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ROSARIO MONTOYA

University of Colorado, Boulder

Socialist scenarios, power, and state formationin Sandinista Nicaragua

A B S T R A C TDrawing on the concept of scenario, I examine the

ideological construction of an agricultural

cooperative in a model village in revolutionary

Nicaragua (197990). I argue that the states

modernist project of development placed the burden

of cooperative members transformation into model

revolutionaries on individual will rather than on

national and global politicaleconomic relations.

This resulted in Tulenos inability to live up to

Sandinista expectations and authorized the

production of Sandinista and academic discourses

that cast these producers as failed revolutionaries.

These discourses helped constitute and naturalize

the vanguardist relationship established by thestates modernist project between the state and the

cooperative sector. [nation-state formation,

revolution, modernism, socialism, cooperatives, model

villages, mystification]

Inthisarticle,Iexaminetheculturalpoliticsofsocialiststateformation

in Sandinista Nicaragua (197990). Recent research on state forma-tion has moved away from Weberian notions of the state as a ratio-

nal bureaucratic institution to emphasize questions of culture and

power in processes of subject formation (Corrigan and Sayer 1985;

Friedman 2005; Gordillo 2006; Hansen and Stepputat 2001). This approach

examines modern forms of power as based on a governmentalization of

society such that human practices become subject to regulation and nor-

malization (Foucault 1983, 1991). Socialist states offer a different angle for

examining such questions.1 Unlike the less visible forms of power in liberal

states whereby subjects come to govern themselves, in socialist societies

crucial forms of power are patently visible through claims about subjectiv-

ity, state legitimacy, and political culture foregrounded in explicit political

projects.As Katherine Verdery (1991:304305) argues, in such societies, cul-

tureand languagetake on particularimportanceto the statebecause, unlikeliberal states, socialist states have not benefited from centuries of gradual

development such that subjectification can take place more through prac-

tice than through discourse. The concern of socialist states with shaping

cultural and intellectual production (Pelley 2002; Verdery 1991), creating

communities of moral discourse (Apter 1995), and fostering technologies

of the self in which subjects come to represent categories of moral exem-

plarity (Anagnost 1997; Rofel 1999) reveals an anxiety over the possibility

for hegemony that is not as apparent in liberal states.

Partly because of this urge to control in socialist states, scholarship

on the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Asia has regarded such states

as primarily oppressive formations, even as their so-called totalitarian-

ism is now widely questioned. Indeed, the unmet expectations of these

social projects likely contributed to ethnographic studies of socialist so-cieties emphasizing widespread cynicism and noncompliance or invok-

ing frameworks of resistance (Scott 1985, 1990; see, e.g., Fforde 1987;

OBrien and Li 2006; Sabel and Stark 1982; Watson 1994; Zweig 1989).2

The case of Nicaragua is markedly different. Scholarship on the Sandinista

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 7190, ISSN 0094-0496, onlineISSN 1548-1425. C 2007 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article contentthrough the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website,http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ae.2007.34.1.71.


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American Ethnologist Volume 34 Number 1 February 2007

revolution was exceptionally enthusiastic and hopeful, even

as, toward the latterpart of the1980s, scholars critiqued cer-

tain aspects of the revolutionary project.3 The Sandinistas

unusual flexibility and their vision of a different kind of

revolutionincluding a commitment to religious pluralism

andvalorizationof thepopularcapturedthe imaginationof writers, scholars, and activists across the world.4 As an-

thropologist Roger Lancaster wrote in his ethnography of a

Managua working-class neighborhood, And I can saylike

George Orwell writing of Cataloniathat for the first time

in my life, I really believed in socialism (1992:9). The demo-

cratic impulse that animated the Sandinista vision also lent

the regime exceptional legitimacyand popularity amongor-

dinaryNicaraguans,ifonlyincriticalnumbersuntilthemid-

to late 1980seven among many who disagreed with or did

not comply with some state policies.5

In this article, I examine the case of an agricultural co-

operative in a model Sandinista community that exhibited

widespread noncompliance with state dictates yet retainedstrongaffectivetiesandcommitmenttotheSandinistastate.

I examine this problem by exploring contradictions created

forcooperativemembersbyaSandinistanation-stateimagi-

naryofwhichcooperativesweresupposedtobeemblematic.

To do so, I extend Verderys insight on language and culture

in socialiststates byexamining state formationthrough per-

formative scenarios. The analysis shows the workings of the

visible forms of power underscored by scholarship on so-

cialism. Yet it also shows that these forms were imbricated

with less visible forms of state power that worked to form

the putative subjects of the Sandinista state and the states

leadership itself.

In search of the New Man

I learned of El Tule in 1989 from a Spanish internationalist

workingin southeastern Nicaragua.6 Hereferredmetoalittle

book,Esta luz ya no se apaga(Pena Baldelomar et al. 1988),

which I picked up a few days later in a bookstore in Man-

agua.The book waspublishedby a populareducation center

whose staff had worked with Tulenoson various culturaland

development projects during the decade of the Sandinista

revolution (197990). From the pages of this book, I learned

of a village rent by interfamilial factionalism throughout the

20thcentury,ofthefatefularrivalinthemid-1970sofagroup

of guerrillas belonging to the Sandinista Front for National

Liberation (FSLN), and of the villagers awakening to class

and national consciousness and solidarity through their re-

lationshiptotheguerrillasand,later,totheSandinistamove-

ment. After therevolutionarytriumph, so thestorywent,the

villagers became exemplary revolutionaries in the Sandin-

istamovement.Theirexemplaritywasparticularlyevidentin

theirorganization of an agricultural and cattle-raising coop-

erative. According to the book, the cooperative became the

fulcrumfortheconstructionofacommunityofclassandna-

tion as members worked together and shared the products

of their labor with each other and the Nicaraguan nation.

As I read this story, I was overtaken by the romance of

therevolution.Like many other Latin Americansand people

worldwide, I had been an avid consumer of the utopian sto-

ries of a New Society that Nicaragua exported through printand media images early in the 1980s. By the latter part of

that decade, however, I found myself sharing Nicaraguans

crisis of hope for the revolution. Since 1979, when the FSLN

wrested power from the dictatorship of Anastacio Somoza,

Nicaraguans had faced a war of aggression financed by the

U.S.governmentandwagedbySomocistasandpeopledisaf-

fectedwiththe Sandinistagovernment. By1989,as I traveled

across central and southern Nicaragua, the suffering caused

by the U.S.Contra war and the erosion of enthusiasm for

the revolution were palpable.

The story of El Tules revolutionaryredemption seemed

to offer hope just when Nicaraguans most needed it. In

the book recounting their story, Tulenos claimed that theSandinistas consciousness-raising efforts had empowered

them to define their needs, transform their practices ac-

cordingly, and begin to construct Sandinista New Men and

Women and the New Nicaragua. The story suggested that

the clarity of purpose Tulenos had attained had been made

possible by the Sandinistas use of dialogical pedagogies de-

signed to ground their consciousness-raising work in vil-

lagers own experience and knowledge. It was this knowl-

edge that had been key to Tulenos staying steadfast in the

face of adversity. A few months after I read the story of El

Tule, the FSLN was defeated at the polls and vowed not to

retreat but, rather, to govern from below. In my mind, re-

maining steadfastand sharing this villages experience indialogicalpedagogiesbecame even more urgent in light of

those events as Sandinistas struggled to remain united and

protect the gains of the revolution.

I began fieldworkin El Tuletwo years after the1990 San-

dinista electoral defeat.7 Soon, I began to realize that what

hadtranspiredinthevillageduringtherevolutionarydecade

did not accord with the story I had come to cherish. During

my stay in El Tule, I often felt that the burden of defeat that

fell on Nicaraguas shoulders as a failed symbol of liberation

for people throughout the world had been felt with particu-

lar intensity in this little village. Since the revolutions early

days, the village had received an inordinately hefty share

of the burdens of exemplarity that the state distributed tocommunities integrated into the revolutionary process. For

El Tule was not just any Sandinista village: It was a model

Sandinista village that had had a salient role in the social

pedagogy of the revolutionary project. By this I mean that

El Tule had been a vanguard village, in which many of the

revolutions projects werefirst implemented; and it had been

a showcase village, promoted by Sandinista organizations

as a representation and an exemplar of the revolutionary

project. As such, it hadbecome a destination forNicaraguan

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Socialist scenarios, power, and state formation in Sandinista Nicaragua American Ethnologist

and foreign revolutionary tourists eager to witness radical

social transformation.8

Throughout the revolutionary decadeand during its af-

termath, Tulenos role model wasthe Socialist New Man, of-

ten glossed simply as the revolutionary man, icon of class

and national consciousness. Tuleno men and women con-structed their history as the story of a chain of New Men,

strungtogetherthrough theirmartyrdom and heroism. Our

struggle began with the Indian leader Diriangen, Justino

(the village leader) told me the day I met him. Then it was

Sandino, who fought against the Yankee occupation. The

Sandinista Front continued that struggle. Here in the com-

munity we have two martyrs and heroes, they were killed

by theguardiafor defending us, the poor.9 As heirs to this

revolutionary tradition, Tulenos felt the onerous weight of

historical responsibility. This was especially so among the

men, whom Sandinista discourse designated as the central

political subjects of the revolution.

