montoya 2007

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Socialist Scenarios, Power, and State Formation in Sandinista Nicaragua Author(s): Rosario Montoya Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Feb., 2007), pp. 71-90Published by: on behalf of the Wiley American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4496786Accessed: 01-06-2015 12:24 UTC

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ROSARIO MONTOYA University of Colorado, Boulder

Socialist scenarios, power, and state formation in Sandinista Nicaragua

ABSTRACT Drawing on the concept of "scenario," I examine the ideological construction of an agricultural cooperative in a "model" village in revolutionary Nicaragua (1979-90). I argue that the state's modernist project of development placed the burden of cooperative members' transformation into model revolutionaries on individual will rather than on national and global political-economic relations. This resulted in Tulefios' inability to Live up to Sandinista expectations and authorized the production of Sandinista and academic discourses that cast these producers as failed revolutionaries. These discourses helped constitute and naturalize the vanguardist relationship established by the state's modernist project between the state and the cooperative sector. [nation-state formation, revolution, modernism, socialism, cooperatives, model villages, mystification]

n this article, I examine the cultural politics of socialist state formation in Sandinista Nicaragua (1979-90). Recent research on state formation has moved away from Weberian notions of the state as a ratio- nal bureaucratic institution to emphasize questions of culture and power in processes of subject formation (Corrigan and Sayer 1985;

Friedman 2005; Gordillo 2006; Hansen and Stepputat 2001). This approach examines modern forms of power as based on a "governmentalization" of society such that human practices become subject to regulation and nor- malization (Foucault 1983, 1991). Socialist states offer a different angle for examining such questions.' Unlike the less visible forms of power in liberal states whereby subjects come to govern themselves, in socialist societies crucial forms of power are patently visible through claims about subjectiv- ity, state legitimacy, and political culture foregrounded in explicit political projects. As Katherine Verdery (1991:304-305) argues, in such societies, culture and language take on particular importance to the state because, unlike liberal states, socialist states have not benefited from centuries of gradual development such that subjectification can take place more through practice than through discourse. The concern of socialist states with shaping cultural and intellectual production (Pelley 2002; Verdery 1991), creating communities of moral discourse (Apter 1995), and fostering technologies of the self in which subjects come to represent categories of moral exemplarity (Anagnost 1997; Rofel 1999) reveals an anxiety over the possibility for hegemony that is not as apparent in liberal states.

Partly because of this urge to control in socialist states, scholarship on the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Asia has regarded such states as primarily oppressive formations, even as their so-called totalitarian- ism is now widely questioned. Indeed, the unmet expectations of these social projects likely contributed to ethnographic studies of socialist societies emphasizing widespread cynicism and noncompliance or invok- ing frameworks of resistance (Scott 1985, 1990; see, e.g., Fforde 1987; O'Brien and Li 2006; Sabel and Stark 1982; Watson 1994; Zweig 1989).2 The case of Nicaragua is markedly different. Scholarship on the Sandinista

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 71-90, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. ? 2007 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ae.2007.34.1.71.


American Ethnologist m Volume 34 Number 1 February 2007

revolution was exceptionally enthusiastic and hopeful, even as, toward the latter part of the 1980s, scholars critiqued certain aspects of the revolutionary project.3 The Sandinistas' unusual flexibility and their vision of a "different" kind of revolution-including a commitment to religious pluralism and valorization of the "popular"-captured the imagination of writers, scholars, and activists across the world."4 As anthropologist Roger Lancaster wrote in his ethnography of a Managua working-class neighborhood, "And I can say-like George Orwell writing of Catalonia-that for the first time in my life, I really believed in socialism" (1992:9). The demo- cratic impulse that animated the Sandinista vision also lent the regime exceptional legitimacy and popularity among ordinary Nicaraguans, if onlyin critical numbers until the mid- to late 1980s-even among many who disagreed with or did not comply with some state policies.5

In this article, I examine the case of an agricultural cooperative in a model Sandinista community that exhibited widespread noncompliance with state dictates yet retained strong affective ties and commitment to the Sandinista state. I examine this problem by exploring contradictions created for cooperative members by a Sandinista nation-state imagi- nary ofwhich cooperatives were supposed to be emblematic. To do so, I extend Verdery's insight on language and culture in socialist states by examining state formation through performative scenarios. The analysis shows the workings of the visible forms of power underscored by scholarship on socialism. Yet it also shows that these forms were imbricated with less visible forms of state power that worked to form the putative subjects of the Sandinista state and the state's leadership itself.

In search of the New Man I learned of El Tule in 1989 from a Spanish internationalist working in southeastern Nicaragua.6 He referred me to a little book, Esta luz ya no se apaga (Pefia Baldelomar et al. 1988), which I picked up a few days later in a bookstore in Man- agua. The book was published by a popular education center whose staff had worked with Tulefios on various cultural and development projects during the decade of the Sandinista revolution (1979-90). From the pages of this book, I learned of a village rent by interfamilial factionalism throughout the 20th century, of the fateful arrival in the mid- 1970s of a group of guerrillas belonging to the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN), and of the villagers' awakening to class and national consciousness and solidarity through their relationship to the guerrillas and, later, to the Sandinista movement. After the revolutionary triumph, so the story went, the villagers became exemplary revolutionaries in the Sandin- ista movement. Their exemplaritywas particularly evident in their organization of an agricultural and cattle-raising cooperative. According to the book, the cooperative became the fulcrum for the construction of a community of class and na-

tion as members worked together and shared the products of their labor with each other and the Nicaraguan nation.

As I read this story, I was overtaken by the romance of the revolution. Like many other Latin Americans and people worldwide, I had been an avid consumer of the utopian stories of a New Society that Nicaragua exported through print and media images early in the 1980s. By the latter part of that decade, however, I found myself sharing Nicaraguans' crisis of hope for the revolution. Since 1979, when the FSLN wrested power from the dictatorship of Anastacio Somoza, Nicaraguans had faced a war of aggression financed by the U.S. government and waged by Somocistas and people disaf- fected with the Sandinista government. By 1989, as I traveled across central and southern Nicaragua, the suffering caused by the U.S.-Contra war and the erosion of enthusiasm for the revolution were palpable.

The story of El Tule's revolutionary redemption seemed to offer hope just when Nicaraguans most needed it. In the book recounting their story, Tulefios claimed that the Sandinistas' consciousness-raising efforts had empowered them to define their needs, transform their practices ac- cordingly, and begin to construct Sandinista New Men and Women and the New Nicaragua. The story suggested that the clarity of purpose Tulefios had attained had been made possible by the Sandinistas' use of dialogical pedagogies designed to ground their consciousness-raising work in villagers' own experience and knowledge. It was this knowledge that had been key to Tulefios staying steadfast in the face of adversity. A few months after I read the story of El Tule, the FSLN was defeated at the polls and vowed not to retreat but, rather, to "govern from below." In my mind, remaining steadfast-and sharing this village's experience in dialogical pedagogies-became even more urgent in light of those events as Sandinistas struggled to remain united and protect the gains of the revolution.

I began fieldwork in El Tule two years after the 1990 San- dinista electoral defeat.7 Soon, I began to realize that what had transpired in the village during the revolutionary decade did not accord with the story I had come to cherish. During my stay in El Tule, I often felt that the burden of defeat that fell on Nicaragua's shoulders as a failed symbol of liberation for people throughout the world had been felt with particular intensity in this little village. Since the revolution's early days, the village had received an inordinately hefty share of the burdens of exemplarity that the state distributed to communities integrated into the revolutionary process. For El Tule was not just any Sandinista village: It was a model Sandinista village that had had a salient role in the social pedagogy of the revolutionary project. By this I mean that El Tule had been a vanguard village, in which many of the revolution's projects were first implemented; and it had been a "showcase" village, promoted by Sandinista organizations as a representation and an exemplar of the revolutionary project. As such, it had become a destination for Nicaraguan

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Socialist scenarios, power, and state formation in Sandinista Nicaragua m American Ethnologist

and foreign revolutionary tourists eager to witness radical social transformation.8

Throughout the revolutionary decade and during its aftermath, Tulefios' role model was the Socialist New Man, often glossed simply as the "revolutionary man," icon of class and national consciousness. Tulefio men and women constructed their history as the story of a chain of New Men, strung together through their martyrdom and heroism. "Our struggle began with the Indian leader Diriangen," Justino (the village leader) told me the day I met him. "Then it was Sandino, who fought against the Yankee occupation. The Sandinista Front continued that struggle. Here in the community we have two martyrs and heroes, they were killed by the guardia for defending us, the poor."'9 As heirs to this revolutionary tradition, Tulefios felt the onerous weight of historical responsibility. This was especially so among the men, whom Sandinista discourse designated as the central political subjects of the revolution.

