Socialist Scenarios, Power, and State Formation in Sandinista Nicaragua

ROSARIO MONTOYA University of Colorado, Boulder
Socialist scenarios, power, and state formation in Sandinista Nicaragua
A B S T R A C T
Drawing 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 the states modernist project between the state and the cooperative sector. [nation-state formation, revolution, modernism, socialism, cooperatives, model villages, mystication]
n this article, I examine the cultural politics of socialist state formation in Sandinista Nicaragua (197990). Recent research on state formation has moved away from Weberian notions of the state as a rational 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 normalization (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 subjectivity, state legitimacy, and political culture foregrounded in explicit political projects. As Katherine Verdery (1991:304305) argues, in such societies, culture and language take on particular importance to the state because, unlike liberal states, socialist states have not beneted from centuries of gradual development such that subjectication can take place more through practice 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 exemplarity (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 totalitarianism is now widely questioned. Indeed, the unmet expectations of these social projects likely contributed to ethnographic studies of socialist societies emphasizing widespread cynicism and noncompliance or invoking 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, online ISSN 1548-1425. C 2007 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through 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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Volume 34 Number 1 February 2007
revolution was exceptionally enthusiastic and hopeful, even as, toward the latter part of the 1980s, scholars critiqued certain aspects of the revolutionary project.3 The Sandinistas unusual exibility and their vision of a different kind of revolutionincluding a commitment to religious pluralism and valorization of the popularcaptured the imagination of writers, scholars, and activists across the world.4 As anthropologist Roger Lancaster wrote in his ethnography of a Managua working-class neighborhood, And I can saylike George Orwell writing of Cataloniathat for the rst time in my life, I really believed in socialism (1992:9). The democratic impulse that animated the Sandinista vision also lent the regime exceptional legitimacy and popularity among ordinary Nicaraguans, if only in critical numbers until the midto 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 cooperative in a model Sandinista community that exhibited widespread noncompliance with state dictates yet retained strong affective ties and commitment to the Sandinista state. I examine this problem by exploring contradictions created for cooperative members by a Sandinista nation-state imaginary of which cooperatives were supposed to be emblematic. To do so, I extend Verderys insight on language and culture in socialist states by examining state formation through performative scenarios. The analysis shows the workings of the visible forms of power underscored by scholarship on socialism. 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 working in southeastern Nicaragua.6 He referred me to a little Baldelomar et al. 1988), book, Esta luz ya no se apaga (Pena which I picked up a few days later in a bookstore in Managua. The book was published by a popular education center on various cultural and whose staff had worked with Tulenos 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 20th century, of the fateful arrival in the mid-1970s of a group 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 relationship to the guerrillas and, later, to the Sandinista movement. After the revolutionary triumph, so the story went, the villagers became exemplary revolutionaries in the Sandinista movement. Their exemplarity was particularly evident in their organization of an agricultural and cattle-raising cooperative. According to the book, the cooperative became the fulcrum for the construction of a community of class and na-
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 the revolution. Like many other Latin Americans and people worldwide, I had been an avid consumer of the utopian stories of a New Society that Nicaragua exported through print and 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 nanced by the U.S. government and waged by Somocistas and people disaffected with the Sandinista government. By 1989, 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 revolutionary redemption seemed to offer hope just when Nicaraguans most needed it. In claimed that the the book recounting their story, Tulenos Sandinistas consciousness-raising efforts had empowered them to dene their needs, transform their practices accordingly, and begin to construct Sandinista New Men and Women and the New Nicaragua. The story suggested that had attained had been made the clarity of purpose Tulenos possible by the Sandinistas use of dialogical pedagogies designed to ground their consciousness-raising work in villagers own experience and knowledge. It was this knowl staying steadfast in the edge that had been key to Tulenos 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, remaining steadfastand sharing this villages experience in dialogical pedagogiesbecame even more urgent in light of those events as Sandinistas struggled to remain united and protect the gains of the revolution. I began eldwork in El Tule two years after the 1990 Sandinista electoral defeat.7 Soon, I began to realize that what had transpired in the village during the revolutionary decade 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 particular 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 to communities 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 were rst 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 had become a destination for Nicaraguan
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and foreign revolutionary tourists eager to witness radical social transformation.8 Throughout the revolutionary decade and during its af termath, Tulenos role model was the Socialist New Man, often glossed simply as the revolutionary man, icon of class men and women conand national consciousness. Tuleno structed their history as the story of a chain of New Men, strung together through their martyrdom and heroism. Our struggle began with the Indian leader Diriang en, 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 community we have two martyrs and heroes, they were killed by the guardia for defending us, the poor.9 As heirs to this felt the onerous weight of revolutionary tradition, Tulenos historical responsibility. This was especially so among the men, whom Sandinista discourse designated as the central political subjects of the revolution. were By the time I began eldwork, however, Tulenos unsure about how well they had played their role as revolutionaries. When I asked about their lives during the revolution, they delighted in relating tales of exemplarity. Yet when we turned to critical discussions of the difculties they had faced during those years, their memoriesrecounted nostalgically, as when reminiscing about other, more distant pastsseemed to be shadowed by a discourse about backwardness, culpability, failure, and moral shortTuleno comings. In particular, Tulenos directed this discourse to their performance in the cooperative, an organization hailed by Sandinistas as the site par excellence of campesino revolutionary consciousness.10 Time and again during my stay in El Tule, I listened as male villagers castigated themselves and other villagers for failing to live up to exemplary Sandinista cooperative-member standards. The gap between the ideal and real actions of esh-and-blood people haunted my eldwork as it seemed to haunt Tulenos lives. Only later did I understand that my presumptuous disappointment in their performance reiterated a discourse that existed beyond 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 outcome was attributable in large measure to campesinos rejection (or grudging acceptance) of the program. Campesino attitudes were, in turn, seen as resulting from the governments marginalization of rural producers in economic planning 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 argued that greater involvement would have given campesinos a better understanding of the political and economic dif-
culties the government was facing, and more would have remained loyal to the FSLN and its programs (Coraggio 1986; Fagen 1986). Both these arguments criticized the governments exclusionary, even arrogant, policy-making practices. Yet the second view also contained an implicit critique of campesino parochialism, voiced by political scientist Forrest D. Colburn in his discussion of campesino responses to agrarian reform benets: The rural poor narrowly interpret their interests, at a cost to other strata of society (1989:194). Less subtle arguments along this line, particularly among some Sandinista cadres and leaders, claimed outright that campesino recalcitrance to cooperative organization was caused by this sectors backwardness and a perceived individualism rooted in a capitalist consciousness (see, e.g., Wheelock 1981). Some of these arguments, in other words, became discourses that represented campesinos in the familiar modernist image of rural folk as parochial, distrustful, and even traitorousincapable of class and national 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 participating in the constitution of a Sandinista scenario of national liberation and revolutionary state formation that presumed, and created a desire for, an idealized protagonist in the gure of the New Man. In developing my argument, I draw on the concept of scenario as it has been articulated by performance theorist Diana Taylor (2003). Taylor denes scenario as a paradigmatic setup that relies on supposedly live participants, structured around a schematic plot, with an intended, though adaptable end (2003:13). Scenarios, she claims, exist as culturally-specic imaginariessets of possibilities, ways of conceiving conict, 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 time and 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 resistance 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) Nicaragua through forms of representative and participatory democracy that would allow each social sector to dene 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 social justice. In other words, building the New Nicaragua entailed creating local scenarios that would