By the time I began fieldwork, however, Tulenos wereunsure about how well they had played their role as revo-

lutionaries. When I asked about their lives during the rev-

olution, they delighted in relating tales of exemplarity. Yet

when we turned to critical discussions of the difficulties they

had faced during those years, their memoriesrecounted

nostalgically, as when reminiscing about other, more dis-

tant pastsseemed to be shadowed by a discourse about

Tuleno backwardness, culpability, failure, and moral short-

comings. In particular, Tulenos directed this discourse to

theirperformanceinthecooperative,anorganizationhailed

by Sandinistas as the site par excellence of campesino rev-

olutionary consciousness.10 Time and again during my stay

in El Tule, I listened as male villagers castigated themselvesandothervillagers forfailing to live up to exemplarySandin-

ista cooperative-member standards. The gap between the

ideal and real actions of flesh-and-blood people haunted

my fieldwork as it seemed to haunt Tulenos lives. Only later

did I understand that my presumptuous disappointment in

theirperformancereiteratedadiscoursethatexistedbeyond

El Tule, as part of a web of social and scholarly discussions

about the failings of the revolutions cooperative project.

Scholarly discussions about the Sandinista cooperative

project began with the assumption that, in terms of its own

criteria for productivity and organization, the project had

been disappointing at best.11 It was argued that this out-

come was attributable in large measure to campesinos re-jection (or grudging acceptance) of the program.Campesino

attitudes were, in turn, seen as resulting from the govern-

ments marginalization of ruralproducers in economic plan-

ning and decision making. Thus, some argued that, had

campesinos been included in economic decision making,

they would have devised forms of collective organization

that worked for them (Matus Lazo et al. 1990). Others ar-

guedthatgreaterinvolvementwouldhavegivencampesinos

a better understanding of the political and economic diffi-

culties the government wasfacing, andmore would have re-

mained loyal to the FSLN and its programs (Coraggio 1986;

Fagen 1986). Both these arguments criticized the govern-

mentsexclusionary,evenarrogant,policy-makingpractices.

Yet the second view also contained an implicit critique of

campesino parochialism, voiced by political scientist For-rest D. Colburn in his discussion of campesino responses

to agrarian reform benefits: The rural poor narrowly in-

terpret their interests, at a cost to other strata of society

(1989:194). Less subtle arguments along this line, particu-

larly among some Sandinista cadres and leaders, claimed

outright that campesino recalcitrance to cooperative orga-

nization was caused by this sectors backwardness and a

perceivedindividualismrooted in a capitalistconsciousness

(see,e.g.,Wheelock1981). Someof thesearguments, in other

words, became discourses that represented campesinos in

the familiar modernist image of rural folk as parochial, dis-

trustful, and even traitorousincapable of class and na-

tional consciousness.12

I propose that these discourses of campesino failure be

regarded as something other than simple descriptions of an

empirical reality. Instead, I suggest they be seen as partici-

patingintheconstitutionofaSandinistascenarioofnational

liberation and revolutionary state formation that presumed,

and created a desire for, an idealized protagonist in the fig-

ure of the New Man. In developing my argument, I draw on

the concept of scenario as it has been articulated by per-

formance theorist Diana Taylor (2003). Taylor defines sce-

nario as a paradigmatic setupthat relies on supposedlylive

participants, structured around a schematic plot, with an

intended, though adaptable end (2003:13). Scenarios, she

claims, existas culturally-specific imaginariessetsof pos-sibilities, ways of conceiving conflict, crisis, or resolution

activated with more or less theatricality (Taylor 2003:13).

As enacted plots that encode modes of interaction between

familiar characters, scenarios recur across timeand contexts

and are reproduced through discourses, stories, writings,

and actions.13

The setup in Sandinista Nicaragua was structured

around a narrative of national liberation that reactivated

a familiar Latin American scenariothat of indigenous re-

sistance to colonialism.14 This narrative told of Nicaraguas

historical subjugation by colonialism, dictatorship, and U.S.

imperialism and of Nicaraguans struggle and liberation

under the leadership of the Sandinista Front. Liberation,in turn, was framed as a mutually constitutive process of

building the New Man and Woman and the New (socialist)

Nicaraguathroughformsofrepresentativeandparticipatory

democracy that would allow each social sector to define its

own needs (Hoyt 1997; Vanden and Prevost 1993). It was the

role of the state to lead such a social transition by creating

an organizational framework that would direct this process

toward the goal of socialjustice.In other words,buildingthe

New Nicaragua entailed creating local scenarios that would

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emerge from communities own analysis and practice, al-

beit in dialogical relation to the master logic of a (socialist)

national revolutionary scenario.15

El Tule as a revolutionary community and its coopera-

tive as the keysite of campesino revolutionary practice were

two such local scenarios. Here, I point out various dimen-sions of performance containedin theconcept of scenario

(Taylor2003:ch.1)thatareparticularlyrelevantforanalyzing

the case of El Tule: First, the concept points to the Sandin-

ista framing or bracketing of the village and its cooperative

as revolutionary, in contrastto otherplacesand practicesde-

fined as not revolutionary. Second, given that scenarios, by

definition, preexist any particular rendition of themselves,

the concept acknowledges El Tules revolutionary organiza-

tion and practices (e.g., cooperative organization) as place-

specific iterations of similar practices ongoing throughout

Nicaragua and preexistingin a LatinAmericanrevolutionary

tradition. Third, the concept points to a separation between

Tulenos as social actors and as characters in a revolutionaryscenario. As Taylor notes, this distance allows one to keep

boththesocialactorandtheroleinviewsimultaneously,and

thusrecognize the areas of resistanceand tension (2003:30).

Fourth, the concept of scenario invokes a scene, or physical

environment, constructed through conscious strategies of

display (Taylor 2003:29). Thus, it highlights the role of El

Tule as a model of revolutionary practice literally on display

for national and international audiencesto see andevaluate.

Taylors concept of scenario is also relevant to this

study in that, by definition, it implicates me, as ethnogra-

pher, as a participant in the events I analyze. Thus, just as

scenarios force the audience to take a position in relation to

the action onstage, so the story of El Tule that I tell here iscentrally based on the position that I adopted in relation to

thecommunity duringmy research.This aspectof scenarios

is entirely consistent with the ethnographic proposition that

the participant-observer is her or his own research instru-

ment. In this article, I use my experience of disappointment

in Tulenos performance of the cooperative to gain insight

into the dynamics of Sandinista state formation.

