Silenced Discourses

Silenced Discourses: Do Campesinas Have a Voice in Women’s Organizations?

A study done with the women of cooperative Décimo Aniversario, San Ramón, Nicaragua, April-May 2000 Kathryn Fischer

Table of Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................ ii Structural Theory ................................................................................................... 1 Methodology ......................................................................................................... 10 The Actors ............................................................................................................. 15 The Women.................................................................................................................................. 16 Nicaraguan Women’s Organizations ............................................................................................ 37

The Agenda ........................................................................................................... 42 The UCA Gender Program...........................................................................................................

Gender and Empowerment ..........................................................................................................

Sexuality and Reproduction .........................................................................................................

Violence........................................................................................................................................

43 50 62 71

The Process ........................................................................................................... 78 Communication: Meetings and Participation ................................................................................ 79 Silence ......................................................................................................................................... 93

Conclusion............................................................................................................. 99 Works Cited ........................................................................................................ 107 Appendix ............................................................................................................. 112

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Introduction

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The assumption that a woman won’t be heard precedes any knowledge of her voice. Thus, many young women who have grown up in the wake of sixties and seventies women’s liberation have been taught to speak out and speak up, to claim their “innate” voice. Activist or feminist, neither of these identities seemingly matter unless a woman speaks out about them. In a sexual encounter, a woman must vocalize any tremor of apprehension, lest her partner not hear her and take her for granted. Without words, one is seemingly powerless, especially as a woman. Yet, this project is primarily about silence, originating from a nagging curiosity about whether power can be found in the spaces outside of speech. It was a challenge for me precisely because I was taught that silence lacks, never to contain either power nor importance, and I function in my daily relationships in a way that depends deeply on open conversation. Still, I wondered about the functions of speech, what it means to speak or be silent, why persons are encouraged to speak, or assumed to have the capability to do so. A literal silence, a lack of words, could have endless meanings attached to it. It could signal discomfort, or exhaustion, or active rebellion, to cite a few possibilities. Silence can also be defined as that which one can’t hear—because one’s ears have not been trained, or because the speakers don’t speak the same language as the listeners, or because they don't speak the same discourses. Maybe they are not speaking about the same ideas at all. I began to understand that for some people, especially women, it doesn’t matter if they speak or are silent, they are still unheard. In this project I wanted to look deeper at that assertion.

Silence, if it is recognized as a tool at all, is equated with passivity or inaction. Almost never is it associated with offensive tactics. The danger in this is that in the eyes of the potential listeners, those who are unheard appear to lead silent and therefore passive lives. More than being dangerous, this conception is detrimental to our experience because we will continue to be deaf to those voices. Moreover, we will continue to move in the same directions, led only by those who speak, and, more often than not, those that speak loudly and within certain discourses. Leaders become homogenized in their race, gender, and sexual orientation because certain standards of measuring quality of communication, information sharing, and knowledge have not been thoroughly challenged. That’s not to say there isn't a loud and active civil society of diverse backgrounds and needs. Indeed there is, but it is not enough to form political identity groups of alternative voices to the mainstream. All too often they become essentialized into one voice of the minority, thereby reducing the myriad of voices that make up that politic. Cherríe Moraga explains that “as Third World women, we understand the importance, yet limitation of race

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ideology to describe our total experience” (105). I want to argue that as potential listeners (and we are all, always, potential listeners), it is our responsibility to listen to silent voices as individually as we can. That said, I want to emphasize the idea that this is not an approach wherein the “silent” are othered. We are all always potential listeners just as we are all always potential subjects; I do not want to suggest a closed approach either to the possibility of speaking or of being heard.

Rather, this project assumes and focuses on the importance of listening. Here I attempt to personally exercise my agency as a listener.

The challenges and inherent flaws of my project are two-fold: First, it rests on the theoretical assumption that by learning to listen in news ways, the unheard can be heard. Second, it attempts to practice that theory as if subtle yet extremely influential power relations do not always and already distort the project. My personal grappling with both of these critical problems are apparent throughout my writing, but they did not cause a complete paralysis on my part, for the very reason that in the first case, I wanted to see if I could listen in new ways, and in the second case, because I resigned myself to the fact that as a white American woman in Nicaragua I could never avoid the conditions of our differences of class and ethnicity. However they did stand as daunting personal barriers. My desire to do the project was constantly put into question by my own misgivings about what began to appear to me to be anthropological work, which is, in my mind, inherently unethical.1 I couldn't get past who I was, what I was doing in the campo [countryside], and what gave me the right to be there. As if by a divine intervention, I happened to take the book, This Bridge Called My Back: Writing By Radical Women of Color, into the campo with me and read it for the first time. These writers challenged me to look further at the power relationship I was living. One contributing author, doris davenport said, “[...] we saw through the 'myth' of white womon. The myth was that white wimmin were the most envied, most desired (and beautiful), most powerful (controlling white boys) wimmin in existence” (87). She made me wonder if this assumption of power was one that I, too, was making. I think, in retrospect, that playing into that myth did enable me, a white woman, to be in the campo conducting research with women of color. According to Daphne Patai, “It is the very existence of privilege that allows the research to be undertaken” (137). But I also think that the juxtaposition of “white woman” and

1.Daphne Patai argues that ethical research about Third World Women can never be conducted by First World academics until we no longer live in an unethical world that give rise to inequalities that are the preconditions of that research. However, “The fact that doing research across race, class, and culture is a a messy business is no reason to contemplate only our difficulties and ourselves struggling with them” (150).

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“campesina woman” is not inherently negative, and my attempt was not to research but to talk with.

I realize that This Bridge Called My Back, a compilation of writing by select women of color does not represent all women of color. Nor do these women represent the women of the cooperative Décimo Aniversario, with whom I conducted my project. I am not attempting to make that comparison. Rather they are a group of women who have expressed their personal and unique voices by publishing themselves, their time, and their deepest secrets, thus bearing it to anyone who can buy the book, and they challenged me to think deeply about race and ethnicity. These particular women are not silenced any more, but they had to cross many barriers in order to be heard, from learning to write to finding a publisher. For the women I worked with in the campo, these barriers are nearly impassible. Yet time and again, these women, the women before them and the women after them, are asked to empower themselves to move past the barriers, to learn how to speak so that the world hears them. Seldom are “listeners” asked to listen better. In this paper I attempt to challenge this assumption of empowerment. Given that, I did not conduct the interviews with the perception that the experience would be “empowering in that it ‘gives voice’ to those who might otherwise be silent” (Patai 147). Of this common misperception, Daphne Patai asks: is it empowerment or appropriation? (147)” The voice becomes a commodity which the researcher has control over. I am not trying to “give” voice to these women. I am not giving them a space within mine, I am writing their words through the lens of mine with the goal of illustrating my point: primarily the assumption that I do not have the power to empower nor do I need to.

Rather, I need to listen better. I would be contradictory if I purported to “give” anything to these women at all.

Using This Bridge Called My Back as a sort of personal guide, I was able to start thinking about some of the more complicated issues of the project. This paper weaves many voices from This Bridge Called My Back because it became a bridge to my own understanding, and further disillusionment, regarding why I came to the campo at all. Pictures and quotes are meant to illustrate contrasts and contradictions about how it felt to be a middle-class white woman doing what could be considered an anthropological study among Nicaraguan women. In certain ways I was the worst person for the job. My Spanish is not fluent; it was learned and practiced in a university. My rural Nicaraguan colloquial Spanish is even further from adequate. So why should I attempt to listen and talk to women about communication, of all things? The practical pretense

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was to answer the following question: (1) Who is listening to the Women of the cooperative, Décimo Aniversario? The personal curiosity I felt meant that I was also the best person for the job. It was my goal to find out: (2) What are the women of Décimo Aniversario saying?

The majority of Nicaraguan women are campesinas [peasant farming women], making them what should be the focus of Nicaraguan women’s organizations. From the nationally organized women’s networks down through the channels of the cooperative, I looked to see how strong the links were, and if they indeed existed where women ceased to be part of any particular organization. From the local level, I talked to campesinas about how they are involved with the cooperative and women's organizations and services, and whether their needs were served. My purpose was to see how the specific needs of these campesinas connect to the goals of various women’s organizations, expressed through the activities of a variety of women’s organizations including the cooperative. Which campesina voices get listened to?

The first part of the project was relatively straight-forward. Learning how to listen to something most of us can't hear was another story. A particularly large challenge was the liminality of time: I had a full 16 days in the campo, and yet I had just 16 days. Minutes passed slowly and silently and were measured by plates of beans. Three plates of beans and the sun went down. I began thinking that I’d get to know the women slowly, conducting informal interviews as I went, gradually working up to a more intimate knowledge of their lives. I realized in less than 24 hours that I could stay there all my life and still not fully know that community. I hadn't been giving the women enough credit. They knew I had a pointed purpose for being in their community; I didn't have to be there making a fool of myself with a black camera bag and tape recorder.1 I wanted to be up-front by describing my project immediately. But that, in essence, took away some of the informality and part of my ability to get deeper under the surface of these women's lives. The irony was: It was my presence in the community which inhibited my ability to go deeper.

Outside of interview content, I knew I would have to pay attention to communication 1.I made an important distinction between my experience and theirs, if the situation were somewhat reversed. I imagined these women as immigrants in the United States, since many immigrants come because of their socio-economic position in their home countries. If these women, given their same socio-economic position, were in the United States, they wouldn’t be there as students. They wouldn't be able to just leave the United States without giving up their essential desire to survive, their reason for coming in the first place. As immigrants they'd experience a foreign and sometimes oppressive situations, a realm which I sometimes felt like I knew being in the campo. But for them everything: the motivation to stay, to seek out a real living space, to assimilate (or not), would be different. In the campo I could retreat to books when I tired of trying to make myself “part of the community.” I could give up on assimilation altogether because I knew that in just two and a half weeks, I'd go home. This was a freedom I was privileged to because of my class.

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style. First, I recognized an assumption of mine: Knowledge cannot be mapped linearly. Because I use the word feminism and the campesinas I spoke with do not does not mean they are less knowledgeable than I. Interview to interview, I modified my questions to omit words they didn’t know like entrevista [interview] and expresarse [to express oneself]. I thought about what it is that they do know, in place of the academic rhetoric that they don't; their knowledge base that I don’t share. The assumption I make, philosophically, is that we both possess a wealth of knowledge that can’t be quantified, it’s just distinct.

But to obtain that knowledge requires more than just finding out what feminism means to these women if it’s not called feminismo. Although this is a valid and tangible place to start, I knew that searching only for concepts that correspond to my own would limit what I might be able to hear. So many things can't be translated. What concepts are beyond my own paradigm of knowledge that are within theirs? Will any of the questions that I can even formulate, which are, naturally, within my paradigm, penetrate theirs? To hear something of their paradigm was my ultimate goal of the project, but ten days into my stay in the campo and it still looked a long way off. I struggled every day to listen harder and better. I struggled to listen to that which I couldn't hear—yet. I struggled to ask the questions that I hadn't asked. This leads me back to the practical purpose of the project: Do Nicaraguan women's organizations listen to these particular women?

As comprised by mostly Nicaraguan women do these organizations listen better than I can and how are they trying?

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Structural Theory

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The women at the focus of this project live in the farming cooperative known as Décimo Aniversario in the municipality of San Ramón, Nicaragua. The nearest city is Matagalpa, a small town situated in the mountains of northern Nicaragua. Literally translated, Décimo Aniversario means “tenth anniversary.” The cooperative got their name because they were able to gain title to their land in 1989, ten years after the end of the Sandinista Revolution and the fall of the Somoza dictatorship. Most of the people living in the cooperative have been working those lands since before the revolution. At that time, says José Lopez, the oldest member of the cooperative, they worked the fields for dueños, or bosses, who owned large pieces of property. Décimo Aniversario is a member of a union of cooperatives, all of which are heavily Sandinista and fought to overthrow the dictatorship and claim the lands they lived on. When the Frente Sandinista Liberación Nacional (FSLN)1 came to power in 1979, many farming cooperatives were finally able to form. Unfortunately, the FSLN committed a significant oversight. Not thinking that they might be voted out of power as soon as 1990, they neglected to distribute legal titles to many of these Sandinista-created cooperatives. When Violetta Chamorro ran against the Sandinistas in 1990 and won, large land owners who had left for Miami after the revolution returned to Nicaragua expecting to regain their lands. The FSLN rushed to distribute legal titles to the cooperatives before the new president took office, but couldn’t reach everyone during the short period of time after the election and before the change of presidential power.

Décimo Aniversario is one of the fortunate cooperatives who did gain legal title to their land. However the community has always been poor; living in rural Nicaragua they have never had access to much of an infrastructure. The community of closely knit families are in need of basics like food and shelter just as they always have been, even though they now own their land.

For the women and men of Décimo Aniversario, it is enough to try to survive, but they are also faced with the challenge of rebuilding a community torn apart by war, and more recently, violent hurricanes. Nicaragua as a nation also attempts to rebuild. The process of peacebuilding after ten years of war means more than simply putting down guns and forming political alliances2. The process of peacebuilding, according to John Paul Lederach, is more than a postaccord reconstruction. Here, peacebuilding is understood as a

1.Sandinista National Liberation Front 2.Violetta Chamorro was elected president in 1990 on the UNO ticket, a political party formed by the alliance of many different political voices, all of whom were anti-Sandinista. When she came to power she vowed to put an end to the blood-shed and erected the Peace Park in Managua, burying thousands of AK-47 machine guns in concrete.

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comprehensive concept that encompasses, generates, and sustains the full array of processes, approaches, and stages needed to transform conflict toward more sustainable, peaceful relationships [...] Metaphorically peace is seen not merely as a stage in time or a condition. It is a dynamic social construct. Such a conceptualization requires a process of building, involving investment and materials, architectural design and coordination of labor, laying of a foundation, and detailed finish work, as well as continuing maintenance.

This project looks at a loosely based network of women’s organizations in Nicaragua that are participating in the complicated process of peacebuilding. I wish to illustrate the way in which grassroots women’s organizing is a project taken up by women and men across many different types of borders (cooperative, municipal, national), yet I will demonstrate why attempts to frame them as unified fail. One cannot ignore the historic specificity of Nicaraguan women’s organizations that both predate the Sandinista revolution and were shaped by the revolution. Nor can one deny that even within Nicaragua, no unifying feminist agenda or goal exists. Indeed, even the use of the term feminist lies on contested ground. Considering these points, in this project I generalize these particular women’s organizations only to the extent that I refer to them as participants in the broader process of peacebuilding. I describe them uniquely by displaying their points of conflict within the small context of Nicaragua. In effect I attempt to work with the concept of transnational feminisms1 and practices that both acknowledge the multiplicity of forms that feminisms take and seek to undermine the idea that a point of unity could be constructed around “women’s” victim status2. Rather, I wish to look at the ways in which links can be made between women’s organizations through a mutual understanding of difference and histories of inequality and the acknowledgement of inherent power relations that exist between and around them that always and already challenge efforts to create positive peace.3 During the sixties, some of the first efforts to organize women were attempted by women in the socialist party, the Organización de Mujeres Democraticas de Nicaragua (OMDN). Many women eventually left that party and joined the Sandinista Liberation Front. In an effort of peacebuilding, the Sandinistas addressed “women’s issues” because they agreed that “revolution” necessitates an end to structural violence. In 1986, Daniel Ortega, newly elected president of Nicaragua, publicly addressed women’s rights as an issue important to the party: “The FSLN 1.See Grewal, “Introduction” from Scattered Hegemonies. Grewal and Kaplan write that, “in calling for transnational alliances, our purpose is to acknowledge the different forms that feminisms take and the different practices that can be seen as feminist movements.”

2.See Mohanty, Under Western Eyes. She looks critically at the notion that: “What binds women together is a sociological notion of the ‘sameness’ of their oppression.” She argues that this renders women as victims, rather than as subjects of diverse forms of power relationships.

3.Positive peace entails the absence of both direct violence and structural violence.

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commits itself to guaranteeing women’s rights and to struggle energetically against the residual sexism inherited from our past” (Randall, Gathering Rage, 49). Much like other socialist revolutionary movements, the Sandinistas did help create an active women’s organization and welcomed women into their military ranks, but they were unable to eradicate their deeply ingrained patriarchal structure and the sexist attitudes espoused by its male leaders. Women who did create feminist movements outside of the prescribed, official group created by the FSLN, Asociación Mujeres Nicaragüenses Luisa Amanda Espinosa (AMNLAE)1, were told that they were traitors to the revolution, feminists, or “worse”—lesbians. According to poet and revolutionary Michelle Najlis, “AMNLAE was simply an appendage of the FSLN, run by male members of the national directorate who frequently made terrible comments about women and women’s issues [...] I remember the day when Daniel [Ortega] said something about abortion being ‘one of those exotic ideas imported from Europe and the United States’” (56-57). This failure on the part of the FSLN to transcend the patriarchal systems of seemingly less progressive times is a failure that resonates throughout revolutionary and nationalist movements worldwide, and it indicates that the words “nation” and even “revolution” are continually circumscribed within dominant, patriarchal discourses, thereby disallowing women to fully act as subjects within them.2 The fracturing off from AMNLAE, and the freedom from dictatorship that initiative symbolized, served to create a wide variety of women’s organizations throughout the country that exist today. It also set up a permanent debate about what constitutes a “popular women’s movement” and what constitutes an “elitist feminist movement.” At every level of a peacebuilding process, debates of authenticity such as this one reoccur, centered around the voices claiming to speak for the “real” subjects of the movement.3 At a variety of levels, presumed subjects or advocates of the movement are circumscribed by “margins,” those for whom advocates claim to speak: At an international level, “any discussion of the intellectual and political construction of ‘third world feminisms’ must address itself to two simultaneous projects: the internal critique of hegemonic ‘Western’ feminisms, and the grounded feminist concerns and

1.Luisa Amanda Espinosa Nicaraguan Women’s Association. Luisa Amanda Espinosa was the first woman to have died in the revolution.