By the time I began fieldwork, however, Tulefios were unsure about how well they had played their role as revolutionaries. When I asked about their lives during the revolution, they delighted in relating tales of exemplarity. Yet when we turned to critical discussions of the difficulties they had faced during those years, their memories-recounted nostalgically, as when reminiscing about other, more dis- tant pasts-seemed to be shadowed by a discourse about Tulefio backwardness, culpability, failure, and moral short- comings. In particular, Tulefios directed this discourse to their performance in the cooperative, an organization hailed by Sandinistas as the site par excellence of campesino revolutionary consciousness.10 Time and again during my stay in El Tule, I listened as male villagers castigated themselves and other villagers for failing to live up to exemplary Sandin- ista cooperative-member standards. The gap between the ideal and real actions of flesh-and-blood people haunted my fieldwork as it seemed to haunt Tulefios' lives. Only later did I understand that my presumptuous disappointment in their performance reiterated a discourse that existed beyond El Tule, as part of a web of social and scholarly discussions about the failings of the revolution's cooperative project.

Scholarly discussions about the Sandinista cooperative project began with the assumption that, in terms of its own criteria for productivity and organization, the project had been disappointing at best." It was argued that this outcome was attributable in large measure to campesinos' re- jection (or grudging acceptance) of the program. Campesino attitudes were, in turn, seen as resulting from the government's marginalization of rural producers in economic plan- ning and decision making. Thus, some argued that, had campesinos been included in economic decision making, they would have devised forms of collective organization that worked for them (Matus Lazo et al. 1990). Others argued that greater involvement would have given campesinos a better understanding of the political and economic diffi-

culties the government was facing, and more would have remained loyal to the FSLN and its programs (Coraggio 1986; Fagen 1986). Both these arguments criticized the government's exclusionary, even arrogant, policy-making practices. Yet the second view also contained an implicit critique of campesino parochialism, voiced by political scientist For- rest D. Colburn in his discussion of campesino responses to agrarian reform benefits: "The rural poor narrowly interpret their interests, at a cost to other strata of society" (1989:194). Less subtle arguments along this line, particularly among some Sandinista cadres and leaders, claimed outright that campesino recalcitrance to cooperative organization was caused by this sector's "backwardness" and a perceived individualism rooted in a capitalist consciousness (see, e.g., Wheelock 1981). Some of these arguments, in other words, became discourses that represented campesinos in the familiar modernist image of rural folk as parochial, dis- trustful, and even traitorous-incapable of class and national consciousness.12

I propose that these discourses of campesino failure be regarded as something other than simple descriptions of an empirical reality. Instead, I suggest they be seen as participating in the constitution ofa Sandinista scenario of national liberation and revolutionary state formation that presumed, and created a desire for, an idealized protagonist in the fig- ure of the New Man. In developing my argument, I draw on the concept of "scenario" as it has been articulated by performance theorist Diana Taylor (2003). Taylor defines "scenario" as a "paradigmatic setup that relies on supposedly live participants, structured around a schematic plot, with an intended, though adaptable end" (2003:13). Scenarios, she claims, "exist as culturally-specific imaginaries-sets of possibilities, ways of conceiving conflict, crisis, or resolution- activated with more or less theatricality" (Taylor 2003:13). As enacted plots that encode modes of interaction between familiar characters, scenarios recur across time and contexts and are reproduced through discourses, stories, writings, and actions.'3

The setup in Sandinista Nicaragua was structured around a narrative of national liberation that reactivated a familiar Latin American scenario-that of indigenous resistance to colonialism.14 This narrative told of Nicaragua's historical subjugation by colonialism, dictatorship, and U.S. imperialism and of Nicaraguans' struggle and liberation under the leadership of the Sandinista Front. Liberation, in turn, was framed as a mutually constitutive process of building the New Man and Woman and the New (socialist) Nicaragua through forms of representative and participatory democracy that would allow each social sector to define its own needs (Hoyt 1997; Vanden and Prevost 1993). It was the role of the state to lead such a social transition by creating an organizational framework that would direct this process toward the goal of social justice. In other words, building the New Nicaragua entailed creating local scenarios that would

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emerge from communities' own analysis and practice, albeit in dialogical relation to the master logic of a (socialist) national revolutionary scenario.15

El Tule as a revolutionary community and its cooperative as the key site of campesino revolutionary practice were two such local scenarios. Here, I point out various dimensions of performance contained in the concept of "scenario" (Taylor 2003:ch. 1) that are particularly relevant for analyzing the case of El Tule: First, the concept points to the Sandin- ista framing or bracketing of the village and its cooperative as revolutionary, in contrast to other places and practices de- fined as not revolutionary. Second, given that scenarios, by definition, preexist any particular rendition of themselves, the concept acknowledges El Tule's revolutionary organization and practices (e.g., cooperative organization) as place- specific iterations of similar practices ongoing throughout Nicaragua and preexisting in a Latin American revolutionary tradition. Third, the concept points to a separation between Tulefios as social actors and as characters in a revolutionary scenario. As Taylor notes, this distance allows one "to keep both the social actor and the role in view simultaneously, and thus recognize the areas of resistance and tension" (2003:30). Fourth, the concept of scenario invokes a scene, or physical environment, constructed through "conscious strategies of display" (Taylor 2003:29). Thus, it highlights the role of El Tule as a model of revolutionary practice literally on display for national and international audiences to see and evaluate.

Taylor's concept of "scenario" is also relevant to this study in that, by definition, it implicates me, as ethnogra- pher, as a participant in the events I analyze. Thus, just as scenarios force the audience to take a position in relation to the action onstage, so the story of El Tule that I tell here is centrally based on the position that I adopted in relation to the community during my research. This aspect of scenarios is entirely consistent with the ethnographic proposition that the participant-observer is her or his own research instru- ment. In this article, I use my experience of disappointment in Tulefios' performance of the cooperative to gain insight into the dynamics of Sandinista state formation.

I argue that my desire for the New Man, like that of Tulefios, was created by the seductions of a Sandinista revolutionary scenario that glorified campesino-worker revolutionary commitment as foundational to the emerging national community. It was this desire that set the stage for the discourse of failure and, through this discourse, the mystification of the state's relationship to the cooperative sector. For, as I show in subsequent discussion, the cooperative project did not become a site for performing socialist commitment, as the state (and some campesinos) had expected. Rather, it became an ideological process by which the Sandinista state, through no conscious intention of the leadership, naturalized the patriarchal and vanguardist relationship that its project of national development established between the state and campesinos. Such an outcome,

I argue, resulted from contradictions between an idealized scenario of cooperative solidarity based on Sandinista notions of socialist developmentalism and both campesino interests and historical consciousness and the logics of an encompassing-and much more performative-scenario of neocolonial capitalism.

By focusing on the ideological construction of campesino failure in processes of state formation, I engage with work that sees the state as necessarily involving the mystification of political relations (Abrams 1988; Coronil 1997; Mitchell 1991).16 I examine the production of national subjects (Corrigan and Sayer 1985), not as passive objects of a state scenario but as often-willing participants in its construction (Li 2005; Nelson 2004; Nugent 1994; Steppu- tat 2001). My work suggests that inasmuch as revolutionary states are drawn into modernist, developmentalist state scenarios (Scott 1998) and embedded in neocolonial capitalist relations of power, they, much like liberal capitalist states, create marginal populations that "are at once considered to be foundational to particular national identities and ex- cluded from these same identities by the sorts of disciplinary knowledge that mark them as racially and civilizationally 'other' " (Das and Poole 2004:8). Yet I also suggest that it is not just the subjects of the state who are produced by the power of these scenarios; so is the state itself. In what follows, I trace the trajectory of power/knowledge in the relationship between Tulefios, the Sandinista state, and myself as part of an international audience to explore a question that speaks to much recent work on revolutionary state formation and the ideological dimensions of revolutionary culture (Field 1999; Hale 1994; Rodriguez 1996; Saldafia-Portillo 2003): How did a state committed to the liberation of campesinos re-create itself as a patriarchal and vanguardist formation that rein- scribed a distinction between itself as a modern(izing) state and backward campesinos?'7

Constructing revolutionary desire El Tule is spread along ten square kilometers in the south- western department of Rivas. Between the early 1980s and 2000, the village's population grew from fewer than 300 to over 400 people distributed between 70-odd primarily male-headed, nuclear-family and two-generation, extended-family households. Historically, men worked their own or their wives' lands or both, supplementing subsis- tence agriculture with wage labor on neighboring estates. Women worked at home at domestic tasks and tending small farm animals. Only in times of dire need did women work as domestics in nearby towns and cities. Community lands include family parcels of between 5 and 40 hectares and cooperative land received during the Sandinista revolution. To- day's village boundaries are a product of a history of community fractures caused by sibling conflict over inheritance land dating back to the early 1900s.

