desde nicaragua

The books (which took up one of the two suitcases I brought down here originally) are finally coming off the shelves.

This is the one I am currently devouring, by the freelance Mexican journalist, Alma Guillermoprieto: "Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America." She often writes for the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and other magazines. "Dispatches" is her second collection of articles published about Latin America, including the one I'm finishing now that describes Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa's failed run for the presidency there nearly 18 years ago.

Many years ago I picked up Guillermoprieto's first book "Samba" at a used book sale in Lexington, Kentucky, simply because I had heard that word before and thought it had sounded neat, long before I fell in love with Brazil or realized I might want to make my living as a journalist in Latin America.

Now, it's people like Guillermoprieto (or Ramos, whose own book I recently finished, or Kapuscinski, etc.) who I admire. Her reputation as a journalist was made after breaking the story about El Mozote massacre in El Salvador. You can read one of her most recent articles here, about indigenous presence in Bolivian politics here, in National Geographic.

Ometepe, and my place in the world

I meant to write in this earlier, but several friends have been coming in and out of Managua on visits, and it's been hard to juggle everything the right way. Recently, I'd written about a trip into Ometepe, and I wanted to add a couple of photos from the trip.

This is a tree in front of the Morales family house in Las Pilas, Ometepe. This is the family whose children I live with in Managua. Past this tree, where my friend Devin is gazing out one coolish morning, is the village's central plaza, a large square of dirt with a couple of soccer posts and a pretty school at the end.

Devin, Mason and I know each other from university. They stopped in Nicaragua for about a week on a longer, Central America agriculture tour. (I hope you guys made it to Guatemala safely!) The family cleared out a bedroom for us that the three of us shared. "Bedroom" is an abstract word. There's the idea of doors, of walls, in order to deliniate spaces and provide a degree of privacy. But sound travels through thin boards and over the top. And the animals, including a large sow jokingly called a relative, freely roam in and out of the walled spaces.

All of our meals there were the same: sweetened coffee, beans, rice, cheese and plantains. Everything they eat comes from products they grow themselves on the island. Even the fish a nephew brings for stew or to fry comes from his morning's catch, which he sells to other villagers.

Here, my friend's mom squeezes the stuff that soon will become a salty, traditional Nicaraguan cheese. She makes every night when her husband comes home from their mixed-crop finca, bringing home about a gallon of fresh cow milk. The family grows several varieties of bananas, oranges, mandarins, cucumber and other fruits and vegetables — for export or internal consumption, via el Mercado Mayoréo.

You are easily in shape by living on Ometepe. Incer, one of the brothers in the family, used to live in my house in Managua, but returned to the island a month ago when he couldn't find a job here. Since then, he's lost a solid 10 pounds and his muscles are more defined. All you do is walk, and he walks fast. He hurried us (I had to beg for him to slow down) to and from his father's finca, about an hour away, up and down dirt paths, pausing to grab interesting fruits or tree "products" along the way: oranges, mandarins, tamarindo, these sponge things they use for bathing, a coconut-like fruit the size of a strawberry.

It was a good trip, and on the way in and out. The Kapuzcinski book has me thinking about doing journalism and writing about the world you see, and what it means or feels like to do that job now versus 50 years ago, when the famous Polish foreign correspondent did, or even versus a couple thousand years ago, when Herodotus did. Check this:

Man does not obsess about memory today as he once did because he lives surrounded by stockpiles of it. Everything is at his fingertips — encyclopedias, textbooks, dictionaries, compendia, search engines. Libraries and museums, antiquarian bookshops and archives. Audio and video recordings. Infinite supplies of preserved words, sounds, images — in apartments, in warehouses, in basements, in attics. If he is a child, his teacher will tell him everything he needs to know; if he is a university student, he will be informed by his professors.

Of course none, or almost none, of these institutions, devices or techniques existed in Herodotus's time. Man knew as much, and only as much, as his mind managed to preserve. A few privileged individuals started to learn to write on rolls of papyrus and on clay tablets. But the rest? Culture was always an aristocratic enterprise. And wherever it departs from this principle, it perishes as such.

