Flexible Families

Nicaraguan Transnational Families in Costa Rica

Caitlin E. Fouratt, Caitlin Fouratt

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780826504364, 9780826504371
• eBook ISBN: 9780826504388
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia culturale e sociale

Flexible Families examines the struggles among Nicaraguan migrants in Costa Rica (and their families back in Nicaragua) to maintain a sense of family across borders. The book is based on more than twenty-four months of ethnographic fieldwork in Costa Rica and Nicaragua (between 2009 and 2012) and more than ten years of engagement with Nicaraguan migrant communities. Author Caitlin Fouratt finds that migration and family intersect as sites for triaging inequality, economic crisis, and a lack of state-provided social services.

The book situates transnational families in an analysis of the history of unstable family life in Nicaragua due to decades of war and economic crisis, rather than in the migration process itself, which is often blamed for family breakdown in public discourse. Fouratt argues that the kinds of family configurations often seen as problematic consequences of migration—specifically single mothers, absent fathers, and grandmother caregivers—represent flexible family configurations that have enabled Nicaraguan families to survive the chronic crises of the past decades. By examining the work that goes into forging and sustaining transnational kinship, the book argues for a rethinking of national belonging and discourses of solidarity.

In parallel, the book critically examines conditions in Costa Rica, especially the ways the instabilities and inequalities that have haunted the rest of the region have begun to take shape there, resulting in perceptions of increased crime rates and a declining quality of life. By linking this crisis of Costa Rican exceptionalism to recent immigration reform, the book also builds on scholarship about the production and experiences of immigrant exclusion. Flexible Families offers insight into the impacts of increasingly restrictive immigration policies in the everyday lives of transnational families within the developing world.

CHAPTER 1

State, Family, and Solidarity in the Nicaraguan Nation

ALONG THE PAN-AMERICAN HIGHWAY heading north from the Costa Rica-Nicaragua border toward Managua, as in many other prominent places around the city and the whole country, there are bright pink billboards with larger-than-life photos of a smiling Daniel Ortega, the former Sandinista comandante and current president. The billboards read, Nicaragua: Cristiana, Socialista, Solidaria! (Nicaragua: Christian, Socialist, and in Solidarity). In Managua at night, bright streetlights illuminate the billboards and strings of Christmas lights crisscross the urban highways and roundabouts. The year-round lights, hot-pink billboards, and flashy presence of Ortega highlight the contradictory politics of life in Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas returned to power in 2007 after a decade of economic restructuring under a series of liberal democratic administrations. Since then, revolutionary discourse centered on solidarity and focused on the persona of president and Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega has made a resurgence. At the same time, working-class Nicaraguans have faced increasing difficulties in making ends meet. These difficulties have been reinforced by the Ortega administration’s promotion of big business and foreign investment and continued neoliberal economic reforms.

Throughout my research, Nicaraguans of all political persuasions expressed profound frustration with life and politics in Nicaragua. Like other Central American societies after the civil wars of the 1980s, Nicaraguans have faced an extended moment of disillusionment, built on several decades of post-war disappointments (Silber 2004, 2011). There are multiple frustrations linked to various political attempts to steer Nicaragua forward, from the failure of promises of equality under the Sandinista Revolution, to the “sálvese quien pueda” (roughly, sink or swim) neoliberalism of the 1990s (R. Montoya 2013, 46), to current failures of solidarity under the neo-Sandinista party.

This chapter examines the intersections of state constructions of family life and Nicaraguans’ relationship to the state to understand transformations in state-family relations over the past four decades. I trace the history of political and economic transformations, focusing on their interventions and impacts on families and the gender norms that underlie them. The entanglements of national crises and family emergencies, of failed state policies and flexible practices of care and kin in Nicaragua occur in the face of what James Quesada (2009) has called the “vicissitudes of violence” of the past four decades.

Nicaragua underwent two major political and economic transformations in a relatively short time—first from a market economy and authoritarian dictatorship under the Somoza regime (1936–1979) to a state-regulated economy and revolutionary government under the Sandinistas (1979–1990), then to a liberal democracy and neoliberal market economy after the 1990 elections (Babb 1998). Subsequent administrations included major transformations not only of policies, but of the logic and function of the state (Close 2016). These transformations took place in the context of deeply entrenched inequality that was a legacy of both the Somoza regime and a decade of warfare between the Sandinistas and Contra forces. Many scholars have discussed these histories of transformation and exclusion (Babb 1996; Close and i Puig 2011; Lancaster 1992; Montoya 2013; Randall 1994). Here, I focus on state interventions in the family during and after the Sandinista Revolution of the 1980s, situating structural adjustment, poverty, and the privatization of social services within Nicaragua’s particular history of exclusionary social regimes.

