The Aftermath Of The Sandinista Revolution

Examines the causes, events, and consequences of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua.

In 1979, toward the end of the Cold War era, Nicaragua's Sandinista movement emerged on the world stage claiming to represent a new form of socialism. Gendered Scenarios of Revolution is a historical ethnography of Sandinista state formation from the perspective of El Tule-a peasant village that was itself thrust onto a national and international stage as a "model" Sandinista community. This book follows the villagers ́ story as they joined the Sandinista movement, performed revolution before a world audience, and grappled with the lessons of this experience in the neoliberal aftermath. Employing an approach that combines political economy and cultural analysis, Montoya argues that the Sandinistas collapsed gender contradictions into class ones, and that as the Contra War exacerbated political and economic crises in the country, the Sandinistas increasingly ruled by mandate as vanguard party instead of creating the participatory democracy that they professed to work toward. In El Tule this meant that even though the Sandinistas created new roles and possibilities for women and men, over time they upheld pre-revolutionary patriarchal social structures. Yet in showing how the revolution created opportunities for Tuleños to assert their agency and advance their interests, even against the Sandinistas ́ own interests, this book offers a reinterpretation of the revolution ́s supposed failure. Examining this community’s experience in the Sandinista and post-Sandinista periods offers perspective on both processes of revolutionary transformation and their legacies in the neoliberal era. Gendered Scenarios of Revolution will engage graduate and undergraduate students and scholars in anthropology, sociology, history, and women’s and gender studies, and appeal to anyone interested in modern revolution and its aftermath.

From the John Holmes Library Collection.

"LGBTQ Politics in Nicaragua provides the previously untold history of the LGBTQ community's emergence as political actors-from revolutionary guerillas to civil rights activists"--

Uncountable books have been written on the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979, due to the fascination connected with the idea of revolution in general and with its realization in Nicaragua in particular. This book retells the story of the Nicaraguan revolution with the words of women, aiming to show how a high level of transformative energy was accumulated in the Nicaraguan society over time, based on a common utopian vision of a better future for all. The energetic upheaval can be analyzed as a Dionysian ritual. However, the book also follows up on the Apollonian aftermath of the revolution. Martina Handler is a social scientist and a graduate of the Master Program in Peace, Development, Security and International Conflict Transformation in Innsbruck, Austria.