2.See, for example, Chatterjee; also Randall Gathering Rage.

3.Mohanty explains that, “The relationship between “Woman”—a cultural and ideological composite Other constructed through diverse representational discourses (scientific, literary, juridical, linguistic, cinematic, etc.)—and “woman”—real, material subjects of their collective histories—is one of the central questions the practice of feminist scholarship seeks to address” (53).

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strategies” (Mohanty 51). What articulation of a “national agenda” can also encompass the needs of women in rural areas? Assuming rural women organize, to what extent can they speak for women not involved with any form of organization? The question can be framed around smaller and smaller spaces.

On the one hand, how do two different paradigms meet in a critical understanding of what is good for one of the two parties (the marginalized)? Can common understanding be reached about the needs of the oppressed party, taking into consideration the felt needs of the oppressed party and the felt needs of outside groups, based on “common” goals of a loosely united women’s network of organizations? The felt needs, even of those “at the margins” are not the same. This paper examines the ways in which women at all levels of participation in a network of women’s organizations can speak with and hear each other. At a more theoretical level, I ask: How does a group of women who do not speak in dominant discourses get heard by groups outside, who are further and further influenced by academic and Western discourses? What does it mean to speak and to be heard? Can a “feminist” agenda, as opposed to a nationalist agenda, ever be articulated outside of its Western construct, in a place wherein which marginalized women find a space? The second focus of this project is to look deeper at the “silence” of so-called marginalized women.

Silence is not only the active choice or the tendency to be quiet, but also the state of being unheard by potential listeners. The importance of invoking the role of the listener is that it begins to hold accountable both speaker and listener for the production of silence. By many selfidentified feminists and non-feminists alike, speech is equated to power, while silence indicates oppression and powerlessness. The concept of “breaking the silence” or “speaking out” has formed the basis of various liberation theories. If women have been gendered as female/passive/ silent in opposition to male/dominant/loud, then one of the most important struggles within feminist theory in particular has been to undermine this binary construction. Chicana feminist Rita Sanchez writes that, “As long as we remain silent, no voice exists [...] If you do not hear us, no voice exists and no one will notice our absence [...] If we do not speak out, the indictment is of ourselves and we must harbor the guilt of our own rape. If, in our silence, we make no rebellion our sentence [...] will be our own silence; in itself, the worst possible punishment” (58).

According to Cindy Patton, “silence = death” (31).

I will argue that it is necessary to reassess how we think of power and silence. When a person speaks, their power is acknowledged or not acknowledged depending on who can

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understand them; who legitimates that power. Language always operates within frames of intelligibility. “Right speech,” that which can be heard and processed, is “knowledge,” and therefore, power. Those who cannot speak it are not only foreign, they are inaudible. According to Gloria Anzaldúa, “The lesbian of color is not only invisible, she doesn't even exist. Our speech, too, is inaudible. We speak in tongues like the outcast and the insane” (165). Subjects who speak within a frame of intelligibility, must be called into that subjectivity, hailed by culture, interpellated.1 They are interpellated when they begin to take a recognizable shape by the ways in which they talk and function in society. They can only be recognized as subjects through that interpellation. If they are outside that subjectivity, they are unrecognizable as anything at all. In other words, a discourse can only be defined as such if it is within this intelligible framework. “In the Hegelian perspective,” writes Lacan, “the completed discourse is an instrument of power, the scepter and the property of those who know [...]What is at stake in absolute knowledge is the fact that discourse closes back upon itself, that it is entirely in agreement with itself” (Felman 91).

Post-colonial studies theorizes that intelligible frameworks are rooted in the specialized, academic discourses of Enlightenment, Western thinking. Silence, on the other hand, is rooted in a constructed sense of “the other,” for example, the stereotypical conception of the Third World woman, or the “mute native.” She, like any other identity occupying the space of the “Other” is defined by her exclusion from dominant discourses. These margins lie outside of subjectivity, yet they are never static: There is a continuous creation of new margins that fail to fall neatly into the dichotomy of us/them.2 The push-pull between that which occupies subjectivity and that which occupies marginality is dynamic, but, writes Evelyn Hammonds, while it exists it silences. It disallows groups to speak who cannot speak within dominant frameworks of language, even as those frameworks change.

I acknowledge the usefulness of a perspective that problematizes the state of being silenced, however, I’d like to go past this somewhat closed notion of discourse. This paper will consider possible openings in this seemingly endless recreation of powerless women occupying the margins of subjectivity. The dynamism of margins is one reason why I argue that it is dangerous to speak of Third World women as if they are always outside of subjectivity. The assumption that to be denied Western language is the ultimate form of “silencing” merely 1.See Foucault; also Althusser 2.See Derrida; also Hammonds

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reproduces Western power and legitimacy. It suggests that one must be transformed out of a space of marginality into a space of (Western) subjectivity in order to be powerful, and that Western language is the highest form of power. According to Sagri Dhairyam, the “journey from not lesbian to lesbian is simultaneously [...] the journey from Indian and silent otherness to Western and articulated subjectivity” (26). In other words, to articulate verbally a lesbian identity by 'coming out,' is for a closet lesbian the defining act which transforms her formerly oppressed self into an active agent, or subject. This is her interpellation. She likens this to journeying from Indian/silent to Western/subjectivity. If silent/margin/powerless must be transformed to active/ subject/powerful, women who in their context exercise agency are trapped as “victims” outside of a position of “power.” While some women may be unheard at the centers, they are not necessarily powerless in and of themselves. Mohanty writes, “If the struggle for a just society is seen in terms of the move from powerless to powerful for women as a group, and this is the implication in feminist discourse which structures sexual difference in terms of the division between the sexes, then the new society would be structurally identical to the existing organization of power relations, constituting itself as a simple inversion of what exists” (71). While Mohanty speaks of the division of the sexes, the same could be said about the division between women of power and women of marginality.

Essentially, I’d like to challenge the notion that those who are silent/silenced (not heard) cannot be powerful unless they learn to speak in new ways. To do so involves implicating the listener in the responsibility for hearing. It also requires the acknowledgment that there exist many centers of power wherein which the listener operates and the speaker lies outside, but that more than a constant push pull of center/margin, that “specific hegemonic formations and oppressions [...]create agency in various contexts” (Grewal, Home and Harem, 13). If silence always equals death, then “women are seen as victims rather than as complex agents interpellated by various discourses.” These “scattered hegemonies,” are the “multiple subjectivities that replace the European unitary subject” (Grewal Introduction 7). Furthermore, if it is true that “those who suffer from injustice most are least able to articulate their suffering” (Dhairyam 37) then what can explain song and dance as expressions of suffering that exist but are not heard in dominant Western discourse? Why should oppressed peoples attempt to use the ‘master’s tools’1

1.Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”

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unless Western forms of communication are the most effective? What does it mean for communication of suffering to be effective? Here it is important to understand the fact that Western communication is powerful only within a Western discourse: Western language is not innately powerful. Dhairyam states that the silent majority, excluded from the realm of academic or Western dominant discourse, finds themselves suffering thus from their “inability to mobilize language” (37). The ability to mobilize language cannot be judged within such a narrow, Western, sphere. Moreover, it negates the possibilities for power that arise when a listener begins to listen in new ways.

Gayatri Spivak asks the question: “Can the subaltern speak?” and comes to the conclusion that no, they cannot. They are either representing the larger system of power, as subjects (of others) and re-producing the structure, or they are speaking as “subjects” who have been framed as such because they are already speaking in intelligible discourses. Between the spaces of victim or interpellated subject, the subaltern have no place to speak. While I do not disagree, I hope to open up the possibilities for power by discussing ways in which listeners can hear new discourses outside the dominant spaces. In the following paper, I will use the word empowerment in the way that I see it—as synonymous with interpellation. Although well-intentioned groups will draw women out of their “silence” through empowerment, what they are essentially performing is an interpellation of that woman into Western subjectivity, where by she can be recognized and heard, and her language becomes intelligible. They are not, however, asking that people listen to those women in new ways.

The following case study is an attempt to ground theory in a collection of women’s experiences. If the women of Décimo Aniversario are the so-called “silent” other, how do women’s organizations attempt to empower them and what are the implications of that? Living in rural Nicaragua, campesinas’ inability to access international or even national voices of women’s organizations renders them seemingly silent to the rest of the world. When urban women meet in international feminist conferences, rural women who aren’t attending circumscribe the subject positions of urban women in their marginality. When urban women create a coalition and attempt to agree on one national feminist agenda, vocalize it internationally, and then teach it to rural women with the intention of empowering them, how might this type of “empowerment” of rural women deny them ownership of their own knowledge?

This project looks at the ways centers and margins create and recreate each other, speak

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with each other, and hear each other. It will ask to what extent this community speaks within women’s organizations as subjects. It will also look at their silences, because there are many reasons for silence. As Cindy Patton asserted, to pretend that one experience with silence is the same as any individual woman's experience with silence, is to deny the diverse reasons for and conceptions of silence across the many unique cultural and sexual experiences of womanhood. It essentializes women's experience into Woman's experience (603). The “mute native� is further made a tool of academia when they are theorized or accepted into the interdisciplinary field that does not express them and yet purports to do so. The misrepresentation can silence to a greater extent than had they not been allowed to speak at all. Therefore I will attempt to express the views of these women as closely to their words as I can.

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Methodology

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Décimo Aniversario is divided into four sections known as San Juan, Carrizo, Sabana Grande, and Tapali. I lived in San Juan and conducted all of my interviews, except for one, in that area (See Appendix, Map). The 62 people who live in San Juan, 43 of whom are children, are almost all related. Most of the women I worked with are sisters, mothers, or daughters to each other (See Appendix, Matrilineal Family Tree). One can reach San Juan only by walking about an hour down a long dirt road that is traversed just three times a week by a small truck. You can get a ride by paying 15 córdobas. My visit to their community was the first time many of the campesinos had ever seen an American. Most of them had never been to Matagalpa, let alone Managua. I decided to spend the majority of time in the campo with this very small community of women in San Juan. It was an essential decision to focus the project on campesina women as opposed to the acknowledged feminist leadership in Managua. It would be all too easy to fill my paper with the words of the leaders of women’s organizations. I felt that I needed more focused time to listen to this group of campesina women.

I had already been to San Juan and stayed with one of the women there. I came back to the community partly because I had already made some contact with which to build on. The women had been unusually reserved and had never had visitors from the United States before, which made them very interesting to me. The community proved to be a good choice for several other reasons. The Union de Cooperativas Agropecuarias R.L. “Augusto Cesar Sandino” (UCA), the union that unites 27 cooperatives in the San Ramón area, has a program devoted to women.

However, there are varying degrees of participation within the cooperative network. The women of this community provided a nice medium between women who participate in organizing a lot and women who don’t participate at all. Within Décimo Aniversario, nearly three-fourths of the women are uninvolved with the cooperative. San Juan is the one section that does work on women’s projects; therefore it was possible to trace back through the channels of women's organizations and services, starting from women who theoretically are part of the link to them.

Although it is important to talk with women about why they don’t participate with the cooperative, given my time constraints it would have detracted from this project to interview women from all four sections of the cooperative. I ended up concentrating on 12 homes in San Juan.

I spent the first few days getting to know the women I was stayed with by accompanying them in the kitchen and asking a few questions. I also tried to make house calls and talk to

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women, telling them what I was doing, to eliminate any pretense. Generally I told them I was interested in talking to them later on, and in some cases I made appointments. For the first eight nights I stayed with the family of Sílvia Rodriguez Guido. After the first two days of informal discussion, I attempted my first interview. I decided to work with Jessenia, the promotora [representative of the women’s group] first, because of her central role in organizing women.

After interviewing Jessenia, I tried to interview the other women at Sílvia’s ranch and women that lived outside the central section of San Juan. At Sílvia’s I was already isolated to a certain extent due to several factors: Sílvia’s home is across the road from the land owned by the cooperative and her family is visibly more affluent. They are evangelical Christians, unlike the rest of the community, which is Catholic. It proved a good experience to stay there and understand the contrast between this family and the rest of the community. The last two nights of my first ten night stay in the campo, when I began to feel that I needed to have physically closer contact with the other women in San Juan, I moved across the street to the home of Eleadora Lopez Gonzalez.

I left the campo after ten nights for a few interviews in Matagalpa and Managua with women’s organizations. The break afforded me the chance to reflect on what I had already learned and apply them to the interview, as well as refocus for my second trip to San Juan. When I returned for five more nights, I continued to stay with Eleadora. Ideally, I would have stayed with more women, since access to a woman’s kitchen meant access to candid conversation. But to stay only one or two nights at each home would also have limited our relationship from reaching a comfortable level. Eleadora’s home allowed me to develop a close relationship with her, while still getting to visit other homes and getting to know other women. Being the grandmother to dozens of children, her kitchen was central to most of the community. Many women visited her daily.

The questions I asked the women changed daily, based on what words they didn't seem to understand, which concepts they had no answers for, and how intimate I felt like I could get with them in an interview. For example, some women began to get uncomfortable if I asked about their participation in meetings. Others would answer questions about birth control without blinking an eye. A basic interview asked, but was not limited to, the following general questions: (1)In what ways do you participate in the cooperative and in the meetings held for the cooperative and/or the women’s group?

(2) What do you remember of contact with outside organized groups (i.e. doctor visits,

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workshops held by the women from the UCA)?

(3) Are there differences in one’s participation or one’s role in the community that are related to gender?

(4) What are your needs and does the cooperative or do other organizations help you fulfill any of these needs?

(5) What is your tendency towards speaking in general and what is your conception of silence? Is there power in silence?

During my second stay in the campo, I began to ask deeper questions about their lives as women, focusing specifically on marriage, children, and women's health and sexuality. I listened to their stories about having children, being visited by doctors, and/or going to the hospital. While I still took photos of every woman I interviewed, I stopped using the tape recorder altogether.

After I had all my initial interviews, I stopped using notes as well. Instead, I conducted a series of informal interviews with the women central to my project. I had informal conversations with many women almost everyday.

In order to choose the woman I interviewed, I walked around to different homes and usually made contact with those who stood out to me most, simply based on who greeted me.

They were normally the mothers of the household and therefore married or widowed. However, I used them as contacts to get to know other women who were unmarried and not members of the cooperative.

Since listening was integral to my purpose, I spent a lot of time being silent. If the women were sitting silently, sometimes I would just join them, for hours at a time. When I interviewed, I spoke with women one at a time. I didn't conduct any group meetings because I knew inevitably some women would talk more than others. I should note that I didn’t talk to many men or make much of an effort to get to know them. I was purposely selective because of time limitations and to show the community that I was there to talk to women. The project was their (our) time; not for men. If men happened to listen in on the interviews (which almost always happened) I looked directly at the women to send a message to the men. I was interested in what the women knew.

And if they couldn’t or wouldn’t talk to me, I was interested in that too. I was interested in any and all of the dynamics that made up the interviews. Therefore, even if I knew I might be able to get more concrete information about the cooperative from talking to, for example, Jose Lopez, the president, I talked to his wife. In this way I learned about the information that actually reaches

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women, whether or not it is partial or incorrect.

My selectivity became very important for me, so I used the same strategy at the organized level as well. At women’s organizations there were few men around to talk to even if I had wanted to, but at the UCA most of the staff are men. However, I got to know the two women who run the gender department and my interviews concentrated on them. That is not to say I discounted men's knowledge, but I wanted to know what the women knew. And in the case of women at the UCA, how they felt about being women in the mostly male UCA was important as well. At the organized level, I chose a few groups because of my perception about which organizations stood out as main voices in the network of Nicaraguan women’s organizations. Other important groups that I spoke with were a result of going from the bottom up through the channels to organized women. I looked for the organizations that the campesinas told me had direct or indirect influence on them.

The questions for the organized level were sort of like a double check. I asked them similar questions to those that I posed to the campesinas about participation and methodology to see how the impressions of the women’s organizations differed from or were similar to those of the campesinas. I wanted to see how the organizations developed their methodology and what the channels and networks are through which they work. Above all I wanted to see how they were communicating with campesinas.

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The Actors

15

The Women

And When you Leave, Take your Pictures With You Jo Carrillo Our White sisters radical friends love to own pictures of us sitting at a factory machine wielding a machete in our bright bandannas holding brown yellow black red children reading books from literacy campaigns holding machine guns bayonets bombs knives Our white sisters radical friends should think again.