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Although I did not know it at the time, when I arrived to do fieldwork in El Tule in 1992, I was participating in a scenario that had been played out in the village for over 15 years: Middle- and upper-class outsiders arrive in the village, engage Tulefios in political discussion, and incite them to revolutionary practice. Over the years, revolutionary practice in El Tule varied according to the changing needs of the revolution. During the mobilization of the 1970s, engaging in revolutionary practice had meant becoming combatants or guerrilla support elements. In the 1980s, it meant becoming militants of the Sandinista party, participants in mass and cultural organizations, and members of production cooperatives and collectives and the army. In the post-Sandinista 1990s, it meant protecting the hard-won gains of the revolution by remaining organized and actively garnering support for Sandinista projects.

For most Tulefios, my arrival in the village to study their involvement in the Sandinista movement seemed initially to repeat, albeit in the dramatically different conjuncture of the 1990s, the incitement to revolutionary practice they had come to expect from middle-class outsiders. That this was a common perspective was particularly apparent in the initial stages of my research. Thus, Tulefios were often surprised and disconcerted when I interviewed them about matters other than their participation in the revolution. "Don't you want to hear about the revolution?" several people asked. It was also evident as, time and again, I was compared with previous visitors: "You are like the Sandinista schoolteachers," I)ofia Lidia told me, in reference to the guerrillas who had arrived in El Tule in 1975 disguised as schoolteachers. "They also visited all the houses, asked things about the families. They also wanted to find out everything about the community." At other times, I was likened to members of Alforja, a group of popular educators who had worked with Tulefios during the Sandinista decade. On several occasions, people mentioned that Alforja's team leader was a Peruvian-- "like you," they would say, indicating they regarded this connection as significant. A Tulefio friend also told me that he had heard villagers speculate that, as a Peruvian, I was probably a member of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) attempting to recruit Tulefios into the Peruvian revolution. 18 Finally, villagers also referred to me as a "compafiera inter- nacionalista." Like internationalists during the revolution, they noted, I tried to help out in various ways: tutoring schoolchildren, writing project proposals, conducting history and popular-education workshops, and so on. Yet I re- sisted this identification, protesting that I was there to do research, not to provide assistance. The small forms ofassis- tance I did provide, I repeated over and over to mostly deaf ears, could not be compared with the support that internationalists had given Tulefio projects throughout the 1980s.

Yet, as I thought about how Tulefios had positioned me, I understood that, for them, there was an important common- ality between myself and other outsiders, whether guerril-

las, popular educators, internationalists, government tech- nicians, or party cadres. At the time, I thought this com- monality was our commitment to or interest in the Sandin- ista revolution. Later I realized it was our stepping into El Tule's scenario such that we became instruments in the construction of a national desire for New Men and Women. By this I mean that, as Tulefios correctly perceived, outsiders' incitement-whether recruiting Tulefios into the revolution, working with them on local development projects, or inter- viewing them-was aimed at fulfilling our desire to witness the villagers perform revolution before our eyes. Our actions reflected, in other words, projections of revolutionary desire onto Tulefios as "authentic" protagonists of revolutionary history. Ironically, as an anthropologist-historian eager to work against a history of colonialist ethnography, I was blind to the effects of my own and other outsiders' performance. I had no pretensions to ethnographic objectivity-not to pos- itivist renditions of this concept anyway. Yet by regarding my own work as simply that of a committed researcher, I-like so many before me-misidentified the role I was, in fact, playing in the Sandinista scenario.19

Scholars of socialist realism have remarked on its mode of subjectification as based on classifying characters as moral exemplars in a historical drama (Anagnost 1997:ch. 4; see also Apter 1995; Field 1999:ch. 2; Rofel 1999:ch. 1, 3).20 The Sandinista scenario classified campesinos as class and national revolutionary subjects. In El Tule, the prescrip- tions for exemplary practice that constituted these posi- tions structured both outsiders' and villagers' assessment of Tulefio performance. Most Tuleflo men first conceived of themselves as central characters in the national drama when FSLN guerrillas entered their village in 1975 on a recruitment mission. During much of their time in the village, the guerrillas carried out consciousness-raising work focused on issues of class and nation. In particular, they encouraged villagers to think about their poverty and consequent factional strug- gles over scarce land resources as stemming from unequal land distribution and hacienda exploitation of their labor. In this work, the guerrillas were heavily influenced by dialogical methodologies then current in Latin American popular education, particularly by the radical pedagogy of Paulo Freire (1983). According to Freire, the oppressed possessed the means to come to know their oppression through knowledge of their lives and their work in and on the world; it was the role of radical educators to facilitate a dialogue whereby such awareness (or "consciousness") could be constructed. Justino explained that, in El Tule, theater-a central methodology of popular education-became a means to construct such knowledge by helping villagers analyze and clarify their situation as campesinos. Thus, when a group ofTulefios pre- sented plays about their experiences of oppression to the community, according to Justino, "people appropriated so much the problem that the sociodrama or playwas touching on... that people felt represented and sometimes they even

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interrupted-that's my case, right, that's what [was] happen- ing to me."

In succeeding years, several Tulefio men went under- ground as FSLN guerrillas, and the village as a whole became militantly pro-Sandinista. After the FSLN took power, El Tule became a vanguard Sandinista community: Among other organizations, the first agricultural and cattle-raising cooperative and the first women's horticultural collective in the department of Rivas were implemented there (see Montoya 2003). Justino became a regionally recognized campesino leader. (He went on to become mayor of the municipality in three elections.) By 1982, Tulefios' reputation had spread well beyond their region, and their scenario as a model community was in place.

International and Nicaraguan visitors came to the village in large numbers. With each visit, Tulefios (re) activated their local scenario: They adeptly recounted the story of their village in versions long and short and showed visitors around their (men's) cooperative and women's collective, their new schoolhouse, health center and road, and a communal house in which Tulefio villagers made collective decisions and held events. In so doing, Tulefios were not merely "putting on" a show, acting as wily villagers who misled outsiders by presenting an (onstage) surface that hid their real (offstage) depths. Rather, as exemplary revolutionaries, the villagers assumed a role in the model village scenario that entailed performing revolution before Nicaraguan and foreign audiences. Conversely, audiences' roles, particularly those of foreign audiences, entailed acting as engaged witnesses of revolution. As Canadian internationalist Chris Brookes wrote in his book Now We Know the Difference: The People ofNicaragua, "You won't find [El Tule] on any map of Nicaragua. The little village is geographically insignificant. But in many ways the whole story of the Nicaraguan revolution lives here" (1984:48).

Tulefios' understanding of themselves as protagonists in a national scenario of social and political liberation was clearly shaped by their position as model revolutionaries who put their village up for display and who played promi- nent roles in the cooperative movement and the Sandinista party. Yet a story I heard from villagers suggests that early in the 1980s, the shape of such protagonism was more uncer- tain and in flux, foregrounding their position as campesinos vis-a-vis the state rather than their role as its representatives. As happened in other parts of the country, just after the 1979 Triumph, Tulefios took over neighboring land that had belonged to an infamous landowner, without waiting for directives from the state. Soon after, a Sandinista official fenced off a portion of that land, effectively claiming it for himself. Without wasting time, the villagers put to work the theatrical methodologies they had learned through popular education, staging a performance of the events in front of the Ministry of Agriculture. The land was quickly returned to Tulefios.21 As in the prerevolutionary period, then, in the

early years of the revolution, Tulefios and Sandinistas were able to coconstruct scenarios for the mutual constitution of state and civil society.

