Hybrid Cultures of Postdevelopment: The Struggle for Popular Hegemony in Rural Nicaragua

Abstract

This article contributes to contemporary debates around “postdevelopment” by examining the new social alliances that are reimagining, rearticulating, and refashioning development discourses and practices in Northern León, an impoverished region on Nicaragua's Pacific coastal strip. We examine the strategies and tactics whereby Northern León's citizens, local leaders, and nongovernmental organizations have reworked the region's cultural, political, and economic terrains in ways that negotiate and contest Northern León's marginalization by the Nicaraguan central government, and that challenge and reshape global spaces and imaginaries constituted through the disciplinary and regulatory discourses of international financial institutions and predatory multinational capital. We draw particularly on Gramscian perspectives and other contemporary theoretical engagements with neoliberalism, globalization, and postdevelopment in order to present the case of Northern León as an opportunity to think through the possibilities for forms of grassroots globalism that mobilize strategies of discursive activism, disarticulation/rearticulation, and “place-projection” in ways that destabilize and disrupt the linear temporalities and spatial fixities of mainstream development thought and practice.

Key Words:

• globalization
• Gramsci
• neoliberalism
• Nicaragua
• postdevelopment

Notes

1. The ensuing account of Gramsci's theoretical formulations is heavily indebted to Hall (1996a).

2. There is much confusion surrounding property and land ownership in Nicaragua (Cupples 1992). Beneficiaries of the agrarian reform process in the 1980s often failed to receive titles with their land. As a result, many became vulnerable after the Sandinista electoral defeat, when former landowners returned from exile and attempted to reclaim land. In Northern León, only 38.5 percent of farmers possess legal titles to the lands they farm (Government of Nicaragua and AMULEON-AMUNORCHI 2003).

3. Prior to this process, the municipalities of Achuapa, El Sauce, Santa Rosa del Peñon, and El Jícaral had come together to form AMULEON (Asociación de Municipios de León Norte [Association of Municipalities of Northern León]). One other municipality, Malpaisillo-Larreynaga (which is not formally part of Northern León but shares borders with the other municipalities), also joined the process in 2001. Given that the municipalities of Northern Leon had a combined total of two Sandinista and two Liberal mayors, Malpaisillo-Larreynaga was initially excluded from this process as the Liberal mayors argued that its inclusion would have destroyed the balance of political power.

4. In Northern León, the conceptual distinction between producer and entrepreneur is beginning to blur. As Aguirre (2005) indicates, producers have tended to be locally understood as farmers who produce merely to survive and do not care whether they make a profit or not.