Browsing by Subject "Nicaragua"

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1,400 years of biomass burning, climate variability, and environmental change on Ometepe Island, Lake Nicaragua
(2007-05) Avnery, Shiri; Dull, Robert
This study examines the relationship between short-term climate variability, paleo-fires, and anthropogenic sources of environmental change over the past 1,400 years on Ometepe Island, located in the tropical dry forests of southwestern Nicaragua. Macroscopic charcoal, loss on ignition, and magnetic susceptibility records were reconstructed from a lake sediment core, and statistical wavelet analyses were performed to contextualize natural fire regimes in this under-investigated tropical biome. Results from this project suggest that fire regimes on Ometepe Island respond to high frequency (sub-centennial scale) climate variations potentially due to the 11- and 22-year sunspot cycles and/or the El Niño Southern Oscillation, with dominant periodicities of ~7, 14, and 24 years. Results additionally support regional paleoenvironmental analyses by providing evidence of anthropogenic environmental impacts between ~600 and 1500 A.D. with a drastic decline after European contact, as well as evidence of widespread drought conditions between 800 - 1000 A.D. and 1150 – 1300 A.D.
Access to water and sanitation in Atlantic Nicaragua
(2011-05) Gordon, Edmund Wyatt; Hooker, Juliet; Dorn, Edwin
Afro-descendant communities in Central America have recently made important legal strides by enshrining their right to equal treatment under the law and in some cases their ability to claim a distinct group status in national constitutions. The United Nations recently issued a draft resolution declaring that access to water and sanitation is a universal right, furthering the tools available to marginalized afro-descendant peoples in their battles against poverty and underdevelopment. Unfortunately, implementation of these measures has been slow in some areas and non-existent in others. Though there have been some advances, the situation for Afro-descendant communities remains largely unchanged and the availability of the basic requirements of life for Afro-descendant populations remains among the lowest in the region. Increased attention to the political, social, and especially the material situation of Afro-descendant communities is needed in political circles, as well as in the academic community. There is a lack of scholarly work on the material well-being of Afro-descendent populations in Central America. An important initial contribution in this area would be the compilation, and accumulation of statistical information as a primary step in developing the literature. The focus of this study then is on the Atlantic Coast Afro-descendant populations in Nicaragua. This document will outline the current material circumstances of Nicaraguan Afro-descendant communities using data gathered from a variety of sources, identify the causes of inadequate access to water and sanitation, and suggest strategies to improve the situation of these communities. It is my sincere hope that, at the very least, increased attention will be brought to the situation.
Apuntes para un análisis de la ideología Elenista y Sandinista, enmarcada en la guerra irregular
(2010-02-06) Parra, Leonardo
Articulating race on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast
(2017-05-05) Herrera, Francisco Jose, Jr.; Hooker, Juliet
Mestizos have lived on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast since at least 1894 and been the majority group since at least 1981. However, Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast is frequently imagined as a predominantly black and indigenous space. As renewed interest in mega-development projects, such as the trans-oceanic canal, bring attention to Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, questions about the autonomy of Afro-descendant and indigenous communities are raised once again. Moreover, as mestizos continue to migrate from the Pacific and central regions of the country towards the Caribbean coast territories, violence has escalated as they attempt to claim lands that have been constitutionally recognized as collectively owned by Afro-descendant and indigenous communities of the Caribbean coast territories. Recently, mestizos on the Caribbean coast have begun to express a racial identity, as “mestizos costeños.” This thesis explores the emergence of this racial articulation by drawing on Stuart Hall’s theory of articulation to analyze the discourses produced about mestizo costeño history and identity in Bluefields, Nicaragua. Using in-depth interviews and participant observation, this thesis examines the discursive elements that mestizos costeños link together to produce these discourses. The thesis argues that to understand how mestizos costeños fit into regional and national politics, we must explore the political work that the discursive linkages do in the articulations they produce. To that end, this thesis examines these articulations and situates them in the context of local, regional, and national politics to gain a broader understanding of the implications of the discourse of mestizo costeño identity for racial politics in Bluefields and the Caribbean coast. The thesis concludes by examining what the case of mestizos costeños in Bluefields has to offer towards understanding the contributions of identity politics to liberalism by considering the ideas of Charles Mills and Creole community leaders from Bluefields
“BELOVED ENEMIES”: Race and Official Mestizo Nationalism in Nicaragua
(Latin American Research Review, Vol. 40, No. 3, 2005) Hooker, Juliet
Borrower protests and the failures of microfinance in Nicaragua
(2011-12) Hollingsworth, Lora Lee; Garrard, Virginia, 1957-; Sletto, Bjorn I.