In the world of Herodotus, the only real repository of memory is the individual. In order to find out that which has been remembered, one must reach this person. If he lives far away, one has to go to him, to set out on a journey. And after finally encountering him, one must sit down and listen to what he has to say — to listen, remember, perhaps write it down. That is how reportage begins; of such circumstances it is born. (p.75-6)

...

I want to keep copying down the words from the book, but hopefully that gives you a good enough idea of what this is about. Travels with Herodotus is a book that is making me think very hard and profoundly about my job, about foreign correspondence in 2008 and beyond, in my place in the world.

Hermit days

For the past few days, I've been living like a hermit. I go the library or stay in my room reading. I thought I was ready to get serious about my research project, but once I got into the National Archives I realized I need to learn more about methodology and theory, and then narrow down the question. So I have to read more.  But then the more I read, the more questions arise, and then I need to read more (learn more!)in order to nail down the question I want to ask. I fear I'm going to be in this endless circle of never knowing when I know enough to begin learning more about it. Does that make any sense? Basically I've been lost in my head for the past couple of weeks.

This is what I've been reading: academic papers about historical memory, collective memory, spaces and history; theory on doing history; methodology on newspaper content analysis; books about democracy and journalism, media in Latin America; newspapers dating back some 30 years; papers on Nicaraguan media; a totally unrelated novel about migrant farm worker families in the States; Eduardo Galeano; and a slim book about Nicaraguan jokes. 

Oh, and news on the world. Here's two interesting suggestions, the first very long and the second very short: 1) A thoughtful look at Chávez as a dictator v. democratic promoter, taking special account of his failed referendum and historical political exclusion in Venezuela, in The Nation. and 2) In Guatemala, military archives from the country's brutal civil war will be declassified, as reported by Al-Jazeera.

The American Dream, Gatsby-style

My best friends are often other children of immigrants who grew up between borders. Without going into detail, we share remarkably similar life experiences regardless of what country(ies) our parents came from. Recently some friends and I have been comparing those experiences and talking about a way to publish something of a guide or collection of stories for first/second-generation adolescents who might struggle to find their place in the States.

An article in the NYT today reminds me of a book  that engages these students:

BOSTON — Jinzhao Wang, 14, who immigrated two years ago from China, has never seen anything like the huge mansions that loomed over Long Island Sound in glamorous 1920s New York. But F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel, “The Great Gatsby,” with its themes of possibility and aspiration, speak to her.

She is inspired by the green light at the end of the dock, which for Jay Gatsby, the self-made millionaire from North Dakota, symbolizes the upper-class woman he longs for. “Green color always represents hope,” Jinzhao said.

“My green light?” said Jinzhao, who has been studying “Gatsby” in her sophomore English class at the Boston Latin School. “My green light is Harvard.”

Some educators say the best way to engage racially and ethnically diverse students in reading is with books that mirror their lives and culture. But others say that while a variety of literary voices is important, “Gatsby” — still required reading at half the high schools in the country — resonates powerfully among urban adolescents, many of them first- and second-generation immigrants, who are striving to ascend in 21st-century America.

“They all understand what it is to strive for something,” said Susan Moran, who is the director of the English program at Boston Latin and who has been teaching “Gatsby” for 32 years, starting at South Boston High School, “to want to be someone you’re not, to want to achieve something that’s just beyond reach, whether it’s professional success or wealth or idealized love — or a 4.0 or admission to Harvard.” (... visit link above for rest of story)

I need to re-read that book now.

The power wasn't supposed to go off last night but it did.

I was laying in bed reading a book about Paraguay — who has ever seriously thought about that country before? — and completely unprepared for the blinding darkness when it came. The lights went off and the slow, restful hum of my fridge just stopped. I stumbled around in the black, reaching out to touch the walls and tables, trying to remember where the puddles caused by the leaky ceiling had formed on the floor. Oh, it's the rainy season and my roof lets in water. I found the candle my cat Chachita had knocked to the floor but not the matches so I gave up and went back to bed, to sleep. It was 7 p.m.