Our white sisters radical friends love to own pictures of us walking to the fields in hot sun with straw hat on head if brown bandanna if black in bright embroidered shirts holding brown yellow black red children reading books from literacy campaigns smiling.

Our white sisters radical friends should think again.

No one smiles at the beginning of a day spent digging for souvenir chunks of uranium of cleaning up after our white sisters radical friends And when our white sisters radical friends see us in the flesh not as a picture they own, they are not quite as sure if they like us as much.

We're not as happy as we look on their wall.

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Jessenia Salina Huerta Jessenia is the mother of three young children and the wife of the president of the cooperative, Juan José Lopez Gonzalez. She herself is a socia [official member] of the cooperative, as well as the elected promotora [representative of the women’s group]. She identifies herself as the most talkative woman in the cooperative. However when I asked her if she was a leader in her community, she said “no, I'm not, my husband is president.”

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Eleadora Lopez Gonzalez I fell in love with Eleadora, the head of the second household I stayed in, the moment I saw her face. Mother of eleven grown children, she always has grandchildren running in and out of her kitchen. She seemed to have the charge of feeding most of them, even though she told me honestly, “right now our [food] situation is critical.� This was coming from a woman who stuffed my plate with whatever she had to offer every meal. I rarely saw even the tiniest contact between she and her husband, Daniel, as they seemed to share a gift of silence and reserve. Her silence was more than bearable; it was comfortable and warm.

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Bernarda López Gonzalez Bernarda has ten children with her husband Ramón. Although she is one of the holders of a title for a new house, she told me that she was neither a socia nor a member of the women's group.

Rather, she said that she was a member of the cooperative by way of her mother, Paula.1 She identified herself as a leader in her community since, as she said, she is boss of the house. She and Paula share a kitchen and one can almost always find them there together. Since the interview was conducted in the kitchen, the reserved Bernarda often got interrupted by her mother's comments.

When we had communication difficulties, it was Paula who did the translating. In the end, it led to discussion between the three of us. When I tried to ask Bernarda why most men went to the river for semana santa [Holy Week between Palm Sunday and Easter] and women generally stayed home, she explained that men don't like church, but “me, I like church more than the river.”

1. technically the cooperative regards her as a socia

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María Heriberta Hernandez Lopez Eldest of Eleadora's children, María Heriberta remained in her kitchen, hidden from view, for most of the time I was in the campo. Her eight children, however, were often running back and forth between their mother’s and their grandmother’s kitchens. I was frankly surprised to find out how much information I learned from María Heriberta. She was willing to talk about everything, including birth control, and we seemed to understand each other well. Notably, she could also read better than most of the other women I interviewed. However she is neither a socia nor a member of the women’s group. When I asked about participation in meetings, she said she prefers to have her husband, Epifanio, attend meetings for the two of them, while she stays with the house.

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Abelina Hernandez Lopez One of the more quiet of Eleadora's daughter's, Abelina and I had a hard time understanding each other. Her husband, Cristóbal, kept coming in and out of the room trying to be helpful, but he ended up answering some questions for her. Before even starting the interview he pulled me aside and gave me a police report to read. It was the account of how their home had been burned down about a month previous to my visit. It was an act of arson committed by a member of a near-by community. With the police report was a list of things that had been incinerated with the home— everything that they owned. After soliciting me for help, it was hard to know exactly how to start the interview with Abelina. She explained that her four young children had almost died in the fire since the children were alone, asleep in the house, while she and her husband were out. They came home to find their home burnt to the ground and their children outside.

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Paula Gonzalez Cortedaño The matriarch of Décimo Aniversario, this mother of 14, ten of whom live within the cooperative, delighted me every visit. She battles rheumatism in her joints which has significantly limited her ability to walk, but it hasn’t effected her constant chatter. Her 85 year old husband, Cruz Lopez, is the oldest member of the cooperative. When I asked her if she was a leader or boss of her community she said, yes, because she is a viejito [senior], and she leads by working hard. She is both a socia and a member of the women's organization, but she has been unable to attend many meetings due to her illness. Her daughter Bernarda attends for her. She will, however, have a new home with the title in her name as soon as the paperwork is finished. For the most part, we understood each other well enough to slow down and clarify what we didn't understand. When I asked on a whim whether there were any feministas [feminists] in the community, she said yes. I double-checked and asked her if she understood the word feminista, and she said no. However she was the only woman who understood what I meant when I asked about non-verbal body expression; She told me that they hablar con seña [use sign language] when they don’t want others in the room to know what they’re talking about.

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María Andrea Lopez Gonzalez I made contact with Maria Andrea after befriending her eldest daughter, who unsolicited, offered me the latest gossip about their family. Maria Andrea’s husband had just left them three months before, leaving them without an income. Since she had no family where she was living before, after realizing that her husband wasn't coming back, Maria Andrea moved into a little side addition on the house of her brother. Mother of eight children, María Andrea was warm but understandably in a stressful emotional state. The interview with her felt rushed because we touched on some very sensitive subjects and she simultaneously had to attend to her four month old baby while we were talking. I ended up backing off because I sensed that I was pushing the limits of her comfort with me.

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Aura Luz Hernandez Lopez I talked to Aura Luz very little, but she intrigued me. 16 years old, she was extremely quiet and shy around me, and I noticed she always tried to avoid letting me see her goof-off with the other kids. Once when she passed me she covered her smile with a plastic bowl. She seemed to enjoy observing whatever activity I was doing, but she never asked me any questions. She also rarely offered much information about herself. She was unmarried and had no boyfriend. She said she might get married and have children, but not until much later on in her life.

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Juana Lopez Gonzalez Juana is the mother of three grown children and married to José Angelo Lopez Díaz. Both she and he are socios of the cooperative. They live down the road from the main section of San Juan which isolates them geographically and increases the distance required to haul water. When I inquired about it, they simply explained that they didn't have title to any plot of land in the main area. I think the location contributed to her less active participation in the women's group. This was one of the hardest interviews that I conducted. I had made an appointment with her the day before to have an entrevista [interview], but when I showed up and asked about it, she suddenly became tight-lipped and acted confused. Remembering that earlier that day another woman wasn’t familiar with the word entrevista, I asked Juana and found out she wasn’t, either. I reexplained my purpose there and asked about using a tape recorder and notes, but it was obvious that if I used any of my materials, we wouldn't talk. So I decided to attempt to remember all of my questions, and her answers, and move forward. Like other interviews, much of the family gathered around, and since she had a really hard time understanding me, she kept turning to her son or daughter-in-law for translations. They seemed to be able to understand most of what I said.

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Sílvia Rodriguez Guido One of the first things I noticed about Sílvia when she came home from a teacher-training the first night I was there, was that the whole tone of the house changed around her gruff, take-charge mannerisms. When she talked it sounded like a reproach. Suddenly there was a tension that buzzed through the house. Sílvia and her husband Iván Briones Torrez, married at age 18, seemed to share an equal amount of authority. Vice-president of the cooperative, schoolteacher, and mother of five, she and her family are visibly different from everyone else in the community. To begin with, they are not related to the family that constitutes most of San Juan. In fact, they do not actually live on cooperative land; instead they live and work on a ranch whose owners live in Matagalpa. Further distinguishing them is the fact that they are Evangelicals, and attend church an hour away by horseback. Although they do not own their home or land, they were visibly in better shape financially than their Catholic neighbors across the road. Their children were always clothed, fed, and they had a live-in servant. Additionally, their entire family is literate. When I attended church and the subsequent meeting with the them, I noticed that Sílvia was the only woman who knew how to speak loud enough and with enough authority to get heard; only one other woman got listened to. Before she was elected to the directorate of the cooperative, she was already very active in the community as treasurer of ADDAC [development association], treasurer of the potable water project, and the primary school teacher.

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Amparo Delsocoro Cortedaño Díaz Amparo had just moved into her new house, and her husband, Pedro José, was in the process of building a kitchen. Mother of three young children, she was generally very willing to talk with me. She was also relatively curious about who I was, unlike many other women. She was especially curious about my English/Spanish dictionary and whether I would help teach her English. She is a socia and member of the women's group. She even attended a workshop in San Ramón about gender. We had a conversation about verbal expressions and the differences between those that are used in the campo and those that are used by people from San Ramón. She interpreted my translation of “verbal expressions” as “practices that they have in the campo that they don’t have in San Ramon.” She taught me about the types of work they must do that the women elsewhere don't have to, like using an iron heated on the stove instead of an electric one.

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Lucía Hernandez Gemayo She remains a mystery to me yet, but Lucía may have been one of my most important contacts.

She is 21 years old and mother of a three-year-old daughter. She is neither a member of the cooperative nor does she know anything about any of its activities. According to her, she has been living in the home of Sílvia since she was born when her mother was a maid there. She says that she is unpaid, but Sílvia provides her with clothing, room and board. As far as she in concerned, her daughter, who also takes orders from Sílvia, will continue to do the same. Lucía was an important link because she was so disconnected from women's organizations and services. No one attended to her during the birth of her child, she had never been to school, and she wasn’t involved in the women's work group. She was also extremely quiet and often told me she didn't know the answers to my questions, even though I suspect that instead, she was actively resisting me. She laughed a lot at my questions and stared at me in silence, sometimes frustrating me to the extent that I thought I'd never learn anything about her.

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Alicia Huerta Palacio This is the only woman who lived outside of San Juan, and she gave me my very last interview. I almost missed her completely since her house was an hour hike away. But when I found out that she is a partera [midwife] in addition to being the suplenta [alternate representative], I decided to make the trip and found that that was one of the best decisions I made. Mother of nine and widowed, she has been actively working as a partera for two years, a skill she learned from her mother alongside one of her sisters at a young age. Although she said she couldn't organize other women in her area, I was impressed by the way in which she really seemed to have acquired the language of the women’s movement. She kept telling me that it was necessary to “break the patterns� of traditional gender roles and violence against women.

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Adelia Murillo Díaz Like Juana, Adelia lives down the road from the concentrated part of San Juan. Although she is a socia and a member of the women’s organization, the isolation also affected her participation; she was involved in none of the projects. She is married and the mother of five grown children. The interview I had with her was a particularly frustrating experience because she understood very few of my questions. Her daughter, who sat right next to us the whole time, was translating almost every question for her mother. From what I could tell, she seemed to repeat nearly verbatim what I had said. But perhaps my presence and the interview itself really set Adelia on edge.

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Herlinda Lopez GarcĂ­a Herlinda and I instantly became attached. She was always willing to talk, always following me around. It seemed that one reason she wanted to talk so much was that she had the ulterior motive of soliciting me to help her family who had been abandoned by their father. It was an interesting and hard relationship for me. At 14 years of age, she was the youngest woman that I interviewed.

Other women her age in the campo are sometimes married and mothers, so I asked her extensively about this subject, about which she willingly supplied me some stories. However, according to her, she “doesn't like marriage,� will never get married, and will never have any children.

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Interviews and Observation The interview process was extremely challenging for me. While I feel that I did make a lot of progress in building relationships and trust between myself and the women I spoke with, every attempt at dialogue that included any sort of pointed question felt difficult and somehow met with resistance. Formal interviews, those when I tried to make an appointment and tape-record or take notes were frustrating because the presence of pens and tape recorder changed the feel of how we talked. Informal interviews were also challenging without any notes, pens, or tape recorders because not only were they hard on my memory but some of the questions felt forced, as though I were somehow trying to trick them into thinking that I wasn’t actually trying to learn information about their lives. The fact remained that we weren’t long time friends; the interaction itself was somewhat unnatural. However the most challenging aspects of communication in general were the language difficulties and misunderstandings. It felt that sometimes we were speaking two entirely different languages, because the Spanish the women spoke was rapid, colloquial, and influenced by indigenous language. The Spanish I spoke was academic, learned in a university, and imperfect. Repeatedly women would ask someone else present to “translate” what I was saying so that she could understand me; it seemed that her children or husband had a better grasp on my accent. Misunderstandings of particular words were a common occurrence, illustrating the differing ways in which we had learned to interpret our environments. These misunderstandings were some of the most important aspects of the interview process. For example, the women in Décimo were not familiar with the word violencia [violence], and instead used the word pelearse [to fight]. This indicated to me that they might have a more narrow conception of what violence is: fighting and bullying (direct violence), as opposed to allowing more subtle or structural forms of violence, such as verbal abuse, sexism, or poverty, into their definition.

There were also astonishing discrepancies in information given during a single interview or between women over a series of interviews. For example no one (including the men) could tell me the exact names of the junta directiva [leadership board] of the cooperative. Few could remember dates and themes of meetings, and almost everyone told me something different about what services the women from the UCA provided. Within a single interview, I found that women would give me completely contradictory information. Sometimes I felt that they changed their answers because of some perceived idea of what I wanted to hear or how I phrased a question.

When I quote from interviews, I try to include the different ways that I may have asked a question

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to illustrate why I got different answers. Interviews also reflect a very circular communication style. I would ask a question and would receive a single word answer, so I'd ask again in a different way, and they'd repeat what they said, maybe adding a little. I’d ask again in another way, and it went on in this manner. Many times they'd answer a question using the common expression, ¥saber! [who knows!], but then not really speculate on the answer. This made me only want to pull an opinion out of them, thus sometimes I felt that we were struggling more than conversing.

One of the questions I asked them was about the frequency of men speaking relative to the frequency of women speaking. Beyond asking, I also tried to observe this for myself. It was hard to tell whether men or women talked more than the other, since I rarely witnessed contact between men and women, except occasional informal talks after meal-times. These meetings were normally jovial and somewhat relaxed. However, they were dominated by men's stories. During interviews, men often tried to join in, despite my efforts not to include them. I would venture to say that men were more willing to talk with me and understood my language better as well. As I stated above, often a man tried to become the translator at interviews (or tried to answer for his wife). I couldn't tell if men were more willing to talk with me because they were men, or because I was a woman, someone from the opposite sex, who interested them more. I think that it was probably the case that men felt a responsibility to speak for the family. Thus when a stranger comes into their home, male or female, men tend to speak up and engage the visitor as a representative of the family. Therefore I had to pointedly ask to speak with the women.

Most of the time that I observed, women worked within the kitchen. They woke up at about four a.m. to haul water, get the fire started, and begin making coffee and breakfast. Every day they were in charge of cooking, serving the food, washing the dishes, washing clothes, and bathing themselves and the kids, among other assorted tasks which seemed to change daily. For example, one day I noticed a woman hauling huge mounds of clay into her kitchen. The next day I noticed that several women were making clay cooking pots for tortillas. Another day women were helping to haul bricks for a new house. I was told that they also actively helped in the fields from time to time, but during my stay there wasn’t a harvest.

Women were not, however, constantly in motion, as I was led to believe by the heavy emphasis the UCA staff placed on the fact that women work more hours than do men. I think, in retrospect, that they emphasized the amount of work that women do in order to make a point (that

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women’s work is valued less than men’s), rather than as a strict representation of reality. I am not suggesting that women didn’t work hard; I am attempting to describe their day as I saw it in “reality,” and I am also attempting to steer away from a romanticized image of the “hard-working Third World Woman.” Just cooking three meals a day does take a lot of time, especially without an electric stove or a microwave. Beans take a long time to cook over an open fire. But the work does not by nature require a constant “doing” of something, like lifting and chopping wood with an ax. Rather, like much of women’s work, it requires a constant attention, a constant alertness.

Perhaps this is what more closely describes their work and why it is that women are constantly at work. Even when they are talking with friends, their attention is split between the conversation, young children running around, and something cooking on the stove. In this sense, there was a universal quality to their work as women, because it resembled the type of work that women who do not work outside the home do around the world.

On the other hand, there are aspects to their lives that didn’t reflect the busy-ness that many women, for example, women in urban or industrialized areas, are faced with. Much of the time was idle, not through laziness, but literally because there was less to do. Kids didn't need to be prepared for school everyday, there was no homework to help with, there were no meetings to attend or phone calls to make. There wasn’t TV to watch. Women mostly made house calls, sat in each other's kitchen, talked or sat silently. Much time was spent in silence; although I am not suggesting that this was a group of innately silent women. In the same place for a lifetime, with the same people, there may be no necessity for constant chatter. Their activities were reflections of the conditions of their lives.

Needs The most common answer I got when I asked, What are your needs? was, “well, we’re poor,” and I felt ashamed for asking. Hurricane Mitch completely wiped out their crops in 1997, then a smaller hurricane again decimated their harvest the year previous to my visit. Quite simply they need money and food, especially nutritious food, since they sustain on rice and beans, and starchy roots are the only vegetables they have. One of the projects sponsored by the UCA that is targeted towards women is the cow project, an economic program that allows women to buy a cow and pay for it through a long-term installment plan. The advantage is that women learn to take care of a cow and, if everything goes as planned, make money off it by selling milk and

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cuijada.1 However, according to Eleadora, “We haven’t paid for our cow and we don’t have reales [money] to make the next payment, let alone profit from the cow [...] Only one cow is giving milk and we are giving the milk to our children because there’s not enough food. So we’re not selling any of it.” According to Juana, she would love to attend meetings and workshops at the UCA, but they don't even have the córdobas [Nicaraguan monetary unit] for the bus ride to San Ramón. Literally, said many of them, they have nothing. They listed items such as medicine, clothing, shoes, cookware and dishes as too expensive. For those who graduated primary school, the secondary school is a Saturday and Sunday program in another town. Jessenia’s husband goes, but tuition, room and board costs about $1400 a year (Salina Huerta, 17 April). “And there’s no work to make more money,” she says.

