About the project
This archive is part of a larger effort, which has been carried out in spaces of learning and research, to interrogate Nicaragua's recent past. In particular, to illuminate a new way of understanding violence and the processes of national reconstruction as a process that is deeply intersected by gender structures.
In July 1979, an armed and popular movement, known as the Sandinista National Liberation Front, FSLN, managed to take control of different cities in Nicaragua. With the dissemination of the military forces of the flight of Anastasio Somoza, the triumph of the Sandinista Popular Revolution was celebrated by a large majority of Nicaraguans. Days after the flight of the dictatorship and the establishment of a provisional government junta, it became public knowledge that an army of Somoza sympathizers began their organization in Honduras. This army, sponsored primarily by the United States government, was called the Nicaraguan Resistance (RN), but has been commonly known as the Counterrevolution, or simply La Contra.
The war that followed in the 1980s was bloody. The internal contradictions of the Sandinista party generated discontent in the Caribbean and rural Nicaragua. By the middle and end of the war, the idea that the armed counterrevolutionary movement was an effort sustained solely through the former dictatorship and US imperialism was not enough to explain the conflict.
Irene Agudelo (2017) discusses that, from the official media of the FSLN party, La Contra was represented as “former Somocista guards, mercenaries paid by the US, (genocidal) monsters and defeated cowards” (p.48). The author explores the Sandinista newspaper Barricada, which covered national events between 1979 and 1998, finding that - from the Sandinista lens - there was a construction of the Other as an animal, beast, and non-human in order to justify the armed confrontation between Nicaraguans.
The role of women has been explored by Nicaraguan feminists and researchers who wanted to understand the role of female militia members and commanders. Agudelo's own work explores the place of peasant women within the Contra army.
This archive follows the trail of women and families who organized themselves from another place.
With the resurgence of violence in 1980, families began to organize to sustain life and security at the community level. Some families organized themselves into the Committee of Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs. This organization, made up of mothers of people murdered during the war of the 80's, carried out funeral rites publicly, denounced in the media the tragedy that their family was experiencing and accompanied each other through their pain.
In her research, Lorraine Bayard de Volo (2001), mentions that along with mutual accompaniment, this and other mothers' organizations were instrumentalized by both Sandinista and Contras, showing them as moral symbols that justified their political objectives. However, as the same author mentions, mothers could negotiate with these political movements to advance their own agendas.
This archive follows a small part of the actions of these mothers and families after the fall of the dictatorship when they mobilized to demand prison for perpetrators of violence, they organized to create memory actions at the community level, public religious services, and search for missing people.
The records
The objective of this archive is also to pay attention to social processes that have been vital in the history of the country, but that is silenced in official narratives. As Kenneth Foote (1990) mentions, remembering is also forgetting. In this way, this archive recognizes that these are the voices of only a part of the organized families and a fragment of a broader story about the dictatorship and the war in Nicaragua. The voices in these records belong almost exclusively to mothers organized with an affinity for the FSLN. The main records presented in this archive come from Diario Barricada (July-August), a media outlet that aligned itself with the FSLN and the revolutionary project. Other available records were produced by community photographers, researchers, and filmmakers.
There is pending work to find and show the voices that were mobilized from other places and other agendas, but who were going through similar pain and loss.
The public
This digital archive was created with communities of memory and affect in mind. As Caswell, Cifor, and Ramirez (2016) mentioned in their article, affects tend to have a place in academia far from the local experience of people in their every day, however, affective work is deeply ingrained in archival work and this project wants to make that link visible to explore the love and pain of the mothers who politically organized to sustain the life of their families or keep alive the memory of those they lost.
The main target group for the project are families and people directly connected to the events of war during the 80s in Nicaragua. However, given the under representation of these stories in the National narrative, the hope for this archive is to reach history and memory enthusiasts, as well as researchers and historians who are exploring how gender shapes conflict.
Archival concepts and tools
An archival concept that were important during selection and apprisal is representation. Yakel (2003) explores the flexibility and continuous development of tools for representation. In this case, the archives opt for a disruption in the original order of the newspaper, or chronological order to approach from a thematic point of view. This was possible since the time period explored through the main records is short (less than two months), however. If the time is extended or the records included increase, a new way of organization should be considered as well as the use of finding aids that help locate newspaper issues centered with more information on the main topic of the archive.
On the other hand, the representation discussion for this archive also relates to the one described by Adria L. Imada in her book "An Archive of Skin, An Archive of Kin" (2022), because there is a deep need to showcase narratives and experiences erased from public knowledge at the same time that there is an ethical struggle no not revictimize the main actors of this stories.