Gendered Scenarios of Revolution: Making New Men and New Women in Nicaragua, 1975–2000 - Tapa dura

"If anything is to be learned from Latin America's historical revolutionary experiences in order to advance the course of social change in the twenty-first century, then profound and constructive critique of those experiences must be delineated and discussed. Montoya has explicitly done so here."--Les W. Field, author of The Grimace of Macho Rat�n: Artisans, Identity, and Nation in Late-Twentieth-Century Western Nicaragua If anything is to be learned from Latin America s historical revolutionary experiences in order to advance the course of social change in the twenty-first century, then profound and constructive critique of those experiences must be delineated and discussed. Montoya has explicitly done so here. Les W. Field, author of The Grimace of Macho Raton: Artisans, Identity, and Nation in Late-Twentieth-Century Western Nicaragua"

In 1979, toward the end of the Cold War era, Nicaragua\u00b4s Sandinista movement emerged on the world stage claiming to represent a new form of socialism. Gendered Scenarios of Revolution is a historical ethnography of Sandinista state formation from the perspective of El Tule-a peasant village that was itself thrust onto a national and international stage as a 'model' Sandinista community. This book follows the villagers\u00b4 story as they joined the Sandinista movement, performed revolution before a world audience, and grappled with the lessons of this experience in the neoliberal aftermath. Employing an approach that combines political economy and cultural analysis, Montoya argues that the Sandinistas collapsed gender contradictions into class ones, and that as the Contra War exacerbated political and economic crises in the country, the Sandinistas increasingly ruled by mandate as vanguard party instead of creating the participatory democracy that they professed to work toward. In El Tule this meant that even though the Sandinistas created new roles and possibilities for women and men, over time they upheld pre-revolutionary patriarchal social structures. Yet in showing how the revolution created opportunities for Tule\u00f1os to assert their agency and advance their interests, even against the Sandinistas\u00b4 own interests, this book offers a reinterpretation of the revolution\u00b4s supposed failure. Examining this community's experience in the Sandinista and post-Sandinista periods offers perspective on both processes of revolutionary transformation and their legacies in the neoliberal era. Gendered Scenarios of Revolution will engage graduate and undergraduate students and scholars in anthropology, sociology, history, and women's and gender studies, and appeal to anyone interested in modern revolution and its aftermath.