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emerge from communities own analysis and practice, albeit in dialogical relation to the master logic of a (socialist) national revolutionary scenario.15 El Tule as a revolutionary community and its cooperative as the key site of campesino revolutionary practice were two such local scenarios. Here, I point out various dimensions of performance contained in the concept of scenario (Taylor 2003:ch. 1) that are particularly relevant for analyzing the case of El Tule: First, the concept points to the Sandinista framing or bracketing of the village and its cooperative as revolutionary, in contrast to other places and practices dened as not revolutionary. Second, given that scenarios, by denition, preexist any particular rendition of themselves, the concept acknowledges El Tules revolutionary organization and practices (e.g., cooperative organization) as placespecic iterations of similar practices ongoing throughout Nicaragua and preexisting in a Latin American revolutionary tradition. Third, the concept points to a separation between as social actors and as characters in a revolutionary Tulenos scenario. As Taylor notes, this distance allows one to keep both the social actor and the role in view simultaneously, and thus recognize the areas of resistance and 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 audiences to see and evaluate. Taylors concept of scenario is also relevant to this study in that, by denition, it implicates me, as ethnographer, 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 is centrally based on the position that I adopted in relation to the community during my research. This aspect of scenarios is entirely consistent with the ethnographic proposition that the participant-observer is her or his own research instrument. 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 revolutionary scenario that gloried campesinoworker revolutionary commitment as foundational to the emerging national community. It was this desire that set the stage for the discourse of failure and, through this discourse, the mystication of the states relationship to the cooperative sector. For, as I show in subsequent discussion, the cooperative project did not become a site for performing socialist commitment, as the state (and some campesinos) had expected. Rather, it became an ideological process by which the Sandinista state, through no conscious intention of the leadership, naturalized the patriarchal and vanguardist relationship that its project of national development established between the state and campesinos. Such an outcome,
I argue, resulted from contradictions between an idealized scenario of cooperative solidarity based on Sandinista notions 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 mystication 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; Stepputat 2001). My work suggests that inasmuch as revolutionary states are drawn into modernist, developmentalist state scenarios (Scott 1998) and embedded in neocolonial capitalist relations of power, they, much like liberal capitalist states, create marginal populations that are at once considered to be foundational to particular national identities and excluded from these same identities by the sorts of disciplinary knowledge that mark them as racially and civilizationally other (Das and Poole 2004:8). Yet I also suggest that it is not just the subjects of the state who are produced by the power of these scenarios; so is the state itself. In what follows, I trace the trajectory of power/knowledge in the relationship be tween Tulenos, the Sandinista state, and myself 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; Rodr guez 1996; Saldana-Portillo 2003): How did a state committed to the liberation of campesinos re-create itself as a patriarchal and vanguardist formation that reinscribed 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 southwestern 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 primarily male-headed, nuclear-family and two-generation, extended-family households. Historically, men worked their own or their wives lands or both, supplementing subsistence agriculture with wage labor on neighboring estates. Women worked 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 cooperative land received during the Sandinista revolution. Todays village boundaries are a product of a history of community fractures caused by sibling conict 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 eldwork 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 in political discussion, and incite them lage, engage Tulenos to revolutionary practice. Over the years, revolutionary practice in El Tule varied according to the changing needs of the revolution. During the mobilization of the 1970s, engaging in revolutionary practice had meant becoming combatants or guerrilla support elements. In the 1980s, it meant becoming militants of the Sandinista party, participants in mass and cultural organizations, and members of production cooperatives and collectives and the army. In the post-Sandinista 1990s, it meant protecting the hard-won gains of the revolution by remaining organized and actively garnering support for Sandinista projects. For most Tulenos, my arrival in the village to study their involvement in the Sandinista movement seemed initially to repeat, albeit in the dramatically different conjuncture of the 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 were often surprised stages of my research. Thus, Tulenos 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 compared with previous visitors: You are like the Sandinista schoolteachers, Lidia told me, in reference to the guerrillas who had Dona arrived in El Tule in 1975 disguised as schoolteachers. They also visited all the houses, asked things about the families. They also wanted to nd out everything about the community. 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, people mentioned that Alforjas team leader was a Peruvian like you, they would say, indicating they regarded this friend also told me that connection as signicant. A Tuleno he had heard villagers speculate that, as a Peruvian, I was probably a member of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) at into the Peruvian revolution.18 tempting to recruit Tulenos Finally, villagers also referred to me as a companera internacionalista. Like internationalists during the revolution, they noted, I tried to help out in various ways: tutoring schoolchildren, writing project proposals, conducting history and popular-education workshops, and so on. Yet I resisted this identication, protesting that I was there to do research, not to provide assistance. The small forms of assistance I did provide, I repeated over and over to mostly deaf ears, could not be compared with the support that interna projects throughout the 1980s. tionalists had given Tuleno had positioned me, I Yet, as I thought about how Tulenos understood that, for them, there was an important commonality between myself and other outsiders, whether guerril-
las, popular educators, internationalists, government technicians, or party cadres. At the time, I thought this commonality was our commitment to or interest in the Sandinista revolution. Later I realized it was our stepping into El Tules scenario such that we became instruments in the construction of a national desire for New Men and Women. By correctly perceived, outsiders this I mean that, as Tulenos into the revolution, incitementwhether recruiting Tulenos working with them on local development projects, or interviewing themwas aimed at fullling our desire to witness the villagers perform revolution before our eyes. Our actions reected, in other words, projections of revolutionary desire as authentic protagonists of revolutionary onto Tulenos 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 pretensions to ethnographic objectivitynot to positivist renditions of this concept anyway. Yet by regarding my own work as simply that of a committed researcher, Ilike so many before memisidentied the role I was, in fact, playing in the Sandinista scenario.19 Scholars of socialist realism have remarked on its mode of subjectication 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 classied campesinos as class and national revolutionary subjects. In El Tule, the prescriptions for exemplary practice that constituted these positions structured both outsiders and villagers assessment performance. Most Tuleno men rst conceived of of Tuleno themselves as central characters in the national drama when FSLN guerrillas entered their village in 1975 on a recruitment mission. During much of their time in the village, the guerrillas carried out consciousness-raising work focused on issues of class and nation. In particular, they encouraged villagers to think about their poverty and consequent factional struggles over scarce land resources as stemming from unequal land distribution and hacienda exploitation of their labor. In this work, the guerrillas were heavily inuenced by dialogical methodologies then current in Latin American popular education, particularly by the radical pedagogy of Paulo Freire (1983). According to Freire, the oppressed possessed the means to come to know their oppression through knowledge of their lives and their work in and on the world; it was the role of radical educators to facilitate a dialogue whereby such awareness (or consciousness) could be constructed. Justino explained that, in El Tule, theatera central methodology of popular educationbecame a means to construct such knowledge by helping villagers analyze and clarify their presituation as campesinos. Thus, when a group of Tulenos sented plays about their experiences of oppression to the community, according to Justino, people appropriated so much the problem that the sociodrama or play was touching on . . . that people felt represented and sometimes they even
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interruptedthats my case, right, thats what [was] happening to me. men went underIn succeeding years, several Tuleno ground as FSLN guerrillas, and the village as a whole became militantly pro-Sandinista. After the FSLN took power, El Tule became a vanguard Sandinista community: Among other organizations, the rst agricultural and cattle-raising cooperative and the rst 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 community was in place. International and Nicaraguan visitors came to the vil (re)activated lage in large numbers. With each visit, Tulenos their local scenario: They adeptly recounted the story of their village in versions long and short and showed visitors around their (mens) cooperative and womens collective, their new schoolhouse, health center and road, and villagers made colleca communal house in which Tuleno were tive decisions and held events. In so doing, Tulenos not merely putting on a show, acting as wily villagers who misled outsiders by presenting an (onstage) surface that hid their real (offstage) depths. Rather, as exemplary revolutionaries, the villagers assumed a role in the model village scenario that entailed performing revolution before Nicaraguan and foreign audiences. Conversely, audiences roles, particularly those of foreign audiences, entailed acting as engaged witnesses of revolution. As Canadian internationalist Chris Brookes wrote in his book Now We Know the Difference: The People of Nicaragua, You wont nd [El Tule] on any map of Nicaragua. The little village is geographically insignicant. But in many ways the whole story of the Nicaraguan revolution 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 prominent 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 uncertain and in ux, foregrounding their position as campesinos vis-` a-vis the state rather than their role as its representatives. As happened in other parts of the country, just after took over neighboring land that the 1979 Triumph, Tulenos had belonged to an infamous landowner, without waiting for directives from the state. Soon after, a Sandinista ofcial 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 21 As in the prerevolutionary period, then, in the to Tulenos.
