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Nicaraguan State Cultural Initiative and “the Unseen Made Manifest”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2019

T.M. Scruggs
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Extract

In the last two decades, the Nicaraguan experience demonstrated the proposition that periods of dramatic political and economic changes are also times when symbols of national unity, social identity and ethnic solidarity become questioned, their meaning(s) recast and their import heightened. The mobilizing potential of expressive forms encoded with notions of tradition can make such forms especially important when these periods involve an accelerated negotiation of what constitutes national identity. Such was the case in Nicaragua, where the overthrow of the Somoza dynasty and beginning of the Sandinista Popular Revolution in 1979 ushered in an era of intense and unprecedented engagement with cultura popular (popular, or people's culture), forms of expressive culture identified with the clases populares (the popular classes.) Performances that could be classified as folkloric, or típicos (typical or native to the area) became the focus of attention by those geographically removed as well as socially distanced from the traditional performers of these expressive forms. Father Ernesto Cardenal (1982:252), one of the revolution's principal cultural visionaries, described the early results of this process: “Our patrimony, which before was unseen, has been made manifest” (“Nuestro patrimonio, que antes no se veía, se hizo presente”).

Type
Articles
Information
Yearbook for Traditional Music , Volume 30 , 1998 , pp. 53 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 by the International Council for Traditional Music

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