“La Tierra Diversa de Nicaragua” The Diverse Land of Nicaragua 1 1 My personal photo AMINAH LUQMAN My fellow AMIGOS volunteers, Sam and Eliza, and I repeatedly sang the chorus to Kanye West’s song, Dark Fantasy, as we embarked on the strenuous and steep uphill trek to San Miguel, one of the three neighborhoods in my community, La Cuesta. It was our seventh and last week in community, and my partners and I embraced the bittersweet fact that this was the last time we would hike to San Miguel for breakfast in the intense Nicaraguan sun. We got to the top of the mountain and weaved through a forest-like area with rocky terrain that opened up to the central part of San Miguel. Per usual, we were greeted by smiling kids in their sleepwear as we made our way to Sabina’s house. Sabina was the woman that we that we knew the best in San Miguel, since she created our meal plan and we always stopped in at her house before going off to breakfast. After we had a delicious and hardy breakfast of rice, beans and tortillas at another house in San Miguel, we returned to Sabina’s house. She pulled out three plastic chairs for us and sighed as she reminded us that we would be leaving very soon. She was peeling the skin off of recently picked bean pods. When we dragged our chairs over to help her, she went on asking if we liked Nicaragua and if we were excited to go home. Then she held Eliza’s face and asked her if she was going to come back and visit. “¿Usted va a hacer una vuelta?” she questioned, making a quick, circular motion with her hands. Eliza confidently replied in her broken Spanish that it is very expensive to travel and she did not know if she would be able to while paying for college. “¿Y Samuel?” she said, putting extra emphasis on the last syllable and directing the same question at him. He reiterated that it was expensive, but he already planned on returning in February of 2014 for his host brother’s wedding. “Y…ahh no puedo recordar tu nombre” she said, admitting that after seeing her almost every day for seven weeks, she didn’t know my name. While the conversation continued, I sat in my chair and peeled the skin from the bean pods, not expecting Sabina to direct any further questions or attention my way. My expectations were met. She got up to retrieve a pen and paper and handed the pad to Eliza to write down her contact information. As Eliza jotted down her name and number, Sabina opened up about her hopes to be a host mom to AMIGOS volunteers. “Quiero ser la madre para chelas liiiindas como usted.” I want to be the mother to blonde or fair skinned beauties like you.2 Although this was not the first time I experienced the racial favoritism of members in my community, it was just as frustrating. I remember experiencing for the first time on the first day while I sat on the edge of the cot in my host family’s home thinking that it was going to be a long seven weeks. I tickled Luis Fernando, my three-month-old host brother’s belly and put on the façade that everything was okay. In reality, my mind was racing, and I was anxiously trying to figure out what I had done to make the two teenagers I had just met not like me. They hovered around my girl partner, Eliza, and inquired into every detail of her life while playing with her hair and pausing to pinch her cheeks and squeal, “¡Que lindaaa! Usted es BONITA, yo soy fea. ¡Mire¡ Mi piel es negro, ¡Que fea! Y su piel blanco y su pelo, ¡Que LINDA!” How cute. You are so pretty! Look at me; I’m ugly. My skin is dark; look at how ugly it is! Your white skin and hair, you’re so pretty!3 It did not take me long to realize that what I was experiencing was not a contemporary issue, but rather a deep-rooted historical and cultural matter that was 2 Conversation/Interview with Sabina R., Sam Wicoff, Eliza Omohundro and Aminah Luqman 3 Conversation/Interview with Tanya, Joselin, Eliza Omohundro and Aminah Luqman greater than myself and than my 1700 person community in a rural part of Boaco, Nicaragua. For some reason, the men and women in my community saw the skin color and other physical characteristics they and I were born with to be ugly and the ones my partners, Eliza and Sam, were born with to be beautiful. Similarly, my community members ranked my partners as superior based on looks alone. At first I hypothesized that the media was to blame. I was aware of the global phenomenon of the media and advertising putting forth the idea that there is a strong correlation between having a fairer complexion and being successful, beautiful, healthy, and well liked. Although my community was not surrounded by technology like we are in the United