and Sandinistas were early years of the revolution, Tulenos able to coconstruct scenarios for the mutual constitution of state and civil society. became more integrated into the state, and As Tulenos as the state consolidated and came under siege by Contra forces, however, the possibilities for such emergent revolutionary scenarios began closing off. These dynamics of state formation were exemplied particularly clearly by Tulenos work as dramatic performers in support of the Sandinista men created a theater group state. In 1981, a group of Tuleno they named Frente Sur (Southern Front). Frente Sur became one of the founding members of a campesino theater and cultural organization (Movimiento de Expresi on Art stica y Teatral, MECATE) that worked closely with the Ministry of Education in support of the revolution. The groups signature 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 of campesinos in the Sandinista national scenario, the play ex revolutionary commitment through their emplied Tulenos 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 attended by high-level government ofcials, including thenpresident Daniel Ortegas wife, Rosario Murillo. Soon after, 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 revolutionaries with a key role to play in Nicaraguas scenario for national liberation. As Justino commented, It was as if they put you on an elevator and raised you all the way up . . . then El Tule was not only known to insiders, but also to the outside. 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 Alforja and a Sandinista publishing house. Through circula came to represent the authentic tion of their story, Tulenos Nicaraguan rural poor, protagonists of the nations historical struggle against oppression in the Sandinista national scenario. dramatic work was partly a response to the SanTulenos dinista call for the participation of popular sectors in the crafting of a national revolutionary identity (see Montoya also felt called to 1995). As committed Sandinistas, Tulenos use their work for agitational objectives through their participation in MECATE, which was linked to the states propaganda 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 happily found comIn Historia de una decisi on, Tulenos 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 cooperative during the Sandinista decade suggest a more conicted reality. In this reality, Historia de una decisi on was less a faithful revorepresentation of Tulenos past than a site for Tuleno lutionary desire, in which the New Man as model cooperative worker was an increasingly frustrated project. In other words, at some point, the scenario of model revolutionaries depicted in Historia de una decisi on was no longer emergent from villagers experiences. Rather, it became a xed representation performed as an obligation of membership in MECATE as a parastatal organization and out of loyalty to the FSLN. The conicted position of those involved in Frente Sur as representatives of the Sandinista state, on the one hand, and as members of and activists on behalf of the campesino class, 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 as social story of Historia de una decisi on represent Tulenos 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 participatory democracy. Yet it is possible to discern two conceptions within the party and broader Sandinista movement of what such a scenario would entail in practice. One conception understood the revolution as a social project that would favor the popular classes and whose shape would emerge through mass participation in forms of representative and participatory democracy. This entailed the creation of spaces for dialogical 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 highest political body, the National Directorate, and the political line of the Sandinista party (although not necessarily of individual 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 priori by the leadership, the party aimed to create a 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 participatory democracy, then, the FSLN also incorporated notions 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 enlightened leadership, the population would arrive at a correct understanding of their situation and interests.26 At the beginning of the 1980s, however, these differences were not so apparent. Indeed, most Sandinistas initially embraced the leaderships scripting of participatory democracy as expressed in its particular mode of reorganizing the society and economy. It was 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 policy, most of the former hacienda land in the vicinity of El Tule was converted into agricultural and cattle-raising cooperatives known as Cooperativas Agropecuarias Sandinistas (CAS). The state dictated that, under this modality of cooperative, land would be held in common, production carried out collectively, and salaries and produce distributed equally among organization members. Goods produced above local consumption requirements were to be sold to a government organization that purchased and distributed foodstuffs. Some goods were allowed to be sold in the market. Cooperative organization was an important part of the FSLNs economic project, which, during the rst six years, proposed the gradual erosion of individual production in favor of large-scale associative forms compatible with a socialized economy. The FSLN regarded a highly capital- and technological-intensive economic model of agroexport production as the way to accelerate Nicaraguas transition to socialism. This model was in line with the modernist developmentalism undergirding 20th-century socialist scenarios of social and economic progress; it also responded to the practical necessity of reproducing a national agroexport economy based on large estates. Pronouncing the state the centre of accumulation (Irvin 1983) in charge of investment, nance, and commerce, the leadership turned Somozas conscated 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 power also prompted the leadership to support non-Somocista segments of the agroexport elite. The same logic led to the promotion of CAS. Sandinistas thought that CAS not only would secure employment and income for large numbers of previously land-poor campesinos but also would allow for the use of technologies requiring capital investments beyond small producers reach (Jonakin 1994:64). Until 1985, most campesinos who received land from the state were required to organize as cooperatives. Throughout the time I spent in El Tule, villagers praised cooperative labor organization: Cooperative work is very nice, Manuel claimed, because we work together and then men and women dewe share our harvest. Most Tuleno scribed the ideals behind cooperatives in terms drawn from
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Sandinista discourse, which characterized cooperatives as morally superior to individual household production: Individualism is selsh and That is capitalism, people would say.27 Many also expressed their pride in cooperatives as pillars of the revolution, noting their pivotal role in government efforts to achieve self-sufciency in food crops. Sandinista discourse about the formative role of cooperatives for revolutionaries and revolutionary nation-building also structured Tulenos relationship with Alforjas popular educators. Like most groups involved in the Sandinista movement, Alforja accepted the national scenario proposed 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 support of cooperative organization primarily (but not exclusively) in El Tule. In line with dialogical methods, an important part of Alforjas work involved providing contexts such as workshops and group could reect on cooperative discussions in which Tulenos production. Alforja stressed Tulenos need to learn to work with others by doing the work and by reecting on, and posing 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 helping construct: embodiment and telling. As in other socialist societies (Anagnost 1997; Apter 1995; Verdery 1991), language became key to transforming consciousness in El Tule. For, although the New Man would be constructed by ingraining 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. men were members of several cooperatives in Tuleno the vicinity of El Tule. Yet for its model cooperativewhich the popular educators referred 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 communitys dominant and most active Sandinista family. 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, below, other lesser organizations and the home. Implicit here was a theory of social change whereby an unenlightened and passive (and feminized) audience learned from, and imitated, the enlightened, exemplary performance of the New Man. That Sandinismo also posited some, primarily malegendered, places as more revolutionary than others suggests that the leaderships understanding of revolutionary change assumed a similar dynamic for the country as a whole: Those being formed as New Men and Women in workplaces and revolutionary organizations and at the war front would serve as examples for others to imitate. Eventually, the entire nation would perform revolution as the everyday.