Their needs were so basic that only a few women mentioned that they need a school and health center close to home, at least within an hour walking distance. Some would like to see more new homes; Sílvia and Iván would like to be the owners of theirs (Rodriguez Guido). A few people mentioned the lack of electricity, but I heard rumors that they might be getting power lines in the near future. One woman mentioned needing a better road, a paved one, because right now it’s not functional except for 4-wheel-drive vehicles. Another mentioned potable water, although I did notice that each home had USAID water filters they had gotten within the past month. These still did not solve the problem that women walked half a mile away several times a day to bring buckets of water back home.

Overwhelmingly, the needs mentioned were very basic economic needs. When I asked, I know that I was hoping that some women might direct their answer towards “women’s issues,” establishing the fact that the services provided by the UCA’s gender program reflects their needs.

So I asked pointedly: What are the needs that women have in your community? Many women didn’t see what I was getting at and they repeated that they needed food, everything. I asked again, changing my question to: What are some needs or problems that women have that men don’t? This question seemed to come across more effectively. According to Maria Andrea, whose husband had just left her, “aquí somos nueve,” [we’re nine [people] here] living in a small sideaddition on her brother’s home. Other women thought of María Andrea’s situation, and mentioned the large number of single mothers as a problem, especially posandos [homeless].

1.Cuijada is a type of cheese made from strained milk

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According to Adelia, homelessness is a problem more common to women than men.

Many women would like to see an expansion of the women’s projects. A few mentioned specific items needed for the cow project, like salt, which is necessary to make cuijada, a source of income for many families. They also need vaccines for the cows. One woman’s cow died after she spent over 300 córdobas on vaccines (Huerta, A.). Since women are “boss” of the kitchen, dishes, pots, soap, and the machine for grinding corn for tortillas, were all mentioned as women’s needs, despite the fact that these items benefit the entire family. Similarly, women face the problem that they are unable to purchase the supplies their children need to attend school. Since they are the primary caretakers of the children, this was described as a woman’s problem. Sílvia summed up what she considered to be women’s problem when she said, “[women have] too many kids.” While women often do have more than two or three children, obviously the fact that children are burdensome to women is a reflection of the fact that one, they don’t have the money as a family to support even just a few members, and two, that women are expected to be the caretakers of those children, from putting food on the table to sending them off to school. If they are left homeless like Maria-Andrea, their problem becomes even more acute. What I found interesting about the women’s needs that they described to me is that they too were economic instead of social. This is not to suggest that programs addressing social problems are meaningless, but rather to problematize the idea of where to start first when one is engaged in peacebuilding, especially when the women themselves, supposedly the “authentic” informers, do not recognize those social needs. It is worth exploring the idea of authenticity and whether any one voice can posses a more complete knowledge of the “realness” of a situation.

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Nicaraguan Women’s Organizations

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The following section is juxtaposed with the previous descriptions of the women from Décimo Aniversario in order to illustrate the ways in which the needs that the women vocalized are similar to or contrast with the various missions of Nicaraguan women’s organizations. If all non-governmental and nonprofit organizations were merely focused on the vocalized needs of the women, they would, theoretically, merely be addressing economic needs. However, there is clearly some compromising that occurs between voices that claim authority on the peacebuilding needs of this particular community and the women themselves. I wish to explore to what extent those discrepancies are legitimate.

According to Hazel Jirón of Puntos de Encuentro, there are “various expressions of the [women’s] movement.” The movement is any one of the integral groups of people working with and for women. Feminist Sofia Montenegro used the metaphor that, “the women’s movement is like a salad. The basis, urban women, is the lettuce, but all these other distinct groups have contributed their vision or idea.” I was interested in talking with women’s organizations located both in Managua and closer to San Ramón to see how their strategies differed for meeting the needs of campesinas. Some of the more local groups even had direct contact with the women I interviewed.

Radio Mujer, headed by Adaluz Monterrey, is a progressive radio station broadcasting from Managua that focuses on the lives of Nicaraguan women. Its programs report on rural and urban women’s organizations and their projects. They also air educational programs designed to inform the public, especially women, about new legislation affecting them, for example, the passing of a law aimed at curbing domestic violence. They have two programs specifically focused on economic laws and human rights. Part of their goal is to help support independent, working women; vendors and women central to the informal business economy who are generally from urban areas. Although Radio Mujer has reporters in rural areas, their most direct contact with campesinas is filtered through local organizations that work with campesinas. Therefore they only have direct contact with organized women. In the eyes of Adaluz, the needs most important to campesina women are property rights, access to credit, health services and education. Radio Mujer plans to have a program devoted to campesinas which will include a training program about women’s rights and new economic laws.

Puntos de Encuentro is one of the most visible women’s organizations in the country.

Their quarterly publication, la Boletina, is distributed to local women’s organizations nation-

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wide. It contains the latest news about the women’s and youth movements, as well as features on art, culture, organizing, and new legislation. Last year they ran an educational campaign with the slogan, “Violence Against Women: A Disaster Men Can Prevent.”1 Their campaign followed Zoilamerica’s unprecedented charges against Daniel Ortega.2 According to staff member Hazel Jirón, Puntos only direct contact with campesina women was through a study they conducted called “gender and disaster.” Its purpose was to assess how women reconstructed their homes and their lives after hurricane Mitch.

Grupo Venancia is a women’s organization in Matagalpa whose strengths, according to Eduviges Solis, staff member, are in gender training, prevention of violence against women, and services for battered women. Besides being an educational facility, the Grupo Venancia building is a shelter for women seeking refuge from violence or abuse. Additionally, it houses a cafe devoted to women where they can relax and have a drink.3 Like many other women’s organizations, they are a resource to women who have the means to come to them. Women who are interested in training solicit Grupo to do projects, but the organization doesn’t travel to rural areas doing outreach.

Colectivo de Mujeres de Matagalpa, like Grupo, runs workshops for all women, but specializes in rural women. The women at the Colectivo outreach to communities by conducting encuentros [informal talks] in the eleven rural areas they represent. There they initiate small talks with women, distribute information, and conduct workshops about women’s health and reproduction. One of Colectivo’s main goals is to strengthen and support women at the grassroots level (Molina Chow). As Eva Chow, staff member, put it, their idea of a women’s movement is to “get women out of the house and into participative organizing.” Workshops on self-esteem are geared to question traditional gender roles and to expand a woman’s sphere outside private (kitchen) spaces.

Casa Materna, located in Matagalpa, is a sanctuary for pregnant women who are identified as at-risk. It offers women a clean place to spend the night, nutritious meals, medical attention, and monitoring eight days prior and eight days after a woman’s labor. During the actual labor, women go to the Regional hospital in Matagalpa. As payment, they bring only a donation 1. “Violencia Contra Mujeres. Un Distatre hombres si pueden evitar”; because men could not prevent the hurricanes and other natural disasters that have destroyed Nicaragua year after year 2.Zoilamerica, Daniel Ortega’s step-daughter, pressed charges against him for sexual abuse.

3. According to Eduvijes, Nicaraguan women who drink in public are viewed as improper or promiscuous.

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of food. It is the job of the parteras [midwives] to identify those women who are at-risk in their communities. The criteria include the age of the woman, the number of children she already has, and the health of her pregnancy. Staff from Casa Materna go out into communities to conduct partera training programs. They also provide parteras with supplies, to the extent that their budget allows. In San Ramón, the town closest to Décimo Aniversario, partera training is conducted at the Casa de la Niñez. Casa de la Niñez is an organization closely linked to Casa Materna that trains parteras, refers women to Casa Materna, and provides the connection between the campo and Matagalpa for the women in the cooperative in which I worked. I talked with two women who had taken advantage of Casa Materna’s services.

The Health Center of San Ramón, a service of the Ministry of Health [Ministerio de Salud (MINSA)], serves a large geographical area that includes Décimo Aniversario. Staff visit rural communities to conduct free checkups and informal talks, and to distribute medicines and contraceptives. The health center also has a partera program which holds training sessions at the San Ramón center three times a year. There they give out small kits of equipment, although they are not able to give every requisite supply. MINSA has an extensive network of brigadistas [informants] and parteras who are men and women leaders in the communities who serve as a communication link to the health center. They provide information regarding their community’s particular health needs. According to nurse Katy Sobalvarro Mejía, the health centers are drastically under-funded and survive mainly on outside donations. The women of Décimo Aniversario had last been visited over a year before I conducted the interviews.

The Union de Cooperativas Agropecuarias R.L. “Augusto Cesar Sandino” (UCA) of San Ramón is a union of 27 cooperatives, founded by a group of seven cooperatives in 1992. Décimo Aniversario is a member. Each cooperative contributes 14% of their annual profits. In return, the UCA provides the cooperatives with annual credit on seed, cattle, and livestock. One of their more recent initiatives, designed by president Blanca Rosa Mora while she was still a member of the junta directiva in 1996, is their género [gender] program. The initiative allowed women to become socias [members] for the first time and mandated that the general assembly be 50% male and 50% female. The UCA also began to grant credit specifically to women in order to support their economic independence. The women’s groups were set up to provide a framework for two projects: the cow project and the house project. The cow project gives women a four-year loan on a healthy cow and the house project gives women a ten-year loan on a new home, with the title in

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their name.

All of the above groups are part of the web of Nicaraguan women’s organizations. While many of the women’s organizations I spoke with do share common goals, they do not all speak for the same women or from the same experiences as women. Many of their underlying philosophies and methodologies are closely aligned, based on a strategy of mutual participation and critical pedagogy, but they differ in their varying degrees of contact with rural campesina women, and the ways in which they choose to outreach to different types of women. In the following section I will explore what types of direct communication exist between outside women’s organizations and the women in Décimo Aniversario, and question how some women’s organizations, particularly the UCA gender program, critically examine their relationship with campesina women.

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The Agenda

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The UCA Gender Program

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Organization and Methodology When the UCA elaborated its gender program in 1996, they designed potential workshops that would include themes of gender relations, health, participative methodology, and violence, for both a network of promotoras [representatives] and for the UCA staff (Montenegro Chavarría). They hired a woman from Germany, Bergit, specifically trained in gender studies, to initiate the program. She was later replaced by another German, Katrin Sturhan. Katrin and Yadira Montenegro Chavarría now head the program. They have worked to created a network of promotoras in 14 of the 27 UCA cooperatives. Each cooperative has an elected promotora and suplenta [alternate] who both come to monthly training sessions at the UCA in San Ramón.

Afterwards, they present the meeting material to their local communities.

In Décimo Aniversario, the promotora is Jessenia Salina Huerta and the suplenta is her mother, Alicia Huerta Palacio. Alicia lives in another section of Décimo Aniversario, called Carrizo. In fact she is the only member of the 15 member women's group who is not from San Juan. When I asked her why no other women from Carrizo, Sabana Grande, or Tapali come to meetings, she said that she had tried to organize other women but there was little interest. The network of promotoras is incorporated into the development of gender workshops. Yadira explained that “[Katrin and I] asked the promotoras when they first started the program: How do you do a training? And they answered: Have discussions with the people.” Katrin and Yadira have annual meetings with the promotoras to plan a monthly training for the whole year. They began with basic themes, like the difference between sex and gender1. In January 2000 the promotoras said they wanted to be further trained in health, participatory methodology (as a review from the year before, when they had an initial workshop about this theme), and how to vaccinate cows, among other themes (Salina Huerta, 1 May). Developing the plan as a group is one way in which the UCA demonstrated what they call their participative methodology (Montenegro Chavarría).

Almost all the groups I talked with mentioned using participative methodology, which includes anything from sitting in a circle, playing games, white-board activities, using paper and pens to have people write or draw their own ideas, or socio-dramas to engage people and solicit individual responses. Puntos de Encuentro, Grupo Venancia, Colectivo de Mujeres de

1.The irony is, within feminist studies, this is a basic theme. Outside of that context, however, it is a very academic concept to teach.

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Matagalpa, and Casa Materna all mentioned using these methods in their training sessions, so I wanted to find out why it was so widespread. According to Eva Chow, from Colectivo, participatory methodology originates from the widely accepted idea of “Popular Education,” most notably elaborated by Paulo Freire, a twentieth century Brazilian educationalist.

Freire critiqued what he called the banking system, by which educators dole out information without allowing for critical thinking and dialogue. Freire felt that it disabled the potential of education and “was one of the major instruments for the maintenance of the culture of silence.” Thus one of the fundamental ideas taken from his work is to break the culture of silence and to empower others to speak, to find voice and participate. Freire’s words echo those of feminists I have cited earlier who believe that silence must be overcome: “Those who have been denied their primordial right to speak their word must first reclaim this right and prevent the continuation of this dehumanizing aggression” (Freire 69). But more than overcoming silence, Freire’s analysis advocated a transformative dialogue between educator and student that was liberatory both for the student and teacher. He wrote, “If it is in speaking their work that people, by naming the world, transform it, dialogue imposes itself as the way by which they achieve significance as human beings” (Freire 69). Through dialogue the student begins to get a sense of their place in the world, their connection to it, and their own power to change reality as they wee it and as they contribute to it. Moreover, the dialogue contributes to the destruction of domination and hierarchy and moreover, is an act of peacebuilding.

Variations on his ideas about alternative education have been adopted throughout Latin America and all over the world. In Nicaragua, with the rise of so many post-revolution nongovernmental organizations, it is hardly surprising that they would have chosen to take up the philosophy of a social-revolutionary. Many groups have even incorporated the methodology into their work atmosphere and decision making structure. According to Eduvijes Solis from Grupo Venancia, to discourage hierarchy “we don’t have a boss. All of us share leadership equally.” At their meetings, they use a process of consensus to make decisions. Colectivo made similar claims, and the UCA utilizes the consensus process in their meetings with promotoras. In theory, it seemed that the goals and methods espoused by many of the women’s groups I spoke with, and most importantly the UCA gender program, were designed to create a participative and productive space wherein which both campesinas and educators would feel empowered to speak.

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Capacitación In order to see participatory methodology at work, I observed a capacitación [training session] led by Yadira and Katrin on sex and gender. It was held in the coffee cooperative Sílvio Mayorga, not in Décimo Aniversario. Throughout the meeting, Yadira and Katrin took a few breaks to play games with the group to keep things light and to give people a chance to stay relaxed and have fun. From what I could observe, men were on the whole more comfortable talking than women. At the workshop, the women all sat in an inner circle, and the men sat or stood around outside it, some of them acting disinterested but talking when they felt like it.1 During introductions some women were visibly nervous. Besides having frequent breaks for games, there were two major activities. The first activity was a review of the difference between sex and gender, achieved by placing nouns or adjectives on large cards underneath either of two categories: sex or gender. Since it was a review of a workshop they had conducted in the past, the leader, Katrin, asked them the group to define sex and gender. One person volunteered that sex is biological, having to do with physical characteristics. Since no one spoke up further, the leader, Katrin, pinned up two index cards she had already written. Under Sex, she put up a card that said Cannot be changed. Under the category Gender she put a card that said Can be changed. She then solicited responses from the group to the following questions: What characteristics of a person are biological?2 What characteristics of a person aren’t biological and can be changed? One person said that breasts were a biological characteristic of women. Katrin had an index card that said breasts, so she put it up under the category Sex. Another volunteered that clothing is something that you can change about yourself, therefore it should go under the category Gender.

Katrin also had a card that said clothing. After that, the group stopped answering, at which point Katrin put up the rest of the cards she had written and explained the reason for the placement of each one. Words like penis, vagina, and breasts were in the category Sex. Gender was defined as that which can be changed because it is socially constructed. In this category were hairdo, values, and daily chores.

The second activity was called the Activity Clock (see Appendix). Two groups were formed: one group of men and one group of women. Members of each group worked together to 1.I was also able to participate in a youth workshop, and, while it still demonstrated that boys speak out more than girls, the physical nature of their seating arrangement and engagement with the activity was not as segregated.

2. Many contemporary feminist theorists challenge this definition of sex, since the biological, scientific definition of sex has also changed repeatedly throughout history. In other words, sex has been constructed just as gender has.

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fill out a huge clock on butcher paper with the activities that they do in each hour of their day, including sleeping. Each group was responsible for electing a secretary and filling out the clock themselves. After about 15 minutes, they came back together as a large group and presented their clocks. The women nearly filled up their clock with work-related activities, while the men noted more time during which they could relax and attend to personal interests like playing baseball or listening to the radio. Women had very few rest hours. After both presentations, Yadira got up to present the clocks, pointing out how much more time men had to rest. She ended the activity by asking the group Who works more hours? When the group affirmed that the answer was clearly women, Yadira pointed out that yes, women work more, but the work that they do is often valued less. As she explained, this is because the work men do is productive work; it brings in an income.