Such shifts in state-family relations have not only generated conditions that pushed thousands of Nicaraguans to migrate but have also had profound impacts on kin and care arrangements within the country and transnationally. Indeed, despite their stark differences, the Sandinistas, the neoliberal regimes of the 1990s, and the current Sandinista administration under Daniel Ortega have all relied on family flexibility and the unpaid work of women to make up for the poor provision of care through public services (Martínez Franzoni and Voorend 2011). Today, Nicaragua’s social service system remains poorly funded and uncoordinated, resulting in poor coverage and quality of care of the most basic services.

Even as the current government calls on Nicaraguans to participate in building a solidary, post-revolutionary society, working class families find it almost impossible to participate in this national project of development given high levels of poverty and unemployment. While wealthy Managuans flit across the city in cars, sip coffee at cafes, and shop at international malls, others look for new ways to get by, including through migration. By 2009, the families I worked with had little use for revolutionary discourses as they struggled to put food on the table, afford ever-increasing rent and utilities, and find work. To explain the frustrations Nicaraguans felt at this situation, I draw on Ellen Moodie’s (2011, 2013) concept of a “community of care,” which implies desires for belonging and equality. While Moodie and others have used the term to describe desires for democracy in postwar Central America, I am extending it to understand desires for solidarity, a key Sandinista and Nicaraguan national value.

From Dictatorship to Revolution: The New Man and New Woman

By 1979, the Somoza family dynasty had ruled Nicaragua for forty-four years. Don Eloy, my seventy-five-year-old neighbor in Granada who proudly identified as a Somocista, argued that under the Somoza regime, “there was an abundance of everything.” Nicaragua, he claimed, was known as the breadbasket of Central America and achieved economic growth thanks to development projects financed from abroad. Indeed, between 1950 and 1977, annual per capita income doubled to US$3,349 (World Bank 2017). However, this wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few, particularly among the Somoza family and their associates. In the first half of the twentieth century, much of Latin America underwent policy transformations that expanded state interventions in social welfare and the economy. However, in Nicaragua the Somozas, with US support, crushed peasant demands for land and rights (Collier and Collier 2002). From at least the 1930s through 1979, when the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dynasty, Nicaragua was characterized by state-enforced exclusion and inequality. For example, after the 1972 Managua earthquake devastated the capital city, millions of dollars in international aid went directly to the pockets of the Somozas and their allies while Nicaraguans struggled to rebuild.

The Somozas grew wealthy while the majority of the population lacked access to land, education, healthcare, and other services. At the end of the 1970s, half the Nicaraguan population was illiterate; only one-third of the urban population and only 5 percent of the rural population had access to potable water, and even fewer to sanitation (Martínez Franzoni 2008, 191). In this context, poor Nicaraguans, who were the majority of the population, depended on family networks for care provision, and women contributed heavily both to these informal care networks and to income-generating activities. Thousands of Nicaraguans participated in seasonal migration within the country and to Costa Rica for cotton and coffee harvests. Indeed, don Eloy’s own parents had migrated seasonally to Costa Rica and Panama to make ends meet. Discontent with the Somoza regime grew among many sectors, including the business community, leftist activists, students, and the Catholic Church.

The Frente Sandinista de Liberación (FSLN, Sandinista National Liberation Front) came to power in 1979 as part of a broad coalition to overthrow the Somoza regime. They would commence a decade-long experiment in social and economic reform that included attempts to transform family configurations and gender relations and to promote a vision of a society and nation built on solidarity. These ideas were rooted in new ideals of gender roles—the “new man” and “new woman”—and in a vision of solidary family and social relationships.

Sandinista visions of the “new man” and “new woman” sought to transform these relations and promote both men’s and women’s integration into the economy, military service, and volunteer work, while generating particular affects around such revolutionary ideas. As the former Sandinista leader and poet Gioconda Belli (1982, 19) wrote, “solidarity is the tenderness of the people.”* In that same poem, Belli evokes the sense of sacrifice and hope at the beginning of the Sandinista Revolution, along with the continued work to make that dream of Revolution a reality. In transforming gender roles, the Sandinistas sought to enlist both the private and public spheres to create a solidary society that strived for social transformation, through both hope and sacrifice aimed at care for fellow Nicaraguans. Thus, Sandinista notions of solidarity included ideals of mutual sharing, responsibility toward fellow citizens, and active participation in revolutionary efforts and ethos.

