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

Nationalist writers Gámez (1889), Ayón (1882), and Cuadra (1950) put forth the
notion of rural indigenous groups as backward or savage. Mestizaje was a nationalist ploy
to resign indigenous identity to the past and unify the new Nicaraguan national-state
under a common heritage. Although this national heritage was an amalgam of the
purportedly “finest” aspects of indigenous society and the “civilized” contributions of the
Spanish, it further marginalizes rural Indians by recognizing and incorporating the
contributions of certain peri-urban and relatively predominant indigenous groups (Dore
2006) as opposed to the influences and contributions of remote, rural tribes.
The more recent insurrection and revolutionary period, 1960–1989, introduced
class-based interpretations of ethnic struggle and structural inequality. Writers such as
like Jaime Wheelock (1974, 1985) and leaders such as Humberto Ortega characterized
members of rural communities as proletarians in an agrarian capitalist system. The
specificities of ethnic identities in rural Nicaragua were overshadowed when
revolutionary ideologies sought to alleviate oppression solely along class lines. The
Sandinistas identified a need among a presumed rural proletariat that was based on
generalized assumptions of rural Nicaraguan ethnic and class structures. This assumption
situated rural and indigenous groups within a dominant capitalist system as wageworkers
and oppressed laborers. There was no consideration of subsistence production or
communal landholdings (Wheelock 1985). Pre-capitalist and feudal relations were
defined as pertaining to an earlier stage in the Marxist developmental framework.
Sandinistas overarching class-based approach did not include ejidal land claims or ethnic
communities desires for land tenure and autonomous activity.
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