For over two decades, development practitioners, scholars, and institutions have celebrated microfinance—broadly defined as the provision of small-scale financial services to the world’s poor—as an effective tool for poverty alleviation and local economic development. Critics of microfinance, however, suggest that there is little clear evidence to support the claims that microfinance lifts the poor out of poverty and fosters local economic development. In this thesis, I explore some of the challenges to microfinance in northern Nicaragua by exploring a case study of a group of borrowers who have confronted microfinance and exposed some serious problems. Since 2008, thousands of microcredit clients in Nicaragua have expressed their extreme frustration with microfinance and its detrimental effects in their lives. In this case, Nicaraguans caught up in the microfinance scheme risk losing their homes and livelihoods and falling into greater poverty. These borrowers, organized as El Movimiento de Pequeños Productores, Comerciantes y Microempresarios del Norte (the Movement of Producers, Merchants and Small Business Owners of the North), demand new terms on their microcredit debts and new client protections. I explore the reaction and the demands of these borrowers and their direct and indirect critiques of the microcredit sector, its practices and its alleged goals. I argue that the resistance of the MPCN reveals the political and economic rationale and neoliberal ideology behind microcredit as a poverty alleviation intervention, and their contestation challenges its underlying logic. These critiques and demands provide us with a foundation for rethinking the prevailing market-oriented approaches to development.
Chasing justice : violence against women, legal activism, and the gendered state in Nicaragua
(2016-05) Neumann, Pamela Jane; Auyero, Javier; González-López, Gloria, 1960-; Williams, Christine; Young, Michael; Hooker, Juliet; Auyero, Javier
Drawing on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and secondary sources, this dissertation examines how everyday institutional practices shape the different trajectories of women victims of domestic violence who seek legal assistance in Nicaragua. Taking a transnational feminist analytical lens, this research reveals how gendered governance operates through global policy on violence against women, contentious local politics, and the everyday interactions that women have with bureaucratic actors. In so doing, this study demonstrates the limitations of state-centered solutions to violence against women, particularly the unintended consequences of legal-punitive strategies which fail to address women's economic dependence on men. The first chapter analyzes the political battle between feminist organizations and state actors over Nicaragua's new law against gender-based violence (Law 779), passed in 2012. The central question posed here is: why would a government pass a highly progressive law and then almost immediately proceed to dismantle it? The chapter offers a two-fold answer. First, I suggest that Law 779 was passed in order to keep pace with regional legal trends in Latin America. Second, I contend that the law's subsequent derailment resulted from (1) the president's alliance with conservative religious groups, and (2) the interest of particular state actors in preserving Nicaragua's reputation as the so-called “safest country in Central America.” The second chapter draws on feminist theories of the state to analyze how the routine practices of low-level state bureaucrats impact women's experiences navigating legal institutions in Nicaragua. Contrary to theories of representative bureaucracy, I show how the increased presence of women officials within state institutions does not improve most women's treatment by police or prosecutors. Rather, only when women victims have access to specific forms of social capital are their cases granted legitimacy by state actors. The third chapter focuses on why some women do not follow through on their legal cases. Drawing on Dorothy Smith’s concept of bifurcated consciousness and Merton's concept of sociological ambivalence, I identify the specific material, relational, and institutional factors that contribute to the ambivalence of some Nicaraguan women toward laws and legal solutions. Through this institutional ethnography, I demonstrate the linkages between the material, symbolic, and embodied dimensions of gendered governance in Nicaragua, including how gendered hierarchies are constructed within the state itself, and how these hierarchies may be disrupted. At the same time, I also argue that the increasingly homogenized global discourse on “violence against women” has not only erased the diverse array of women’s experiences that constitute such violence, it has also circumscribed the range of alternatives available to women.