I argue that my desire for the New Man, like that of

Tulenos, was created by the seductions of a Sandinista rev-

olutionary scenario that glorified campesinoworker revo-

lutionary commitment as foundational to the emerging na-

tionalcommunity. It wasthis desire that set the stage for the

discourse of failure and, through this discourse, the mys-tification of the states relationship to the cooperative sec-

tor. For, as I show in subsequent discussion, the coopera-

tive project did not become a site for performing socialist

commitment, as the state (and some campesinos) had ex-

pected. Rather, it became an ideological process by which

the Sandinista state, through no conscious intention of the

leadership, naturalized the patriarchal and vanguardist re-

lationship that its project of national development estab-

lishedbetween thestate andcampesinos. Such an outcome,

I argue, resulted from contradictions between an idealized

scenario of cooperative solidarity based on Sandinista no-

tions of socialist developmentalism and both campesino

interests and historical consciousness and the logics of an

encompassingand much more performativescenario of

neocolonial capitalism.By focusing on the ideological construction of

campesino failure in processes of state formation, I engage

with work that sees the state as necessarily involving the

mystification of political relations (Abrams 1988; Coronil

1997; Mitchell 1991).16 I examine the production of national

subjects (Corrigan and Sayer 1985), not as passive objects

of a state scenario but as often-willing participants in its

construction (Li 2005; Nelson 2004; Nugent 1994; Steppu-

tat 2001). My work suggests that inasmuch as revolutionary

states are drawn into modernist, developmentaliststate sce-

narios (Scott 1998) and embedded in neocolonial capitalist

relations of power, they, much like liberal capitalist states,

create marginal populations that are at once consideredto be foundational to particular national identities and ex-

cludedfromthesesameidentities bythe sorts of disciplinary

knowledge that mark them as racially and civilizationally

other(DasandPoole2004:8).YetIalsosuggestthatitisnot

just the subjects of the state who are produced by the power

ofthesescenarios;soisthestateitself.Inwhatfollows,Itrace

the trajectory of power/knowledge in the relationship be-

tween Tulenos, the Sandinista state, andmyself as part of an

international audience to explore a question that speaks to

much recent work on revolutionary state formation and the

ideological dimensions of revolutionary culture (Field 1999;

Hale 1994; Rodrguez 1996; Saldana-Portillo 2003): How did

a state committed to the liberation of campesinos re-createitself as a patriarchal and vanguardist formation that rein-

scribed a distinction between itself as a modern(izing) state

and backward campesinos?17

Constructing revolutionary desire

El Tule is spread along ten square kilometers in the south-

western department of Rivas. Between the early 1980s

and 2000, the villages population grew from fewer than

300 to over 400 people distributed between 70-odd pri-

marily male-headed, nuclear-family and two-generation,

extended-family households. Historically, men worked their

own or their wives lands or both, supplementing subsis-

tence agriculture with wage labor on neighboring estates.

Womenworked at home at domestic tasks and tending small

farm animals. Only in times of dire need did women work

as domestics in nearby towns and cities. Community lands

include family parcels of between 5 and 40 hectares and co-

operativeland receivedduringthe Sandinistarevolution.To-

days village boundaries are a product of a history of com-

munity fractures caused by sibling conflict over inheritance

land dating back to the early 1900s.

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Although I did not know it at the time, when I arrived

to do fieldwork in El Tule in 1992, I was participating in a

scenario that had been played out in the village for over 15

years: Middle- and upper-class outsiders arrive in the vil-

lage, engage Tulenos in politicaldiscussion, andincitethem

to revolutionarypractice. Overthe years, revolutionaryprac-tice in El Tule varied according to the changing needs of the

revolution.Duringthemobilizationofthe1970s,engagingin

revolutionary practice had meant becoming combatants or

guerrilla supportelements. In the 1980s, it meant becoming

militants of the Sandinista party, participants in mass and

cultural organizations, and members of production cooper-

atives and collectives and the army. In the post-Sandinista

1990s,it meant protecting the hard-won gains of the revolu-

tion by remaining organized and actively garnering support

for Sandinista projects.

For most Tulenos, myarrival in the village to study their

involvement in the Sandinista movement seemed initially

to repeat, albeit in the dramatically different conjuncture ofthe 1990s, the incitement to revolutionary practice they had

come to expect from middle-class outsiders. That this was a

common perspective was particularly apparent in the initial

stages of my research. Thus, Tulenos were often surprised

and disconcerted when I interviewed them about matters

other than their participation in the revolution. Dont you

want to hear about the revolution? several people asked. It

was also evident as,time and again, I was comparedwith pre-

vious visitors: You are like the Sandinista schoolteachers,

Dona Lidia told me, in reference to the guerrillas who had

arrived in El Tule in 1975 disguisedas schoolteachers. They

also visited all the houses, asked things about the families.

They also wanted to find out everything about the commu-nity. At other times, I was likened to members of Alforja, a

group of popular educators who had worked with Tulenos

during the Sandinista decade. On several occasions, peo-

ple mentioned that Alforjas team leader was a Peruvian

like you, they would say, indicating they regarded this

connection as significant. A Tuleno friend also told me that

he had heard villagers speculate that, as a Peruvian, I was

probably a memberof Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) at-

tempting to recruit Tulenos into the Peruvian revolution.18

Finally, villagers also referred to me as a companera inter-

nacionalista. Like internationalists during the revolution,

they noted, I tried to help out in various ways: tutoring

schoolchildren, writing project proposals, conducting his-tory and popular-education workshops, and so on. Yet I re-

sisted this identification, protesting that I was there to do

research, notto provide assistance.The small forms of assis-

tance I did provide, I repeated over and over to mostly deaf

ears, could not be compared with the support that interna-

tionalists had given Tuleno projects throughout the 1980s.

Yet, as I thought about how Tulenoshadpositionedme,I

understoodthat,forthem,therewasanimportantcommon-

ality between myself and other outsiders, whether guerril-

las, popular educators, internationalists, government tech-

nicians, or party cadres. At the time, I thought this com-

monality was our commitment to or interest in the Sandin-

ista revolution. Later I realized it was our stepping into El

Tules scenario such that we becameinstrumentsin thecon-

struction of a national desire for New Men and Women. Bythis I mean that, as Tulenos correctly perceived, outsiders

incitementwhether recruiting Tulenos intothe revolution,

working with them on local development projects, or inter-

viewing themwas aimed at fulfilling our desire to witness

the villagersperform revolution before our eyes. Our actions

reflected,in other words, projections of revolutionary desire

onto Tulenos as authentic protagonists of revolutionary

history. Ironically, as an anthropologisthistorian eager to

work against a history of colonialist ethnography, I was blind

to the effects of my own and other outsiders performance. I

had no pretensionsto ethnographic objectivitynot to pos-

itivist renditionsof this concept anyway. Yet by regarding my

own work as simply that of a committed researcher, Ilikeso many before memisidentified the role I was, in fact,

playing in the Sandinista scenario.19

Scholars of socialist realism have remarked on its mode

of subjectification as based on classifying characters as

moral exemplars in a historical drama (Anagnost 1997:ch.

4; see also Apter 1995; Field 1999:ch. 2; Rofel 1999:ch. 1,

3).20 The Sandinista scenario classified campesinos as class

and national revolutionary subjects. In El Tule, the prescrip-

tions for exemplary practice that constituted these posi-

tions structured both outsiders and villagers assessment

of Tuleno performance. Most Tuleno men first conceived of

themselvesas central characters in the national drama when

FSLNguerrillas entered theirvillagein 1975on a recruitmentmission. Duringmuchof their time in thevillage, theguerril-

lascarried out consciousness-raisingwork focused on issues

of class and nation. In particular, they encouraged villagers

to think about their poverty andconsequent factional strug-

gles over scarce land resources as stemming from unequal

land distribution and hacienda exploitation of their labor.

In this work, the guerrillas were heavily influenced by dia-

logical methodologies then current in Latin American pop-

ular education, particularly by the radical pedagogy of Paulo

Freire (1983). According to Freire, the oppressed possessed

themeansto come to know their oppressionthroughknowl-

edge of their lives and their work in and on the world; it was

the role of radical educators to facilitate a dialogue wherebysuch awareness (or consciousness) could be constructed.

Justino explained that,in El Tule,theatera central method-

ology of popular educationbecame a means to construct

such knowledge by helping villagers analyze and clarify their

situationas campesinos.Thus,when a groupof Tulenos pre-

sented plays about their experiences of oppression to the

community, according to Justino, people appropriated so

much theproblem that thesociodrama or play wastouching

on . . . that people felt represented and sometimes they even

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interruptedthats my case, right, thats what[was] happen-

ing to me.

In succeeding years, several Tuleno men went under-

ground as FSLN guerrillas,and thevillageas a whole became

militantlypro-Sandinista. Afterthe FSLNtook power, El Tule

became a vanguard Sandinista community: Among otherorganizations, the first agricultural and cattle-raising coop-

erative and the first womens horticultural collective in the

department of Rivas were implemented there (see Montoya

2003). Justino became a regionally recognized campesino

leader. (He went on to become mayor of the municipality

in three elections.) By 1982, Tulenos reputation had spread

well beyond their region, and their scenario as a model com-

munity was in place.