As Tulefios became more integrated into the state, and as the state consolidated and came under siege by Contra forces, however, the possibilities for such emergent revolutionary scenarios began closing off. These dynamics of state formation were exemplified particularly clearly by Tulefios' work as dramatic performers in support of the Sandinista state. In 1981, a group of Tulefio men created a theater group they named Frente Sur (Southern Front). Frente Sur became one of the founding members of a campesino theater and cultural organization (Movimiento de Expresi6n Artistica y Teatral, MECATE) that worked closely with the Ministry of Education in support of the revolution. The group's signa- ture play, an hour-long rendition of their history-Historia de una decisi6n (History of a decision)-told of Tulefios' "awakening" to class consciousness and of their decision to commit to the revolutionary struggle. In line with the role of campesinos in the Sandinista national scenario, the play exemplified Tulefios' revolutionary commitment through their participation in production cooperatives.22

As with other revolutionary theater groups, Frente Sur performed its story in barracks and workplaces, at national commemorative events and even international festivals. In 1981, the village hosted an international theater festival at- tended by high-level government officials, including then- president Daniel Ortega's wife, Rosario Murillo. Soon after, Frente Sur was invited to stage El Tule's history in the country's National Theater, formerly the exclusive domain of Nicaraguan elites. These experiences were particularly formative of Tulefios' subjectivities as model revolutionaries with a key role to play in Nicaragua's scenario for national liberation. As Justino commented, "It was as if they put you on an elevator and raised you all the way up ... then El Tule was not only known to insiders, but also to the outside. The Vice-Minister of Culture of Cuba already speaks of El Tule; El Tule appears constantly in the newspapers and all that."23 In succeeding years, illustrated versions of Tulefios' story put together from photographs and villagers' drawings and testimonies were disseminated in Nicaragua and abroad through books and pamphlets published by Al- forja and a Sandinista publishing house. Through circula- tion of their story, Tulefios came to represent the "authentic" Nicaraguan rural poor, protagonists of the nation's historical struggle against oppression in the Sandinista national scenario.

Tulefios' dramatic workwas partly a response to the San- dinista call for the participation of popular sectors in the crafting of a national revolutionary identity (see Montoya 1995). As committed Sandinistas, Tulefios also felt called to use their work for agitational objectives through their participation in MECATE, which was linked to the state's pro- paganda apparatus. "We were clear that Frente Sur was a

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Socialist scenarios, power, and state formation in Sandinista Nicaragua n American Ethnologist

combat group, that it was not a group of guerrilla combat, but of ideological combat," Justino explained.24

In Historia de una decisi6n, Tulefios happily found community and communion through sharing their labor and haivests with each other and with the nation. But, as I show below, the actual events that took place in the cooperative du ring the Sandinista decade suggest a more conflicted reality. In this reality, Historia de una decisi6n was less a faithful representation of Tulefios' past than a site for Tulefio revolutionary desire, in which the New Man as model cooperative worker was an increasingly frustrated project. In other words, at some point, the scenario of model revolutionaries depicted in Historia de una decisi6n was no longer emergent from villagers' experiences. Rather, it became a fixed representation performed as an obligation of membership in MECATE as a parastatal organization and out of loyalty to the FSLN. The conflicted position of those involved in Frente Sur as representatives of the Sandinista state, on the one hand, and as members of and activists on behalf of the campesino class, on the other hand, created a tension in Tulefios' sense of their roles in the revolution that I could still identify in the 1990s. This tension was expressed particularly clearly as a n ambivalence toward the story of the cooperative: Did the st:ory of Historia de una decisi6n represent Tulefios as social actors or as characters of the Sandinista scenario?

Producing the cooperative scenario On taking power, the FSLN proclaimed its commitment to a society shaped by ordinary Nicaraguans through participatory democracy. Yet it is possible to discern two conceptions within the party and broader Sandinista movement of what such a scenario would entail in practice. One conception understood the revolution as a social project that would favor the popular classes and whose shape would emerge through mass participation in forms of representative and participatory democracy. This entailed the creation of spaces for dialogical exchange in which the mutual construction of state and civil society could take place.25 The second, orthodox, socialist conception was associated with the FSLN's high- est political body, the National Directorate, and the political line of the Sandinista party (although not necessarily of individual party members). According to this view, Nicaragua was a society in transition to socialism with the FSLN as its vanguard. The FSLN's vision of the vanguard, however, differed from the authoritarian Leninist conception. Thus, rather than implementing a proletarian program conceived a priori by the leadership, the party aimed to create a political program that would encompass the sum of the aspirations of the heterogenous popular sectors, as expressed through their mass organizations. Because of its emphasis on participatory democracy, then, the FSLN also incorporated notions of popular democracy into their more orthodox vision of socialism. Yet, through time, it became clear that lead-

ers oriented by this perspective tended to see the political process as a site at which, with the guidance of an enlightened leadership, the population would arrive at a "correct" understanding of their situation and interests.26 At the beginning of the 1980s, however, these differences were not so apparent. Indeed, most Sandinistas initially embraced the leadership's scripting of participatory democracy as expressed in its particular mode of reorganizing the society and economy. It was in this context that El Tule's cooperative developed.

El Tule's cooperative was organized in 1979. Beginning in 1981, as part of the government's agrarian reform policy, most of the former hacienda land in the vicinity of El Tule was converted into agricultural and cattle-raising cooperatives known as Cooperativas Agropecuarias Sandinistas (CAS). The state dictated that, under this modality of cooperative, land would be held in common, production carried out collectively, and salaries and produce distributed equally among organization members. Goods produced above local consumption requirements were to be sold to a government organization that purchased and distributed foodstuffs. Some goods were allowed to be sold in the market.

Cooperative organization was an important part of the FSLN's economic project, which, during the first six years, proposed the gradual erosion of individual production in favor of large-scale associative forms compatible with a socialized economy. The FSLN regarded a highly capital- and technological-intensive economic model of agroexport production as the way to accelerate Nicaragua's transition to socialism. This model was in line with the modernist developmentalism undergirding 20th-century socialist scenarios of social and economic progress; it also responded to the prac- tical necessity of reproducing a national agroexport economy based on large estates. Pronouncing the state the "cen- tre of accumulation" (Irvin 1983) in charge of investment, finance, and commerce, the leadership turned Somoza's confiscated estates (20% of the country's arable land) into state farms. The Sandinistas' privileging of economies of scale, their need for foreign exchange, and an emphasis on national unity stemming from the broad-based alliance that brought them to power also prompted the leadership to support non-Somocista segments of the agroexport elite. The same logic led to the promotion of CAS. Sandinistas thought that CAS not only would secure employment and income for large numbers of previously land-poor campesinos but also would allow for the use of technologies requiring capital in- vestments beyond small producers' reach (Jonakin 1994:64). Until 1985, most campesinos who received land from the state were required to organize as cooperatives.

Throughout the time I spent in El Tule, villagers praised cooperative labor organization: "Cooperative work is very nice," Manuel claimed, "because we work together and then we share our harvest." Most Tulefio men and women described the ideals behind cooperatives in terms drawn from

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Sandinista discourse, which characterized cooperatives as morally superior to individual household production: "Indi- vidualism is selfish" and "That is capitalism," people would say.27 Many also expressed their pride in cooperatives as pil- lars of the revolution, noting their pivotal role in government efforts to achieve self-sufficiency in food crops.

Sandinista discourse about the formative role of cooperatives for revolutionaries and revolutionary nation-building also structured Tulefios' relationship with Alforja's popular educators. Like most groups involved in the Sandin- ista movement, Alforja accepted the national scenario proposed by the leadership as a starting point for its work with campesinos. During much of the 1980s, Alforja worked through the Ministry of Education in support of cooperative organization primarily (but not exclusively) in El Tule. In line with dialogical methods, an important part ofAlforja's work involved providing contexts such as workshops and group discussions in which Tulefios could reflect on cooperative production. Alforja stressed Tulefios' need to learn to work with others by doing the work and by reflecting on, and pos- ing solutions-as a group-to problems that emerged in the process. Implicitly, then, the methodology of Alforja made a distinction between two communicative systems (Taylor 2003:31-32) at work in the cooperative scenario it was helping construct: embodiment and telling. As in other socialist societies (Anagnost 1997; Apter 1995; Verdery 1991), language became key to transforming consciousness in El Tule. For, although the New Man would be constructed by ingrain- ing a new cooperative work practice, this process required the support of a discourse that the villagers would elaborate on the basis of their own experiences.

