i Patrick W. Staib Anthropology This dissertation is approved, and it ...

Don Amado raised his family of six children on that tract and expanded his
holdings so as to be able to give parcels to his children. He has never joined a cooperative
and continues to manage his coffee farming independently, relying only on family for
support. He continues to use chemical additives on his farm and sells to any coyote 16 or
buyer who will pay what he regards as a reasonable price.
Much like Myerhoff’s (1978) focus on the living histories of Jewish Holocaust
survivors, I focus here on the life histories of Don Amado and Don Sixto because they
reflect the socioeconomic conditions that small farmers have faced in Las Segovias over
the past century. I show that neither of these farmers is more “native Segovian” than the
other; rather, their interactions with the state and elite sectors of society validate their
thoroughly native Segovian identity.
The use of determiners such as Indio, as opposed to Ladino, merits discussion at
this point. Indio typically refers to an individual with indigenous ancestry. As a result of
race-mixture, or mestizaje, most Nicaraguans acknowledge a blend of Spanish, African,
and indigenous ancestry in their ethnic and cultural heritage. However, the word Indio is
often used as a derogatory term for idle, lazy, slow, or ignorant. People who self-identify
as Indio are, like Don Sixto, making a political statement to refute traditional stereotypes
and engage with their local structures of power, oppression, and stigmatization.
Nonetheless, what follows is not an account of who is indigenous and who is not. Rather,
it is an appraisal of historical antecedents and political events that have informed the
lived realities of people who identify to a common regional identity are native to Las
16 Coyote is a local term for a broker. In this context, coyotes are the coffee brokers that
tend to finance farmers’ production by prepaying for harvest crop in the low season when
the farmers most in need of cash.
25