Sandinista revolutionary projects of the 1980s sought to create a unified nation in part through gender equality and family stability. Such state intervention to transform the patriarchal family has been a common reform in socialist states as new governments seek to dismantle social relations of the “old” society (Molyneux 1985a). As Ann Laura Stoler (2001, 831) has argued, the “tense and tender ties” of families, households, and intimate relationships are important “microsites of governance.” It is, after all, within the family that citizens first learn about rights and duties, labor, and power relations. Interventions into the family represent highly gendered interventions into the basic social fabric. In Nicaragua, the traditional patriarchal family represented the society of the past, particularly its deep gender inequality and rigid hierarchy.

The Sandinistas attempted to redefine relations between the sexes and create legislation to protect women’s rights at home and in the workplace. They tried to legislate equitable relations within the home by requiring men to participate in household work. Underlying the solidary family was a vision of the “new man” who was both a social revolutionary and a benevolent patriarch. This “new man” would be a model of solidarity publicly and privately—both building a revolutionary society in the streets and nurturing solidary relationships within the home. This “new man” was embodied by three revolutionary figures: Che, Christ, and Sandino—the Nicaraguan peasant who first stood up to the Somoza dictatorship (R. Montoya 2003).

The image of the “new woman” naturalized women’s role as nurturers and caregivers to enroll mothers in the service of the revolution and the nation. During the Revolution, women participated in armed conflict, income-generating activities, and government literacy and vaccination campaigns. The iconic photo Miliciana de Waswalito (1984) by Orlando Valenzuela highlights the idea that to mother the nation was to fight for its liberation. In the image, a young woman with a rifle slung across her back nurses a baby in her arms. Her radiant smile projects optimism and hope for the Revolution. The image circulated internationally as a symbol of the revolution and appeared on murals, posters, and other materials sponsored by the FSLN and the Asociación de Mujeres Nicaragüenses Luisa Amanda Espinoza (AMNLAE, the Sandinista women’s organization). Certainly, the image evokes Belli’s “tenderness of the people.” At the same time, the young woman’s full arms point to how such “tenderness” within both families and the larger nation was undergirded by the labor of women.

The Sandinistas emphasized economic and social development as national projects requiring the participation and contribution of all citizens. While much of Latin America experienced a retrenchment of social services under structural adjustment during this period, Nicaragua underwent an expansion of programs and services under the Sandinistas. For the first time, large numbers of Nicaraguans saw increasing access to public services as education and healthcare became key goals of the Revolution. This expansion of services largely depended on the unpaid and voluntary work of citizens. For example, Dennis Rodgers (2007) describes how in the early 1980s, residents of a Managua barrio that had once been a notorious urban slum participated in urban redevelopment projects by collectively building local infrastructure including houses, roads, drainage, and public spaces. Further, women represented the primary volunteers in literacy and vaccination campaigns as well as nutrition and medical brigades (Chinchilla 1990). As the Contra War intensified in the latter half of the 1980s, many of these same women joined the popular militias.

For the Sandinistas, voluntary work represented revolutionary principles of the people’s participation and ownership of the Revolution. It was also the only way for an overstretched, under-resourced government to provide such services to the population. The Sandinistas, often seen as socialists, attempted to create a mixed economy in which a strong and expanded state sector existed alongside a private sector. At first, as they sought to dismantle the agro-export economy, the Sandinistas implemented broad agrarian reform and nationalized key sectors of the economy. However, as the decade wore on, Sandinista efforts at social and economic transformation stalled, in part because of the US trade embargo and the ongoing Contra War. Defense spending increased and the government’s capacity to fund social welfare decreased. By the mid-1980s, Sandinista economic policy shifted from revolutionary social transformation to economic stabilization (Babb 1998; Metoyer 2000). They cut state spending and public sector jobs in an effort to combat hyperinflation and slowing economic growth. The end of consumer subsidies especially impacted women and children (Lancaster 1992). Wage increases and other actions meant to protect poor Nicaraguans from these adjustment measures were unable to cushion the blow. US support for the Contras and influence in international lending agencies also meant no new international loans for Nicaragua. As in previous periods, women’s unpaid domestic labor compensated for economic impacts, consequences of war, and community needs. Indeed, collective and cooperative survival strategies relied heavily on kin-based networks, including remittances from relatives abroad (Higgins and Coen 1992; Pérez-Alemán 1992).