Work that women do is reproductive; it is related to raising children and tending to domestic, family matters. While it benefits the entire family, it is not valued economically.

I think the responses for the first activity, given the pre-written cards, were limited and framed to a certain end. Women were not allowed to really explore the meanings of sex and gender beyond a list of characteristics, nor were they engaged in a critical dialogue that might create alternative characteristics or definitions. Granted, this is partly what training is. Attendees were being trained because they were uneducated about the academic difference between sex and gender, and at the women’s meeting at the beginning of the year they had indicated interest in this type of training. As Eva from the Colectivo said, “We answer to the needs of women who solicit us and ask for training, although they don't always ask using the technical terms that we might use. There’s a mix between what we offer (the technicality) and what they tell us they want to learn.” In other words, women may have mentioned that they wanted to talk about the roles men and women take in their daily work. Yadira and Katrin took that to a deeper level and talked about the social construction of gender roles. The difficulty comes in when they are trying to make the connection between defining the categories of sex and gender and talking about social value placed on work. This is especially difficult since the workshop attendees, based on their participation, have only a partial grasp on the difference between sex and gender. The connection to the Activity Clock that Yadira then proceeded to try to make was a connection built on shaky grounds, and was the one part of the workshop that was lecture-style as opposed to participative.

Moreover, it was a direct attempt to give meaning to ideas that might not already have meaning for the campesinos.

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Asking the question Who works more hours of the day? assumes that this question is of value. In other words, the workshop attendees were taught to see this question as important. What Yadira and Katrin might not have learned in return, however, are the questions about work that are already of value to the campesinos. During the workshop evaluation, one man even pointed out that, “although it’s important to note the contribution of women, the work we do out in the fields is really hard manual labor.” He objected to Yadira’s framing the question as Who works more hours of the day? because to him the number of hours of work was not as relevant as the type of work done. He was, however, the only person that made any kind of protest. It appeared to me that a lot of other people said what they thought Yadira and Katrin wanted to hear. Most everyone agreed that women work more than men and that men and women should share domestic work more equally. I in no way mean to diminish the importance of these ideas. But I did feel that the campesinos interpreted an obligation to learn certain concepts already framed by Yadira and Katrin, as opposed to interpreting or contributing other ideas about work outside of that frame. In this sense they were empowered to view work in a particular way.

UCA Goals and Areas of Focus The following section specifically addresses the goals and areas of focus of the UCA Gender Program, since it directly targets the women in Décimo and other UCA cooperatives. I organized their agenda using the following three categories: Gender and Empowerment, Sexuality and Reproduction, and Violence. This structure represents what I see as the main areas of focus for not only the UCA, but also other women’s organizations. While there is variation between different women’s organizations throughout the country, most of the women’s groups that I spoke with have very common goals and reference each other as being part of a cooperative network. La Boletina, the publication produced by Puntos de Encuentro, is one distributed to the UCA, Grupo Venancia, and Colectivo de Mujeres de Matagalpa, among other organizations. Its liberal politics, especially on issues of abortion, do conflict with more conservative groups such as AMNLAE and the Ministry of Women and Families, but are compatible with most of the groups I interviewed.

The purpose of a deeper look at the UCA agenda is not meant to be an attack on the aims of many Nicaraguan women’s organizations; it will be obvious that the women in Décimo Aniversario face many different forms of oppression, sexism being merely one of them. What this section does try to do is analyze how each area of focus effects the women of Décimo Aniversario specifically, and how the campesinas respond. The following question is a central aspect of

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inquiry: What about the experience of being a campesina might influence how the women of Décimo Aniversario view the aims of various women’s organizations? If campesina women had never thought about some of these “women’s issues,” why not? If women in the campo hadn't felt oppressed as women, why not? Much of the focus of the UCA gender program addresses subtle forms of structural violence, such as lack of autonomy and decision-making power. Often these forms of violence, because they are outside of more obvious forms of direct violence, are not recognized as violence by campesinas I spoke with. Moreover, they had not been given space within their conception of the term violence to make claims about structural violence affecting them daily.

I put the words of the women from Décimo Aniversario separately from the Background Voices in order to structurally emphasize the power of their experience as campesinas, nevertheless I do not wish to make claims that any one woman’s voice is more “authentic” or more revealing of the “truth” than any other. Of the background voices, I spoke extensively with the staff-women from the UCA, Yadira and Katrin, not only because they implement the gender program but because they have had direct contact with the women I interviewed in Décimo.

Information and opinions from other organizations and individual feminists is meant to be supplementary and add to the broader opinion on problems affecting campesina women in Nicaragua. While their voices are valuable, I also realize that their general experience with and knowledge about campesinas does not necessarily apply to the specific community of Décimo Aniversario.

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Gender and Empowerment

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Background Voices According to Katrin, UCA staff-member, campesinas “don’t have very much selfesteem.” Whether or not women from other organizations would agree with her, most women’s groups mentioned that their goals were to raise self-esteem and empower women. In the past five to ten years, “empowerment” has become a buzz-word used internationally by a variety of organizations and movements1 to invoke a kind of advocacy that will lead to the independence and power of the powerless, underprivileged, or oppressed. Empowerment is the realization of a person’s fullest power to act as an agent. According to Magdalena León, empowerment is a process to “challenge the basic power relations in our society [... a process] that is essentially collective, but at the same time recognizes individual acts of resistance” (31). Six aspects of empowerment are: “security and vision for the future; majority of control over personal income; ability to act effectively in the public sphere; majority of power over decisions at home; participation in groups outside the family; and mobility and visibility in the community” (León, 32). Gender (generally female) is linked insofar as the social construction of gender—all of the baggage and expectations that we carry due to our biological sex—limits and challenges one’s ability to realize that power. Clearly, gender is merely one of the social constructions one might be empowered to transcend, and cannot be delinked from class, race, or ethnicity. This is why some theorists have referred to women of color as “triply” oppressed; their gender, race, and class are intricately linked to each other and to the nature of their oppression. Empowerment is an attempt to delink gender, class, and race from one’s particular potential and caste in life. More specifically, empowerment has been attached to gender-focused development projects because of the way in which “the empowered woman” connotes an economically independent woman who can participate in the development of her nation, transcending an otherwise undeveloped economic state.

Women, have, of course, always been participating in the “development” of their nation, whether their work has been within the home or outside of it. The word empowerment was evoked during the seventies’ Women in Development (WID) programs that for the first time began to officially view women as potential instruments in the development process. In other words, they were recognized as a valuable resource in the production of means, thereby leading to 1. To the limited extent that the Beijing Women’s Conference in 1999 represented women worldwide, it is nevertheless important to mention that The Platform at the Beijing Women’s Conference begins with the words, “The Platform for Action is an agenda for women's empowerment” (UN).

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an ends, a decrease in poverty. WID programs were merely an aspect, however, of post-WWII development policy that was based on the idea that underdeveloped nations should follow a linear path in the footsteps Western or “First World” nations in order to “catch-up,” often with an emphasis on rapid economic growth, measured primarily by a nation’s GDP. While the slightly more progressive Gender and Development (GAD) policy has acknowledged that poverty affects and influences women and men differently; that poverty is feminized (more of the world’s poor are women); that men and women take different roles in the development process; and has allowed women them to play a more independent role in development policy, it has not radically challenged gender relations nor the generally patriarchal and hierarchical frame of development policy. In fact, some agencies that still operate within a mostly WID framework have “adopted the term gender or GAD to reassure men that their interests and concerns were not being overlooked or undermined by excessive focus on women” (Connelly et al., 64).

While some have argued that perhaps such development projects have not, after all, led to the empowerment of women,1 I would argue that in fact the “empowerment of women” is inherently based on hierarchal and often patriarchal power dynamics, much like the development policy that evoked the use of the word. The very idea of empowerment, I would suggest, interpellates a person into a position of subjectivity, a fully acting agent, with the idea that “others” must assimilate into or assume the power roles that the advocate is already endowed with. As one can see from León’s definition of empowerment cited above, several aspects of empowerment, especially “mobility and visibility in the community” and “ability to act effectively in the public sphere” are framed within particular notions of what it means to be an “effective” actor and what characteristics are necessary in order to be “seen” and “heard.” In other words, empowerment and interpellation could be used interchangeably in that they both create subjects that can only, by definition, act within intelligible discourses.

The idea that the UCA even decided to create a gender focused program is worth investigating and ultimately reflects the work of feminists and development theorists who pioneered WID and GAD development policy. However it also reflects the political history of a region that is primarily Sandinista, and the communities that fought for the ideals of a socialist economy and cooperative living. In fact, Décimo Aniversario is the product of Sandinista

1.See, for example, Goetz.

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agricultural reform, and the programs designed by the UCA, originally targeting men, nevertheless utilize progressive sustainable development policy through their strategies of team farming and communal rearing of livestock. Since 1996, the year the Gender Program was founded, the UCA’s goals additionally reflect contemporary gender and development policy to the extent that its lending programs primarily focus on women as the vehicles for economic empowerment, and they deliberately place women in positions of power. The program that the UCA runs is effectively an economic “empowerment” program. The new house project grants women material for the building of a new home, and the cow project grants women a new cow; papers for both cow and home are made out in the woman’s name. According to Yadira, UCA staff member, these projects are directed so women can start to answer the question: “How can I participate in the cooperative … as a member and as a woman?”

Part of the objective of a gender and empowerment program is literacy and education. The idea is that not only will literacy ideally open the lives of women to greater employment opportunity, for them or for their children, but education will lead to transformative thinking, where women begin to view their own oppression as an outsider might. A literacy program was attempted in Décimo during 1998, but was terminated about a year later, when the woman running the project left. Décimo does suffer from low literacy rates that directly correlate to poverty level. A Nicaraguan government study conducted in 1999 divided the population between rural and urban, and those living above the poverty line, below the poverty line (about 48% of the population), and those living in extreme poverty (about 17% of the population). The poverty line is defined as the “annual income per capita necessary for one person to consume the required minimum calories and provide for themselves other basic needs such as good health, clothing, and transportation” (3). The poverty line in 1998 was C$4,259; The line of extreme poverty was C$2,246.1 The study showed that in 1993, rural men and women living in extreme poverty had a 51.6% illiteracy rate, while those living in poverty had a 40% illiteracy rate. By 1998, the illiteracy rate of those living in extreme poverty had decreased to 39.4% and those in poverty to 33.5% (11).2 According to the report, men and women in Nicaragua, unlike most other countries, have nearly the same illiteracy rate. According to Yadira, however, the majority of people who are illiterate in the campo are women. While the statistics I found did not reflect that, perhaps her 1.With an approximate exchange rate of 14 Córdobas to the dollar, the 1998 poverty line was about $304, the extreme poverty line at $161.

2. The illiteracy rate is defined as the number of people over ten years of age who cannot read.

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personal experience within the UCA has led her to believes that this is true. The UCA promoted a literacy program so women could not only learn to read and write, but also be exposed to gender focused education, a form of training that encourages women to start talking about their relationships and family life while learning to read (Montenegro Chavarría). Colectivo runs a similar alternative literacy program, for which they wrote their own curriculum. Eva explained that, using the literacy training as a vehicle, “We try to plant a conversation between women,” so after the basics they can start talking about themes like sexuality, property rights, and violence.

Eva emphasized that, “We want them [women] to get out of the house, and participate in organizing.” To encourage this, the Colectivo helps build Casas de Mujeres, women’s community centers, so that woman effectively have their own space outside of the kitchen. Some communities use the buildings to run literacy training programs or to hold preschools. Others use it as a meeting house for women’s organizations or other community groups that agree to support women with and through their initiatives. Ideally, women will begin to gain power and visibility within these community organizations.

A second empowerment project designed by the UCA, the microcredit project, encourages women to involve themselves more independently in small-scale business. Microcredit programs are offered by a variety of organizations throughout the country for both rural as well as urban women. While the UCA has been granting loans to men since their inception, the idea of a microcredit program for women was first made widely known in the late 1980s, when some large development organizations, most notably the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, initiated microcredit programs so that the poorest of the population, mainly women, could participate in small business ventures. While the program in Décimo gives out small loans to individual women in the form of material goods or livestock, other microcredit programs have been established in the urban areas of Nicaragua that lend money to small groups of women, thus setting up a system of collective responsibility for repayment (Radio Mujer). The loans are especially important to women who either would like to be economically independent from their husbands, or are forced to be economically independent from their husbands through some extenuating circumstance. In fact, the women from Décimo mentioned that some of their friends and acquaintances were posandos, homeless women, who were either widowed or whose husbands had left them.

A final empowerment program run by the UCA focuses on the socially constructed conditions of work and gender, attempting to find new ways in which men and women can work

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together within and outside of the home. Yadira and Katrin make the point that women are the sole performers of reproductive labor, work that centers around the home and child rearing, which is valued less in society, even though “women’s” work benefits the entire household and in a sense holds it together by forming the daily structure of meals, cleanliness, and sending kids to school. Yet women also perform work outside of the home, such as milking the cows or helping in the fields; work that is considered “productive” as opposed to reproductive because it benefits the family economically. Yadira believes that, “the [economic] participation of women is very important so that [they] can get a little income and so they’re not completely dependent.” Clearly, however, women do earn an income. A report conducted by Grupo Interinstitutional Género y Agricultura concluded that, “Women’s work brings in about 50% of the income of rural families,” yet their dependence is maintained in the sense that women are not primary actors when they live within the nuclear family structure. Because women also perform the work that does not bring in income, Yadira and Katrin want to raise an awareness among men and women about the large amount of work women do relative to men. Ideally that will empower both genders to participate in work that is less restricted to former roles, specifically by encouraging men to help around the home. According to the above study, “Rural women work between 13 to17 hours daily, compared to men who work between 6.5 and 9 hours daily [...] Yet domestic work represents between 53% and 61% of [a campesina’s] working day.” While the statistics reported above are not completely representative of the particular nuances of work performed by the women in Décimo and other UCA cooperatives, they have provided part of the impetus for the UCA program and have clearly influenced the agendas of many other women’s organizations.

Voices From Décimo Aniversario In order to get an idea of how work is divided between men and women in Décimo Aniversario, I asked women to describe how men and women play different roles in their community, if there are differences. Initially, a lot of women were confused by the question. Most women answered that there were no differences in the roles that they played, yet when I asked some women to think through their daily work routine, they were able to identify differences between how women and men spend their work time. These women said that no, men and women don’t do the same work. Abelina explained, “Well women make tortillas and men sow the fields and hack weeds with the machete.” “Men work the beans and corn,” said Jessenia. “Women stay in the house,” said Amparo. While Paula agreed that women do the work in the kitchen, she added

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that women help with everything else, including hauling cement bricks for the new house project.

Sílvia agreed that both women and men help work the land.

In Sílvia’s mind, men and women had different roles because “men give orders, women take them. This is true of the majority of couples.” Her husband, who was standing near-by, nodded his head. She went on to say that, “If there aren’t men, nothing gets done. They have a disposition for working.” So I asked what would happen if they were no women. “There would be disorder around the house,” she answered. “Men don’t understand that women play an important role in the house.” Like Sílvia, Paula’s opinions about division of labor appeared contradictory.

Although she talked about the great amount of work women participate in, she believes that, “Men are built for work. Women work softer. Men have more ideas for work.” Bernarda agreed that “women don’t have the same capacity for work [...] Men do harder work and they can help with the projects because they can build houses and women can’t.”

I asked in several ways about power and making decisions in the family, as a measure of autonomy and therefore, a feeling of being empowered. It was a very hard concept to convey, and I got mixed answers. As Bernarda said, she’s a leader in her community because she’s “boss” of the house, yet men, in her opinion, are still more suited to work and to make decisions about work. Both Amparo and Jessenia said they make decisions together with their husbands, but the general domain (mental and physical) of men is much larger. From what the women said, it appeared that the work in the kitchen was work expected of women without question; they had no right to ask men to help them. Moreover, they wouldn’t think of asking men to help. Men, however, had the right to ask women to help them in the fields and the extent to which they did so was dictated by men’s orders. In terms of physical domain, women were often occupying the kitchen space, only to be shared by men during meal time. Men were often out and about, including out on horses further from the home. The most extreme example that I was able to observe was Holy Week. One of the annual Catholic traditions in Nicaragua is to spend Holy Week, the week between Palm Sunday and Easter, at the beach (for urbanites) or by the river (if you live in a rural area). Every year there are a large numbers of cases of people who die by drowning; the standard story being that they drink too much and then attempt to go swimming.

Although urban women generally join in the festivities on the coast with the men, rural women, according to several women in Décimo, don't go to the river.1 On Sundays, or when one of the men has an opportunity to get into town, men will sometimes have a drink and play baseball.

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Women in Décimo, on the other hand, don't drink, nor do they join in the game. And the reason women don’t drink, said Eleadora, is because they almost never leave the house.

The literacy campaign that was conducted by the UCA had reached the women I spoke with. However, of the woman I talked to, only Sílvia, Aura Luz, and Jessenia could read. I believe that all three of those women had access to other education, outside of the campaign. Eleadora had participated in the literacy campaign, but she told me she still didn’t know how to write her name. Although I didn’t speak much with women about the literacy training, from what I could gather, the first woman hired from Germany for the UCA Gender Program, Bergit, had been the primary director of the program, and when she left the campaign also stopped. It is quite possible that the women in Décimo didn’t have enough exposure to the training to form a relationship with it, or a strong desire to see it continued.

