
          A Southerner in Nicaragua
          By Whisnant, David E.David E. Whisnant
          Vol. 10, No. 5, 1988, pp. 1-5
          
          David E. Whisnant, longtime commentator on Southern
Appalachian culture who is perhaps best known as the author of All
That Is Native and Fine (The Politics of Culture in an American Region
CINC Press, 1983), returned this summer from a five-month visit to
Nicaragua as a Fulbright scholar. Whisnant, a professor of English,
American studies and folklore at the University of North Carolina, was
interviewed in Chapel Hill in June by Southern Changes editor Allen
Tullos. The topic was Whisnant's trip and the historical study of the
politics of culture in Nicaragua that is his current project. His
edited comments follow.
          THINK THE FIRST thing to say is that I came to Nicaragua from a
different direction and with a different set of expectations than
those which were characteristic of many of the internacionalistas (and
there were many) whom I met there. Some of them came out of a history
of political activity that goes back in their families for a
generation or so. One of my acquaintances was the son of a Communist
Party organizer from New York in the 1930s. There were people who had
come out of SDS or other kinds of 1960s organizing. I did not. I came
there with political awarenesses and interests that had developed
relatively late in my life, primarily through work I was then
beginning to do in the Appalachian region.
          As I got to know more people from the U.S. who were in Nicaragua, I
discovered some other Southerners. I had a few discussions with a
couple of them about whether and to what extent their being from the
South had anything to do with the way they experienced being in
Nicaragua.
          One reaction we turned out to share was that as Southerners we
frequently had difficulty conversing with Nicaraguans. The difficulty
seemed not to have much to do with the language barrier, since we all
spoke Spanish. As well as I could understand it, it had to do with
people's accustomed styles of verbal interaction. For a number of

reasons, Nicaraguans, particularly Nicaraguan men, tend to be highly
verbal and domineering in conversation. Such a style and dynamic are
uncongenial to me, mainly I think because in the mountains where I
grew up, people talked relatively little and listened a lot. They
tended to be self-effacing in conversational situations. But most of
the Nicaraguan men I met weren't.
          When a Nicaraguan man begins to talk, I learned to my utter
astonishment, he may talk for an hour and a half without
stopping. Although he may give certain verbal cues which are (at least
formally) invitations for response, it is clear that he really doesn't
expect you to respond, because no time is left for a response to
occur. I found that difficult to deal with, and so did the friends I
made there from the South.
          
            Men and Women in Nicaragua
          
          I had more serious difficulties with Nicaraguan men's treatment of
women. Having grown up in the South, I am not unfamiliar with macho
behavior, and I know also that macho, though it has a Spanish name, is
a virtually universal phenomenon. Nevertheless, what I witnessed in
Nicaragua was frequently shocking and depressing. In conversation
among a group of adult married couples, for example, men frequently
would literally shush their wives when they tried to say
anything. Such a gesture offended me; I had never seen anything like
it. Although women in the mountains where I grew up were somewhat more
taciturn than men, when they did talk they were usually listened
to.
          Partly to try to avoid seeing such behavior, I spent a lot of time
talking with women--frequently about machismo, about the ways
Nicaraguan women and men interact, and about the general situation of
women there.
          Margaret Randall and others have written eloquently of the central
and heroic roles Nicaraguan women played in the armed struggle
preceding the overthrow of Somoza, and of their continuing importance
in national reconstruction. What has not so often been talked about is
that machismo is still a fundamental fact of life for virtually every
man and woman in Nicaragua. Indeed a number of women told me it is
worse now than ever. It takes a larger variety of forms than I ever
imagined before I went. I had never imagined how pervasive it was, how
many aspects of life it affects or even determines, how brutal it can
be and frequently is. And how ultimately dysfunctional it is for a
social order that is trying to go through the transformations that
Nicaragua is trying to go through.
          Besides being degrading and
painful to individual women, machista attitudes and behaviors
(personal and institutional) block and frustrate the potential
contributions that a vast number of very bright, sensitive women could
make and are trying to make to the process of reconstruction. They are
making contributions nevertheless, basic and crucial ones, but much
less efficiently and effectively than they might, and at an
unconscionably high personal cost.
          What Nicaraguan women say about machismo varies depending upon who
one is talking with--on how self-consciously ideological they are, on
their social class and profession. One woman friend of mine--a highly
transitional professional who has suffered considerably from the
operation of machismo--said in essence that dealing with this and some
other women's issues has to wait because the first priority must be
the solidification of the revolution. In her mind there was a
hierarchical ranking between the urgent needs of "the revolution" and
the urgent needs of women. My own feeling is that it is artificial to
partition those two dynamics in such a way. It is also damaging,
because it leaves things too much in the hands of men, who are still
for the most part setting the parameters of the revolution and
controlling its institutions.
          If one talks to working-class women--and I spent a lot of time
talking with maids, with the women who came to wash clothes and iron,
with women who were working in the markets--one finds that the forms
machismo takes in their lives are sometimes very brutal. Wife-beating
is quite common, and there is a great deal of drinking and
philandering. Women know it and know what it costs them, and have
little protection against it, though some recent laws expressly forbid
such behavior. In any case, working-class women seemed to me less
willing than some more ideologically oriented professional women to
excuse machismo, or to comprehend it within some higher critique.
          If I frequently felt out of sync with Nicaraguans in conversations,
and if I felt put off by machismo, I also felt that we Southerners had
a real commonality of experience with them in certain other ways. We
knew in the first place what it was to be in a subjugated, dominated
and deprecated culture. More particularly, as a hillbilly I felt that
I had some intuitive feeling of what Nicaraguan people had experienced
culturally and politically vis-a-vis the U.S. And that helped me in
some ways with what I went there to do.