International and Nicaraguan visitors came to the vil-

lage in large numbers. With each visit, Tulenos (re)activated

their local scenario: They adeptly recounted the story of

their village in versions long and short and showed visi-

tors around their (mens) cooperative and womens collec-tive, their new schoolhouse, health center and road, and

a communal house in which Tuleno villagers made collec-

tive decisions and held events. In so doing, Tulenos were

not merely putting on a show, acting as wily villagers who

misledoutsiders by presenting an (onstage) surface that hid

their real(offstage) depths. Rather, as exemplary revolution-

aries, the villagers assumed a role in the model village sce-

nariothatentailedperformingrevolutionbeforeNicaraguan

and foreign audiences. Conversely, audiences roles, partic-

ularlythoseof foreign audiences, entailed actingas engaged

witnesses of revolution. As Canadian internationalist Chris

Brookes wrote in his bookNow We Know the Difference: The

People of Nicaragua, You wont find [El Tule] on any map ofNicaragua. The little village is geographically insignificant.

But in many ways the whole storyof the Nicaraguan revolu-

tion lives here (1984:48).

Tulenos understanding of themselves as protagonists

in a national scenario of social and political liberation was

clearly shaped by their position as model revolutionaries

who put their village up for display and who played promi-

nent roles in the cooperative movement and the Sandinista

party. Yet a story I heard from villagers suggests that early in

the 1980s, the shape of such protagonism was more uncer-

tain and in flux, foregrounding their position as campesinos

vis-a-vis the state rather than their role as its representa-

tives. As happened in other parts of the country, just afterthe 1979 Triumph, Tulenos took over neighboring land that

had belonged to an infamous landowner, without waiting

for directives from the state. Soon after, a Sandinista official

fenced off a portion of that land, effectively claiming it for

himself. Without wasting time, the villagers put to work the

theatrical methodologies they had learned through popular

education, staging a performance of the events in front of

the Ministry of Agriculture. The land was quickly returned

to Tulenos.21 As in the prerevolutionary period, then, in the

early years of the revolution, Tulenos and Sandinistas were

able to coconstruct scenarios for the mutual constitution of

state and civil society.

As Tulenos became more integrated into the state, and

as the state consolidated and came under siege by Contra

forces, however, the possibilities for such emergent revolu-tionary scenarios began closing off. These dynamics of state

formation were exemplified particularly clearly by Tulenos

work as dramatic performers in support of the Sandinista

state. In1981, a group of Tuleno mencreated a theater group

they named Frente Sur (Southern Front). Frente Surbecame

one of the founding members of a campesino theater and

cultural organization (Movimiento de Expresion Artstica y

Teatral, MECATE) that worked closely with the Ministry of

Education in support of the revolution. The groups signa-

ture play, an hour-long rendition of their historyHistoria

de una decisi on (History of a decision)told of Tulenos

awakening to class consciousness and of their decision to

commit to the revolutionary struggle. In line with the role ofcampesinos in the Sandinista national scenario, the play ex-

emplifiedTulenosrevolutionary commitmentthroughtheir

participation in production cooperatives.22

As with other revolutionary theater groups, Frente Sur

performed its story in barracks and workplaces, at national

commemorative events and even international festivals. In

1981, the village hosted an international theater festival at-

tended by high-level government officials, including then-

president Daniel Ortegas wife, Rosario Murillo. Soon af-

ter, Frente Sur was invited to stage El Tules history in the

countrys National Theater, formerly the exclusive domain

of Nicaraguan elites. These experiences were particularly

formative of Tulenos subjectivities as model revolutionar-ies with a key role to play in Nicaraguas scenario for na-

tional liberation. As Justino commented, It was as if they

put you onan elevatorandraised you all the way up. . . then

El Tule was not only known to insiders, but also to the out-

side. The Vice-Minister of Culture of Cuba already speaks

of El Tule; El Tule appears constantly in the newspapers

and all that.23 In succeeding years, illustrated versions of

Tulenos story put together from photographs and villagers

drawings and testimonies were disseminated in Nicaragua

and abroad through books and pamphlets published by Al-

forja and a Sandinista publishing house. Through circula-

tion of their story, Tulenos came to representthe authentic

Nicaraguan rural poor, protagonists of the nations histori-cal struggle against oppression in the Sandinista national

scenario.

TulenosdramaticworkwaspartlyaresponsetotheSan-

dinista call for the participation of popular sectors in the

crafting of a national revolutionary identity (see Montoya

1995). As committed Sandinistas, Tulenos also felt called to

use their work for agitational objectives through their par-

ticipation in MECATE, which was linked to the states pro-

paganda apparatus. We were clear that Frente Sur was a

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combat group, that it was not a group of guerrilla combat,

but of ideological combat, Justino explained.24

In Historiade una decisi on, Tulenoshappilyfoundcom-

munity and communion through sharing their labor and

harvests with each other and with the nation. But, as I show

below, the actual events that took place in the cooperativeduringthe Sandinistadecade suggest a moreconflictedreal-

ity. In this reality,Historia de una decisi onwas less a faithful

representation of Tulenos past than a site for Tuleno revo-

lutionary desire, in which the New Man as model coopera-

tive worker was an increasingly frustrated project. In other

words, at some point, the scenario of model revolutionaries

depicted in Historia de una decisi onwas no longer emer-

gent from villagers experiences. Rather, it became a fixed

representationperformedasanobligationofmembershipin

MECATE as a parastatal organization andout of loyaltyto the

FSLN.TheconflictedpositionofthoseinvolvedinFrenteSur

as representatives of the Sandinista state, on the one hand,

and as members of and activists on behalf of the campesinoclass, on the other hand, created a tension in Tulenos sense

of their roles in the revolution that I could still identify in

the 1990s. This tension was expressed particularly clearly as

an ambivalence toward the story of the cooperative: Did the

story ofHistoria de una decisi onrepresent Tulenos as social

actors or as characters of the Sandinista scenario?

Producing the cooperative scenario

On taking power, the FSLN proclaimed its commitment to a

society shaped by ordinary Nicaraguans through participa-

torydemocracy. Yet it is possible to discern twoconceptions

within the party and broader Sandinista movement of whatsuch a scenario wouldentail in practice.Oneconception un-

derstood the revolution as a social project that would favor

thepopular classes andwhoseshapewouldemerge through

mass participation in forms of representativeand participa-

tory democracy. This entailed the creation of spaces for di-

alogical exchange in which the mutual construction of state

and civil society could take place.25 The second, orthodox,

socialist conception was associated with the FSLNs high-

est political body, the National Directorate,and the political

line of the Sandinista party (although not necessarily of in-

dividual party members). According to this view, Nicaragua

was a society in transition to socialism with the FSLN as

its vanguard. The FSLNs vision of the vanguard, however,

differed from the authoritarian Leninist conception. Thus,

rather than implementing a proletarian program conceived

a prioriby theleadership, thepartyaimed tocreatea political

program that would encompass the sum of the aspirations

of the heterogenous popular sectors, as expressed through

their mass organizations. Because of its emphasis on par-

ticipatory democracy, then, the FSLN also incorporated no-

tions of popular democracy into their more orthodox vision

of socialism. Yet, through time, it became clear that lead-

ers oriented by this perspective tended to see the political

process as a site at which, with the guidance of an enlight-

ened leadership, the population would arrive at a correct

understanding of their situation and interests.26 At the be-

ginning of the 1980s, however, these differences were not

so apparent. Indeed, most Sandinistas initially embracedthe leaderships scripting of participatory democracy as ex-

pressed in its particular mode of reorganizing the society

andeconomy. Itwas in this context that El Tules cooperative

developed.

El Tules cooperative was organized in 1979. Beginning

in 1981, as part of the governments agrarian reform pol-

icy, most of the former hacienda land in the vicinity of El

Tule was convertedinto agricultural and cattle-raisingcoop-

eratives known as Cooperativas Agropecuarias Sandinistas

(CAS). The state dictated that, under this modality of coop-

erative, land would be held in common, production carried

out collectively, andsalariesand produce distributedequally

among organization members. Goods produced above lo-cal consumption requirements were to be sold to a gov-

ernment organization that purchased and distributed food-

stuffs. Some goods were allowed to be sold in the market.

Cooperative organization was an important part of the

FSLNs economic project, which, during the first six years,

proposed the gradual erosion of individual production in

favor of large-scale associative forms compatible with a so-

cialized economy. The FSLN regarded a highly capital- and

technological-intensive economic modelof agroexport pro-

duction as the way to accelerateNicaraguas transitionto so-

cialism. This model was in line with the modernist develop-

mentalism undergirding 20th-century socialist scenarios of

socialand economic progress; it also responded to the prac-tical necessity of reproducing a national agroexport econ-

omy based on large estates. Pronouncing the state the cen-

tre of accumulation (Irvin 1983) in charge of investment,

finance, and commerce, the leadership turned Somozas

confiscated estates (20% of the countrys arable land) into

state farms. The Sandinistas privileging of economies of

scale, their need for foreign exchange, and an emphasis on

national unity stemming from the broad-based alliance that

brought them to poweralsopromptedthe leadership tosup-

port non-Somocista segments of the agroexport elite. The

same logic ledto the promotion of CAS. Sandinistas thought

that CASnot only would secure employment andincome for

large numbers of previously land-poor campesinos but alsowould allow for the use of technologies requiring capital in-

vestmentsbeyond small producers reach (Jonakin1994:64).