Cold War and Contempt: The Lyndon B. Johnson Administration and Nicaragua
(2010-02-06) Briscoe, Dolph
The Dilemma of Food Security in a Revolutionary Context: Nicaragua, 1979 - 1986
(1987) Frenkel, María Verónica
In recent years, many Central American nations have experienced recurring food deficits and have become importers of food, rather than exporters, as they once were (see Murdoch, 1980: 98-166~ Barry and Preusch, 1986: 144-162). Simultaneously, their economies have become increasingly dependent on exports of primary agricultural products. Such agro-export expansion not only increased the integration of these economies into the international market, but it also initially fueled high rates of growth and provided the necessary foreign exchange with which to import essential goods and pay off their debt. However, as a result of economic policies which have promoted the extension and elaboration of the commercial agricultural export sector, the land available for food production has decreased, and the food resources of Central America are being threatened (Super and Wright, 1985: xi).
Disparate Diasporas: Identity and Politics in an African-Nicaraguan Community
(University of Texas Press, 1998) Gordon, Edmund T.
Education for the alleviation of poverty : a comparative study of conditional cash transfer programs to improve educational outcomes in Nicaragua and Colombia
(2009-05) Stackhouse, Shannon Alexis; Lincove, Jane Arnold; Reyes, Pedro, 1954-
The importance of education for individual well-being, social cohesion and economic growth is widely accepted by researchers and policymakers alike. Yet there exist vast numbers of people around the world, largely poor, who continue to lag behind wealthier people, often within their own nations. Conditional cash transfer programs were created to encourage investments in education and health by subsidizing their cost and changing household preferences. The programs increase short-term income as well as future wage potential, thus decreasing short-term and long-term poverty, as well as the poverty that is passed from generation to generation. Begun in Mexico and Brazil, the conditional cash transfer model is being replicated in many countries, but its replicability across socioeconomic and political contexts is far from clear. The present study adds to the research on conditional cash transfer programs through a comparative quantitative analysis of the effects of two programs on key educational outcomes in Nicaragua and Colombia. Using secondary panel data for the Nicaraguan Red de Proteccion Social and the Colombian Familias en Accion programs, a model reflecting demand constraints to education is used to determine the relative impacts of individual and household characteristics in the schooling decision, as well as to measure program impact in some of the most impoverished communities in the two countries. The empirical analysis is situated within a description of the historical, political and demographic contexts into which the programs were introduced. The results indicate that both programs increased enrollment and attendance, with lesser but still positive effects on retention. These effects were stronger for boys in Colombia, as was the importance of schooling expectations in determining enrollment. The study suggests that conditional cash transfer programs should be effective in other settings in which low educational attainment is caused largely by a lack of household resources.
El rebelde nicaraguense. La santidad del sandinismo
(2004-02-14) Rueda Estrada, Veronica
Ernesto Cardenal Papers: Ministerio de Cultura Spreadsheet
(Benson Latin American Collection, 2016) González Vílchez, Francisco Alfredo
Ministerio de Cultura Correspondence and Records, arranged by country/region and alphabetically. The majority of this subseries are digital copies of materials which remain in Nicaragua. The Benson Latin American Collection retain the digital files and the originals reside at IHNCA, Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamerica. The spreadsheet below shows an inventory of the digitized materials. The hard drive is housed in Box 62.