          
            Culture and National Reconstruction,/hi>
          
          I went to Nicaragua to work on a book on the politics of culture
there, to follow up some questions I had dealt with in All That is
Native and Fine. I took as my focus for talking about the politics of
culture the development of cultural policy and programs under the
Sandinistas since 1979.
          But one obviously cannot begin to talk simply about what has
happened since 1979. So I tried to do a lot of historical work on the
dynamics of cultural change in Nicaragua since the middle of the
nineteenth century. As soon as one begins to look at Nicaraguan
cultural history it becomes clear that one must talk about
intervention.
          Certainly the Spanish conquest was a massive and destructive
cultural as well as economic and political intervention. Many of the
most fundamental dynamics of Nicaraguan cultural and social history
since the 1600s flowed from that conquest: the virtual extermination
of the original population, mestizoization and catholicization, the
east/west division of the country, the Liberal (Leon) vs. Conservative
(Granada) antagonisms and wars.
          But the Spanish intervention was not the only or the last one by
any means. The British, for instance, intervened in the seventeenth
century on the east coast and dominated life there until the
1860s. Serious U.S. intervention began in the 1840s and has continued
with few interruptions since. One of the best known nineteenth century
books about Nicaragua, Nicaragua: Its People, Scenery, Monuments and
the Proposed Canal (1862), was written by Ephraim G. Squire, the
U.S. consul who was sent to Central America to do reconnaissance in
preparation for building the proposed canal through Nicaragua. Passing
up the San Juan river, Squire noted that a few American business
establishments were already there, and some Nicaraguans had already
picked up a few phrases of colloquial American English.
          The arrival of the U.S. Marines in 1912 was a cultural as well as
military and political intervention. The national sport of Nicaragua,
for example, is baseball, brought there by the Marines. Following the
ascension of the first Somoza to power in the mid-1930s, Nicaragua
became a major consumer of the worst of U.S. commercial popular
culture. That pattern continued through 1979 and in some degree still
continues, though it has been modulated considerably by Nicaraguan's
lack of money to travel or buy goods, and of course by the Reagan
trade embargo.
          What have the Sandinistas done about those historical patterns? My
answer is that the original intention was to institute a whole range
of policies that were culturally sensitive and responsible, and they
have attempted a number of things, some more successfully than
others. They have tried in the first place to counter the history of
cultural intervention, particularly that emanating from the U.S. They
have also tried to democratize cultural activity, to make it more
accessible, to legitimize more forms of it, to disperse cultural
institutions throughout the country. Nicaragua had very few cultural
institutions before 1979, and Managua had become almost the only
center of institutionalized cultural activity. So an effort was made
to build a new set of cultural organizations and
institutions--museums, libraries, theater and dance companies--and to
distribute them throughout the country.
          They have also focused more on cultural production than on
consumption--on empowering and training people to think of themselves
as producers of culture rather than as passive consumers. They have
tried to integrate cultural concerns into other arena of development
policy, such as economic policy and housing policy.
          Such a projection seemed very attractive to me when I began to read
about it several years ago. After all, I had just spent a couple of
years reading about cultural policy in the United States, and it was
precisely the lack of such concerns--for democratizing cultural
institutions, for extending respect to non-elite culture, for
sensitivity to cultural values in other policy sectors--that seemed to
me to characterize most cultural policy in this country, where there
has been any at all.
          So I went to Nicaragua with a very positive set of
expectations. And having been there, I still feel that the
Sandinistas' intentions in the area of cultura1 policy were good. But
the situation proved to be much more complicated than what I had read
led me to expect.
          In the first place, at present most efforts at social or cultural
reconstruction are effectively at a standstill and have been for
several years--as a result of the war. Unfortunately, the
militarization of Nicaraguan society has been necessary to confront
the real threat that U.S. policy has presented. The past eight years
have made it clear that there is nothing the Reagan administration
won't do to 