Anagnost 1997 and Rofel 1999 have pointed to the practice of speaking bitterness as a technology for constructing socialist subjects in Maos China. In El Tule, socialist self-construction was carried out through a discursive elaboration of the cooperative as the central scenario for Tulenos revolutionary transformation. This discursive elaboration took place in 1983, during a two-week workshop on culturalhistorical recuperation facilitated by Alforja. Alforjas workshops were supposed to be designed according to principles common to the philosophy, theory, and methodology of popular education in Latin America at the in researching time. This approach meant assisting Tulenos their villages history, diagnosing their current situation, and, on the basis of this knowledge, proposing ways to move forward. My interviews and the materials generated in the workshop, however, reveal that the workshop did not engage participants in exploratory research from which local knowledge could emerge. Rather, as in other socialist societies in which putative presocialist histories and cultural forms were used to justify socialist organization and practices (Abrahams and Bukurura 1993; Cheater 1993; Grillo 1993; used the materials adduced Pelley 2002), Alforja and Tulenos through community reection to arrive at predetermined conclusions that echoed Sandinista discourse on cooperatives as instantiations of campesinos class and national interests. For example, in their transcriptions of workshop testimonies, Alforja workers chose to highlight comments that described the need for cooperative organization as based on the need for unity among the poor.29 As evidence of this need, workshop testimonies discuss the puntero system that had worked in existed in some haciendas at which Tulenos the days of Somoza: The patr on [boss] would come and look at us and choose the strongest one and they would call him: look, were going to pay you 3 c ordobas, but were going to give you 2 varas less, youre going to have 8 varas in width and the others 10, but you [have to] work a lot so they will follow, and if anyone leaves at 11 am. and [doesnt nish], I wont pay them for their work. They did not say this [openly], but that was their intention. [Alforja, Programa Coordinado de Educaci on 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 Educaci on Popular 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 embedding the cooperative in a predetermined village teleol ogy, I do not mean to claim that Tulenos reconstruction of their history of exploitation served to conrm their decision to organize as cooperatives. As James Paul Gee points out, there is no such thing as thinking for oneself outside of the groups and institutions within which we are socialized to interpret certain types of words and worlds in certain ways (1988:209210). There is also no pure campesino discourse or correct organizational form that follows from any particular history. In this sense, the Sandinista scenario of cooperative organization (had it not been a requirement for obtaining 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 reection on practice that potentially generates new knowledge and understanding for teachers and students. Indeed, by 1983, El Tules cooperative was having serious difculties that were not helped by the lack of critical discussion about cooperativesor this modality of cooperativeas organizational forms for this community at 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 (Rodr guez 1996:pt. 2) of a prescripted modernist scenario of socialist production. In this way, Alforjas methodology reproduced the patriarchal elitism of orthodox sectors of the revolutionary leadership, enacting a pedagogical split between people and state and the banking education (Freire 1983) that dialogical pedagogies repudiated.30 played leadership roles in state deThat Alforja and Tulenos velopment projects was probably not incidental to this outcome. The result was the sacrice of the potential for an emergent campesino scenario of socialist rural production.
self-deprecation colored their assessment of what had happened. Documents from workshops conducted through 1986 and my interviews in 199293 with over 70 percent of village adults provide evidence of Tulenos recurrent struggles with the same problems.32 Almost every person I interviewed believed that cooperatives were better than individual 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, had failed to become the altruistic New Men they Tulenos had envisioned in their more utopian moments. In a conversation 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 have the opportunity to do anything except cut one more grass stem, but the one that goes to the market has a lot of advantageonly to win, and not to lose, because if he sold [the product] cheaper than the market price, he tells you the truth, I sold it cheaper, but if the price was higher [than members thought], he doesnt come back and tell you the price was higher. And also if he takes 10,000 bananas, he says he is taking 8,000. However you cut it, he wins. And so he buys any bottle of booze, any pack of cigarettes, whatever, and he doesnt remember about the one that is cutting the fodder. So it is as if you see more clearly the reality of the world, the reality of society, inside a cooperative. Supposedly, with this new model of production, with a new model of society . . . that is what [we] attempted to express with the cooperative here, [but] we didnt achieve muchId say [we achieved] nothing. Following, I offer a reading of what happened in the co noncompliance with operative that does not reduce Tuleno 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 national community entailed in the Sandinista revolutionary scenario and, on the other hand, the local, national, and global contexts of power that produced cooperative members as social actors in the 1980s. Viewing the cooperative as a scenario in which social actors are distinct from characters helps sustain the focus on this disjuncture. Let me begin with the problem of unity among the initial cooperative members. As in the rest of the country, some problems derived from an incompatibility between cooperative and household production principles characteristic of campesino society.33 This incompatibility fueled problems associated with a lack of internal democracy stemming
(De)constructing failure
The cooperative was organized in 1979 with 37 members from different village families, a large number of whom were members of the Reyes family, the politically dominant family in the village. The organizations performance, however, did not conform to the expected scenario of class and national 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 inlaws 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 cooperative members, the failure of For many Tuleno their organization represented the loss of a dream for which they felt responsible, and more than a tinge of defeat and
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from a second common feature of campesino society: the dominance of one family group. Yet, rather than working through these problems by addressing campesino realities, the state imposed an inexible model of cooperative organization that remained xed until 1986. As the had particular diffollowing example demonstrates, Tulenos culty accommodating this models stipulation that membership be restricted to adult heads of families and its demand 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 spend some of their time teaching their children to 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 unevenness in members participation, particularly because Reyes members used the states stipulation for equal distribution of produce to insist on remunerating members equally regardless of work time invested. Nonfamily members who had put in their full share of work were left feeling abused, particularly if the seasons harvest could not adequately sustain all members families. These political problems only aggravated 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 difculty it posed for transferring agricultural skills to the next generation.35 As a result, many non-Reyes members left the organization. Others managed to exchange their membership for a piece of cooperative land to be held (informally) as individual property. With these defections, the Reyes were freed to organize aspects of production not controlled by the state as they saw t. Nonetheless, their behavior 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 competition and conict and that cooperative organization was intended to eliminate. For example, some cooperative members chose to benet their families at the expense of other members of their cooperative (and of the organization as a whole) because of the insecurity of tenure on cooperative lands in the face of the U.S. economic blockade and Contra military aggression toward the Sandinista state. This problem became clear to me in a discussion members of a neighboring cooperative who, to with Tuleno my consternation, had dismantled portions of the former hacienda housewhich was now the cooperatives administrative 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 benet of all cooperative 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 material 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 cooperative, the problem of land insecurity also affected, by extension, 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. Jos e voiced a key complaint of cooperative members: There was an insecurity about the land because I couldnt bequeath it to my children. The issue of ownership also came up in the comments of Carlos, who suggested that the cooperative re-created a familiar situation from prerevolutionary days: We didnt like it because [the government] seemed like a patr on 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 prerevolutionary 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 disposition 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 shield Nicaragua from larger neocolonial scenarios characterized by unequal terms of trade. Until 1985, the state attempted to control the distribution of foodstuffs and protect producers from uctuating world market prices by xing prices and becoming the single largest legal purchaser of basic grains such as rice and sorghum, the two most important crops in El Tule. Although at some points the prices of some products kept up with production costs, on the whole, prices were low, as the state attempted to secure the loyalty of 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 xing prices for crops (and other items). Because ofcial producer prices were insulated from international markets, these developments only deepened the downward spiral in producers purchasing power and encouraged black-market transactions. The black market was