Until 1985, most campesinos who received land from the

state were required to organize as cooperatives.

Throughoutthe time I spent in El Tule, villagers praised

cooperative labor organization: Cooperative work is very

nice, Manuel claimed, because we work together andthen

we share our harvest. Most Tuleno men and women de-

scribed the ideals behind cooperatives in terms drawn from

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Sandinista discourse, which characterized cooperatives as

morally superior to individualhousehold production:Indi-

vidualism is selfish and That is capitalism, people would

say.27 Many also expressed their pride in cooperatives as pil-

larsof the revolution, notingtheir pivotal rolein government

efforts to achieve self-sufficiency in food crops.Sandinistadiscourseabouttheformativeroleofcooper-

atives for revolutionaries and revolutionary nation-building

also structured Tulenos relationship with Alforjas popu-

lar educators. Like most groups involved in the Sandin-

ista movement, Alforja accepted the national scenario pro-

posed by the leadership as a starting point for its work

with campesinos. During much of the 1980s, Alforja worked

through the Ministry of Education in supportof cooperative

organization primarily (butnot exclusively) in El Tule.In line

with dialogical methods, an important part of Alforjas work

involved providing contexts such as workshops and group

discussions in which Tulenos could reflect on cooperative

production. Alforja stressed Tulenos need to learn to workwith others by doing the work and by reflecting on, and pos-

ing solutionsas a groupto problems that emerged in the

process. Implicitly, then, the methodology of Alforja made

a distinction between two communicative systems (Taylor

2003:3132) at work in the cooperative scenario it was help-

ing construct: embodiment and telling. As in other social-

ist societies (Anagnost 1997; Apter 1995; Verdery 1991), lan-

guage becamekey to transforming consciousness in El Tule.

For,althoughtheNewManwouldbeconstructedbyingrain-

ing a new cooperative work practice, this process required

the support of a discourse that the villagers would elaborate

on the basis of their own experiences.

Tuleno men were members of several cooperatives inthe vicinity of El Tule.Yetfor its modelcooperativewhich

thepopular educatorsreferred to as the central organism of

the community (Comunidad de Cantimplora 1983:27)28

Alforja chose an organization whose members included the

higher-ranked members of the Reyes family, the commu-

nitys dominant and most active Sandinistafamily. Within El

Tule, Alforja set up a hierarchy of scenarios for performing

revolution, with this cooperative at the pinnacle, presenting

the most revolutionary performance. This cooperative was

followed in the hierarchy by the womens collective and, be-

low, other lesser organizations and the home. Implicit here

was a theory of social change whereby an unenlightened

and passive (andfeminized)audience learned from,and im-itated, the enlightened, exemplary performance of the New

Man. That Sandinismo also posited some, primarily male-

gendered, places as morerevolutionarythan otherssuggests

that the leaderships understanding of revolutionary change

assumed a similar dynamic forthe countryas a whole:Those

being formed as New Men and Women in workplaces and

revolutionaryorganizations andat the warfront wouldserve

as examples for others to imitate. Eventually, the entire na-

tion would perform revolution as the everyday.

Anagnost 1997 and Rofel 1999 have pointed to the prac-

tice of speaking bitterness as a technology for construct-

ing socialist subjects in Maos China. In El Tule, social-

ist self-construction was carried out through a discursive

elaboration of the cooperative as the central scenario for

Tulenos revolutionary transformation.This discursive elab-oration took place in 1983, during a two-week workshop

on culturalhistorical recuperation facilitated by Alforja.

Alforjas workshops were supposed to be designed accord-

ing to principles common to the philosophy, theory, and

methodology of popular education in Latin America at the

time. This approach meant assisting Tulenos in researching

their villages history, diagnosing their current situation,

and, on thebasis of this knowledge, proposingways to move

forward.

My interviews and the materials generated in the work-

shop,however, revealthat the workshop didnot engagepar-

ticipants in exploratory research from which local knowl-

edge could emerge. Rather, as in other socialist societiesin which putative presocialist histories and cultural forms

were used to justify socialist organization and practices

(Abrahams and Bukurura 1993; Cheater 1993; Grillo 1993;

Pelley 2002),Alforjaand Tulenos usedthe materialsadduced

through community reflection to arrive at predetermined

conclusions that echoed Sandinista discourse on coopera-

tives as instantiations of campesinos class and national in-

terests.For example, in their transcriptions of workshop tes-

timonies, Alforja workers chose to highlight comments that

described the need for cooperative organization as based

onthe needfor unity among the poor.29As evidence of this

need,workshoptestimoniesdiscuss the puntero system that

existed in some haciendas at which Tulenos had worked inthe days of Somoza:

The patr on[boss]wouldcomeandlookatusandchoosethe strongest one and they would call him: look, weregoing to pay you 3 cordobas, but were going to giveyou 2varas less, youre going to have 8 varas in widthand the others 10, but you [have to] work a lot so theywill follow, and if anyone leaves at 11 am. and [doesntfinish], I wont pay them for their work. They did notsay this [openly], but that was their intention. [Alforja,Programa Coordinado de Educacion Popular n.d.:8]

The discursive link between the puntero system and

the cooperative appears in another testimony transcribed

in the workshop materials: After describing an experience

with the puntero system in which three exhausted coworkers

fainted, a villager says, Thats when we made the decision.

Thats when we started talking about the cooperative. Then

it was not [the Sandinistas] talking [about cooperatives], it

was us (Alforja, Programa Coordinado de Educacion Pop-

ular n.d.:8). Once this discursive link was made, most of the

discussion turned to how best to make such organizations

work for the campesinos and the nation.

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In drawing attention to this discursive process of em-

bedding the cooperative in a predetermined village teleol-

ogy, I do not mean to claim that Tulenos reconstruction of

their historyof exploitation served to confirm their decision

to organize as cooperatives. As James Paul Gee points out,

thereisnosuchthingasthinkingforoneselfoutsideofthegroups and institutions within which we are socialized to

interpret certain types of words and worlds in certain ways

(1988:209210). Thereis alsono pure campesino discourse

or correct organizational form that follows from any par-

ticular history. In this sense, the Sandinistascenario of coop-

erative organization (had it not been a requirement for ob-

taining land) was a reasonable starting point for campesino

production. Yet missing from Alforjas methodology was the

very heart of dialogy: a process of dialogue and critical re-

flection on practice that potentially generates new knowl-

edge and understanding for teachers and students. Indeed,

by 1983, El Tules cooperative was having serious difficulties

that were not helped by the lack of critical discussion aboutcooperativesorthis modality of cooperativeasorganiza-

tionalformsfor this communityat this timein short,by the

dogmatism of modernist state development that precluded

openness to different possibilities, to different scenarios.

Rather than the dialogical emergence of a New Man,

the workshop worked as a desire-creating apparatus for the

heroic Old Man (Rodrguez 1996:pt. 2) of a prescripted mod-

ernist scenario of socialist production. In this way, Alforjas

methodologyreproducedthe patriarchal elitism of orthodox

sectors of the revolutionary leadership, enacting a pedagog-

ical split between people and state and the banking edu-

cation (Freire 1983) that dialogicalpedagogies repudiated.30

That Alforja and Tulenos playedleadership roles in state de-velopment projects was probably not incidental to this out-

come. The result was the sacrifice of the potential for an

emergent campesino scenario of socialist rural production.

(De)constructing failure

The cooperative was organized in 1979 with 37 members

from differentvillage families,a large numberof whom were

members of the Reyes family, the politically dominant fam-

ily in the village. The organizations performance, however,

did not conform to the expected scenario of class and na-

tional unity. After a few years, the cooperative had failed to

consistently deliver its products to the state and repeatedly

defaulted on its credit loans. It had also been reduced in

membership to 11 men, all of them siblings and close in-

laws of the Reyes family, working mostly independently of

each other. By the end of the 1980s, most cooperatives in

the village and its surrounding area had followed a similar

trajectory.31

For many Tuleno cooperative members, the failure of

their organization represented the loss of a dream for which

they felt responsible, and more than a tinge of defeat and

self-deprecation colored their assessment of what had hap-

pened. Documents from workshops conducted through

1986 and my interviews in 199293 with over 70 percent of

village adults provide evidence of Tulenos recurrent strug-

gles with the same problems.32 Almost every person I inter-

viewed believed that cooperatives were better than indi-vidual work but only if there was unity among members.

