To Die in This Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880-1965 - Latin American History Book on Indigenous Culture & Ethnic Identity | Perfect for Academic Research, Cultural Studies & Latin American History Enthusiasts

This second book by Jeffrey Gould is a remarkable investigation of the fate of Western Nicaragua's indigenous communities within the ladino national state. This history begins in the 1880's as scientific positivist liberalism and booming export agricultural production embolden and enrich Nicaragua's ladinos. The era opens a second Conquest against Nicaragua's indigenous communities under the banner of Progress, Civilization and Modernity. To Die in This Way follows this story well into the 20th century. On the eve of the Sandinista Revolution, many of these indigenous communities are broken, their children scattered through the countryside and the city. Their descendants share with their ladino neighbors a disdain for "lo indio," but they share with these ladinos also their "memories of mestizaje,"-their idealized memories (centered in episodes of "primitive accumulation") of the destruction of their communities. These historical grievances augment shared experiences of oppression in the agro-export economy, and contribute to the popular antipathy toward the Somoza regime. Although the Sandinistas incorporate these historical grievances into their revolutionary discourse, after the Revolution, the Sandinistas fail to come to terms with the hidden history of the indigenous communities. 'You were destroyed by the imperialist terratenientes,' they said, 'and we will avenge you.' As the reawakened Comunidades Indigenas demand their land, however, the Sandinistas insist that, indeed, the Comunidades had been destroyed. In 1990, the Sandinistas pay for their "participation in the reproduction of the myth of mestizaje" with losses in the north by margins of 4 to 1 and 5 to 1 in the areas of the Comunidades Indígenas. Today still, the hidden time bomb of the mestizaje project threatens to blow a hole in Nicaraguan politics. To Die in This Way proposes to bring this repressed history into the open. "This study shows," Gould states, "that the Nicaraguan Indians played such a vital economic and political role from 1880-1925 that their absence from the standard historical portrait leaves a seriously distorted image of Nicaragua's social and political development. Without understanding this prolonged, multi-front assault against the Comunidades Indigenas it would be impossible to recognize a submerged cornerstone of elite hegemony." To Die in This Way is a study of discourse in the Foucaultian sense. It approaches the myth of mestizaje as a set of mutually justifying rhetorical and coercive strategies which create the mestizo nation as a natural condition. " The `myth of Nicaragua mestiza,' the common sense notion that Nicaragua had long been an ethnically homogenous society," Gould writes, "is one of the elite's most enduring hegemonic achievements." To Die in This Way adopts two senses of hegemony as it undertakes to describe both the moment when a "Nicaragua mestiza" becomes common sense, and how the mestizaje project colors resistance to it. The first, following Jean and John Comaroff, defines hegemony as a naturalized ideology. William Roseberry proposes, however, that "we use the concept not to understand consent but to understand struggle, the ways in which the words, images, symbols. . .used by subordinate populations to talk about. . .or resist their domination are shaped by the process of domination itself." Roseberry's comment on hegemony addresses also the difficult concept of ethnic identity so central to To Die in This Way. Precisely because indígena becomes mestizo with the triumph of mestizaje, the heirs of the discredited Comunidades Indígenas claim no separate identity. "Who was I then," Gould writes, "to devise ethnic identities around people's stories who rejected those identities as irrelevant." Kay Warren argues, though, that indigenous identity is not a fixed set of attributes but is the outcome of the type of struggle Roseberry describes, that is, it is the product of resistance to a unifying state. Gould recounts the demise of Nicaragua's Comunidades Indígenas, then, as the history of indígenas robbed of the means to articulate their identity by an expanding ladino economy and state. Moreover, the outcome of the struggle against the mestizaje project is not a neutral reinterpreted indigenous ethnicity, but is one characterized by loss. "But that loss," Gould argues, "has far less to do with essentialist markers of ethnicity crucial to cultural survivalism and far more to do with the destruction of communities, communal organizations and identities." The Comunidades Indígenas are the history of To Die in This Way. Gould describes these organizations as something of "a trade union, a powerful local government cum political party and a church rolled into one," and thus, they are the principal vehicle for conserving autonomous identities. Each of the first three chapters highlights the struggle of specific Comunidades. In 1881, the Matagalpa indígenas rise in revolt against the ladino municipal government over a mix of grievances, and attempt to create an independent "Indian nation." Over the next two decades, local elites broker a solution to the "Indian problem" with the national government that silences the Comunidad. In Boaco, the Comunidad Indígena confronts expanding cattle ranchers armed with a discourse of equal citizenship that denies its very existence. Unlike Subtiaba, the Comunidad continguous with Le/n, where artisan and ethnic politics overlapped to form a flexible and intense resistance to ladino politics, these two Comunidades succumbed to the mestizaje project and largely ceased to operate several decades before the Sandinista Revolution. However, in all three cases, the events of primitive accumulation which mark watersheds in these struggles enter collective memory and be come important rallying cries for the rural union movements of the 1960's and 1970's. To Die in This Way is an empirically rich study of a fundamental and poorly understood element of Nicaragua's modern history. While documenting the history of western Nicaragua's silenced indigenous communities, it constructs also a meaningful dialogue with other scholars engaging similar problems. Thus, the book makes a significant theoretical and empirical contribution to Latin American historiography.