States, I saw examples of how the media shaped their attitudes about beauty, race and self worth. Some of the wealthier families in the community, whose husbands usually worked for the government, had televisions in their homes, and whenever I was invited to watch ridiculously dramatic and entertaining telenovelas with them, I could not help but notice the staggering difference in skin color, hair color and texture, eye color and body type between the stars in the telenovela and the Nicaraguan men, women and children sitting right next to me. The findings of a case study on the portrayal of both race and gender in telenovelas also revealed the under representation of ethnic looking people in telenovelas. From 466 speaking characters and 481 two-minute intervals on 19 telenovelas that aired in Los Angeles in the summer of 2002, a mere “32 were coded as olive tone and only 6 were coded as dark skinned” Similarly, according to data collected by the researchers in this case study, the countries producing these telenovelas that run 24 hours a day in Nicaragua are featuring a cast that is at least 84% light skinned when the actual population of light skinned people in that country very small. For example, Pasión de Gavilanes, a telenovela I watched almost every night at 7pm with my neighbors was produced in Colombia and features a cast that is 100% light skinned, while a mere 20% of the Colombian population is White.4 5 Similarly, every time I was welcomed into a family’s home in my community, I generally observed that their mud or brick wall displayed a few framed photos of family and a relative’s quinciniera, President Daniel Ortega’s poster with the words “Cristiana, Socialista, Solidaria” or Christian, Socialist and Unified, in bold letters, a couple of photo-shopped photos of family members inside a mansion or in front of a waterfall, and 4 Rivadeneyra, Rocío. "Gender and Race Portrayals on Spanish-Language Television." Sex Roles 65, no. 3-4 (2011): 208-222. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11199-011-0010-9. http://search.proquest.com/docview/874308147?accountid=39972 5 http://images4.fanpop.com/image/photos/23300000/Pasion-de-Gavilanes-minhas- telenovelas-23333674-1024-768.jpg a picture of a blonde, white or Anglo-looking model cut out from a magazine. So while I believe the media definitely plays a role, I think the only role it plays is perpetrating and emphasizing a racist attitude that was established hundreds of years before I set foot in La Cuesta, the beautiful community I lived in for seven weeks in Boaco, Nicaragua during the summer of 2012. This experience led me to investigate the history of Nicaragua, and more specifically, the experience of Afro-Nicaraguans and indigenous people. Although Africans were first brought to Nicaragua as slaves, the first form of slavery in Nicaragua was the Indian Slave Trade, or the slavery of indigenous peoples by early Spanish colonizers. However, due to foreign diseases, mistreatment, and the trade of indigenous peoples to other countries, the number of indigenous people dwindled. In one region, the population of Nicarao and Chorotega peoples dropped from over 1,000,000 to less than 50,000. Thus, the Spanish brought African Slaves to Nicaragua in the early 1500s to make up for the number of indigenous people that died.6 Even though slavery was not abolished in Nicaragua until 1838, it never became a huge part of society like it did in the United States and other countries in Central America.7 Jorge Eduardo Arellano, a Nicaraguan man who wrote about the slavery of Africans in Nicaragua, hypothesized that slavery was not as deeply institutionalized because “African slaves were imported in a gradual manner and there were no massive importations during a relatively concentrated period of time (in contrast to Haiti and Cuba, in which sugar plantation agriculture 6 McGarrity, Gail. "Contrasting Experiences of Blackness in Lowland Central America: The Case of Nicaragua." Caribbean Quarterly 46, no. 2 (2000): 45-66,93. http://search.proquest.com/docview/854857603?accountid=39972. 7 Yvan Bertin, "Historical Evolution: Abolitions of Slavery," Caribbean Atlas, http://atlas-caraibe.certic.unicaen.fr/en/. required more accelerated and intensive patterns of importation)”2 While I do not doubt that slavery in Nicaragua suggested a racial hierarchy early on, I believe the idea of western superiority that I experienced last summer in La Cuesta stems from a greater influence of the dual colonization of Nicaragua by the British and Spanish empire that took place hundreds of years after slavery was first introduced in Nicaragua.