Food Insecurity in Nicaragua
(2004-02-14) Habib Mintz, Nazia
Frente Sandalista: Liberal Yanquís and Political Power in Nicaragua and El Salvador, 1979-1992
(2008-02-09) Cheasty Miller, Kristin
Health care reform in Sandinista Nicaragua, 1979-1990
(2014-08) Anderson, Kristin Cheasty; Garrard, Virginia, 1957-
This dissertation explores the health care system built by the Sandinista government in Nicaragua between the years 1979-1990. Prior to the 1979 victory of the Sandinista revolution, Nicaragua had a limited, balkanized health care system that afforded access to care to only a small percentage of the Nicaraguan population. The Sandinistas sought to build a nationwide health care system that provided free and equal access to health care. This project is a study of how the Sandinistas did that, and an analysis of what success they had. This project relies upon new sources as well as established archival ones. Former Minister of Health Dora María Tellez (1985-1990) recently donated her personal collection of Actas Ministeriales (Ministerial Executive Orders) to the Universidad de Centroamérica's Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica (IHNCA), a cache that substantially increases the documentary record of the latter half of the 1980s, and thus expands our understanding of the issues at hand and the solutions the Ministry implemented. Also, this dissertation relies heavily upon oral history. Seventy-five interviews with Ministry leaders, health workers, and Nicaraguan citizens create a more personal history of health in Sandinista Nicaragua, and explain how this nationwide effort actually functioned in communities, both urban and rural. The five chapters of this dissertation explore these central questions through multiple lenses. The first chapter provides both a history of foreign intervention and of history of health care in Nicaragua. The second and third chapters explore the historical trajectory of the Ministry of Health during the eleven years of Sandinista rule, first at a national level, and then with a focus on the northern zones of Nicaragua. In the final two chapters the dissertation explores the international angle of this history. The fourth chapter looks at the important role Cuban foreign aid played in helping the Sandinista government build, supply, and maintain their health care system. The fifth and final chapter interrogates the presence of long-term volunteer health care workers from the United States in light of the fact that the U.S. was leading efforts to overthrow the Sandinista government throughout the 1980s.
The impact of international migration on ethnic relations and ethnic identity shift in Guatemala and Nicaragua
(2012-05) Yoshioka, Hirotoshi, 1978-; Roberts, Bryan R., 1939-; Ward, Peter M., 1951-; Buckley, Cynthia J.; Pullum, Thomas W.; Rodriguez, Nestor P.; Jessee, Stephen A.
Over the past few decades, the volume of international migrants has increased considerably. As a result, impacts of international migration on migrants' communities of origin have become much more prevalent and diverse. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, this dissertation investigates a little studied aspect of such diverse impacts: the impact upon ethnic structures and relations in migrants' communities of origin. More specifically, I examine to what extent international migration affects the level of socioeconomic inequality across ethnic groups and how such impacts influence indigenous people's ethnic identity in two Central American countries: Guatemala and Nicaragua. I contend that ethnic identity shift is one of the most significant changes that international migration brings to these countries because such a shift can even endanger the existence of the indigenous population. I have found that international migration reinforces ethnic identity shift from indigenous to Mestizo in both countries. At the same time, the pace of such a shift differs by a community's characteristics including its demographic composition and definition of indigenousness. While it is hard to deny the fact that international migration provides indigenous people in both countries economic opportunities that are hard to obtain through other ways, it can also have unexpectedly negative effects on ethnic minorities and their cultures in the long run. Since indigenous people in both countries face a tough economic reality, it is difficult to prevent them from migrating to other countries. In such a situation, to conserve indigenous cultures and prevent more indigenous people from abandoning their ethnic identities, we need to assure that indigenous people can feel pride in their cultures while they participate in national economy and politics under the strong pressure caused by changes originating from international migration and multicultural reforms. Understanding how the definition of indigenousness is constructed and transformed as well as a mechanism of ethnic identity shift is an essential step to finding solutions to the dilemma related to international migration among indigenous people and achieving a robust multicultural society.
International Organizations, Health, and Nation Building in Nicaragua
(1989) Donahue, John M.
Intervención de Carlos Fernando Chamorro en la conferencia Archiving the Central American Revolutions
(2014-02-19) Chamorro, Carlos Fernando
Intervención de Dora María Téllez en la conferencia Archiving the Central American Revolutions
(2014-02-19) Téllez, Dora María