Analysis The purpose of an analysis here is not to question the validity of an empowerment project, but rather to acknowledge and explore the various ways that campesinas experience a life which, besides being economically limited has also been described as “unempowered,” or is implied to be so. Specifically, what are the various ways in which the campesina women within Décimo Aniversario experience poverty and gender inequity? How might that experience change the way in which a woman receives an empowerment program? The interviews revealed that most women feel that there is a gendered dividing line between work performed by men and women, although women generally breech their boundaries to help in the fields. While Sílvia was the only woman to observe that, “Men don’t understand that women play an important role in the house,” she nevertheless had internalized the idea that “men give orders while women take them.” On the one hand, women are starting to question how men value their work, which perhaps indicates the success of the UCA programs. However, the social structure of gender relations had still allowed for these two realizations to co-exist: Sílvia could internalize a subordinate role to her husband without that contradicting with her own need to be recognized for the work that she does. She appears to be “fine” with taking orders as long as she gets appreciated for the role she plays. The women from the UCA, however, would like to see “women’s” work being split more equally, as opposed to just an acknowledgment of its current inequality.

1.Notable exceptions are Yadira and Katrin, who work in the rural village of San Ramon with the UCA, but live in town (Matagalpa) and participate with other “town folks” in the celebration at the river.

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The training session that I observed posed the question: Who works more hours in the day: women or men? Yadira and Katrin thought that the campesinas should start to think about this as a question relevant to their lives. While female participants in the capacitación had filled their “Activity Clock” with work at all hours of the day and were able to recognize that in numbers of hours, women work more, they also claimed that women work “much softer.” Perhaps for them “softer work” is a trade-off for more hours. Perhaps they’re comfortable with a division of labor wherein which women spend more time in the kitchen. Or maybe “work” has become merely a process of making it through a day, or force of habit, or a type of mechanization. Poverty may have changed the extent to which labor has become mechanized and comfortable, to the extent that they cease to question it. When I first asked if men and women played different roles in the community, I was told that the work done by men and women was “the same.” It was not until later when I asked about the specifics of the work day that women told me about the division of labor, indicating that in general they think of themselves as equal to men, even though men do not help in the kitchen. A study conducted with peasant families in India found that in fact, poor women tend to have more equal work lives that do more wealthy families, most likely for the same reasons that the women in Décimo Aniversario help in the fields—they don’t have the luxury not to.

Katrin’s feeling, however, was that the division of labor was just one of the many indications of the “terrible environment of machismo in the campo.” While Yadira shared similar views, hers were not as strongly negative, most likely because she is Nicaraguan and accustomed to the specific forms of sexism exhibited in Nicaragua (as opposed to in Germany), just as the women in Décimo are. Katrin also felt that the women in the campo have no self-esteem. During my stay in Décimo I found it hard to draw conclusions about a woman’s self-esteem, especially since women did not complain about their lack of autonomy, rather they expressed frustration about economic constraints that limit their entire family. According to Naila Kabeer, “For poor women, the notion of self-esteem itself might be more closely tied to the ability to feed their children than to middle class ideals of female propriety, which would hamper their survival strategies” (139). While it is important to broaden the notion of what the needs might be of women living in poverty to include such concepts as self-esteem and autonomy, it is also important to realize the various ways in which self-esteem and autonomy take shape depending on the context of a particular community. A few women did mention to me ways in which they

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take on leadership roles in their community. Paula, for example, told me that she is a leader because she is a veijita, a senior woman. Bernarda, her daughter, said she was a leader because she is boss of the kitchen. Is the fact that they both boast their leadership roles any less legitimate because it is trapped within middle class conceptions of the domesticated, subordinate woman? I would argue that their pride is a “legitimate” form of self-esteem, even as, at the same time, the system they live in is hegemonic, and like any system, it can be critiqued. Norma Alarcón writes how women who live within such power dynamics often interchange the idea of choice with what outsiders might criticize as oppressive obedience: The thought of being in absolute subjection as somebody's plaything is a thought no human being can sustain: so if a man (I add woman) is left with no means at all of escaping constraint he (she) has no alternative except to persuade himself (herself) that he (she) is doing voluntarily the very things he (she) is forced to do; in other words, he (she) substitutes devotion for obedience [...] devotion of this kind rests upon self-deception, because the reason for it will not bear inspection [...] This factor makes it almost impossible to sense a shift from obedience to devotion; they have been one and the same for hundreds of years.

Alarcón exposes part of the dilemma in analyzing the situation of many campesina women. While one could argue that their position is reproduced by the choices of the women themselves, through their consent to the division of labor, Alarcón illustrates the hegemonic trap that can be reproduced and condoned by those who are oppressed. This kind of trap is confusing for outsiders as well, especially if they’re trying to listen to the authentic “women’s needs” and the “authentic” women aren’t feeling oppressed, even though they live their lives in seemingly in oppressive positions.

While women might not have identified a lack of autonomy in their communities, women spoke proudly to me about their new homes with the papers in their name, as though this were a positive indicator of autonomy. Perhaps one project that indirectly raises the self-esteem of women, while still maintaining direct relevancy to the immediate needs of women, is the microcredit project run by the UCA. Credit programs targeted specifically for women took off in the late 1980s. While programs like the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh have received international recognition, they have also received significant criticism for their failure to adequately challenge traditional gender roles (Goetz). All too often, the loans are given to women but end up being controlled and invested by men. The banks are complicit in this because they believe that while women are more trustworthy and responsible for repayment, men are generally better managers of the money.

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Some have suggested, however, that while such credit projects may not redefine gender stereotypes, they are a direct challenge to class lines, because they do serve to raise the status of the entire family. Thus, credit projects aimed at women may ultimately redistribute income more effectively than will it upset patriarchy. Interviews with the UCA staff reflected that while men were initially resistant to the idea of women having the titles to loans, they were eventually complicit because otherwise, their family would not receive any kind of loan. While the somewhat “forced” loan agreement Décimo men face may not challenged their own sexism, I would argue that the UCA at least addresses potential problems arising between men and women within families because it loans material items and livestock, as opposed to money, and puts that in the woman’s name, thereby retaining her authority and disallowing her husband from taking over the decision making regarding that loan. While one could argue that in this case the UCA has simply made the decision about how to invest the money for the woman, at least the cash is not solely managed by men with little advantage to their wives at all. Moreover, special classes have been conducted for women to help them learn how to take care of their investment (i.e. how to vaccinate a cow). Additionally, what seemed relatively clear was that the repayment would be a collective, familial effort, as there were no wages earned by specifically one gender. The reality of the situation in Décimo is that men and women make a living off the land, and at the time of my interviews, their means to pay off loans were dire, implicating men, women, and more importantly their class status as campesinos in their inability to pay back the loans. Much further research can and should be conducted with the women in Décimo to assess to what extent, in the long-term, the credit projects have “empowered” women and what specifically that empowerment means.

While Anne Marie Goetz challenges the notion that credit necessarily has lead to further empowerment of women, I challenge the notion of empowerment itself. GAD development theorists have elaborated several goals of the policy, one of them being the delineation between strategic interests and practical needs of women (Connelly et al). While practical needs are shortterm and easily identifiable by women, usually economic needs, strategic interests are long-term and are less frequently identified by women because they have yet to be empowered to see the nature of their oppression (sexism, structural violence). The UCA program manages to address both, almost as a cookie-cutter example, in the framework of contemporary development policy, whose buzzword is empowerment. They address women’s practical needs by empowering them

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through an economic focus on independent, income-earning women. Simultaneously, they empower women to view their oppression as an outsider might—that their division of labor reflects “a terrible culture of machista.” More importantly, the UCA staff fail to truly address how several systems of hegemony are at work, that of relations in the campo, and those that they also live in. Under the pretence of empowering women, they appear to teach more than they listen.

Still, I don’t argue for a paralysis on the part of the UCA staff in their programs targeting either “practical” or “strategic” needs, even if they do ask women to begin thinking in the staff’s terms. Gender relations do need to be looked beyond merely answering to the vocalized needs of the women, and without the “assumption that somehow poverty-eradicating programs will lead to gender equity” (Jackson). For this reason some of the programs, specifically the literacy training, are promising in their attempt to address both at the same time. Nevertheless, in my opinion, the use of the term empowerment remains problematic. If many women are waiting, in their homes, for “practical needs” that are due to them and yet the government and other organizations can’t provide basic services for them, the use of the term empowerment appears to be a cop-out. It assumes a lack of power and/or self-esteem on the part of the campesinas and it implies that if they had power, they would no longer be the victims of circumstance. Moreover, it assumes that power will come if they begin to learn about issues important to more economically powerful women, women who get heard within larger national and international spheres. How should women react to learning about gender inequality, new economic opportunities, and human rights, when their basic human needs are not being met? Women may learn that they have the right to report to a health clinic, to a women's shelter, collect alimony, charge their husband with assault, but they still won’t have to have reales [money] to ride into Matagalpa.

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Sexuality and Reproduction

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Background Voices According to a survey conducted by Centro Nicaragüense de Derechos Humanos [Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights] in 1999, 17% of the Nicaraguan population have no access to any type of health care. This is a situation “which is even more grave in rural areas, where the population has to walk great distances in order to get access to medical advice” (Centro Nicaragüense). In fact, at the Centro de Salud [Health Center] in San Ramón, the nursenurse I spoke with told me a story of a young woman who was pregnant and had to walk for eight hours in order to reach the road where she could catch a bus to a hospital. Because of the likelihood that most women will simply have their babies in the campo without medical attention, Colectivo de Mujeres de Matagalpa has produced user-friendly, picture-guided resource books for and about women in rural Nicaragua that explain the stages of pregnancy, talk about prenatal care, and alert women to risks associated with some pregnancies. According to Colectivo’s research, Nicaraguan campesinas have an average of 6.4 children, but the more children a woman has, and the older she gets, the more risks she may have in childbirth. One of the resource guides has a complete description of signs of an abnormal pregnancy, so that pregnant women or local parteras [midwives] can identify at-risk moms. I looked for some statistics about the very area in which I conducted my interviews and found out that, in 1999, 33 women in the rural area around Matagalpa died in childbirth. Four of them were from the campo around San Ramón (Colectivo de Mujeres de Matagalpa).

Besides basic access to prenatal care, sexual education about family planning and sexually transmitted diseases is not readily available. Although I was told that there had been no reports of AIDS, in a study conducted in Matagalpa, “of the 112 women who received a gynecological exam, 70.5% tested positive with some STD” (Colectivo de Mujeres de Matagalpa). One of the main thrusts of the UCA gender program has been sexual education. According to Katrin, “Men who work in other places will have other contacts during the day. They seldom use a condom.”

One of the reasons, she thought, was because, “There is a strong machista culture [...] Here there is an expression: El se la hace a ella su mujer, acostándose con ella [...] It’s not whether she likes him or not, it’s whether he wants her. Then it’s assumed that she’s his.” Despite their separate interviews with me, Katrin and Yadira both recalled an exam they had given for women at the UCA. Of the women that came, 90% had a major vaginal inflammation and 10% had a minor vaginal inflammation. Most everyone needed to rest and recuperate, but they didn’t (Montenegro

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Chavarría). In order for the medicine to be effective, women are told that they shouldn’t have sexual intercourse while they are on the antibiotic. However, Katrin claimed, the women came a few weeks after the exams complaining that they still had the infections “because they had participated in sexual relations!” Unfortunately, Katrin explained, “its not really a woman’s decision whether or not to have sex” (Sturhan). Yadira agreed that women generally accept pressure from men to have sex. “Sexual relations are most difficult. The women are always pregnant. Always! [...] There are two problems. There’s the lack of knowledge, and there’s the lack of economic resources. Women don’t know when they’re pregnant and then they don’t get prenatal care.” Feminist Maria Teresa Blandón, who lived and worked with campesinos for ten years, said that most women feel obligated to have sex, so it becomes a form of violence. And women will sometimes use sex in an equally negative sense as a type of reward or punishment, giving or denying sex based on the actions of their husband. Maria Teresa agreed with Katrin that there isn’t much satisfaction for the women: “They don't often know what an orgasm is. There’s only one conception of sex: with the light on, partially clothed, and the women have to make as little noise as possible. Close-quarters at home make sex even less relaxed. “In the house, since the space is free, everyone knows what's going on. So sex gets hidden, or its fast, so that the children won't know” (Sturhan).

Katrin commented that, “It’s hard to talk about these things. Sometimes we do a skit [as part of a training workshop] with a couple who tickle each other's ears as a form of foreplay. This is to teach that there are other ways to enjoy sexuality besides sex, but [...] everyone always just laughs.” She said that for young adults, enjoying sex was especially hard, because the only place to have sex is outside in the campo, hidden somewhere in the fields. According to Katrin, young adults marry at 14 or 15, usually after the woman gets pregnant. She added that, “few women use birth control.” Of those who do decide to use birth control, it’s most common to use the Pill.

Many women decide they don’t want or can’t afford the operation for the Intrauterine Device (Montenegro Chavarría). Although not many women do take advantage of birth control methods, Katrin believes that, “You can see the use of contraceptives increase with a rise in self-esteem, education, and training.”

The problem of access to health care has become a fight taken up by many women’s organizations internationally. Before WID policy, the link between women and health policy has historically been ignored, partly because women have acted as healers in their communities and

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families outside of institutional health care, especially in areas where there is none available.

Women’s health needs, even those directly related to reproduction, were not regarded as needs important to the whole community. Instead, women’s health needs have been addressed secondly to those of men, even though pregnancy and childbirth are clearly issues pertinent to an entire community.

Voices From Décimo Aniversario All but two of the women I interviewed were married and had already had their first child between the ages of 17 and 20. Only a little over a year previous to my visit, in 1998, the women in Décimo Aniversario received their first gynecological exam, given free by a doctor and a nurse from the MINSA health center who made the journey out to the campo. Because of their contact with the UCA, most of the socias heard directly about the exams, and they brought with them their children and other female friends. However, I asked five of the younger women in Décimo, ages 14-18, if they had attended the exam. Even though two of these women now have kids, none of the women them said that they’d attended. Until that exam, there had been virtually no type of sexual education. Some women still don’t know what sex education is. Contraceptives are almost completely new to them as well. According to Jessenia, some women have started using contraceptives since the exam. Mostly, she says, “they get the injection.”1 The health center also offers birth control pills and what is known as the aperato [Intrauterine Device (IUD)]. Jessenia said that prior to this exam, women “knew nothing about family planning or about their bodies.”

Maria Heriberta and Paula both confirmed that they knew women who use contraceptives, but only a few. According to them, women who used birth control methods lived in “el otro lado” [other hillsides]; They didn’t know these women personally. When I asked Amparo about contraceptives she said, “Yes women here use planificación familiar [family planning], but me— No. In the health center there's the pill, the injection, and the [...] cómo se llama?

Anticonceptivos?”2 When I asked why most women don't use contraceptives, few women gave me a concrete answer. I suggested, in the form of a question, that perhaps contraceptives are too expensive, and Maria Heriberta agreed. However, contraceptives are free from both the health center and local brigadistas who theoretically should regularly have them on hand (Sobalvarro Mejía). At the 1. Most likely she is making reference to Depo-Provera.

2. “What are they called? Contraceptives?” Her statement implied that she was confused about the differences between types of contraceptives.

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exam, the doctor brought condoms and tried to hand them out, but Alicia, a local partera, thinks that most men tended to reject them. Even though some women were also ambivalent about using condoms, Alicia believes that the majority of women have learned and believe that condoms are a good idea in order to prevent sexually transmitted diseases, from which many women suffer.

What confused me was that she then started talking about “diseases” that were actually complications associated with childbirth. For example, she mentioned that sometimes, “kids don't come out ‘equal’ or are still-born.” Whether or not she understood the symptoms of sexually transmitted diseases was unclear. However, this is to be somewhat expected, since as a partera, most of Alicia’s experience has been with widwifery, not with sexual health: “I learned [how to deliver babies] with the help of my mom and my sister, when I was little. I haven’t yet been to the official training at the Health Center, but I'd like to go.” A local brigadista did, however, bring Alicia a free small briefcase of equipment from the Health Center. “Inside it has towels, gloves, cotton [...] but there are a lot more things that I need.” Sometimes she uses medicines that she must buy in Matagalpa; they’re not available at the health center. For these she spends her own money. The majority of the time, however, she uses several different types of herbal remedies in order to sooth the pain of labor. She showed me the leaves of a medicinal plant growing right outside her door.

Lucía was the only woman I spoke with who had absolutely no one attend to her when she had her first, and only, child. According to her, the labor took place at her mother's home, but no one came to help during or afterwards. When I asked what she did after her child was born, she said Nothing. By her answers, I was pretty sure that she just didn't want to talk about her labor with me, probably because it was such a traumatic experience. During our conversation, she was laughing shyly the whole time, as if she were either embarrassed about the experience, or trying to tell me to stop asking questions, so I backed off. More common than Lucía’s experience were women who told me that their husbands delivered their babies. “He was my partero,” Paula told me, looking at her husband Crúz. My husband, many women said, Well, he learned and I learned how to deliver with the first child. Also, a considerable amount of women were attended by local parteras, of whom I was given the name of three. Eleadora told me that they had to go get a partera at 3:00 in the morning for one of her daughters. But, she says, parteras aren't always available, or they are too far away. This is clearly a risk for women who have any complications.

