The Mother of the Nicaraguans

Abstract

Clothed in unsoiled white, arms outstretched to embrace her family, the Nicaraguan family, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro campaigned for president. She projected an image of herself as the mother of her country. Though a presidential candidate and a public figure, she was presented as symbolic of the private woman, the traditional mother. Donia Violeta promised that, just as she had reconciled her own politically torn family, she would reconcile the Nicaraguan people, torn by more than a decade of war. Violeta Chamorro won the presidential election of 1990 with 54.7 percent of the vote (Barricada Internacional, 1990: 6). The symbolism of that campaign foreshadowed antifeminist' policies that have been put into place in a number of areas including education, day care, and macroeconomic policy. Yet despite her political successes, Donia Violeta's vision of proper family relations has not come to dominate Nicaraguan life. Gender in Nicaragua remains contested, though that, in and of itself, is a rather uninteresting observation. After all, where is it that gender relations are not contested? What is interesting in Nicaragua is the how and why of the contest. In Nicaragua, debates over gender take place with reference to the revolutionary mobilization2 of the 1980s: rejecting it, embracing it, or, most often, in ambivalent relation to it.