destroy the Sandinistas if they think they can get away
with it. Whether they can get away with it is the only
consideration. So one cannot know what the Sandinistas would have done
in the cultural arena if they had had the tranquility (and money) to
do it.
          If you look at the national budgets from 1979-81, what you find is
that military expenditures were taking less than 10 percent. By
1987-88, it was about 50 percent. And the problem is not only the
expenditures themselves, but also the social and cultural distortions
that occur when you're putting that percentage of the budget into
warfare. Virtually all young men over the age of sixteen, and many
young women, are going to end up in the military. And there are many
losses because of that. People who might be poets, who might be
writers, who might be singers or dancers or whatever are not doing
those things with proper concentration and intensity. The years
between sixteen and twenty-five, after all, are crucial years for the
education and artistic formation of any creative person.
          So the loss of human potential is enormous, and in a small country
of three million people such losses are especially critical.  The
distortion of institutions, including cultural ones, is also
serious. The country has managed to open several small new museums,
start a number of new dance and theater companies, an art school, a
school of dance, and so on. But the facilities of all are pathetic;
there is no other way to describe them: tiny buildings minimally
converted from other uses, and virtually no equipment. Clearly, things
have not happened on anything like the scale envisioned in the heady
days of late 1979.
          On the other hand, as some Nicaraguan artists and writers have
pointed out, revolution and war can also offer new creative challenges
and possibilities. Nicaraguan poetry during the past quarter-century
is a good example. If one reads it not only from 1978-79 and later,
but also from the early 1960s on, one sees that it is remarkable in
both quantity and quality. The forced transformations of people's
lives and consciousness led to enormous creativity. Poetry by FLSN
people who were imprisoned by Somoza in the 1970s--such as that
written by Ricardo Morales Aviles from Managua's La Aviacion
prison--is deeply moving and beautiful, and it could not have been
written under any other circumstances. Similar things occurred in
music and theater.
          But the war and its economic consequences have not been the only
problems in the area of post-revolutionary cultural development. It
turns out that some of the Sandinistas' thinking about culture, and
therefore their programmatic projection of it, has not been as
well-grounded as it might have been. The most dramatic case of their
lack of cultural sensitivity and sophistication was of course their
treatment of the Miskitos on the east coast. That has been much
discussed. It arose out of a complex set of circumstances, but central
among them was the fact that like the majority of Nicaraguans, the
Sandinista leadership was from the west coast and knew very little
about the east coast of their own country.
          It also seems to me that there has been some tendency to
romanticize and simplify the cultural history and the contemporary
cultural realities of the country. In a way this is understandable
because so little has been written about either. The kinds of detailed
cultural studies that exist in abundance for the United States and for
many other countries simply have never been done in Nicaragua. A
researcher in the area of culture or cultural history in Nicaragua
cannot hope to have the kind of research materials and facilities that
would be necessary to do the job well. Archives, where they exist, are
small and poor. So in some ways it is hard even for Nicaraguans to
learn about their own cultural past or present.
          Moreover, a good many of the Sandinista leadership came out of
urban, middle-class backgrounds, which afforded them limited
understanding of the culture of the majority of Nicaragua's rural,
agricultural population. So in a curious way I see the Sandinistas
making some of the same kind of romantic assumptions that were made by
the New England ladies who came to protect and revive Appalachian
culture at the turn of the century: projecting some of their own
somewhat romantic and simplistic cultural fantasies on a situation
that is complex and dynamic, reviving "traditions" of debatable
authenticity, and so on.
          For instance, there is a fairly extensive folk dance movement in
Nicaragua, supported by the Ministry of Culture and Sandinista
Association of Cultural workers (ASTC). Some of the dance groups are
splendid, and it is in any case extraordinary that such things are
going on at all under such difficult economic and social
circumstances. Nevertheless, as has happened at other times in many
other places (the Ballet Folklorico de Mexico, to cite one well-known
example), some of the dance productions amount to a rather prettified
and romanticized version of what they may once have been.
          Nevertheless, what is going on now in dance in Nicara-

gua is far
healthier culturally than what was going on before 1979, which was
mainly importing second-rate ballet companies from the U.S. or Europe
to perform for the Managua elite in El Teatro Ruben Darzo itself an
Edward Durrell Stone white marble copy of Edward Durrell Stone's
Kennedy Center.
          Perhaps what ought to be said finally is that these things are
difficult and perilous to talk about. The processes are subtle and
complicated, and I feel uneasy about making any generalizations at
all. Although I have read a vast amount about Nicaragua, and have
spent some time there traveling, talking, reading and observing, I am
acutely aware of the dangers of commenting on the cultural situation
in such a cursory way.
          On the other hand, it is important for U.S. people to know these
issues exist--that the cultural life of a nation moves forward even
under the most difficult of circumstances--and must be understood if
we ever are to play a positive role in the reconstruction of a small
and struggling country we have done so much for so long to confuse and
destroy.
          I would hope that people in the South who have been put down
culturally for so long by so many, who have been stigmatized as
rednecks and hillbillies and crackers, who have been the pitied
objects of many a cultural missionary effort, who live in a part of
the world the snobbish and sophomoric H. L. Mencken dismissed as the
Sahara of the Bozarts at about the same time the U.S. government was
trying to discredit and destroy Augusto C. Sandino as a bandit--may
find themselves able to draw upon their own experience to comprehend
and empathize with the struggle of Nicaraguan people to survive,
decolonize, recover and reinterpret their own cultural past, and shape
a cultural future for their children.
        