Tulefio men were members of several cooperatives in the vicinity of El Tule. Yet for its "model" cooperative-which the popular educators referred to as "the central organism of the community" (Comunidad de Cantimplora 1983:27)28_ Alforja chose an organization whose members included the higher-ranked members of the Reyes family, the community's dominant and most active Sandinista family. Within El Tule, Alforja set up a hierarchy of scenarios for performing revolution, with this cooperative at the pinnacle, presenting the most revolutionary performance. This cooperative was followed in the hierarchy by the women's collective and, below, other lesser organizations and the home. Implicit here was a theory of social change whereby an unenlightened and passive (and feminized) audience learned from, and im- itated, the enlightened, exemplary performance of the New Man. That Sandinismo also posited some, primarily male- gendered, places as more revolutionary than others suggests that the leadership's understanding of revolutionary change assumed a similar dynamic for the country as a whole: Those being formed as New Men and Women in workplaces and revolutionary organizations and at the war front would serve as examples for others to imitate. Eventually, the entire nation would perform revolution as the everyday.

Anagnost 1997 and Rofel 1999 have pointed to the practice of "speaking bitterness" as a technology for constructing socialist subjects in Mao's China. In El Tule, socialist self-construction was carried out through a discursive elaboration of the cooperative as the central scenario for Tulefios' revolutionary transformation. This discursive elaboration took place in 1983, during a two-week workshop on "cultural-historical recuperation" facilitated by Alforja. Alforja's workshops were supposed to be designed according to principles common to the philosophy, theory, and methodology of popular education in Latin America at the time. This approach meant assisting Tulefios in researching their village's history, "diagnosing" their current situation, and, on the basis of this knowledge, proposing ways to move forward.

My interviews and the materials generated in the workshop, however, reveal that the workshop did not engage participants in exploratory research from which local knowledge could emerge. Rather, as in other socialist societies in which putative presocialist histories and cultural forms were used to justify socialist organization and practices (Abrahams and Bukurura 1993; Cheater 1993; Grillo 1993; Pelley 2002), Alforja and Tulefios used the materials adduced through community reflection to arrive at predetermined conclusions that echoed Sandinista discourse on cooperatives as instantiations of campesinos' class and national interests. For example, in their transcriptions of workshop testimonies, Alforja workers chose to highlight comments that described the need for cooperative organization as based on the need for unity among the poor.29 As "evidence" of this need, workshop testimonies discuss the puntero system that existed in some haciendas at which Tulefios had worked in the days of Somoza:

The patr6n [boss] would come and look at us and choose the strongest one and they would call him: "look, we're going to pay you 3 c6rdobas, but we're going to give you 2 varas less, you're going to have 8 varas in width and the others 10, but you [have to] work a lot so they will follow, and if anyone leaves at 11 am. and [doesn't finish], I won't pay them for their work." They did not say this [openly], but that was their intention. [Alforja, Programa Coordinado de Educaci6n Popular n.d.:8]

The discursive link between the puntero system and the cooperative appears in another testimony transcribed in the workshop materials: After describing an experience with the puntero system in which three exhausted coworkers fainted, a villager says, "That's when we made the decision. That's when we started talking about the cooperative. Then it was not [the Sandinistas] talking [about cooperatives], it was us" (Alforja, Programa Coordinado de Educaci6n Pop- ular n.d.:8). Once this discursive link was made, most of the discussion turned to how best to make such organizations work for the campesinos and the nation.

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Socialist scenarios, power, and state formation in Sandinista Nicaragua * American Ethnologist

In drawing attention to this discursive process of em- bedding the cooperative in a predetermined village teleol- ogy,; I do not mean to claim that Tulefios' reconstruction of their history of exploitation served to confirm their decision to organize as cooperatives. As James Paul Gee points out, th ere is no such thing as "thinking for oneself" outside of "the groups and institutions within which we are socialized to interpret certain types of words and worlds in certain ways" (1988:209-210). There is also no "pure" campesino discourse or "correct" organizational form that follows from any particular history. In this sense, the Sandinista scenario of cooperative organization (had it not been a requirement for ob- taining land) was a reasonable starting point for campesino production. Yet missing from Alforja's methodology was the very heart of dialogy: a process of dialogue and critical reflection on practice that potentially generates new knowledge and understanding for teachers and students. Indeed, by 1983, El Tule's cooperative was having serious difficulties that were not helped by the lack of critical discussion about cooperatives-or this modality of cooperative-as organizational forms for this community at this time-in short, by the dogmatism of modernist state development that precluded openness to different possibilities, to different scenarios.

Rather than the dialogical emergence of a New Man, the workshop worked as a desire-creating apparatus for the heroic Old Man (Rodriguez 1996:pt. 2) of a prescripted modernist scenario of socialist production. In this way, Alforja's methodology reproduced the patriarchal elitism of orthodox sectors of the revolutionary leadership, enacting a pedagogical split between people and state and the "banking" education (Freire 1983) that dialogical pedagogies repudiated.30 That Alforja and Tulefios played leadership roles in state development projects was probably not incidental to this outcome. The result was the sacrifice of the potential for an emergent campesino scenario of socialist rural production.

(De) constructing "failure" The cooperative was organized in 1979 with 37 members from different village families, a large number of whom were members of the Reyes family, the politically dominant family in the village. The organization's performance, however, did not conform to the expected scenario of class and national unity. After a few years, the cooperative had failed to consistently deliver its products to the state and repeatedly defaulted on its credit loans. It had also been reduced in membership to 11 men, all of them siblings and close in- laws of the Reyes family, working mostly independently of each other. By the end of the 1980s, most cooperatives in the village and its surrounding area had followed a similar trajectory.31'

For many Tuleflo cooperative members, the failure of their organization represented the loss of a dream for which they felt responsible, and more than a tinge of defeat and

self-deprecation colored their assessment of what had happened. Documents from workshops conducted through 1986 and my interviews in 1992-93 with over 70 percent of village adults provide evidence of Tulefios' recurrent strug- gles with the same problems.32 Almost every person I interviewed believed that cooperatives were "better" than individual work but "only if there was unity among members." "For me," a cooperative member noted, "we human beings don't get close to each other when we are told that they are distributing sugared water. We get close when we are told that what they are giving [us] is bitter" In the end, that is, Tulefios had failed to become the altruistic New Men they had envisioned in their more utopian moments. In a conversation I had with Justino about these issues, he candidly and regretfully concluded that CAS and the ideals these cooperatives presumably embodied were doomed in El Tule.

The one that goes to cut the cattle fodder doesn't have the opportunity to do anything except cut one more grass stem, but the one that goes to the market has a lot of advantage-only to win, and not to lose, because if he sold [the product] cheaper than the market price, he tells you the truth, "I sold it cheaper," but if the price was higher [than members thought], he doesn't come back and tell you the price was higher. And also if he takes 10,000 bananas, he says he is taking 8,000. However you cut it, he wins. And so he buys any bottle of booze, any pack of cigarettes, whatever, and he doesn't remember about the one that is cutting the fodder. So it is as if you see more clearly the reality of the world, the reality of society, inside a cooperative. Supposedly, with this new model ofproduction, with a new model ofsociety... that is what [we] attempted to express with the cooperative here, [but] we didn't achieve much-I'd say [we achieved] nothing.

Following, I offer a reading of what happened in the cooperative that does not reduce Tulefio noncompliance with state dictates to a lack of class and national consciousness. My explanation focuses not on villagers' intentions in the abstract but, rather, on the disjuncture between, on the one hand, the expectation of class unity and devotion to a national community entailed in the Sandinista revolutionary scenario and, on the other hand, the local, national, and global contexts of power that produced cooperative members as social actors in the 1980s. Viewing the cooperative as a scenario in which social actors are distinct from characters helps sustain the focus on this disjuncture.