Jessenia, for example, had to stay for a few days at Casa Materna in Matagalpa, which is a

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clinic open to mothers-to-be who, due to several factors, may be at high risk for complications during their labor. Fortunately, Jessenia was identified as at-risk prior to her labor by a local partera. She ended up having to get a cesarean section at the near-by hospital, which made her trip to Casa Materna essential. She said other women don’t take advantage of the service because they don’t want to walk such a long way up the road. Andrea had also gone to Casa Materna two days before her eighth child was born, because, she said, she could have lost her life had she not.

She had been identified by a partera as at-risk because she already had more than five children. I learned that one of her children had died at 13 months; She couldn’t get to the hospital, so it died at home. Other women, such as María Heriberta, had a partera attend her for all eight children, and she never had any complications. Abelina likewise had never had any problems nor ever visited the medical center. But according to Eleadora, services for pregnant women are no better than they were when she had her first: “Women are mostly still having kids in their homes without any help.”

I didn’t ever feel comfortable enough to ask any women or teenagers directly about their sexual relations. However both Herlinda and Aura Luz seemed adamantly against having kids any time in the near future. Herlinda claimed she never wanted to have any at all. Their opinionated reactions to my questions about childbirth and marriage didn’t seem to match what Katrin had said about women’s lack of choice in the matter. Perhaps since Herlinda and Aura Luz hadn’t yet experienced pressure from husbands, all they knew was the over-burden they saw their mothers dealing with. In Herlinda’s case, she practically takes on a mothering figure to most of her siblings already. Ideally, they will continue to be able to live out their own wishes about marriage and childbirth.

Analysis While the health programs need more staff members and money, it seems clear from the interviews that both the women in the campo and the women at the UCA are able to recognize together the need for more health exams and education. Furthermore, once the women had attended one exam, they were able to recognize their own lack of knowledge about their bodies.

In this sense they were able to step outside themselves and see what they still needed and ultimately wanted to learn. The partera program is a way in which the education gets reciprocated in the opposite sense, in that money and time gets invested back into the community at the grassroots level, strengthening an education and knowledge that had already been established

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locally and passed down through generations. Alicia had learned to be a midwife as a child, and the MINSA program, ideally, tries to support that. The other network, of brigadistas as liaisons to the health center in San Ramon again strengthens local networks and knowledge. While education about contraceptives seemed a little less clearly communicated and slow to change, at least one woman in Décimo Aniversario did tell me that she herself has decided to use birth control, as opposed to telling me that just women from “other hills” use them. Young women who already know that they don’t want to have kids, or that they won’t want to have kids until much later, could benefit from the new education that they are receiving through the health center or passed down from the new knowledge acquired by older women. The fact that contraceptives are available and free from local brigadistas makes them a viable option.

While these topics were relatively easy and comfortable to approach with women, talking about so-called “machista culture” and the pressures to have sex were extremely difficult, to the extent that I didn’t get concrete information from their point of view on the matter. This leaves a lot of room for more discussion, some of which can hopefully be taken up by women who will spend time in the community getting to know the women through extended dialogue, ideally during meetings like the ones conducted by Yadira and Katrin. From the point of view of several women’s organizations, women have no enjoyment during sex and no choice about when to engage in sexual activity. Since one of the objectives of the UCA workshops is to learn new ways in which to “enjoy sex,” I wondered what ways in which this middle-class or urban ideal of enjoying sex might be interpreted in the context of the experience of these women in Décimo. If the conception of gender is different in the campo than it is for the leaders of women’s organizations, how does campesina’s conception of sex change the meaning of “enjoying sex”?

In what ways do the close quarters in campesino homes change sexual relations for campesinas, while the same problem might not exist for urban women? Does the concept of “the natural” play a role? I noticed that young kids would step in each other’s urine, right on the floor inside a house or kitchen. Houses often have only one partition. I wonder whether or not the close proximity had changed how people thought about sex in general in the campo. In what way do these experiences change cultural ideas of sex appeal? Do the concepts of sex and body develop new meanings? On the one hand, sex and body could take on the significance of openness between family members.

And, as a result, sex could develop into merely a productive, non-enjoyable process. Is sex viewed as just a reproductive process for women, something that doesn’t involve sexual pleasure,

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and if it is, do women think of that view as something to be changed?

This made me wonder what kind of conflict must exist between the Catholic Church and the possibilities of a natural, open conception of sex that women in the campo might have. I asked María Heriberta about the church in relation to family and she told me that “God told women to have children.” According to feminist María Teresa Blandón, the Catholic Church has a strong influence in the campo. However, she says, people generally aren’t strict about all of the teachings of the church. Although sex, drinking, and smoking are all “immoral,” people engage in these activities, anyway. For instance, women still use birth control, even though that is in contradiction with the views of the church. Katrin made a similar point. She likened campesinas’ simultaneous use of birth control and their religious piety with the fact that during the eighties campesinos “went to FSLN meetings and still went to church.” In Katrin’s opinion, “for campesinos, there is no contradiction” between attending church and seemingly conflicting behavior. In that sense, I would argue that the church is a daily constant that is more connected to cultural practices, community, and relationships than it is to deeply ingrained ideologies. While this leaves room for new dialogues about sex and reproduction, with the possibility of changing cultural habits related to the enjoyment of sex and family planning, it also indicates that the church is likely to stay as a function of community.

The idea that somehow sex is natural, as opposed to either violent and unpleasant or especially pleasurable does not exist, according to María Teresa, because families don't talk about sex. “Campesinos never discuss sex with the kids, so I think the kids get more curious about it.

They actually have very little knowledge of their body.” While sex may be viewed as mundane, it is also not something that people discuss with each other because of social taboo. This silence surrounding sex, many women argue, is a form of violence that leads to a culture which disallows women from asserting any form of power or pleasure through sexual relations. The empowerment of women in sexual situations, therefore, is something that outside voices clearly see as necessary.

The idea that all women should enjoy sex is part of that empowerment. While the UCA may not direct their program towards teaching women how to reach orgasm, they do direct conversations that attempt to place the power of the decision about whether to engage in sexual activity into the hands of women. I would suggest that they also engage in conversations about what it means to enjoy sex before there are assumptions made that enjoyment of sex is completely absent from all women’s sexual relations.

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Moreover, some women’s groups’ discussions about sex may be connected with underlying development policy goals to curtail childbirth among poor women. According to Cecilia Jackson, “Women’s reproductive goals and interests do not necessarily conform with those of family planners. Furthermore, although it has been widely argued that the education of women is linked to declining fertility, and that thus the empowerment of women through education is consistent with population limitation policies, Patricia Jeffery (1994) argues that this link may speak less of empowerment and more of the impact of the nuclear family ideology embodied in the content of much educational material” (43). While few of the groups I spoke with are likely to be implicated in this complicated and double-edged sword of empowerment, it is an example of the underlying meanings of empowerment that can be executed by seemingly wellintentioned groups. It would be my hope that conversations opening up basic assumptions and goals on the part of both the UCA staff and the women participants occur in discussion forums accessible to all Décimo campesinas.

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Violence

“If black women are to be free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression.�

-Combahee River Collective

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Background Voices “‘Two wrongs do not make a right’ are claims frequently used to silence those who are to ask the questions, who challenge, who accuse. And inevitably the silencing becomes a new language of oppression” (Randall. Gathering Rage). Margaret’s Randall’s voice may best describe how many women’s groups approach the problem of violence against women. Thus, the slogan, “Romper el Silencio” [Break the Silence] has been adopted internationally. According to Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, local groups in Latin America began to work on the issue of violence against women in the late seventies and early eighties, but it didn't become a serious focus for transnational organizations until the eighties. The United Nations did not consider violence against women a topic worth mentioning in any official documents until 1985. The first official statement that came from the Organization of American States (OAS) did not appear until 1994. In other words, local action within the developing world had been well in effect before violence against women became one of the hottest topics for international feminists and networks during the mid-nineties.

Because the term “violence against women” encompasses a wide range of practices both in and outside of the home, at first it was difficult to refer to many different specific campaigns against violence under the same term: “It was neither obvious nor natural that one should think of female genital mutilation and domestic abuse as part of the same category. The category ‘violence against women’ had to be constructed and popularized before people could think of these practices as the ‘same’ in some basic way” (Keck 172). Whether they should be thought of the ‘same’ at all is arguable, but grouping them together did assist in the next step, which was to convince States to consider violence against women both in and out of the private sphere as a violation of human rights. “The public/private divide within human rights discourse posed a significant problem for women's organizations that hoped to claim that domestic violence, dowry death, and female genital mutilation, though all carried out in the household, were nevertheless violations of women's rights for which states could and should be held accountable” (Keck, 180).

Red de Mujeres Contra la Violencia, of which both the Colectivo and Grupo Venancia are a part, is currently one of the most active networks in Nicaragua fighting acts of violence against women. In 1996 they wrote, Confites en el infierno: Prevalencia y Características de la violencia conyugal hacía las mujeres en Nicaragua [Sweets In Hell: The Prevalence and Characteristics of Domestic Violence Effecting the Women of Nicaragua] and presented it to the government in

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support of Law 230, which aims to prevent and sanction domestic violence. The passage of this legislation led to the creation of the police Comiserías—local police stations exclusively for women and children to place charges against their attackers. Prior to the establishment of the Comiserías, the report found that 80% of all women in Nicaragua who were victims of violence did not seek any form of help. There are now 14 Comiserías in Nicaragua, including one located in San Ramón. In 1999, there were 4,432 cases of intrafamiliar violence in Nicaragua (Centro Nicaragüense). Although there was no available data specific to San Ramón, a study conducted by the Civil Coordinator for Emergency and Reconstruction revealed that domestic violence grew in the late nineties in communities like San Ramón, following the devastation of Hurricane Mitch (Centro Nicaragüense). According to Eva Chow, the majority of incidences of violence are rural, “and the men are really protected there because the women won't report it. There are so many more violations than represented.” The nurse at the health center in San Ramón confirmed she had seen many cases of violence among men and women of all types. Maria Teresa Blandón, who lived and worked with campesinos for ten years, recalled that “women are very violent in the house—to their kids! They don't often leave the home. Men are violent both in and out, because they have a larger domain. And the more violent they are outside of the house, the more violent they are inside as well.”

Grupo Venancia said that in the case of violence against women, organization of campesinas was crucial because quite simply, “if they are not organized, campesinas accept it. If they are organized, they begin to question it.” Katrin pointed out that no one ever talks about violence at the workshops held by the UCA staff. She also said that, “We have never seen anyone with bruises on their face at a meeting, but I know there have been cases of women who have tried to charge their husbands with domestic violence in the comisería [in San Ramón].” Yadira feels that, “violence [...] is the aspect [of life in the campo] most intense. One part of it is violence against women's rights—How a husband treats his wife [...] But also how a father punishes his kids.” Katrin began to speak about the issue of violence beyond the physical: “How can you exactly decide what violence is? Violence also occurs when women don’t have the option of deciding when they'll get married to their husband.” She sees violence as a structural problem that is especially strong in Nicaragua. In Katrin’s opinion, Nicaraguan society is especially violent: “Here it is something extreme. Almost everyday there are cases [of violence] and mainly these [...] are in the campo [...] Many problems are solved with violence [...] with a machete and

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everything. A party is good when there aren't any dead or injured people.”

Voices From Décimo Aniversario I was only able to talk to three women about violence, because it was such a hard topic to approach. Unfortunately, I lived with a family who experienced violence directly. While I was staying in Sílvia’s home, two men in the family got brutally assaulted and robbed on the Good Friday, the last Friday of Holy Week. Fortunately, this event allowed me to approach the topic of violence with a few of the women when I ventured to the other homes across the street the next day. Despite the terrifying incident, Eleadora, Jessenia, and Alicia each told me that violence was not a problem in their community. However, mentioned all three, violence does become a problem when men drink. Alicia mentioned Friday of Holy week as particularly bad because, said she, “[the men] were borracho [drunk]! We were scared.” She added, however, that, “The violence is between men, sometimes friends. There is no violence between husbands and wives.”

Jessenia confirmed that there hadn’t been any cases of men hitting women or parents hitting their kids. “Here,” she said, “we work to together [...] Those who are violent are from other parts.”

Eleadora agreed that violence was mostly in el otro lado.1 “The assault happened at Sílvia's house because those men were drinking [at the river]. Almost no one drinks here [...] They only drink when they leave the community [...] We’re really tranquil here. The only thing that happens is sometimes the kids play-fight with each other.” Whether or not they were being realistic about the presence of violence in their own small community, certainly all three women were well aware of it. I was surprised, in fact, by how little anybody seemed effected by the assault on Good Friday.

The workshops on violence will continue to be held by the UCA staff, whether or not women view it as a problem in their community. Alicia was the one woman who agreed that the workshops conducted by Yadira and Katrin were essential. In her words, “[Violence] is a custom that fathers pass to their sons and we want to break the cycle by raising awareness.”2 Analysis It’s difficult to talk to close friends about violence they have experienced, let alone almost complete strangers. Thus I realize the limitations of both the information women offered to me as well as what I observed. If there were violence, most likely it would have been well hidden from my (outsider) eyes. Talking about violence gets even tougher when one thinks about the reasons 1. Literally, the other side [of the hills], the surrounding areas.

2. The literal translation of her words is cut the ice. I translated this concept to break the cycle.

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that the Colectivo de Mujeres de Matagalpa has never done a community study on instances of violence; They don't want to put women on the spot in front of husbands who, if accused, could become more violent.

Therefore I will present what I found given those limitations. What I can say is that I did not observe any domestic violence (between husband and wife), verbal abuse, sexual abuse, catcalls, or parents hitting their kids. In Eleadora’s house, I never even heard a raised voice. Sílvia’s house, on the other hand, was always a little tense. Maria Teresa Blandón did put this in perspective when she suggested that parents might punish their kids later, out of my sight, in order to present a happier home life to me. Likewise, other forms of violence could occur out of my sight. However, I paid really close attention to observe the relationships between mother and child, and I seldom left the house or near-by vicinity. I have never seen such patient and laid-back mothers. Nor did I ever hear a child crying or people fighting behind the walls of a house. Maria Teresa’s suggestion makes me wonder if mothers are as patient as they seemed, but I stayed at Eleadora's house seven nights and was continually struck by how calm the mothers were. For example, kids’ play- fighting and even hitting directed at moms was met with unusually comfortable, tolerant smiles and laughing. The kids weren’t engaged in violent or malicious playing, but the mothers were far more calm than I’ve seen mothers ever be before. I also noticed that parents were a little less protective of their youngsters. A child not yet two years old found a large knife in the kitchen and began to hack away at the wood counter, and Eleadora barely batted on eye. Kids would fall and hit their heads and mothers wouldn’t turn around, thus refusing to give attention just to baby them.

These observations lead me to ask a few questions: Is violence viewed as a natural part of life here? If it is, does that make it more subtle—so subtle that no one really notices it, and therefore it constantly oppresses? Or is the conception of violence as natural an indicator of a brutal culture of violence that is more likely to raise young men who think it’s OK to hit their wives? Or, is violence in the campo as it appears to be between children; playful and minimal, that neither encourages nor reproduces violence in other aspects of life? I suggest that like many cultures, some forms of violence in Décimo may be seen as natural, even as people are able to identify certain other forms of violence that are particularly prevalent and negative. Thus, contradictory conceptions of violence and measures of violence may appear to outsiders as particularly neglectful of violence that they may view as especially oppressive. I wouldn’t argue

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that this culture is particularly violent, nor would I describe their community as a “culture of violence.” Like violence that occurs unnoticed throughout the world, it produces a subtle daily oppression. This becomes the kind of violence that goes unreported because no one takes notice. I do believe that violence outside the home will translate to violence inside the home.

In my opinion, any culture that engages or suffers from any form of structural or direct violence, including support for and engagement in war, does help reproduce violence against women. Proceeding this section I placed a photograph of a woman soldier with a machine gun slung on her soldier as she breast-feeds her baby. Does the woman in the picture symbolize the destruction of patriarchy or the reproduction of it? The idea that women are allowed to fight as guerillas does not imply that there is any form of structural revolution that turns patriarchy on its back. War and patriarchy go hand in hand, thereby reproducing each other. Neither can be stopped without a non-violent revolution that looks radically at women’s rights, racial inequality, and class hierarchies. As Maria Teresa Blandón said, “That's what war is: a reproduction of power. Macho.” Revolutionary Michelle Najlis suggests that the FSLN was unable to eradicate it’s patriarchal structure partly because “the FSLN took power through armed struggle, with the [...] military structure that implies. And those vertical chains of command remained in place” (Randall Sandino’s Daughters).