As families struggled under the weight of economic reforms, war, and more, Sandinista visions of solidarity began to fracture. Women, and by extension the families they cared for, suffered under cuts to the public sector toward the end of the decade. Families faced separation, polarization, and death because of the divisiveness of the war and compulsory military service. Daniel, a Nicaraguan migrant in his thirties who lived in Río Azul, had moved to Costa Rica with his mother as a young boy in the 1980s. “I came because there, the war and that Sandinista regime stuff started—either you were with the Somocistas or you were with the Sandinistas. So my mamá said, ‘Here they’re going to militarize everything and I don’t want my children going off to war and being killed.’” Like many other families, Daniel’s mother sold her farm and took her children out of the country.

For many, ending the Revolution seemed like the only hope for ending the war, since the US continued to support the Contras. A number of scholars have attributed the Sandinista’s 1990 electoral defeat, at least in part, to their failure to address family issues and women’s concerns because of their focus on the war (Babb 2001; Molyneux 1985b; Randall 1994). Violeta de Chamorro, who won the 1990 election ending the Revolution, cultivated an image of an apolitical mother and widow, appealing to Nicaraguan mothers’ frustrations with war and loss (Kampwirth 1996; Metoyer 2000). For example, in Managua doña Ester talked about the heartbreak of having her then fifteen-year-old son sent off to the mountains to train as part of his military service. She said she felt “great relief” when the Sandinistas lost the 1990 election, not because she did not believe in the Revolution, but because she was scared of losing her son. The Sandinistas left behind a mixed record: the institutionalization of democracy, a culture of citizen participation, and important social reforms, as well as a highly polarized society and an economy in shambles (Close and i Puig 2011). Although no longer in power, the party, and particularly party leader Daniel Ortega, vowed to continue to fight from below, promising the party’s continued push for solidarity and social reform.

1990–2006: Free Market Democracy, Economic Crisis, and Traditional Family Values

The promises of peace and economic well-being on which Violeta Chamorro campaigned never came to fruition for many Nicaraguan families. When the Sandinistas peacefully handed over power to Chamorro’s UNO party, they became only the second party to relinquish power peacefully in the country’s history. Similar political shifts were occurring throughout the region, with promises of democracy that would provide a path toward peace and collective well-being (Coronil 2011). However, as Jennifer Burrell and Ellen Moodie (2013, 24) point out, many Central Americans found they could not access “the community of care,” the peace and security many associated with the transition to democracy. Nicaraguans struggled to rebuild physical infrastructure, political institutions, and the economy as well as families fractured by war. In the 1990s, the Chamorro regime accelerated the implementation of neoliberal structural adjustment begun under the Sandinistas, and the impacts were intensified.

Further, the end of the Sandinista Revolution saw a shift in political discourse from the language of revolution to the language of reconciliation and democracy (R. Montoya 2013). The language of democracy as tied to obligation, concern for the well-being of others, equality, and justice was challenged by neoliberal interpretations of democracy. The first, which Moodie (2013) refers to as a desire for “a community of care,” contrasts directly with the second, which includes neoliberal rationalities of individual responsibility and self-care. In Nicaragua, notions of democracy as participation in the free market confronted ideas about social justice and solidarity, leading to the erosion of revolutionary ideals in the public sphere. Neoliberal reforms that included the privatization of much of the public sector, cuts in social services, and the removal of protective tariffs on imports were implemented very quickly, leaving already struggling small producers and business owners unprepared for the transition. Unemployment and underemployment rose to almost 60 percent (Babb 1998). As the economic crisis deepened, Nicaraguans continued to rely on families and particularly the unpaid work of women to ameliorate the devastating consequences.

As in other Latin American countries, women suffered disproportionately under structural adjustment as policies shifted responsibility for survival from the state to individuals and families (González de la Rocha 1994; Safa 1995). First, women were not only among those who took advantage of Sandinista programs promoting small producers and cooperatives that were cut in the 1990s, but they also represented large numbers of workers in sectors hard hit by an influx of cheap imported goods in the 1990s (Babb 1998). Women faced heavier burdens at home ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Image
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. “The Family Is a Little Society”
• 1. State, Family, and Solidarity in the Nicaraguan Nation
• 2. Locked Up and Waiting
• 3. Single Mothers and Absent Fathers
• 4. Reconfiguring Relationships across Borders
• 5. Mamitas: Grandmother Caregivers and Extended Family Households
• 6. “I Eat All My Money Here”: Remittances in Transnational Family Life
• 7. Returns and Reunions
• References
• Index