Let me begin with the problem of unity among the initial cooperative members. As in the rest of the country, some problems derived from an incompatibility between cooperative and household production principles characteristic of campesino society.33 This incompatibility fueled problems associated with a lack of internal democracy stemming

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from a second common feature of campesino society: the dominance of one family group. Yet, rather than working through these problems by addressing campesino realities, the state imposed an inflexible model of cooperative organization that remained fixed until 1986. As the following example demonstrates, Tulefios had particular difficulty accommodating this model's stipulation that membership be restricted to adult heads of families and its demand for collectivization of all aspects of production and distribution.34

From the outset, members of the Reyes family, who owned land independently of cooperative holdings, were unable to invest fully in the cooperative, as they needed to spend some of their time teaching their children to tend their family lands. By contrast, several members unrelated to the Reyes owned little or no land and so placed all their effort in working cooperative lands. These men resented the uneven- ness in members' participation, particularly because Reyes members used the state's stipulation for equal distribution of produce to insist on remunerating members equally regard- less of work time invested. Nonfamily members who had put in their full share of work were left feeling abused, particularly if the season's harvest could not adequately sustain all members' families. These political problems only aggravated members' dissatisfaction with other aspects of cooperative organization, such as its incapacity to absorb the labor of their entire families and the consequent loss of resources, and the difficulty it posed for transferring agricultural skills to the next generation.35 As a result, many non-Reyes members left the organization. Others managed to exchange their membership for a piece of cooperative land to be held (in- formally) as individual property. With these defections, the Reyes were freed to organize aspects of production not con- trolled by the state as they saw fit. Nonetheless, their behavior incurred the resentment of non-Reyes members and fed community criticism of the Reyes's failure to live up to their revolutionary commitments.

Ironically, the roots of these divisive dynamics lay in the continued presence of conditions that had historically fueled campesino competition and conflict and that cooperative organization was intended to eliminate. For example, some cooperative members chose to benefit their families at the expense of other members of their cooperative (and of the organization as a whole) because of the insecurity of tenure on cooperative lands in the face of the U.S. economic blockade and Contra military aggression toward the Sandin- ista state. This problem became clear to me in a discussion with Tulefio members of a neighboring cooperative who, to my consternation, had dismantled portions of the former hacienda house-which was now the cooperative's adminis- trative headquarter-to use the bricks to improve their own homes. When I asked one of the members about this, he stated that, "if the [previous] owners take back the land, we at least improved our houses."36 In short, although in the

abstract villagers were committed to the benefit of all cooperative members, they were unable to consistently uphold this position once embroiled in decisions that affected their households' and extended families' economies. No doubt, historical scenarios of patriarchal economic responsibility and kin solidarity in the context of scarce resources under- lay Tulefios' competitive behavior. Yet, while these very ma- terial dynamics were playing out within, and undermining, the cooperative scenario, Sandinista discourse insisted on reducing such pressures to a matter of consciousness.

By affecting members' commitment to the cooperative, the problem of land insecurity also affected, by ex- tension, their ability to keep their commitments to the state-notably, to produce a surplus for state distribution and consistently pay back the government's generous credit loans. This problem, however, was not only an effect of U.S. economic blockade and Contra military aggression but also of the very patriarchal relationship that the Sandinista state established with the cooperative sector. Jos6 voiced a key complaint of cooperative members: "There was an insecurity about the land because I couldn't bequeath it to my children." The issue of ownership also came up in the comments of Carlos, who suggested that the cooperative re-created a familiar situation from prerevolutionary days: "We didn't like it because [the government] seemed like a patr6n telling us what to do and where to sell our harvest. It didn't feel like the land was ours." That is, like the landowner of prerevolutionary days, who put limits to sharecroppers' autonomy by claiming part of their production, the state offered land to the cooperative but (in theory) did not allow the members to freely control its products.

The Sandinista state's policies with regard to the dis- position of cooperative production changed throughout the decade of the 1980s and varied according to the product. These policies also varied according to the FSLN's changing ability to shield Nicaragua from larger neocolonial scenarios characterized by unequal terms of trade. Until 1985, the state attempted to control the distribution of foodstuffs and protect producers from fluctuating world market prices by fixing prices and becoming the single largest legal purchaser of basic grains such as rice and sorghum, the two most important crops in El Tule. Although at some points the prices of some products kept up with production costs, on the whole, prices were low, as the state attempted to secure the loyalty of urban populations by providing them with inexpensive foodstuffs. Campesinos in El Tule and elsewhere, thus, exercised their agency by decreasing their productivity.37 Others sold their surplus grain in parallel (black) markets, which increasingly became the dominant force in fixing prices for crops (and other items).

Because official producer prices were insulated from international markets, these developments only deepened the downward spiral in producers' purchasing power and encouraged black-market transactions. The black market was

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fur ther fueled by the government's decision to issue checks in payment for campesino crops. For many, particularly those without means of transportation, this bureaucratic proce- du re was unduly cumbersome. In El Tule, some claimed that the bank sometimes lacked the funds to cash their checks or that it forced them to accept payment in parts, probably to avoid depleting its reserves. In response to its inability to control the revolutionary scenario vis-a-vis capitalist markets, in 1985 the government initiated a series of reforms th at included ending food subsidies and liberalizing the sale of basic grains. This led to renewed production by both cooperatives and smallholders. But rising inflation in consumer goods, particularly from 1987 to 1989, undermined much of the benefit campesinos derived from this change in economic policy (Spoor 1995:ch. 4).

Tulefios' responses to state agricultural policy should be read not only in light of Sandinista-campesino relations, but also, more broadly, in light of campesinos' historically subordinate position vis-a-vis the Nicaraguan state. For, despite the leadership's supposed commitment to a scenario shaped from below, its vision of campesino interests as shaped by the Sandinista scenario led it to reproduce traditional patriarchal scenarios of state-campesino relations by single- handedly designing the revolution's macroproject and re- sisting campesino input. Perhaps this accounts partly for Tulefios' response to one of the most significant changes in- stituted by the Sandinista government on coming to power, namely, the liberal disbursement of credit for cooperatives and small producers. At the end of agricultural cycles financed by these credit funds, Tuleflo members repeatedly opted to increase their buying power by using these funds for purposes other than agriculture rather than for loan repayment and reinvestment in the cooperative. As they soon learned to expect from a paternalist Sandinista state, their debts were canceled, and defaulting on payments did not jeopardize future loans. As in the rest of the country, this experience with the government's lenient provision of credit, along with the lack of accountability requested from them in paying their debts, poised Tulefios to act toward the state as they would a bountiful father who gave without expectation of return or, worse, an employer who set him- or herself up to be taken advantage of. These actions, moreover, were reinforced by the very language of the Sandinista scenario, which stressed that campesinos, as an exploited class prior to the revolution, were owed these benefits. As Daniel told me, people in those days often remarked that "we worked enough under Somoza. Now we want to be given what is ours."38

Aside from contradicting the Sandinistas' ethical commitment to participatory politics-the supposed corner- stone of the Sandinista scenario-the government's top- down leadership in economic policy resulted in other, politically costly, policies that demobilized the population and undermined support for the revolution. The demand

for cooperative organization as a prerequisite for receiving land, for example, created feelings of betrayal among many campesinos whose social visions were grounded in historical desires for autonomy through their own plots of land. (Given most Tulefios' investment in the Sandinista scenario of socialist transformation, however, this desire was voiced only reluctantly and mainly by the few villagers not committed to the FSLN.) The government's underrepresentation of campesinos in the process of price formation of basic grains also created problems, such as calculating production costs for agricultural products on the basis of technological lev- els to which most campesinos (and many CAS) did not have access (Spoor 1995:4). Onlylarge producers benefited as a result. In the meantime, the government's need for capital led it to court agrarian elites through preferential credit and tax incentives, at the expense of small cultivators. These practices partially offset the government's efforts to increase the social wage through the provision of schooling, health care, and the like."39 In short, the state's investment in a scenario grounded in a modernist version of agroexport capitalism produced a masculinist certainty in a vision that dehistoricized and devalued campesino desires and distorted the San- dinista politics of dialogy.

