Nahuas, Gachupines, Patriarchs and Piris1: Nicaraguan History through Highland Peasant Eyes

History, the art of trying to know the past in order to understand the present, and perhaps even catch a glimpse of the future, is lived by all but written by few. Latin American history is no exception to this rule. Writers of the region's history have, with but rare exceptions, either been members of its Europeanate elite or foreigners, with perspectives reflecting their origins? Perhaps while elites ruled unchallenged this sufficed. But today, as democracy takes tentative hold, once marginal and historically unnoticed groups are emerging as important political players and major demandeurs of attention and quotas of power in country after country as the newly unleashed processes of free trade, open economies and one-man-one-vote democracy cause profound changes to social systems and structures.3 This makes it useful to consider now how these new players view the world, since their perspectives and interests, even if they could once be ignored, are now important. The highlands mountain peasant "indio" campesinos of Nicaragua, an erstwhile marginalized group with well over a million members, have just emerged from facelessness into national prominence and can therefore serve as a case in point.' As a consequence of the Sandinista revolution and highlands peasant resistance to it (the latter a process inaccurately known to the outside world as the Contra War) the campesinos of Nicaragua's central mountains regained an important measure of historical group coherence. Since they number about 35% of the country's population, this has made them a major new political force and, as a consequence of their having voted heavily in Nicaragua's 1996 national elections, arguably that nation's most decisive yet least known electoral constituency, with the power to decide virtually any national election.5 Pre-literate and historically marginalized, Nicaragua's highlander campesinos have no written history of their own and they and the region they inhabit are virtually "black holes" even to academics. With extremely rare exceptions, scholarly studies of them simply do not exist.6 Their emergence as possibly the decisive constituency in the country makes it important to begin to fill in this gap. This study attempts to initiate that process by trying to see Nicaraguan history through their eyes. It is, in a sense, a case study of one of many such marginal groups that, stimulated by newly emergent participatory democratic processes, are beginning to emerge into political prominence in the region. Other such groups include Peru's Quechuas, Bolivia's Aymaras, and Guatemala's highlands Maya, and numerous less precisely defined post-tribal/sub-national populations. It is hoped that this particular case study, limited though it is, may serve as a model, or at least an inspiration to others to take another look at similar heretofore marginalized peoples in Latin America, or even elsewhere, and to begin asking of questions about them as well. If the world is indeed finally drawing out of its authoritarian past into a more democratic future, such exercises might well prove of more than mere passing value. A caveat: since the writer is neither a Nicaraguan nor highlander campesino, this attempt will, of necessity, involve a certain degree of pretentiousness, and the view will be inexact. Nonetheless, the writer feels that his credentials to write a proxy history for this people, while imperfect, are arguably at least above average, including as they do over 42 years Nicaragua and Central America experience, 15 years living and working in five of the republics of the region, bilingual Spanish, and more than ten years working directly with and studying Nicaragua's highlands peasant populace, including preparation of a successful doctoral dissertation on them. With that point made, the reader is now invited to accompany the writer in an attempt to refocus the mind's eyes, to look at Nicaraguan history not, as has been traditional, from the center out but in a new way, from the periphery in, from the point of view of a constituent mass, a once faceless people who have just emerged as a major actor on the national scene. …