For me, a cooperative member noted, we human beings

dont get close to each other when we are told that they are

distributing sugared water. We get close when we are told

that what they are giving [us] is bitter. In the end, that is,

Tulenos had failed to become the altruistic New Men they

had envisioned in their more utopian moments. In a con-

versation I had with Justino about these issues, he candidly

and regretfully concluded that CAS and the ideals these

cooperatives presumably embodied were doomed in El

Tule.

The one that goes to cut the cattle fodder doesnt havethe opportunity to do anything except cut one moregrass stem, but the one that goes to the market has a lotof advantageonly to win, and not to lose, because ifhe sold [the product] cheaper than the market price, hetells youthe truth,I sold it cheaper, butif thepricewashigher [than members thought], he doesnt come backand tell you the price was higher. And also if he takes10,000 bananas, he says he is taking 8,000. However youcut it, he wins. And so he buys any bottle of booze, anypack of cigarettes, whatever, and he doesnt rememberabout the one that is cutting the fodder. So it is as ifyou see more clearly the reality of the world, the reality ofsociety, inside a cooperative. Supposedly, with this new

model ofproduction,with a new model ofsociety. . . thatis what [we] attempted to express with the cooperativehere, [but]we didnt achieve muchId say [we achieved]nothing.

Following, I offer a reading of what happened in the co-

operative that does not reduce Tuleno noncompliance with

state dictates to a lack of class and national consciousness.

My explanation focuses not on villagers intentions in the

abstract but, rather, on the disjuncture between, on the one

hand, the expectation of class unity and devotion to a na-

tional community entailed in the Sandinista revolutionary

scenario and, on the other hand, the local, national, and

global contexts of power that produced cooperative mem-bers as socialactors in the 1980s. Viewing the cooperative as

a scenario in which socialactors are distinct from characters

helps sustain the focus on this disjuncture.

Let me begin with the problem of unity among the ini-

tial cooperative members.As in therest of thecountry, some

problems derived from an incompatibility between coop-

erative and household production principles characteristic

of campesino society.33 This incompatibility fueled prob-

lems associated with a lack of internal democracystemming

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from a second common feature of campesino society: the

dominance of one family group. Yet, rather than work-

ing through these problems by addressing campesino re-

alities, the state imposed an inflexible model of cooper-

ative organization that remained fixed until 1986. As the

followingexample demonstrates,Tulenoshadparticulardif-ficulty accommodating this models stipulation that mem-

bership be restricted to adult heads of families and its de-

mand for collectivization of all aspects of production and

distribution.34

From the outset, members of the Reyes family, who

owned land independently of cooperative holdings, were

unable to invest fully in the cooperative, as they needed to

spendsomeof theirtime teachingtheirchildrento tend their

family lands. By contrast, several members unrelated to the

Reyes owned little or no land and so placed all their effort in

working cooperative lands. These men resented the uneven-

ness in members participation, particularly because Reyes

membersusedthestatesstipulationforequaldistributionofproduce to insist on remunerating members equally regard-

less of work time invested.Nonfamilymembers whohad put

in their full share of work were left feeling abused, particu-

larly if the seasons harvest could not adequately sustain all

membersfamilies.These politicalproblems onlyaggravated

members dissatisfaction with other aspects of cooperative

organization, such as its incapacity to absorb the labor of

their entire families and the consequent loss of resources,

and the difficulty it posed for transferring agricultural skills

to the next generation.35 As a result, many non-Reyes mem-

bersleft the organization. Others managed to exchange their

membership for a piece of cooperative land to be held (in-

formally) as individual property. With these defections, theReyes were freed to organize aspects of production not con-

trolled by the state as they saw fit.Nonetheless, their behav-

ior incurred the resentment of non-Reyes members and fed

community criticism of the Reyess failure to live up to their

revolutionary commitments.

Ironically, the roots of these divisive dynamics lay in

the continued presence of conditions that had historically

fueled campesino competitionand conflict and thatcooper-

ative organization was intended to eliminate. For example,

some cooperative members chose to benefit their families

at the expense of other members of their cooperative (and

of the organization as a whole) because of the insecurity of

tenureon cooperative lands in theface of theU.S. economicblockade and Contra military aggressiontowardthe Sandin-

ista state. This problem became clear to me in a discussion

with Tuleno members of a neighboring cooperative who, to

my consternation, had dismantled portions of the former

hacienda housewhichwas nowthe cooperatives adminis-

trative headquarterto use the bricks to improve their own

homes. When I asked one of the members about this, he

stated that, if the [previous] owners take back the land, we

at least improved our houses.36 In short, although in the

abstract villagers were committed to the benefit of all coop-

erative members, they were unable to consistently uphold

this position once embroiled in decisions that affected their

households and extended families economies. No doubt,

historical scenarios of patriarchal economic responsibility

and kin solidarity in the context of scarce resources under-lay Tulenos competitive behavior. Yet, while these very ma-

terial dynamics were playing out within, and undermining,

the cooperative scenario, Sandinista discourse insisted on

reducing such pressures to a matter of consciousness.

By affecting members commitment to the coopera-

tive, the problem of land insecurity also affected, by ex-

tension, their ability to keep their commitments to the

statenotably, to produce a surplus for state distribution

and consistently pay back the governments generous credit

loans. This problem, however, was not only an effect of U.S.

economic blockade and Contra military aggression but also

of the very patriarchal relationship that the Sandinista state

established with the cooperative sector. Jose voiced a keycomplaint of cooperative members: There was an insecu-

rity about the land because I couldnt bequeath it to my chil-

dren.Theissueofownershipalsocameupinthecomments

of Carlos, who suggested that the cooperative re-created a

familiarsituationfrom prerevolutionarydays:Wedidnt like

it because [the government] seemed like a patron telling us

what to do and where to sell our harvest. It didnt feel like

the land was ours. That is, like the landowner of prerevolu-

tionary days, who put limits to sharecroppers autonomy by

claiming part of their production, the state offered land to

the cooperative but (in theory) did not allow the members

to freely control its products.

The Sandinista states policies with regard to the dis-position of cooperative production changed throughout the

decade of the 1980s and varied according to the product.

These policies also varied according to the FSLNs changing

ability to shieldNicaragua fromlarger neocolonialscenarios

characterizedbyunequaltermsoftrade.Until1985,thestate

attempted to control the distribution of foodstuffs and pro-

tectproducersfromfluctuatingworldmarketpricesbyfixing

prices andbecomingthe singlelargestlegalpurchaser of ba-

sicgrains such as rice andsorghum,the twomost important

crops in El Tule.Although at some points the prices of some

productskept up with production costs,on thewhole, prices

were low, as the state attempted to secure the loyaltyof urban

populations by providing them with inexpensive foodstuffs.Campesinos in El Tule and elsewhere, thus, exercised their

agency by decreasing their productivity.37 Others sold their

surplus grain in parallel (black) markets, which increasingly

became the dominant force in fixing prices for crops (and

other items).

Because official producer priceswere insulated fromin-

ternationalmarkets, these developments only deepened the

downward spiral in producers purchasing power and en-

couraged black-market transactions. The black market was

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furtherfueledbythegovernmentsdecisiontoissuechecksin

payment for campesino crops. For many, particularly those

without means of transportation, this bureaucratic proce-

dure wasunduly cumbersome. InEl Tule, some claimed that

the bank sometimes lackedthe funds to cash their checksor

that it forced them to accept payment in parts, probably toavoid depleting its reserves. In response to its inability to

control the revolutionary scenario vis-a-vis capitalist mar-

kets, in 1985 the government initiated a series of reforms

that included endingfood subsidiesand liberalizingthe sale

ofbasicgrains.Thisledtorenewedproductionbybothcoop-

eratives and smallholders. But rising inflation in consumer

goods, particularly from 1987 to 1989, undermined much

of the benefit campesinos derived from this change in eco-

nomic policy (Spoor 1995:ch. 4).

