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Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs: Gender Identity Politics in Nicaragua, 1979–1999

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Description

How did a group of overwhelmingly poor, older women in a third-world country emerge to change into a powerful force in their country’s politics? Founded throughout the Nicaraguan revolution, the Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs of Matagalpa contains women who supported the revolution but didn’t carry guns; who, in their words, gave up their family members to the struggle.

In this book Lorraine Bayard de Volo makes a speciality of this group to reveal what she calls “the dominant but rarely examined maternal identity politics of revolution, war, and democratization.” Dividing Nicaraguan politics (1979-99) into four periods, Bayard de Volo uses both macro- and micro-levels of analysis to capture the dialectical relationship between large-scale political processes and the “micropolitics” of collective action. She shows how Sandinistas and anti-Sandinistas mobilized both mothers and maternal imagery and in turn analyzes how this imagery used to be adopted and manipulated by the Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs. Employing a feminist Gramscian approach to address the gendered nature of cultural politics and collective identity, the writer shows how, within the battle to capture Nicaraguan hearts and minds, both sides relied primarily on maternal images of women. Such “mobilizing identities” propelled women into unprecedented levels of collective action, yet on the same time channeled them away from feminist priorities.

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