Nicaragua and the Politics of Utopia: Development and Culture in the Modern State by Daniel Chavez

Author:Daniel Chavez [Chavez, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Utopias, Caribbean & Latin American, Public Affairs & Administration, Political Science, World
ISBN: 9780826520494
Google: 96L-CgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Published: 2015-12-08T11:39:02+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Cultural Warfare I

The Struggle for a Revolutionary Reader

Popular revolutions in the twentieth century had a marked educational vocation. It takes only a quick look at the social programs in the first years of these postinsurrectionary governments to realize how essential education was to them. The Soviet and Mexican Revolutions were marked by extensive educational and cultural campaigns (Figes 1996: 736; Matute 1997: 174–81; Ryan 1985: 3103; Selbin 1993). The Spanish Republic stressed the transformation of education, and then of course, there was the Cuban revolution and its successful literacy campaign (Bunck 1994: 23–27; Luis Martín 1993: 98–101; Leiner 1989: 447). With the emergence of Paulo Freire’s educational philosophy for marginalized populations in the 1960s, many Third World countries struggling for the postcolonial consolidation of their national states in the last half of the twentieth century adopted in whole or in part his methodologies to achieve formal or informal levels of education unheard of in the years of colonial oppression (cf. Ryan 1985: 3104; Roberts 1985: 2599). The present chapter and the next underscore the dramatic transformations in education and cultural production planned by the Sandinista government in two different realms: first, in the realm of literary production both before and after the triumph of the revolution; second, in the realm of film exhibition and production during the revolutionary era.

In the first part of this chapter, I propose a revision to how these educational and cultural tendencies were developed during the long years of struggle for cultural hegemony. While many academics believe that the cultural and educational transformations of the period began with the political triumph of the Nicaraguan Revolution in 1979, I argue that the main characteristics of the cultural politics of the 1980s were already taking shape before the revolutionaries came to power. In the second part of this chapter, I concentrate on how the formation of a revolutionary citizen was directed under the mythologies of a new concept of “the popular” or “the masses” essential to advancing the utopian discourse of the Sandinista Revolution.

As discussed in the previous chapter, the main discursive construction at the top of the semiotic quadrangle of discourses in the Sandinista era was a version of the myth of the New Latin American man. When and how to contribute to the construction of this myth was in great part the central objective of the educational and cultural politics of the New Nicaragua. Also in the second part of this chapter, I analyze the major tenets, varieties, and critical elements constituting this new discursive formation. I will analyze first the evolution of the concept of “the people” from the point of view of critical theory in relation to Latin American political history of the second part of the twentieth century, and then I will compare this discursive construction with its specific implementation in a speech delivered by one of the commanders of the revolution. Commander Víctor Tirado López was in charge of the Ministry of Labor, and even if his rhetorical persona was not

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