Tulenos responsesto stateagriculturalpolicy should be

readnot only in lightof Sandinistacampesino relations,but

also, more broadly, in light of campesinos historically sub-

ordinate position vis-a-vis the Nicaraguan state. For, despitethe leaderships supposed commitmentto a scenario shaped

from below, its vision of campesino interests as shaped by

the Sandinista scenario led it to reproduce traditional pa-

triarchal scenarios of statecampesino relations by single-

handedly designing the revolutions macroproject and re-

sisting campesino input. Perhaps this accounts partly for

Tulenos response to one of the most significant changes in-

stituted by the Sandinista government on coming to power,

namely, the liberal disbursement of credit for cooperatives

and small producers. At the end of agricultural cycles fi-

nanced by these credit funds, Tuleno members repeatedly

opted to increase their buying power by using these funds

for purposes other than agriculture rather than for loan re-payment and reinvestment in the cooperative. As they soon

learned to expect from a paternalist Sandinista state, their

debts were canceled, and defaulting on payments did not

jeopardize future loans. As in the rest of the country, this ex-

perience with the governments lenient provision of credit,

along with the lack of accountability requested from them

in paying their debts, poised Tulenos to act toward the state

as they would a bountiful father who gave without expecta-

tion of return or, worse,an employer who set him- or herself

up to be taken advantage of. These actions, moreover, were

reinforced by the very language of the Sandinista scenario,

which stressed that campesinos, as an exploited class prior

to the revolution, were owed these benefits. As Daniel toldme, people in those days often remarked that we worked

enough under Somoza. Now we want to be given what is

ours.38

Aside from contradicting the Sandinistas ethical com-

mitment to participatory politicsthe supposed corner-

stone of the Sandinista scenariothe governments top-

down leadership in economic policy resulted in other, po-

litically costly, policies that demobilized the population

and undermined support for the revolution. The demand

for cooperative organization as a prerequisite for receiving

land, for example, created feelings of betrayal among many

campesinos whose social visions were grounded in histor-

ical desires for autonomy through their own plots of land.

(Given most Tulenos investment in the Sandinista scenario

of socialist transformation, however, this desire was voicedonly reluctantlyand mainlyby thefew villagersnot commit-

ted to the FSLN.) The governments underrepresentation of

campesinosin the process of price formation of basic grains

also created problems, such as calculating production costs

for agricultural products on the basis of technological lev-

els to which most campesinos (and many CAS) did not have

access(Spoor1995:4).Onlylargeproducersbenefitedasare-

sult. In the meantime, the governments need for capital led

it to court agrarian elites through preferential credit and tax

incentives, at the expense of small cultivators. These prac-

tices partially offset the governments efforts to increase the

social wage through the provision of schooling, health care,

and the like.39

In short, the states investment in a scenariogrounded in a modernist version of agroexport capitalism

produced a masculinist certainty in a vision that dehistori-

cizedanddevaluedcampesinodesiresanddistortedtheSan-

dinista politics of dialogy.

It must be recognized that Nicaraguas neocolonial

economy and the overwhelming pressures of the war con-

strained Sandinista options.40 Nonetheless, only a strong

ideological investment in a modernist vision of develop-

ment, one that contradicted campesino desires, can explain

how the leadership remained blind to campesino discon-

tent for so long. Indeed, although campesinos were clam-

oring for greater participation in economic policy forma-

tion as early as 1981 (Matus Lazo et al. 1990:148), theirdemands did not register with the leadership until the

middle of the decade. By then, campesinos were mili-

tantly claiming their rights to individual property and to

greater autonomy in cooperatives through their mass or-

ganization,the Union Nacional de Agricultores y Ganaderos

(UNAG). Campesinos ability to pressure the state through

UNAG was consistent with the revolutions goal of em-

poweringdisenfranchisedNicaraguans.Indeed,it evidences

participatory democracy at work. However, other forms of

campesino resistance that were damning to the state had

also become patent: Campesinos were withdrawing from

production and cooperatives and defecting to the Contra

guerrillas.In response, the government began a series of policy

changesin1985.Onesignificantchangewasacceleratingthe

pace of land distribution, especially of individual holdings.

Thisgesture, however, waswidelyinterpretedby campesinos

as a measure forced on an unwilling leadership by the U.S.

Contra war. Other changes included giving greater opera-

tional autonomy to cooperatives and largely ending market

intervention. Despite these reforms, serious critiques of the

revolutions economic project from within Sandinismo did

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not emerge until the endof the decade(Spoor 1995:56).41 By

then,powerfully performative scenarios of neocolonialcap-

italism combined with military aggression to ensure their

enforcement had undermined much of the revolutionary

impulse for the would-be Sandinista scenario.

For most Tulenos, who benefited greatly from the revo-lution andwere deeplybound to it affectively, coming to see

the state and, especially, the national leadership of the San-

dinista Front as something more complicated than simple

allies and benefactors was a slow process, full of pain and

ambivalence. In October 2000, I had a conversation with

Jorge, a member of the cooperative since its inception, in

which he discussed how campesinos were both benefited

and harmed by the Sandinista government. His views sup-

ported other Tulenos opinion that the village had, on the

whole, done well by the revolution, particularly in the early

1980s.Jorgescommentsareframedinthecontextoftheland

and the education Tulenos received from the government,

on the one hand, and their conscription into the war, on theother hand:

In my judgement I think that at one moment, from 79to 84, really we were spoiled. Already in 1985 one feltthat one was spoiled but that they they pinch you [tepellizcan],right,andsometimesbecauseoftheaffection[cari no]thatyoufeelandthattheyfeelforyou,youdontfeel the pain when they pinch you. . . . At the beginningyou dont feel it, you start feeling it partially. It is not thesame when I go to the funeral in another village of afriend that died, than when the pinch is harder becauseithastobemyson.Orithastobeafamilymember.Then,it puts pressure, the war pressures the government to

have to bring together affection and pinching.

Jorges words express a characteristic Janus-faced patri-

archal view of the government as both an oppressive and a

giving father. His views both support and complicate Jeffrey

L. Goulds claim that campesinos who, like Tulenos, had a

history of activism prior to or during the revolution largely

viewed the Sandinistas as sincere,if occasionally misguided

allies (1988:282). Goulds discussion of campesinos views

of the FSLN was a response to Colburns assertion that

campesinos he spoke to questioned the benefits they had

derived from the Sandinista agrarian reform, asking, What

good is a land reform if you have to sell your crops to the

government at a low price? (1988:101). Goulds argumentwas primarily based on interviews with campesino activists

who had been proletarianized prior to 1979. By contrast, in

El Tule, most campesinos were smallholders. Despite these

differences, Tulenos overall assessment of the Sandinista

agrarian reformleads me to concur with Gould that, regard-

less of specific complaints, most campesinos never ques-

tioned the validity of land distribution and that distribution

didtransform rural socialconditions.I also concur with him

that a more appropriate question to ask is why, in the face

of economic disasters, so many rural Nicaraguans contin-

ued to participate in the revolution (and, indeed, support

the FSLN).

Goulds response is not only that many campesinos, es-

pecially thelandless, benefited from theagrarian reform but

also that, by the middle of the decade, campesinos did, in-deed, have a voice in government policy through UNAG.

Although this is true, the dominance of government de-

cree in what was supposed to have been a scenario shaped

from below was not easily transformed. For, the potential

that may have existed in a context of peace to address the

problems in the Sandinistas modernist scenario was effec-

tively destroyed by the exigencies of the U.S.Contra war. It

is in this context that I read Tulenos noncompliance with

state policy not as a product of an ahistorical individual-

ist consciousness or an inability to comprehend the idea

of the nation, as implied in critiques of peasant parochial-

ism or even as the FSLNs inability to effectively communi-

cate its predicament.42

Rather, I see it as consistent with thesubordinate position campesinos, in fact, occupied in the

revolutionary polity. Indeed, viewed from within the sce-

nario motivating Tulenos responses, noncompliance did

not constitute a failure at all but, rather, a means to secure

campesinos ability to meet their responsibilities as family

patriarchsand kin-groupmembers.Their actions alsoreveal

an evolving view of the Sandinista state from a campesino

ally to a patriarchal, albeit also paternalist, organization of

power that, in the name of the nation, could both love and

pinch them.