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further fueled by the governments decision to issue checks in payment for campesino crops. For many, particularly those without means of transportation, this bureaucratic procedure was unduly cumbersome. In El Tule, some claimed that the bank sometimes lacked the funds to cash their checks or that it forced them to accept payment in parts, probably to avoid depleting its reserves. In response to its inability to control the revolutionary scenario vis-` a-vis capitalist markets, in 1985 the government initiated a series of reforms that included ending food subsidies and liberalizing the sale of basic grains. This led to renewed production by both cooperatives and smallholders. But rising ination in consumer goods, particularly from 1987 to 1989, undermined much of the benet campesinos derived from this change in economic policy (Spoor 1995:ch. 4). Tulenos responses to state agricultural policy should be read not only in light of Sandinistacampesino relations, but also, more broadly, in light of campesinos historically subordinate position vis-` a-vis the Nicaraguan state. For, despite the leaderships supposed commitment to a scenario shaped from below, its vision of campesino interests as shaped by the Sandinista scenario led it to reproduce traditional patriarchal scenarios of statecampesino relations by singlehandedly designing the revolutions macroproject and resisting campesino input. Perhaps this accounts partly for Tulenos response to one of the most signicant changes instituted 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 members repeatedly nanced by these credit funds, Tuleno opted to increase their buying power by using these funds for purposes other than agriculture rather than for loan repayment 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 experience with the governments lenient provision of credit, along with the lack of accountability requested from them to act toward the state in paying their debts, poised Tulenos as they would a bountiful father who gave without expectation 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 benets. As Daniel told me, 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 commitment to participatory politicsthe supposed cornerstone of the Sandinista scenariothe governments topdown leadership in economic policy resulted in other, politically 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 historical desires for autonomy through their own plots of land. (Given most Tulenos investment in the Sandinista scenario of socialist transformation, however, this desire was voiced only reluctantly and mainly by the few villagers not committed to the FSLN.) The governments underrepresentation of campesinos in the process of price formation of basic grains also created problems, such as calculating production costs for agricultural products on the basis of technological levels to which most campesinos (and many CAS) did not have access (Spoor 1995:4). Only large producers beneted as a result. 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 practices 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 scenario grounded in a modernist version of agroexport capitalism produced a masculinist certainty in a vision that dehistoricized and devalued campesino desires and distorted the Sandinista politics of dialogy. It must be recognized that Nicaraguas neocolonial economy and the overwhelming pressures of the war constrained Sandinista options.40 Nonetheless, only a strong ideological investment in a modernist vision of development, one that contradicted campesino desires, can explain how the leadership remained blind to campesino discontent for so long. Indeed, although campesinos were clamoring for greater participation in economic policy formation as early as 1981 (Matus Lazo et al. 1990:148), their demands did not register with the leadership until the middle of the decade. By then, campesinos were militantly claiming their rights to individual property and to greater autonomy in cooperatives through their mass organization, the Uni on Nacional de Agricultores y Ganaderos (UNAG). Campesinos ability to pressure the state through UNAG was consistent with the revolutions goal of empowering disenfranchised Nicaraguans. 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 changes in 1985. One signicant change was accelerating the pace of land distribution, especially of individual holdings. This gesture, however, was widely interpreted by campesinos as a measure forced on an unwilling leadership by the U.S. Contra war. Other changes included giving greater operational 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 end of the decade (Spoor 1995:56).41 By then, powerfully performative scenarios of neocolonial capitalism 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 beneted greatly from the revolution and were deeply bound to it affectively, coming to see the state and, especially, the national leadership of the Sandinista 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 beneted 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. Jorges comments are framed in the context of the land received from the government, and the education Tulenos on the one hand, and their conscription into the war, on the other hand: In my judgement I think that at one moment, from 79 to 84, really we were spoiled. Already in 1985 one felt that one was spoiled but that they they pinch you [te pellizcan], right, and sometimes because of the affection [carino ] that you feel and that they feel for you, you dont feel the pain when they pinch you. . . . At the beginning you dont feel it, you start feeling it partially. It is not the same when I go to the funeral in another village of a friend that died, than when the pinch is harder because it has to be my son. Or it has to be a family member. Then, it puts pressure, the war pressures the government to have to bring together affection and pinching. Jorges words express a characteristic Janus-faced patriarchal 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 benets 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 argument was 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 reform leads me to concur with Gould that, regardless of specic complaints, most campesinos never questioned the validity of land distribution and that distribution did transform rural social conditions. I also concur with him that a more appropriate question to ask is why, in the face
of economic disasters, so many rural Nicaraguans continued to participate in the revolution (and, indeed, support the FSLN). Goulds response is not only that many campesinos, especially the landless, beneted from the agrarian reform but also that, by the middle of the decade, campesinos did, indeed, have a voice in government policy through UNAG. Although this is true, the dominance of government decree 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 effectively 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 individualist consciousness or an inability to comprehend the idea of the nation, as implied in critiques of peasant parochialism or even as the FSLNs inability to effectively communicate its predicament.42 Rather, I see it as consistent with the subordinate 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 patriarchs and kin-group members. Their actions also reveal 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 revolutionary consciousness that would benet the citizen and the nation (2003:112). This policy assumed that, once enlightened, campesinos would leave behind the (feminized) particularity of their own reality and preexisting afliations to embrace a universal (masculine) subject of revolution, a self-determining ahistorical hero that, at great cost to himself and his people, would sacrice himself to work in soli darity with other campesinos and with the nation (SaldanaPortillo 2003:ch. 3, 4). As I have shown, such a modernist scenario of state-building, particularly in a neocolonial, wartorn context, produced roles that were increasingly at odds with campesino realities and historical consciousness and that Tulenos found impossible to fulll. The role of the state 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 created for the New Man mystied statecampesino relations by assuming a state that primarily represented campesino interests. Thus, they failed to recognize that the national scenario they had constructed pregured, by its continued economic and power inequalities, the inevitability of campesino noncompliance.
