Heirs of Sandino

Abstract

The 1979 triumph of the Sandinista Revolution and the Sandinista National Liberation Front’s resistance of U.S. efforts to oust it from power inspired thousands of individuals from all over the world to support Nicaragua’s struggle for self-determination. One of the most important constituencies to take up the Sandinista cause was a significant portion of the U.S. public. What moved this collection of individuals and organizations to join a movement to oppose their own government’s policy and often even identify with the Sandinista cause? To date Latin Americanists have neglected this movement and the role that Nicaraguans, both in their home country and in the United States, played in its rise and success. A transnational approach to the movement’s origins and its relationship to Nicaraguan revolutionary social forces allows one to understand it as it really was: a transnational social movement in which U.S. and Nicaraguan citizens acted together for a common purpose.