Saldana-Portillo argues that Sandinista agricultural

policy was . . . a regime of subjection: its intention was to

produce a model subject in agriculture, one with a revo-lutionary consciousness that would benefit the citizen and

the nation (2003:112). This policy assumed that, once en-

lightened, campesinos would leave behind the (feminized)

particularity of their own reality and preexisting affiliations

to embrace a universal (masculine) subject of revolution, a

self-determining ahistorical hero that, at great cost to him-

self and his people, would sacrifice himself to work in soli-

darity with other campesinos and with the nation (Saldana-

Portillo 2003:ch. 3, 4). As I have shown, such a modernist

scenario of state-building,particularlyin a neocolonial, war-

torn context, produced roles that were increasingly at odds

with campesino realities and historical consciousness and

that Tulenos found impossible to fulfill. The role of thestate in producing such a situation, however, was rendered

invisible by the very discourse of socialist achievement

becoming the New Man. For the desire the Sandinistas cre-

ated for the New Man mystified statecampesino relations

by assuming a state that primarily represented campesino

interests. Thus,they failedto recognizethat the national sce-

nario they hadconstructedprefigured,by itscontinued eco-

nomicandpowerinequalities,theinevitabilityofcampesino

noncompliance.

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Situating knowledges and power inthe revolution

When I began writing my dissertation shortly after I returned

from Nicaragua, I was vexed by the problem of writing the

chapter about the cooperative with respect and sensitivity.Indeed, I postponed writing that chapter until the very end

because I hesitated to confront a story that Ilike Tulenos

themselvesbelieved they had spoiled by their lack of con-

sciousness. Only after extensive, focused reflection was I

able to bring back to mind a conversation I had had with

a group of Tuleno men, the significance of which I did not

understand at the time. These men had attempted to im-

press on me that their failure to unite around the coop-

erative project did not reflect an incapacity for solidarity.

They pointed, instead, to different organizational possibil-

ities that they thought would work for them. In particular,

they felt that, although producer autonomy was essential,

so, too, was uniting as a class for credit and commercializa-tion. Recollecting this conversation allowed me to see that

duringmy stay in El Tule, villagershad been searching for an

explanation for their actions that did not center on their in-

capacity for solidarity but, rather, focused on the conditions

under which different forms of solidarity were possible.43 In

so doing, Tulenos were attempting to define their interests

on the basis of the particularities of their situation, rather

than on abstract notions of class and national interests.

Ironically, the villagers impulse to define themselves

by drawing on their own knowledge and experiencesthe

heart of dialogicalmethodologieshad been suppressed by

a cooperative scenario that did not make room for alter-

native interpretations. The dominance of this scenario alsoaccounted for my inability to hear what the villagers were

saying. More generally, I could not understand that Tulenos

were operating according to two contradictory frameworks:

that of patriarch and kinsman and that of aspiring New

Man. Thus, I was unable to hear their explanations of

their noncompliance as anything more than insufficient

intentionalitymuch as they themselves seemed to regard

it.44 I realized, too, that our views were not innocent of our

own politics: The possibility of Tulenos recasting their anal-

ysis had been blunted by the will to Sandinista power that

inhered in the villages position as a model community that

both depended on the Sandinista state and was part of San-

dinista state governance. The will to Sandinista power alsoaccounted for my own inability to recognize obvious prob-

lems with the revolutionary project. Not until a few years

after the 1990 electoral defeat of the Sandinistas, during a

period of self-criticism, were Tulenos able to confront the

contradictions in the Sandinista scenario and the leader-

ships claimsto represent thepoor. Likewise,it wasonlythen

that I recognized that the Sandinista scenario that I had so

cherished was not an emergent scenario of national libera-

tion but, rather, more a product of moderniststatescripting.

Indeed, I realizedthenthat thecampesinos responsesto co-

operative policy revealed not a lack of class consciousness

but, rather, an acute awarenessof their position vis-a-visthe

state and, more specifically, vis-a-vis a state unable to break

out of the neocolonial grip. I recognized, too, that my own

romantic attachments to theSandinista vision of therevolu-tion hadled me to performthe very antidialogical,uncritical

colonialist ethnography that I had repudiated, for my role,

too, had been scripted.

My interpretation of the Sandinista states vision of the

cooperatives also rests on these dynamics of power and

knowledge. The Sandinista cooperative scenario created a

contradiction between social actors and characters as it put

the burden of transformation on individual will rather than

on widersets of national and global politicaleconomic rela-

tions. In the process, campesinos agency wasdehistoricized

and their experience devalued. Yet given the Sandinistas

ideologicalimmersionin modernist socialist scenarios,they

were unable to acknowledge that the conditions of possibil-ity for their scenario of class andnational consciousness did

not exist during most of the 1980s among cooperativized

campesinos. More to the point, these conditions could not

exist if the Sandinistas were to lead a state whose forma-

tion was inspired by modernist scenarios of development

thatexacerbated by neocolonial constraints and a war of

aggressionhinged largely on the subordination and, in

some cases, exploitation, of campesinos.

Fernando Coronil argues that the state is not the mask

that prevents our seeing political practice for what it is

(1997:114), as Phillip Abrams (1988) claims. Rather, it is the

practice of masking and the masking of practice as dual as-

pects of the historical process through which states are con-stituted (Coronil 1997:114). The case of El Tule supports

Coronils argument, yet it raises questions about the use of

the concept of masking to analyze a process that is not

fueled by intentionality or subterfugeas Coronil himself

makes clear. As I have shown through the concept of sce-

nario,likethecampesinos,theSandinistas,too,werecaught

in imaginaries that had unintended yet very real effects of

power.45 Thus, despite the Sandinistas best intentions, co-

operative organization and its construction as a scenario of

class andnationalconsciousness workedas a technology for

maintaining a patriarchaland vanguardistrelationship

between the state and campesinos, as it placed Tule nos in

a position of never living up to the states and their own ex-pectations. Indeed, the campesinos inability to live up to

Sandinista expectations, their discourse of failure, and their

continued but failed intention to rectify this behavior were

built into what increasingly became a pedagogical relation-

ship between a self-identified modernizing state and back-

ward campesinos. The discourse of failure elaborated and

reproduced bysome Sandinistas andacademicsalike,rather

than simplypointingto an empirical reality outin theworld,

was part of the process of constituting and naturalizing this

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relationship.Through a kind of perverse logic, these dynam-

ics ensured that the states vanguardist position vis-a-vis the

peasantry would be upheld.

NotesAcknowledgments. The following institutions supported the

fieldwork on which this article is based: the Social Science Research

Council; National Science Foundation; Wenner-Gren Foundation;Rackham School of Graduate Studies, University of Michigan; and

the Faculty Research andCreative Activities Fund at WesternMichi-gan University. Initial versions of this argument were formulated

with the support of a Charlotte Newcombe dissertation-writing fel-lowship; Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship foundation; a resi-dent fellowship from the Kellogg Institute for International Studies,

Notre Dame University; and a Carley J. Hunt postdoctoral fellow-ship, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. I es-

peciallywant to thankJaniseHurtig,Lessie Jo Frazier, Ellen Moodie,and Bilinda Straight for their generosity in commenting on variousdrafts andFernando Coronilfor his commentson earlier versionsof

this article and support of the project of which it is a part. FlorenceBabb, Les Field, Jon Jonakin,Karen Kampwirth,Michael Schroeder,

and an anonymous reviewer also provided insightful comments.Names of peopleand thecommunity have been changed to protect

Tulenos privacy.1. See Verdery 1991 for an argument about the problems asso-

ciated with using only a Foucauldian notion of modern power to

analyze socialist societies and for a broader argument about formsof power in these societies.

2. Some of these analyses are theoretically sophisticated, qual-ifying or going beyond the problematic concept of resistance asproposed by James Scott (1985, 1990). For critiques of this concept,

see Abu-Lughod 1990, Turton 1986, and Mitchell 1990. See White1986 for a critique of the use of the concept of everyday peasant

resistance to analyze socialist contexts. From a very different per-

spective, Humphrey 1994 critiquesthe useof theconcept of hiddentranscripts in the analysis of socialist societies.

3. See Babb 2001:ch. 1 for a discussion of the many writersand scholarsincluding anthropologistswho were inspired and

transformed by the Sandinista revolution. See, for example, Dashti1994; Field 1999; Gordon 1988; Hale 1994; Higgins and Coen 1992;

Lancaster 1988, 1992; and Montoya 1996. Writing in the aftermathof revolution, and despite a more critical perspective afforded byhindsight, Florence Babb (2001:10) credits the revolution with in-

troducing forms of democracy that became part of the Nicaraguanpolitical landscape.

4. For my interpretation of Sandinista forms of democracy, seeN. 25. For references that document Sandinista democracy in the

educational, artistic, and cultural realms, see N. 30. The differenceis striking between thes

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