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Situating knowledges and power in the 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 consciousness. Only after extensive, focused reection was I able to bring back to mind a conversation I had had with men, the signicance of which I did not a group of Tuleno understand at the time. These men had attempted to impress on me that their failure to unite around the cooperative project did not reect an incapacity for solidarity. They pointed, instead, to different organizational possibilities 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 commercialization. Recollecting this conversation allowed me to see that during my stay in El Tule, villagers had been searching for an explanation for their actions that did not center on their incapacity for solidarity but, rather, focused on the conditions under which different forms of solidarity were possible.43 In were attempting to dene their interests so doing, Tulenos on the basis of the particularities of their situation, rather than on abstract notions of class and national interests. Ironically, the villagers impulse to dene themselves by drawing on their own knowledge and experiencesthe heart of dialogical methodologieshad been suppressed by a cooperative scenario that did not make room for alternative interpretations. The dominance of this scenario also accounted 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 insufcient intentionalitymuch as they themselves seemed to regard it.44 I realized, too, that our views were not innocent of our recasting their analown politics: The possibility of Tulenos 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 Sandinista state governance. The will to Sandinista power also accounted for my own inability to recognize obvious problems with the revolutionary project. Not until a few years after the 1990 electoral defeat of the Sandinistas, during a able to confront the period of self-criticism, were Tulenos contradictions in the Sandinista scenario and the leaderships claims to represent the poor. Likewise, it was only then that I recognized that the Sandinista scenario that I had so cherished was not an emergent scenario of national liberation but, rather, more a product of modernist state scripting.
Indeed, I realized then that the campesinos responses to cooperative policy revealed not a lack of class consciousness but, rather, an acute awareness of their position vis-` a-vis the state and, more specically, vis-` a-vis a state unable to break out of the neocolonial grip. I recognized, too, that my own romantic attachments to the Sandinista vision of the revolution had led me to perform the 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 wider sets of national and global politicaleconomic relations. In the process, campesinos agency was dehistoricized and their experience devalued. Yet given the Sandinistas ideological immersion in modernist socialist scenarios, they were unable to acknowledge that the conditions of possibility for their scenario of class and national 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 formation 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 aspects of the historical process through which states are constituted (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 scenario, like the campesinos, the Sandinistas, too, were caught in imaginaries that had unintended yet very real effects of power.45 Thus, despite the Sandinistas best intentions, cooperative organization and its construction as a scenario of class and national consciousness worked as a technology for maintaining a patriarchaland vanguardistrelationship in between the state and campesinos, as it placed Tulenos a position of never living up to the states and their own expectations. 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 relationship between a self-identied modernizing state and backward campesinos. The discourse of failure elaborated and reproduced by some Sandinistas and academics alike, rather than simply pointing to an empirical reality out in the world, was part of the process of constituting and naturalizing this
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relationship. Through a kind of perverse logic, these dynamics ensured that the states vanguardist position vis-` a-vis the peasantry would be upheld.
Notes
Acknowledgments. The following institutions supported the eldwork 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 and Creative Activities Fund at Western Michigan University. Initial versions of this argument were formulated with the support of a Charlotte Newcombe dissertation-writing fellowship; Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship foundation; a resident fellowship from the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Notre Dame University; and a Carley J. Hunt postdoctoral fellowship, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. I especially want to thank Janise Hurtig, Lessie Jo Frazier, Ellen Moodie, and Bilinda Straight for their generosity in commenting on various drafts and Fernando Coronil for his comments on earlier versions of this article and support of the project of which it is a part. Florence Babb, Les Field, Jon Jonakin, Karen Kampwirth, Michael Schroeder, and an anonymous reviewer also provided insightful comments. Names of people and the community have been changed to protect Tulenos privacy. 1. See Verdery 1991 for an argument about the problems associated with using only a Foucauldian notion of modern power to analyze socialist societies and for a broader argument about forms of power in these societies. 2. Some of these analyses are theoretically sophisticated, qualifying or going beyond the problematic concept of resistance as proposed by James Scott (1985, 1990). For critiques of this concept, see Abu-Lughod 1990, Turton 1986, and Mitchell 1990. See White 1986 for a critique of the use of the concept of everyday peasant resistance to analyze socialist contexts. From a very different perspective, Humphrey 1994 critiques the use of the concept of hidden transcripts in the analysis of socialist societies. 3. See Babb 2001:ch. 1 for a discussion of the many writers and scholarsincluding anthropologistswho were inspired and transformed by the Sandinista revolution. See, for example, Dashti 1994; Field 1999; Gordon 1988; Hale 1994; Higgins and Coen 1992; Lancaster 1988, 1992; and Montoya 1996. Writing in the aftermath of revolution, and despite a more critical perspective afforded by hindsight, Florence Babb (2001:10) credits the revolution with introducing forms of democracy that became part of the Nicaraguan political landscape. 4. For my interpretation of Sandinista forms of democracy, see N. 25. For references that document Sandinista democracy in the educational, artistic, and cultural realms, see N. 30. The difference is striking between these works and those documenting the topdown methods used in places such as Cuba (Fagen 1969), the Soviet Union (Kenez 1985), and China (Yu 1964). 5. In 1990, the Sandinista party was voted out of power, which devolved to a coalition of 14 U.S.-supported parties. As I show in this article, by the end of the 1980s, Nicaraguans had many reasons to be unhappy with the Sandinistas. Yet many observers agree that a large portion of the population voted against the Sandinistas to bring an end to the U.S.-funded and orchestrated Contra war, which had inicted enormous human and economic costs. According to this perspective, which I share, a vote against the Sandinistas did not in all cases reect the regimes loss of legitimacy. In the aftermath of the revolution, the Sandinista party remained the single largest political party in the country. For a useful discussion on the complexity of
