Books about Sandinistas from Amazon.com

“A must-read for anyone interested in Nicaragua—or in the overall issue of social change.”—Margaret Randall, author of SANDINO'S DAUGHTERS and SANDINO'S DAUGHTERS REVISITED 

Sandinista is the first English-language biography of Carlos Fonseca Amador, the legendary leader of the Sandinista National Liberation Front of Nicaragua (the FSLN) and the most important and influential figure of the post–1959 revolutionary generation in Latin America. Fonseca, killed in battle in 1976, was the undisputed intellectual and strategic leader of the FSLN. In a groundbreaking and fast-paced narrative that draws on a rich archive of previously unpublished Fonseca writings, Matilde Zimmermann sheds new light on central themes in his ideology as well as on internal disputes, ideological shifts, and personalities of the FSLN.
The first researcher ever to be allowed access to Fonseca’s unpublished writings (collected by the Institute for the Study of Sandinism in the early 1980s and now in the hands of the Nicaraguan Army), Zimmermann also obtained personal interviews with Fonseca’s friends, family members, fellow combatants, and political enemies. Unlike previous scholars, Zimmermann sees the Cuban revolution as the crucial turning point in Fonseca’s political evolution. Furthermore, while others have argued that he rejected Marxism in favor of a more pragmatic nationalism, Zimmermann shows how Fonseca’s political writings remained committed to both socialist revolution and national liberation from U.S. imperialism and followed the ideas of both Che Guevara and the earlier Nicaraguan leader Augusto César Sandino. She further argues that his philosophy embracing the experiences of the nation’s workers and peasants was central to the FSLN’s initial platform and charismatic appeal..
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First published in 1981 in the wake of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) revolution in Nicaragua, Sandino's Daughters can now be seen not as a triumph of revolutionary ideals, but as a triumph of the spirit. Through a series of interviews with participants at all levels in the resistance, Margaret Randall recounts the lives of ordinary women who became pillars of strength and perseverance during their decades-long involvement in the Sandinista struggle against the Somoza dictatorship. Believing firmly that women's liberation was inextricably linked with national liberation, many of these women were in the vanguard of the movement inspired by Augusto Sandino. At the peak of revolutionary activity, women from all classes and backgrounds comprised 30 percent of the Sandinista army. For many of these women, politics became one with the personal. Hindsight perhaps offers the greatest irony of the women's alliance with the FSLN in the fact that it was a woman, Violeta Chamorro, who challenged and defeated the Sandinistas in the free elections of 1990. Though lured by the revolutionary quixotism of a promise that lasted slightly more than a decade, the women of Sandino's Daughters will stand as a monument to all those who yearn to be free..
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Nicaragua: The Imagining of a Nation is geared to students and academics of nationalism studies, history, and Latin American studies. Analyzing Nicaragua s post-colonial history, the author studies the Sandinista Revolution in the context of Nicaragua s ongoing efforts at nation-building. Baracco identifies the origins of the Sandinista Revolution in terms of the failure of nineteenth-century liberal regimes to complete the task of constructing Nicaragua as a culturally and historically distinct, sovereign, national entity.
The book is based on research of various sources from the archives of the Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamerica, Central American University Managua, and on interview evidence taken from leading figures from within the Sandinista government (1979-90).
At the nexus of politics, sociology, development studies, nationalism studies and Latin American studies, this work takes Nicaragua as a case study to engage and advance Benedict Anderson s ideas on the origins and spread of nationalism and illustrates his theories on nations as imagined political communities.
The empirical application of these ideas to national literacy campaigns and popular nationalist literature illustrates how nationalism has worked in Nicaragua on a routinized and daily basis, and shows how the Sandinistas attempted to complete a process of nation building that had been initiated in the previous century, yet had remained an unfinished task largely due to the successive interventions of the United States in the political and economic affairs of Nicaragua. It also illustrates how Sandinista nationalism departed from its nineteenth-century Liberal version, by re-imagining the nation in terms of an anti-imperialist political identity that would serve the revolutionary government s developmental objectives.
The book offers insights into the evolution of states in post-colonial Latin America and their struggle to strike an acceptable balance between sovereignty issues and the imperatives of global politics..
Price: $29.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This book is a carefully argued study of peasants and labor during the Somoza regime, focusing on popular movements in the economically strategic department of Chinandega in western Nicaragua. Jeffrey Gould traces the evolution of group consciousness among peasants and workers as they moved away from extreme dependency on the patron to achieve an autonomous social and political ideology. In doing so, he makes important contributions to peasant studies and theories of revolution, as well as our understanding of Nicaraguan history.

According to Gould, when Anastasio Somoza first came to power in 1936, workers and peasants took the Somocista reform program seriously. Their initial acceptance of Somocismo and its early promises of labor rights and later ones of land redistribution accounts for one of the most peculiar features of the pre-Sandinista political landscape: the wide gulf separating popular movements and middle-class opposition to the government. Only the alliance of the Frente Sandinista (FSLN) and the peasant movement would knock down the wall of silence between the two forces..
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