The forbidden revolution: Participatory democracy and the cultural politics of class, community, and national identity in Nicaragua.

Weaving together cultural, political economic, and ethnographic analysis, and based upon 3.5 years of intensive field research, this work explores unforeseen responses to revolutionary transformations orchestrated by the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. It maps the formation of social identity and historical consciousness in the small southcentral rural town of Mojarra and the resettlement community of La Guayaba in the Rio San Juan basin. Most semi-proletarianized members of the peasantry in Mojarra, where capitalist relations of production and class differentiation had become the most salient organizing forces in everyday life, showed less receptivity to the revolution than did most Guayabeno cultivators, who had come to Rio San Juan to form separate domestic economies after leaving agroexport capitalism that swept the western heartland of the country between the 1950s and mid-1970s. Contrary to the received wisdom--which holds that the more capitalist community would be the most susceptible to revolutionary ideals--why did Sandinista projects collide with the local Mojarreno ideologies and power structures, while they proved to be more compatible in La Guayaba? To explain these differences, I utilize, rework, and historicize concepts of hegemony, community, and social contradiction to examine the two communities as products of interplays between local and national economic, political, and cultural histories, and show how their varied receptivity to Sandinista ideology depended on their contrasting pre-revolutionary forms of sociality, as well as on the organizational strategies and structures allowed for by the Sandinista version of the revolutionary theory.(Abstract shortened by UMI.)PhDCultural anthropologyEconomic historyLatin American historyPolitical scienceSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129349/2/9500913.pd