issues of state legitimacy, see Hann 1993:1114. For an analysis of socialist state processes of legitimation in socialist Romania, see Verdery 1991. 6. Internationalist is a term that refers to foreign nationals working (or engaging in combat) in solidarity with a revolutionary movement. 7. I conducted ethnographic eldwork and oral historical research in El Tule from June 1992 to August 1993, in March 1995, in July 1997, and in September and October 2000. Most of the sources on which I have drawn for this study were collected in the course of this research and are, thus, conditioned by that time and context and by my interpretations. These sources were part of a broader set of eldwork materials, including a survey on political opinions and class, familial, and gender ideologies with over 70 percent of village adults; hundreds of hours of taped and untaped interviews on these and other topics with men and women of a range of ages; oral historical and life-history interviews; and participant-observation materials recorded in my eld notes. 8. Scholars of socialism have often claimed that the governments of socialist countries restricted foreign visitors to model institutions (collectives, factories, etc.). This claim does not apply to Nicaragua, where large numbers of internationalists were fully integrated into the revolution, living in the country for years at a time. The claim is also problematic, as Lisa Rofel argues, because it assumes that they [visitors] could nd an unmediated voice . . . if only they were given sufcient freedom (1999:291). I also wish to distance my characterization of revolutionary tourists from that of scholars like Paul Hollander (1997). Hollander argues that leftwing Western intellectuals blindness to the pitfalls of revolutionary regimes has been rooted in alienation from their own secularizing societies, which pushes them to search for community, meaning, and purpose in idealized societies. Their political views, rather than reality, he argues, shape what they encounter in socialist societies. Hollander fails, however, to apply a similar analysis to apologists of capitalist systems, as if their views are transparent representations of reality. Perhaps his inability to be critical of his own ideological lenses accounts for why he nds no merit in critiques of Euro-U.S. societies and praise for certain aspects of revolutionary societies. 9. The term guardia refers to the dictator Somozas repressive force, the National Guard. In the 1990s, the term was also sometimes used by Nicaraguans to refer to the Contra guerrillas, as many had been former National Guard members. 10. I use the term campesinoroughly rural producerinstead of the more commonly used term peasant to avoid anachronistic and culturally misplaced connotations stemming from the European feudal origin of the latter term. 11. A study conducted in the mid-1980s suggested that cooperatives performance was very uneven (Centro de Investigaci on de la Reforma Agraria [CIERA] 1985). Yet a review of the literature for this period nds a heavy emphasis on cooperatives myriad problems in organization, production, delivery of products to the state, and loan repayment (see, e.g., Cort es 1987; Matus Lazo et al. 1990; Ortega 1987; Porras 1987). A study by Jon Jonakin (1994) carried out in the second half of the 1980s shows that, at least in some areas, cooperative performance improved after 1986, as the government exibilized certain aspects of production and marketing. By then, however, the Sandinista project was already in crisis because of the effects of the U.S.Contra war and FSLN errors. This may explain and other campesinos I spoke with do not seem to why Tulenos have registered these improvements as signicant in their overall assessment of cooperatives contribution to the revolution. 12. Images of rural producers as lacking in social and political consciousness have been common in socialist countries (see, e.g., Cernea [1974] in Kideckel 1982; Pelley 2002:11). In her analysis of Che Guevaras discourse, a foundational source in the Latin American
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revolutionary tradition, Mar a Josena Saldana-Portillo (2003:67 78) nds a constant shifting between portrayals of campesinos as the natural subjects of revolution and as cunning and potentially traitorous to revolutionaries. That these images are similar to those of Miskitu Indians in Nicaraguas Atlantic coast encountered by Charles R. Hale (1994:1213) among Sandinistas suggests that suspicion of the traditional is as much a feature of revolutionary discourse as it is of capitalist discourse. See also Nelson 1999:5961 and Lemon 2000:ch. 6 for similar images of Indigenous populations in Guatemala among the countrys Left and of Romani gypsies in Russia, respectively. 13. Similar concepts have been proposed by anthropologists to capture culturally patterned modes of social interaction (Geertz 1980; Ortner 1973, 1989; Sahlins 1981; Schieffelin 1976; Turner 1974). These concepts, however, either do not bring together or are not concerned with certain dimensions of performance and theatricality (particularly issues of display and audience participation) that I discuss below as useful in my analysis of the case of El Tule. 14. For a Sandinista historical analysis of Nicaraguan history that makes use of this scenario, see Wheelock 1974. For an analysis of the obverse of this scenariothat of the conquerors discovery of native Americansusing the concept of scenario, see Taylor 2003:ch. 2. Soto and Burbach 15. For a discussion of this vision, see Nunez 1987:49. 16. I dene ideology as discourses and practices that (re)produce relations of domination. 17. As I indicated at the beginning of this article, many scholars of the Nicaraguan revolution were deeply supportive of the Sandinista project. For anthropological analyses sympathetic to the revolution but that resisted incorporation into its scenario and expressed, instead, constructive criticism of Sandinista policies, see the work of Hale (1994). Les W. Fields work (1999) is more critical of the Sandinistas, yet Field mentions that this was not always the case during his eldwork in the 1980s. Not surprisingly, both of these scholars worked with indigenous peoples who, they argue, were excluded from the very premises of a revolutionary nationalism based on mestizo hegemony. 18. Sendero Luminoso was a Maoist guerrilla organization that launched a revolutionary war against the Peruvian state. It operated primarily from 1980 to 1992, although vestiges of the movement remain to this day. 19. See Nelson 1999:ch. 2 for a very interesting discussion of the investments and pleasures undergirding the self-fashioning of gringos in solidarity with progressive movements. 20. Les Field reminds me that the FSLN made revolutionary icons of the artisan community of Monimb o, (mis)representing its participation in the uprising against Somoza as motivated by a revolutionary class consciousness. The San Juanero potters he worked with (Field 1999) were similarly iconicized by the Sandinistas, in this case, as indigenous producers of culture that were emblematic of certain revolutionary goals. 21. The uses of theater as a tool for social transformation in Nicaragua are examined particularly carefully by Randy Martin (1994) and Pamela Calla (1996). These researchers also examine the revolution as theater. An examination of theater for social change in Latin America, more generally, is provided by Pianca 1990 and Taylor 1991. Judith Weiss with colleagues (1993:pt. 3) offers a useful review of the history of the Latin American New Theater movement and includes references to sources in both Spanish and English. For article-length case studies, see Rizk 1989; Kaiser-Lenoir 1989; and Weiss 1989a, 1989b. 22. The image of the cooperative was extensively used in Sandinista Nicaragua to symbolize campesino revolutionary consciousness. See Martin (1994:ch. 4) for an analysis of a play from
the Nicaraguan Community Theater Movement in which a cooperative member is confronted with ethical choices that symbolize the campesinos dilemmas in awakening to revolutionary consciousness. 23. This comment is taken from an interview I conducted with Justino Reyes Balderrama on February 8, 1993. 24. This comment is taken from an interview I conducted with Justino Reyes Balderrama on June 25, 1992. Frente Sur confronted these limitations in a way that popular theater groups not directly afliated with the state did not. For example, in an analysis of a play by a community theater group, Martin argues that the play provided a platform to both represent and elicit a critical response with respect to the direction of national policy that required mobilizing the participation of an audience. This medium for the formation of a critical public was directed at the discourse of the state even though this theater group was not itself an agency of state policy. Here social problems were articulated and rehearsed in performance. [1994:83] 25. Participatory democracy formally refers to the incorporation of citizen participation in popular organizations in civil society (Hoyt 1997:1). In Sandinista Nicaragua, these organizations were supposed to represent the interests of distinct social sectors to the state while helping consolidate the revolutionary project. Most writings on Sandinista participatory democracy focus on mass organizations. Yet I also see Sandinistas notions of participatory democracy reected in their goal of using dialogical methodologies to structure statesociety relations. This goal was particularly evident at the beginning of the 1980s, prior to the destabilization brought about by the U.S.Contra war. Most ministries, for example, had departments of popular education. The extensive consultative sessions with ordinary people carried out across the country prior to crafting the 1986 constitution also illustrate such a vision at work. Yet another example is the practice of members of the Sandinista National Directorate of going onstage in public assemblies called De Cara al Pueblo (Face toward the People), where crowds gathered to query national leaders about their concerns (Barndt 1991). For sources that document the complexity of this issue in the realms of culture, education, and the arts, see N. 29. 