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

periphery. The small farmers of San Juan del Río Coco continue to be actively involved
in determining their own fates.
Nicaraguan independence from Spain in 1838 brought forms of nationalist
ideology that cloaked the class interests of civic and trade leaders. This new nation was
governed under a common statute that recognized a general Nicaraguan ethnicity as the
unifying force for national identity construction. The ideology of a common Nicaraguan
ethnicity, later bolstered by nationalist intellectuals such as Pablo Antonio Cuadra, Jorge
Luis Arellano, and Jose Coronel Urtecho, advanced the notion of mestizaje. This “myth
of mestizaje” (Gould 1992) served to unify the upper and middle classes of the urban
populace, leaving the rural ethnic communities at the margins of the nation-building
project. This is unlike the case in Guatemala, where pan-Maya activism has responded to
dominant ladino (or mestizo) hierarchies that threaten to leave the indigenous ethnic
communities out of national discourse (Warren 1998).
Indigenous identity markers declined as post-independence nation-building efforts
strove to unify Nicaragüenses under a general mestizo national identity. Scholars have
attributed a sort of “culture loss” to native Segovians who were forced to abandoned
traditional dress and speech. To “ladinoize” or “de-indianize” afforded a better chance to
access ladino privilege and to survive the brutal oppression of colonial and postcolonial
states (Wheelock 1980; Gould 1998; Warren 1998; Field 1999; Snyder, Williams and
Peterson 2003; Dore 2006).
The changing identity of rural inhabitants has been explored within the context of
rising nationalisms in Latin America (Anderson 1992). The subject of anthropology
shifted from the “primitive” to the “peasant” as increased influence from dominant
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