attention.

Florence Babb has written a thoughtful book examining the intersection between neoliberalism, postrevolutionary politics, and gender in Nicaragua. She does this with a multileveled analysis that adroitly "maps" the complexity of connections between the local and the international, the past and the present, and dominant discourses and cultural struggles.

Babb's study is based on ethnographic research conducted during the decade following the electoral loss of the Sandinistas in 1990. The loss signified the beginning of the "After Revolution": a switch from the mixed economy and revolutionary politics of the Sandinistas to the neoliberal free-trade model of political economy, the altering of physical space to support this neoliberal project, and changes both in patterns of political mobilization and the relationship between the state and civil society.

The seven main chapters are a series of freestanding essays. In chapter 2, Babb explains how neoliberalism has led to enormous economic hardships—both personal and collective—for Nicaraguan women, while also requiring changes and the growth of the women's movement. Babb contends that the growth of an independent women's movement in the post-Sandinista period is "likely the result of a questioning of top-down Sandinista Party politics, strong opposition to neoliberal government policy, [and] continued mobilization under a government that tolerates a degree of political dissent" (p. 27). She thus refuses to accept the general argument of Sandinista critics, that the growth of an autonomous movement is the result of post-Sandinista democratization. Neither does she concur with FSLN supporters that the movement is merely a continuation of the Sandinista support for political mobilization. Instead, she argues that current trends in social mobilization are related to both historical and current developments.

In chapter 3, Babb outlines how neoliberalism is attempting to reshape discourses of gender. How are masculinity and femininity being redefined and what political ideologies are being used to justify these new definitions? She thus quotes an article in La Prensa that "hailed the Miss Nicaragua beauty pageant as the most important cultural event of the year, commenting that this is 'possible only in a real democracy'" (p. 63). In another instance, the Nicaraguan vice president, speaking at an opening of a McDonald's restaurant, remarked that "Nicaragua is taking off its loincloth" (p. 60). "Democratization" and "development" thus require and justify sexist and racist cultural reformulations.

In chapters 4-7, Babb presents a well-balanced critique of the effects of neoliberalism on the Nicaraguan urban working class. In chapter 4, Babb provides the reader with an ethnographic look at one working-class neighborhood in Managua. While the neighborhood is politically and economically diverse, the study points to a growing dependence of the working poor on the informal economy in their continuous battle for survival. Chapter 5 is based on Babb's decade-long study of four urban cooperatives, most of which are dominated by women. The dismantling of the Sandinista project and the implementation of neoliberal policies have devastated these cooperatives. Chapter 6 outlines attempts of Chamorro's and Aleman's governments, with the support of the international community, to refocus entrepreneurial attention away from cooperatives and toward microenterprises. While microenterprises have been praised by many as a way to assist poor women in Latin America and elsewhere, Babb's careful analysis points out some critical problems with the...