26. It must be recognized that the FSLNs position was also shaped by the pressures of economic embargo and the U.S.Contra war. For an insightful discussion of FSLN understanding of the revolutionary project and its role as the vanguard, see Hale 1994:3034. 27. Discourse on overcoming individualism such as that espoused was common among Sandinistas and was part of the by Tulenos discourse on the morality of cooperatives that I discuss in this article (see also N. 21). See, for example, Field 1999:95 and Saldana-Portillo 2003:140144. 28. On the formative role of cooperatives, see Comunidad de Cantimplora 1983:734. See also Alforja, Programa Coordinado de Educaci on Popular n.d.:28. 29. See Alforja, Programa Coordinado de Educaci on Popular n.d., specically Archivo Cantimplora A.CTL. Un dia de tantos en la comunidad de Cantimplora, Audio/video, frame 54. 30. Freire (1983:58) describes banking education as one in which students receive, le, and store teachers information deposits. The experience with popular education in El Tules cooperative echoes one of the most important critiques (and self-critiques) of the revolutionary government: the tendency to issue top-down directives to popular organizations. Thus, it now seems clear that, notwithstanding the commitment to dialogics among some in the Sandinista leadership, it was an impulse realized to a signicant degree only in limited contextssuch as education, theater, and the artsand could not transcend the top-down demands of modernist
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state-building, particularly in a country under siege. For some works that document Sandinista dialogics at work, see Barndt 1991, Craven 1989, and Martin 1994. For works documenting Sandinista efforts at using dialogical methods, and the tensions between these and top-down methods, see Arnove 1986, La Belle 1986, and Street 1984. For an ethnographic study that illustrates the incorporation of popular perspectives into the revolutionary process, see Lancaster 1988. Lancaster argues that radical grassroots Christianity emerged from Nicaraguan popular religiosity, shaped the character of the revolution, and became the dominant ideology of the revolutionary culture (1988:59). 31. For countrywide analyses of economic and political problems in cooperatives, see N. 5. A government study (Direcci on Nacional de Reforma Agraria 1987) of CAS showed a reduction in membership of 34 percent for the years 198186 (the study did not account for uctuations in membership, only total member numbers). Existing data are not clear on whether loss of membership in cooperatives in other parts of the country was affected by the dominance of particular family groups, as it was in El Tule and its surrounding area (but see Jonakins observation, N. 35). Thus, by the end of the decade, of the ve cooperatives in and around El Tule, three were composed primarily of members of one family, one by members of two families, and another by members of three families. Moreover, the number of members in most of these cooperatives was 11, only slightly above the 10 members legally required for cooperative organization. 32. See Comunidad de Cantimplora 1983, Cooperativa Maria 1984, and Alforja, Programa Coordinado de Mercedes Avendano Educaci on Popular 1986. 33. Difculties with cooperative and collective organization stemming from preexisting, usually household, forms of social organization were common in socialist societies. For a particularly careful analysis of some of the problems faced in these systems, see Grant Evanss (1990) study of Lao peasants. Although Evans details some of the problems with collectivized agriculture as imposed by the Laotian government, he makes clear that the rural producers he worked with were not naturally inclined either toward or against cooperation. 34. Although the Sandinista government decreed that women could become cooperative members, in practice, they experienced resistance from men. As a result, only a small fraction of cooperative members in the country were women. Numbers for the 1980s as a whole do not exist. Yet the First National Census of Cooperatives conducted in 1984 (CIERA) revealed that only 6 percent of the total number of cooperative members were women (Padilla et al. 1987:128). 35. Many CAS circumvented these problems by exibilizing some of their practices, such as paying members on the basis of time worked rather than equally on the basis solely of membership (Jonakin 1995). Yet in cooperatives in which one extended family was dominant, problems with favorable treatment to relatives tended to occur (Jon Jonakin, personal communication, May 15, 2006). 36. See Saldana-Portillo 2003:131 for a similar example in the department of Matagalpa. Like myself, Saldana-Portillo speculates that campesinos behavior was conditioned by the uncertainty imposed by the U.S.Contra war on their future tenure on cooperative land. 37. During a conversation with Justino, I was reminded of how complicated peoples perceptions of adequate remuneration can be. Justino stated self-critically that he and other campesinos often resented the prices they received from the state, momentarily forgetting the generous subsidies the state provided for a range of agricultural inputs. Economist Jon Jonakin (personal communication, May 15, 2006) heard similar reections among producers he worked with in other areas of Nicaragua.
38. This quote is from an interview conducted October 14, 2000. In the early days of the revolution, this type of understanding, which betrays a continued paternalist view of the state, seems to have been widespread. By 1980, workers in many farms and factories had shortened the work day, increased holidays, and so on. See, for example, Hoyt 1997:45. For similar attitudes in Cuba, see MacEwan 1981:145. 39. See Stahler-Sholk 1990 for an insightful analysis of the multiclass alliances presupposed by the Sandinista economic project and the difculties this presupposition created in meeting the demands of both capitalists and popular classes. 40. Important works that discuss the economic difculties of Third World revolutions in the transition to socialism are GrifthJones 1981, Fagen et al. 1986, Morawetz 1980, and White et al. 1983. For Nicaragua, see Colburn 1986, Enr quez 1991, and Stahler-Sholk 1990. 41. Sandinista campesinista, or peasant-centered critiques, stated that throughout history peasants have worked the land individually and were not accustomed to work in collectives. If we had been more exible from the beginning, as to the distribution of land and the modalities of organization of peasants to receive it, possibly we would have strengthened the co-operative movement much more, and above all, the CAS. [ENVIO 1989] 42. I use the term noncompliance rather than resistance to under did not intend to subvert the cooperatives but, score that Tulenos rather, were exercising their agency in protecting their interests. 43. In a book manuscript I am currently completing (Montoya in n.d.), I examine in detail the organizations devised by Tulenos the late 1990s to advance campesino interests. 44. Whereas Tulenos were operating according to two frameworks, that of the aspiring New Man was dominant in their overall assessment of their performance. Of course, campesinos discourse on their failure may have been more pronounced at the time of my eldworkthe aftermath of Sandinista electoral defeatthan it was during the FSLN period. Yet Tulenos persistent statements about overcoming individualism in the workshop materials from the revolutionary period, their investment in their status as model revolutionaries, and my oral-history materials demonstrate that it was a discourse that circulated during that period as well. This interpretation is consistent with a view of hegemony that refuses to make an essential distinction between ideological persuasion and physical coercion (see Mitchell 1990). Indeed, it is in this vein that I see this article as contributing to an understanding of ideological state effects such as those that I document for El Tule. Thus, I believe that the widespread discourse on the morality of cooperatives and on transforming individualism among Sandinista subaltern classes, especially cooperative members, suggests that a similar process took place elsewhere in the country. Of course, the effect elsewhere was likely less strong than in El Tule, given the communitys close ties to the state. See Anagnost 1997:102 for a similar argument in a case in socialist China. 45. Ann Anagnost (1997:ch. 4) makes this point masterfully in her analysis of ritualized forms of subject formation in Maos China.
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accepted June 3, 2006 final version submitted July 25, 2006 Rosario Montoya University of Colorado, Boulder Department of Anthropology, 1350 Pleasant St. Hale Sciences 350/233 UCB Boulder, CO 80309-0233 rosario.montoya@colorado.edu
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ROSARIO MONTOYA University of Colorado, Boulder

Volume 34 Number 1 February 2007

In search of the New Man