It must be recognized that Nicaragua's neocolonial economy and the overwhelming pressures of the war con- strained Sandinista options.40 Nonetheless, only a strong ideological investment in a modernist vision of development, one that contradicted campesino desires, can explain how the leadership remained blind to campesino discon- tent for so long. Indeed, although campesinos were clam- oring for greater participation in economic policy formation as early as 1981 (Matus Lazo et al. 1990:148), their demands did not register with the leadership until the middle of the decade. By then, campesinos were militantly claiming their rights to individual property and to greater autonomy in cooperatives through their mass organization, the Uni6n Nacional de Agricultores y Ganaderos (UNAG). Campesinos' ability to pressure the state through UNAG was consistent with the revolution's goal of em- powering disenfranchised Nicaraguans. Indeed, it evidences participatory democracy at work. However, other forms of campesino resistance that were damning to the state had also become patent: Campesinos were withdrawing from production and cooperatives and defecting to the Contra guerrillas.

In response, the government began a series of policy changes in 1985. One significant change was accelerating the pace of land distribution, especially of individual holdings. This gesture, however, was widely interpreted by campesinos as a measure forced on an unwilling leadership by the U.S.- Contra war. Other changes included giving greater opera- tional autonomy to cooperatives and largely ending market intervention. Despite these reforms, serious critiques of the revolution's economic project from within Sandinismo did

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American Ethnologist "

Volume 34 Number 1 February 2007

not emerge until the end of the decade (Spoor 1995:56).41 By then, powerfully performative scenarios of neocolonial capitalism combined with military aggression to ensure their enforcement had undermined much of the revolutionary impulse for the would-be Sandinista scenario.

For most Tulefios, who benefited greatly from the revolution and were deeply bound to it affectively, coming to see the state and, especially, the national leadership of the San- dinista Front as something more complicated than simple allies and benefactors was a slow process, full of pain and ambivalence. In October 2000, I had a conversation with Jorge, a member of the cooperative since its inception, in which he discussed how campesinos were both benefited and harmed by the Sandinista government. His views supported other Tulefios' opinion that the village had, on the whole, done well by the revolution, particularly in the early 1980s. Jorge's comments are framed in the context of the land and the education Tulefios received from the government, on the one hand, and their conscription into the war, on the other hand:

In my judgement I think that at one moment, from 79 to 84, really we were spoiled. Already in 1985 one felt that one was spoiled but that they they pinch you [te pellizcan], right, and sometimes because of the affection [carifio] that you feel and that they feel for you, you don't feel the pain when they pinch you.... At the beginning you don't feel it, you start feeling it partially. It is not the same when I go to the funeral in another village of a friend that died, than when the pinch is harder because it has to be my son. Or it has to be a family member. Then, it puts pressure, the war pressures the government to have to bring together affection and pinching.

Jorge's words express a characteristic Janus-faced patriarchal view of the government as both an oppressive and a giving father. His views both support and complicate Jeffrey L. Gould's claim that campesinos who, like Tulefios, had a history of activism prior to or during the revolution largely viewed the Sandinistas as "sincere, if occasionally misguided allies" (1988:282). Gould's discussion of campesinos' views of the FSLN was a response to Colburn's assertion that campesinos he spoke to questioned the benefits they had derived from the Sandinista agrarian reform, asking, "What good is a land reform if you have to sell your crops to the government at a low price?" (1988:101). Gould's argument was primarily based on interviews with campesino activists who had been proletarianized prior to 1979. By contrast, in El Tule, most campesinos were smallholders. Despite these differences, Tulefios' overall assessment of the Sandinista agrarian reform leads me to concur with Gould that, regard- less of specific complaints, most campesinos never questioned the validity of land distribution and that distribution did transform rural social conditions. I also concur with him that a more appropriate question to ask is why, in the face

of economic disasters, so many rural Nicaraguans continued to participate in the revolution (and, indeed, support the FSLN).

Gould's response is not only that many campesinos, especially the landless, benefited from the agrarian reform but also that, by the middle of the decade, campesinos did, indeed, have a voice in government policy through UNAG. Although this is true, the dominance of government de- cree in what was supposed to have been a scenario shaped from below was not easily transformed. For, the potential that may have existed in a context of peace to address the problems in the Sandinistas' modernist scenario was effectively destroyed by the exigencies of the U.S.-Contra war. It is in this context that I read Tulefios' noncompliance with state policy not as a product of an ahistorical individual- ist consciousness or an inability to comprehend the idea of the nation, as implied in critiques of peasant parochialism or even as the FSLN's inability to effectively communi- cate its predicament.42 Rather, I see it as consistent with the subordinate position campesinos, in fact, occupied in the revolutionary polity. Indeed, viewed from within the scenario motivating Tulefios' responses, noncompliance did not constitute a failure at all but, rather, a means to secure campesinos' ability to meet their responsibilities as family patriarchs and kin-group members. Their actions also reveal an evolving view of the Sandinista state from a campesino ally to a patriarchal, albeit also paternalist, organization of power that, in the name of the nation, could both love and pinch them.

Saldafia-Portillo argues that "Sandinista agricultural policy was ... a regime of subjection: its intention was to produce a model subject in agriculture, one with a revolutionary consciousness that would benefit the citizen and the nation" (2003:112). This policy assumed that, once enlightened, campesinos would leave behind the (feminized) particularity of their own reality and preexisting affiliations to embrace a universal (masculine) subject of revolution, a self-determining ahistorical hero that, at great cost to himself and his people, would sacrifice himself to work in solidarity with other campesinos and with the nation (Saldafia- Portillo 2003:ch. 3, 4). As I have shown, such a modernist scenario of state-building, particularly in a neocolonial, war- torn context, produced roles that were increasingly at odds with campesino realities and historical consciousness and that Tulefios found impossible to fulfill. The role of the state in producing such a situation, however, was rendered invisible by the very discourse of socialist achievement- becoming the New Man. For the desire the Sandinistas created for the New Man mystified state-campesino relations by assuming a state that primarily represented campesino interests. Thus, they failed to recognize that the national scenario they had constructed prefigured, by its continued economic and power inequalities, the inevitability of campesino noncompliance.

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Socialist scenarios, power, and state formation in Sandinista Nicaragua n American Ethnologist

Situating knowledges and power in the revolution

When I began writing my dissertation shortly after I returned from Nicaragua, I was vexed by the problem of writing the chapter about the cooperative with respect and sensitivity. Indeed, I postponed writing that chapter until the very end because I hesitated to confront a story that I-like Tulefios themselves-believed they had spoiled by their lack of consciousness. Only after extensive, focused reflection was I able to bring back to mind a conversation I had had with a group of Tulefio men, the significance of which I did not understand at the time. These men had attempted to im- press on me that their failure to unite around the cooperative project did not reflect an incapacity for solidarity. They pointed, instead, to different organizational possibilities that they thought would work for them. In particular, they felt that, although producer autonomy was essential, so, too, was uniting as a class for credit and commercializa- tion. Recollecting this conversation allowed me to see that during my stay in El Tule, villagers had been searching for an explanation for their actions that did not center on their incapacity for solidarity but, rather, focused on the conditions under which different forms of solidarity were possible.43 In so doing, Tulefios were attempting to define their interests on the basis of the particularities of their situation, rather than on abstract notions of class and national interests.

Ironically, the villagers' impulse to define themselves by drawing on their own knowledge and experiences-the heart of dialogical methodologies-had been suppressed by a cooperative scenario that did not make room for alter- native interpretations. The dominance of this scenario also accounted for my inability to hear what the villagers were saying. More generally, I could not understand that Tulefios were operating according to two contradictory frameworks: that of patriarch and kinsman and that of aspiring New Man. Thus, I was unable to hear their explanations of their noncompliance as anything more than insufficient intentionality-much as they themselves seemed to regard it.44 I realized, too, that our views were not innocent of our own politics: The possibility of Tulefios recasting their analysis had been blunted by the will to Sandinista power that inhered in the village's position as a model community that both depended on the Sandinista state and was part of San- dinista state governance. The will to Sandinista power also accounted for my own inability to recognize obvious problems with the revolutionary project. Not until a few years after the 1990 electoral defeat of the Sandinistas, during a period of self-criticism, were Tulefios able to confront the contradictions in the Sandinista scenario and the leadership's claims to represent the poor. Likewise, it was only then that I recognized that the Sandinista scenario that I had so cherished was not an emergent scenario of national liberation but, rather, more a product of modernist state scripting.