I've come to enjoy those completely disorienting moments. They take away my choices, force me to settle for myself alone in bed near a candle on the couch on my front step thinking and writing. Always writing, always thinking about the possibilities, the what I can write next.

If I was more creative I would start to write a story. I want to write a story about this dog named Romeo. He belongs to Nadene, the Canadian woman whose apartment I rent. Romeo lounges on the front steps, wags his tail when a (white) foreigner comes into the little shop, and barks angrily when a (brown) Nicaraguan walks past. He chases old men down the street and Nadene has to hurry after him, apologizing with obvious embarrassment.

What does this to mean? Romeo barks at brown people because his owners spend all their time around white foreigners. A lot of foreigners, ex-pats, retirees, tourists, investors here only spend time with other people like them. You start seeing the same white people at bars and coffeshops and restaurants. It's so easy to befriend them, to speak English and feel comfortable.

And every time I tell myself I won't be like them, that I will find Nicaraguan friends and local spots and like them, I don't. And I go back to my coffeeshop where the newest item on the menu — a fruit plate — will cost four times the price it does on the street.

It's kind of pathetic, and here I am.

third book down

I finally finished reading Gioconda Belli's El País Bajo mi Piel, or The Country Under my Skin. It was the book most highly recommended to me by professors and journalists who have studied and worked in Nicaragua.

At times, it’s hard to believe this story, her story. It’s about a young married woman who became part of the idealistic revolutionary movement that successfully overthrew a dictatorship in 1979. She raised children, fell in love many times with many Sandinista leaders, wrote internationally acclaimed poetry, secretly transported weapons to guerillas, trained in Cuba, lived in exile and struggled find internal peace. Among other things, of course.

Years into a Sandinista government, Belli decides to pursue a romantic relationship with an American journalist, despite the political situation of the mid 1980s. But because she is the Sandinista spokeswoman, this presents problems, and her higher-ups eventually tell her to break it off with him. Even though I knew while reading it that the true story ends with a happily ever after, I cried after reading this scene in her car. The pair is trying to delay the inevitable breakup:

"We can speak on the phone," I tell him, despite myself, "but it'd be better if we didn't see each other anymore."

He stepped out of the car. He walked toward his house.

I wanted to get out, run after him. I watched him walk slowly, sadly, and I cursed Ronald Reagan with all my heart.

(my translation)

reading material

I probably could have updated this at least once in the past month, but I want to make each post count. And I'm still getting my act together. But this thing will be updated on a near-daily basis when I'm in Central America, I promise.

Slowly, I am making my way through a list of books/articles about Nicaragua, the FSLN, Central American history, health care, Nicaraguan immigration to Costa Rica. This morning, I finished pouring through Fire from the Mountain: The Making of a Sandinista by Omar Cabezas.

At the end of the book, the guerrilla Omar meets an old man who fought with Augusto Sandino decades earlier. He writes: "Never did I feel more a son of Sandinismo, more a son of Nicaragua than at that moment. I had been a young student who came to Sandino through books. I had come to Sandino through the study of Sandinismo, but I still had not arrived at the root, the true paternity of all our history ... Through him, I had recovered my own history, the tradition, the essence of Nicaragua. I had found my genesis, my antecedents; I felt myself a continuation, concrete and uninterrupted. I had found the source of my strength."

The book vividly paints one person's experiences as a student activist and guerrilla during his country's brutal civil war. By 1979, the Frente Sandinista Liberación Nacional overthrew a repressive military dictatorship controlled by the Somoza family since the 1930s. The FSLN political party stayed in power until 1990. Last year, Nicaraguans elected former president and Sandinista Daniel Ortega back into office. It's hard to gauge his success. He's done a good job of staying out of the news for the most part. (A Google news search turned up only a few recent stories in major papers, including this one: Poll: Leftist Nicaraguan president plunges in popularity after 6 months in office)

The reason I am going to Nicaragua is because I want to know what people think about the FSLN today, whether it can be successful, what works and what doesn't. When I was in Nicaragua in March, most of the folks I talked to said they wouldn't complain about Ortega because he hadn't screwed up ... yet. They were cautious, but hopeful.

Anyway, on to other books.