Nicaragua's ethnic minorities in the revolution

Monthly Review, Jan, 1985 by Philippe Bourgois

The Creoles dominated the skilled jobs. Because of their superior education they tended to obtain white-collar employment in disproportionate numbers. Since the decline in activity of the foreign corporations in the region over the last 50 years, many Creoles had withdrawn from the local labor market, relying instead on income earned as seamen on foreign vessels or on cash remittances from family members in the United States. Above the Creoles there was a stratum of upper class Pacific-born Mestizos, usually of lighter complexion than the poorer Mestizos, who held administrative and political appointee positions. Finally, until the triumph of the revolution this ethnic-class hierarchy was capped by a miniscule layer of North American and European whites who owned or ran the few companies still operating on the coast, such as the gold mines or the lumber export firms.

This class hierarchy was accompanied by acute racial prejudice. Mestizos and Creoles presented the "inferiority" of the Miskitu and other Amerindians as a matter of common sense. In turn, the working-class and peasant Mestizos looked down upon the Creoles for their dark complexion while the Creoles--whether dark or light complexioned--insisted upon their superiority over the "Panias" (Spaniards).

It would be ahistorical to expect it to be possible to eradicate quickly these patterns of interethnic domination, so solidly rooted in local class inequalities. Indeed, these patterns of ethnic-class hierarchy existed with local variations throughout all the nations of the Central American Atlantic litoral. Racism was an integral part of the social formations spawned by the multinational enclaves.

By the end of the fifth year of the revolution, theoreticians within the revolutionary process were beginning to publish analyses of the dual nature of ethnic/class domination in Zelaya. For example a CIDCA document noted that there was an inherent tendency for class-conscious movements composed of the dominant ethnic group of a country to subordinate the struggle against ethnic oppression to that of economic exploitation. The document concludes that in the case of Nicaragua "class exploitation and ethnic oppression are inextricably interconnected both in history and in the present. Therefore, one form of domination cannot be successfully eradicated without a conscious, simultaneous struggle to eliminate the other." Ironically the contras, for all their indigenous rights rhetoric, had evidently not learned this lesson. In fact in mid-1984, a prominent member of ARDE resigned from the organization, citing racism against the Miskitu as one of his primary motives.

Perhaps the most explosive psychological legacy of this history of dual domination was the neurosis of internalized racism on the part of the Amerindians at the bottom of the hierarchy. This explains why so many Miskitu could be mobilized into a virtually suicidal war. The Miskitu contras appealed to these deeply ingrained sentiments of heartfelt injustice and humiliation. Through MISURASATA and later MISURA, Fagoth offered the Miskitu people, who had always been ridiculed and exploited by the surrounding ethnic groups, an illusion of racial superiority. For example, he advocated the expulsion of the Mestizo population from the northeast and the relegation of Creoles to the status of second-class citizens.