Indeed, I realized then that the campesinos' responses to cooperative policy revealed not a lack of class consciousness but, rather, an acute awareness of their position vis-h-vis the state and, more specifically, vis-a-vis a state unable to break out of the neocolonial grip. I recognized, too, that my own romantic attachments to the Sandinista vision of the revolution had led me to perform the very antidialogical, uncritical colonialist ethnography that I had repudiated, for my role, too, had been scripted.

My interpretation of the Sandinista state's vision of the cooperatives also rests on these dynamics of power and knowledge. The Sandinista cooperative scenario created a contradiction between social actors and characters as it put the burden of transformation on individual will rather than on wider sets of national and global political-economic relations. In the process, campesinos' agency was dehistoricized and their experience devalued. Yet given the Sandinistas' ideological immersion in modernist socialist scenarios, they were unable to acknowledge that the conditions of possibility for their scenario of class and national consciousness did not exist during most of the 1980s among cooperativized campesinos. More to the point, these conditions could not exist if the Sandinistas were to lead a state whose formation was inspired by modernist scenarios of development that-exacerbated by neocolonial constraints and a war of aggression-hinged largely on the subordination and, in some cases, exploitation, of campesinos.

Fernando Coronil argues that the state is not the mask that prevents our seeing political practice for what it is (1997:114), as Phillip Abrams (1988) claims. Rather, "it is the practice of masking and the masking of practice as dual aspects of the historical process through which states are constituted" (Coronil 1997:114). The case of El Tule supports Coronil's argument, yet it raises questions about the use of the concept of "masking" to analyze a process that is not fueled by intentionality or subterfuge-as Coronil himself makes clear. As I have shown through the concept of "scenario," like the campesinos, the Sandinistas, too, were caught in imaginaries that had unintended yet very real effects of power.45 Thus, despite the Sandinistas' best intentions, cooperative organization and its construction as a scenario of class and national consciousness worked as a technology for maintaining a patriarchal-and vanguardist-relationship between the state and campesinos, as it placed Tulefios in a position of never living up to the state's and their own expectations. Indeed, the campesinos' inability to live up to Sandinista expectations, their discourse of failure, and their continued but failed intention to rectify this behavior were built into what increasingly became a pedagogical relationship between a self-identified modernizing state and "backward" campesinos. The discourse of failure elaborated and reproduced by some Sandinistas and academics alike, rather than simply pointing to an empirical reality out in the world, was part of the process of constituting and naturalizing this

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relationship. Through a kind of perverse logic, these dynamics ensured that the state's vanguardist position vis-a-vis the peasantry would be upheld.

Notes

Acknowledgments. The following institutions supported the fieldwork on which this article is based: the Social Science Research Council; National Science Foundation; Wenner-Gren Foundation; Rackham School of Graduate Studies, University of Michigan; and the Faculty Research and Creative Activities Fund at Western Michi- gan University. Initial versions of this argument were formulated with the support of a Charlotte Newcombe dissertation-writing fellowship; Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship foundation; a resi- dent fellowship from the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Notre Dame University; and a Carley J. Hunt postdoctoral fellowship, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. I especially want to thank Janise Hurtig, Lessie Jo Frazier, Ellen Moodie, and Bilinda Straight for their generosity in commenting on various drafts and Fernando Coronil for his comments on earlier versions of this article and support of the project of which it is a part. Florence Babb, Les Field, Jon Jonakin, Karen Kampwirth, Michael Schroeder, and an anonymous reviewer also provided insightful comments. Names of people and the community have been changed to protect Tulefios' privacy.

1. See Verdery 1991 for an argument about the problems associated with using only a Foucauldian notion of modern power to analyze socialist societies and for a broader argument about forms of power in these societies.

2. Some of these analyses are theoretically sophisticated, qual- ifying or going beyond the problematic concept of "resistance" as proposed by James Scott (1985, 1990). For critiques of this concept, see Abu-Lughod 1990, Turton 1986, and Mitchell 1990. See White 1986 for a critique of the use of the concept of "everyday peasant resistance" to analyze socialist contexts. From a very different perspective, Humphrey 1994 critiques the use of the concept of "hidden transcripts" in the analysis of socialist societies.

3. See Babb 2001:ch. 1 for a discussion of the many writers and scholars-including anthropologists-who were inspired and transformed by the Sandinista revolution. See, for example, Dashti 1994; Field 1999; Gordon 1988; Hale 1994; Higgins and Coen 1992; Lancaster 1988, 1992; and Montoya 1996. Writing in the aftermath of revolution, and despite a more critical perspective afforded by hindsight, Florence Babb (2001:10) credits the revolution with in- troducing forms of democracy that became part of the Nicaraguan political landscape.

4. For my interpretation of Sandinista forms of democracy, see N. 25. For references that document Sandinista democracy in the educational, artistic, and cultural realms, see N. 30. The difference is striking between these works and those documenting the top- down methods used in places such as Cuba (Fagen 1969), the Soviet Union (Kenez 1985), and China (Yu 1964).

5. In 1990, the Sandinista party was voted out of power, which devolved to a coalition of 14 U.S.-supported parties. As I show in this article, by the end of the 1980s, Nicaraguans had many reasons to be unhappy with the Sandinistas. Yet many observers agree that a large portion of the populationvoted against the Sandinistas to bring an end to the U.S.-funded and orchestrated Contra war, which had inflicted enormous human and economic costs. According to this perspective, which I share, a vote against the Sandinistas did not in all cases reflect the regime's loss of legitimacy. In the aftermath of the revolution, the Sandinista party remained the single largest political party in the country. For a useful discussion on the complexity of

issues of state legitimacy, see Hann 1993:11-14. For an analysis of socialist state processes of legitimation in socialist Romania, see Verdery 1991.

6. Internationalist is a term that refers to foreign nationals working (or engaging in combat) in solidarity with a revolutionary movement.

7. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork and oral historical research in El Tule from June 1992 to August 1993, in March 1995, in July 1997, and in September and October 2000. Most of the sources on which I have drawn for this study were collected in the course of this research and are, thus, conditioned by that time and context and by my interpretations. These sources were part of a broader set of fieldwork materials, including a survey on political opinions and class, familial, and gender ideologies with over 70 percent of village adults; hundreds of hours of taped and untaped interviews on these and other topics with men and women of a range of ages; oral historical and life-history interviews; and participant-observation materials recorded in my field notes.

8. Scholars of socialism have often claimed that the govern- ments of socialist countries restricted foreign visitors to "model" institutions (collectives, factories, etc.). This claim does not apply to Nicaragua, where large numbers of internationalists were fully integrated into the revolution, living in the country for years at a time. The claim is also problematic, as Lisa Rofel argues, because "it assumes that they [visitors] could find an unmediated voice ... if only they were given sufficient freedom" (1999:291). I also wish to distance my characterization of revolutionary tourists from that of scholars like Paul Hollander (1997). Hollander argues that left- wing Western intellectuals' blindness to the pitfalls of revolutionary regimes has been rooted in alienation from their own secularizing societies, which pushes them to search for community, meaning, and purpose in idealized societies. Their political views, rather than reality, he argues, shape what they encounter in socialist societies. Hollander fails, however, to apply a similar analysis to apologists of capitalist systems, as if their views are transparent representations of reality. Perhaps his inability to be critical of his own ideological lenses accounts for why he finds no merit in critiques of Euro-U.S. societies and praise for certain aspects of revolutionary societies.

9. The term guardia refers to the dictator Somoza's repressive force, the National Guard. In the 1990s, the term was also sometimes used by Nicaraguans to refer to the Contra guerrillas, as many had been former National Guard members.

10. I use the term campesino-roughly "rural producer"-instead of the more commonly used term peasant to avoid anachronistic and culturally misplaced connotations stemming from the Euro- pean feudal origin of the latter term.

11. A study conducted in the mid-1980s suggested that cooperatives' performance was very uneven (Centro de Investigaci6n de la Reforma Agraria [CIERA] 1985). Yet a review of the literature for this period finds a heavy emphasis on cooperatives' myriad problems in organization, production, delivery of products to the state, and loan repayment (see, e.g., Cort6s 1987; Matus Lazo et al. 1990; Ortega 1987; Porras 1987). A study by Jon Jonakin (199

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