While I was not witness to war, I was directly effected when the assault happened during Holy Week. I saw one of the largest displays of male power when Sílvia’s husband grabbed a rifle to avenge the attackers, young boys armed themselves with machetes at the door, and finally when the eldest son, brutally beaten, came home shouting, “one for one!” Needless to say, his statement reflected a violent socialization. The community also surprised me because they reacted to my experience with little or no surprise. The next day everything was back to normal. The personnel at the UCA were also not shocked at my experience. I began to think about it. Beyond the assault, the situations then effecting the community of Décimo Aniversario were, one, a serious case of arson which left a family homeless after the fire nearly killed their children; two, serious malnutrition and lack of resources affecting the entire community; and three, a woman who was abandoned by her husband with eight kids. Moreover, the community was constantly at risk of sickness or starvation. In other words, they faced severe structural violence. I didn’t need to witness any domestic violence to know that violence is highly prevalent in the campo.

If certain forms of violence are taken for granted, campesinas may have a different

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conception of the meaning of breaking the silence. The silence oppressing them immediately may not be the silence of failure to accuse one’s perpetrator, but may be the silence of not knowing that there is anything to report. Women’s organizations I spoke with are also well aware of this. They have dedicated time towards raising awareness about what domestic violence is. Yet it’s not clear that the break the silence campaign has been put in a framework designed for and by campesinas.

As campesinas, the women of Décimo Aniversario face economic violence. As of yet, there are no women’s shelters in rural areas, although possibly the women’s community centers supported

by Colectivo could be used as a type of shelter for women. Still, all women working around this issue face the difficulty of making the leap between training and actively doing. One can’t expect to train women about the atrocity of violence against women and then expect them to be able to open up a shelter in their community the next day, especially with all the work women already face.

Women empowering women about violence and helping them to recognize violence can and should occur. This should not imply, however, that all violence is the same, nor should it preclude the idea that there are forms of violence that go unnoticed in all cultures. While women should not be paralyzed from pointing out culturally specific forms of violence, they should also be open to new forms of dialogue and education. Perhaps some of the peace that already exists within families in Décimo can also be learned by outside groups and talked about as frames for peacemaking outside of Décimo. Moreover, the slogan Break the Silence has gained the connotation of the empowered woman who speaks out against domestic violence and rape. It does not, however, apply to speaking out against war, specifically because the language of war is spoken in very dominant discourses and is not heard as “silence.” Perhaps it should.

While many of the questions I have raised could not be answered in my case study, what I hope is that the forum established through the UCA will lead to pedagogical discussions with the women in Décimo that address some of these questions and that focus on ways in which women speak with each other as women about peace, not as teachers who will “empower” their students.

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The Process

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Communication: Meetings and Participation

“A certain degree of institutionalization is necessary for open and transparent debate on sustainable use of natural resources. Discussion forums [...] need to be supported, extended and strengthened [...] It is often the case that social structures which could provide a framework for public discourse are either too weak or non-existent.”

—Group for Development and Environment

“Wanting to be loving and have a family is my connection with my culture. I am doing that. Going to meetings is not part of my ethnic background.”

—Naomi Littlebear Bridge

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Voices from the UCA Gender Program Since 1996, the two staff members of the UCA gender program, Yadira and Katrin, have been developing an outreach system for the women in each of the 27 UCA cooperatives. Besides conducting the monthly meetings in San Ramón with the network of promotoras, they try to visit cooperatives periodically to hold meetings and workshops there, like the capacitación that I observed in the cooperative Sílvio Mayorga. Unfortunately, due to the remoteness of some of the cooperatives, inaccessible by car, Yadira and Katrin are able to work with only 14 of the 27 cooperatives. In this Yadira feels “limited, because [...] we can only work with those who are pretty integrated into the UCA [...] Another limitation is at the cultural level, because most of [the campesinos] are illiterate [...] There are many methods that allow us to disseminate information and/or hear their thoughts, for example, pamphlets or written evaluation cards, but if people don't know how to read or write then we need to contact them directly.”

Monthly meetings in San Ramón with the network of promotoras are generally very participative, depending, says Katrin, on her own demeanor. “I don't know exactly how I carry myself, but sometimes the women who come are just closed.” However, Katrin feels that the network is their most productive space. The promotoras decided to have their meetings closed to men. But when Yadira and Katrin tried to organize women-only meetings in the campo, women said they’d rather organize with men because they don’t want to have any problems (Sturhan).

Yadira commented that, “they have to work with men because otherwise men might not let them participate [...] and the women wouldn't say anything. In this respect they are submissive.” Katrin found that “its difficult to change this […] environment of machista [...] The men think that the women must be working against them if they form their own groups […] So we try to include them, especially attending doctors appointments, and learning about birth control.” These are positive results of mixed meetings, because men learn what’s important for their wives. “But even then,” she said, “there is rejection. Even after men learn about the importance of gynecological exams, they still don't allow their wives to attend them.” Katrin said there was less rejection of the women's credit projects only because the men “know that if they don't let the woman have the title on the house, there won’t be a house for the family [...] If the woman doesn't sign for the cow, they won't see a cow. So they have to accept it.”

Both Yadira and Katrin remembered that when they met with the women of Décimo Aniversario in San Juan, they were unusually quiet. Katrin recalled that the men sat on one side of

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the room with the older boys, and the women sat in a corner with the smaller children. “In the Décimo,” observed Katrin, “it was really separated and I noticed it. The five women who received titles for their new homes were a little more central but except for them no woman played an important role.” At this particular meeting, the leaders of the UCA came and talked most of the time. Katrin had been particularly turned off because they were campaigning and many of the leaders were speaking in political, academic language and the campesinos were “sitting in the cold, bored!”

I wanted to see whether Yadira and Katrin felt a particular problem communicating with campesinas. Yadira mentioned that she always has to use simpler words when talking with them.

Katrin’s pointed out other differences: “There is a distance because I am chela [white woman] and I can never escape that fact [...] I don't live in the campo, I live in Matagalpa [...] I don't have a husband, nor children. All of these things separate us. Sometimes they don't understand my words [...] I studied in a university. Sometimes they don't even have a primary school education.”

Several women in Décimo Aniversario confirmed that the people at the UCA use different vocabulary: “Es pueblo. [Our language is folk],” said Amparo. From my own experience doing the interviews, I knew that the women found it particularly hard to understand my Spanish, not only because of my accent but because of my vocabulary. Therefore I could see how language difficulties could disrupt a clear flow of ideas between the the women in Décimo and the women from the UCA. Voices From Décimo Aniversario Despite what little contact some women have had with the UCA staff, most of the women I spoke with identified that they knew Yadira, Katrin, or former staff-member Bergit, although Sílvia commented that “they never come to the cooperative.” Sílvia’s comment, however, reflected her frustration at irregular visits rather than the absolute truth. Yadira and Katrin held least one meeting in Décimo together; Bergit had conducted a few as part of her literacy program.

Most women told me that they had attended some meetings, whether they be meetings for the women’s groups, debriefing meetings conducted by Jessenia, or meetings conducted by the men for the entire cooperative. Unfortunately, it was very difficult to obtain information from them about their own participation. Either they did not understand my questions, or they were not very forthcoming with information, or they simply found it difficult to really analyze their own behavior in that context. When I asked: What do you do in meetings?, most women did not answer

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me in the depth that I desired. The most descriptive answers revealed only that they “talk about projects in meetings.” When I asked if they make decisions in meetings, the women I interviewed told me no, generally they just sit in a circle and talk. Jessenia informed me, however, that they make decisions by consensus. Though they did not directly say so, this particular discrepancy may indicate the extent to which women feel that the decision making power of women, already subordinate to men, is in the hands of local leaders like Jessenia. It may also indicate that few women go to meetings, and that they are reluctant to admit it. Sílvia was the one woman who did acknowledge low levels of participation. “They [the other women in the cooperative] don’t participate because they figure: Why go to a reunion [meeting]? The UCA can’t help us. If there is a reunion to help them, they will come.”

It is Jessenia’s responsibility to plan and announce women’s meetings. These meetings are generally debriefing sessions wherein which she explains the monthly workshops, those that she attends in San Ramón, to the rest of the group. However, said Sílvia, “almost no one comes for the debriefing meetings.” Other women countered that they felt the sessions were ineffective, complaining that “[Jessenia] doesn’t explain anything to anyone” (Lopez Gonzalez, B.). Eleadora said, “Yes, she [Jessenia] has [meetings] but I can’t remember anything about them” (23 April).

Other interviews indicated similar sentiments. Like a perfect pyramidal system of representation and information dissemination, from the women at the UCA to the most rural campesinas, every woman was theoretically supposed to have access to the same information, taught through participative methodology. In fact, every promotora and suplenta, including Jessenia and Alicia, were trained to use participatory methodology in their debriefing meetings. Jessenia shared with me a leaflet explaining the concept of participatory methodology, given to her by UCA staff, but she said that no one really understood it when she tried to explain, and in fact she didn’t really understand it, either.

Overwhelmingly, women who attend meetings of any type told me they participate “bastante.”1 However, few women said that they talk a lot in general.2 Only Jessenia seemed proud of that fact that she was talkative. From the nature of other women’s answers, I concluded that in their community, verbosity might be an embarrassing quality for a woman to admit to. In fact, questions about participation were some of the hardest to ask. I felt that I was broaching an 1. The translation is ambiguous because the word bastante can mean either enough or plenty.

2. I tried to ask if it was part of their personality to be talkative, but many women didn’t understand the word hablantina [talkative].

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uncomfortable subject for women to analyze. Many women sort of avoided the question by saying that they won’t talk if they don’t understand a concept in the meeting (Murillo Díaz). In an interview with Eleadora, I asked her if everyone participates equally. She laughed, said she didn’t understand, so I explained more, but she laughed again and stayed silent for what seemed like hours. We both turned our heads for a moment; I was burning with frustration. Finally she said, “well, when we understand, we participate. But when we don’t understand, we don’t participate.”

This comment only perpetuated my curiosity, because I then wondered what and how much exactly the women don’t understand. Some women suggested that they lacked training and knowledge, others pointed to actual language miscommunication. Said Sílvia, “If I don’t know something it’s better to listen and learn.” In a sense, what the women expressed was that participation wasn’t even a relevant issue because there was such a discrepancy in knowledge (types of knowledge) between the “teachers” and the “students” that even promotoras could not bridge that gap. In such a situation, issues of participation become a mute point.

There was, however, a sense of progress internalized by many of the women I spoke with.

When I asked if the participation of women had increased or improved over the previous couple of years, most agreed that it had because, “There weren’t meetings before and now there are” (Lopez Gonzalez, B.). According to Sílvia, “the UCA wasn’t attending to the needs of women but now they do.” Jessenia described the increase in participation by noting that before no one really knew the meaning of the word género [gender] except for a few.” Jessenia’s answer directly speaks to the idea that for these women, participation is directly related to the specific knowledge taught by the UCA staff. Thus, participation itself, especially the academically specific critical pedagogy espoused by participative methodology can be interpreted only in the context of the type of knowledge (is circumscribed by) the knowledge that the UCA staff wishes to teach. In other words, in order to participate” these women felt that they already had to be “fluent” in the language they were learning, rather than bringing former knowledge to the table in a participation that bridges the two paradigms.

Another indication of “progress” in the area of participation is that a few women mentioned that they used to be afraid to talk. But, like their tendency to speak about problems occurring not in their community but in “other hills,” no one mentioned this fear of speaking out as a problem affecting them at the time. Rather, they would indicate other women who were

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afraid of talking at meetings. For example, Amparo specifically mentioned that Aura Luz was scared to speak up in meetings, because she hadn’t ever had any experience with the material presented at workshops.1 Jessenia told me that before, “a lot of women were scared to talk, but now it’s better, now that its organized.” Alicia told me that women were quiet at meetings in the beginning “because they had never been out before [...] They came to meetings timid. But now, everyone talks openly [...] I was nervous in the beginning too.” Alicia, one of the women most analytical about women’s participation, also mentioned that when women’s meetings began, the participation wasn’t equal between men and women. However she too seemed optimistic that everyone was making progress: “Men understand little by little that women need to participate.

They also began another type of participation [...] helping us in the house.”2 I decided to pursue the idea of gendered differences in participation. When I asked about how men participate relative to women, I heard from one woman that “men talk more because they have more experience. They talk more in general outside of meetings as well” (Hernandez Lopez, María Heriberta). “Ellos tienen más lugar,”3 said María Heriberta; When I asked her what that means, she explained that, “men have the liberty and time to participate more in meetings […] Women have to stay home and take care of the house and their kids.” However she thinks this arrangement is “fine,” “its equal,” because her husband comes home and shares information from the meeting with her. He attends meetings and María Heriberta doesn’t because, according to her, men have more experience talking. In fact, she said that she prefers it that way: “Yes, of course [I prefer it]. I get to stay here because I haven’t learned about the projects.” When I asked if she wanted to learn about them, she said, “sure,” but nothing more.

Paula agreed that men do participate more, and for this reason women-only groups are valuable. Almost everyone seemed to think that groups for women and women’s issues were a good idea, but only a few women could identify any advantages to women-only groups. Adelia said, “It’s better with women because we have demands specific to us as women.” Paula felt that working with women is good because that way women can learn all the things that men know, for example, how to vaccinate a cow.4 The majority of women, however, felt that both men and 1. Aura Luz, however, told me that she doesn’t attend meetings of the cooperative, thus she wouldn’t have had an opportunity to demonstrate this alleged fear of talking.

2.Alicia’s situation in Carrizo may have been particularly progressive, but the women living in San Juan did not seem to be receiving help from their husbands in the kitchen during my visit.

3. Literally, Men have more place. Her words are especially telling because they emphasize the physically larger space in the community that men occupy as subjects.

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women should attend meetings because they both work on the projects. Amparo told me, “No, there aren’t advantages to all women’s groups. Men have more training so it’s better that they come, too.” Alicia said that she personally likes men to participate because they add diversity, they can teach, and [...] they help the women learn.” But Alicia also mentioned another reason: “Later [after the meetings] they might call us liars [...] because they think the things we learn [at the workshops in San Ramón] are lies [...] So it’s better if they come to meetings so they see we weren't lying.” It’s hard to tell whether other women are also motivated by this same defense mechanism and if they, too, face their husband’s doubts at home. Either way, Alicia’s statement indicates that the material presented at workshops is very powerful and very new to this community.

Analysis Irregular contact between campesinas and UCA staff members directly influence the way in which women participate in workshops, and further, how they responded to my questions about that participation. While Katrin may see the women in Décimo as quiet or lacking initiative, Décimo women respond with the following: They don’t participate when they don’t understand something. What I hear in that statement is that there exists a very intimate relation between participation, learning, knowledge, and language, where each reinforces and frames the other. In this project, I look at knowledge as a type of language or discourse that one learns in order to claim a subject position. In a sense, one can think of different types of knowledge as different languages. At first glance, the idea that women wouldn’t feel comfortable talking in a group until they understand the themes of the discussion may seem to be an obvious explanation and moreover, one to be accepted. Settling for the explanation above, however, reinforces the following ideas: One, it says that participation can only happen when the students are already speaking in the language that they should be learning, meaning, they’ve already learned it to a degree and can use it as a tool for further learning. Two, it says that former language/knowledge is not important or valid as a method of participation. In other words, women can’t come to the table and participate if they speak the language/knowledge they already know. It is here that the word participation gets defined as a method of learning that can only take place in the context of the language of the educator. Participation won’t make sense if it is spoken in the former language 4.Her specific example is in reference to the Cow Project initiated by the UCA. Before the project, women generally did not have ownership or responsibility for a cow, a vital piece of property.

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(knowledge) of the students, especially if that language (knowledge) is garbed in the clothes of silence. Moreover, that participation will sound like silence because it lies outside intelligible discourse.1 On the one hand, the training session that I observed led by Yadira and Katrin illustrated the ways in which participants were expected to come and use/learn the new language of a feminist discourse (e.g. they learned that the question Who works more hours? should be important to them). On the other hand, the UCA staff also clearly believed that if the meetings were fun, informal, and interactive, then participation would be more likely to happen and as a result, more learning would happen. Thus, their efforts to play games, use cards and drawings, and break up into small groups. Perhaps their use of this informal teaching indicates that they want the women to open up to them and thus, share their language and knowledge. Still, in observing the lifestyles of the women in the campo, playing games was not a daily experience for them. Games like baseball were played almost exclusively by men. The most informal experience, from my observations, seemed to be the chatter that went on in kitchens among a few women. In other words, I am not sure that cards and games makes them feel more comfortable.

Further, the women didn’t say that their lack of participation centered around the feeling that meetings should be more relaxed or informal. The women said they were “afraid to talk” because they must understand first to participate more. In a sense they are internalizing the idea that they have so much to learn, and that the UCA staff (urban, formally educated women) should be the ones to educated them; Thus they reproduce a kind of hegemony that is viewed through the lens of empowerment. Indeed, campesinas are encouraged and rewarded by engaging in such a relationship with the UCA staff. Women began to recognize signs of success: When I asked them about “progress,” they told me that now women talk more, are less afraid, and know the difference between sex and gender. The women at the UCA congratulate the promotoras for being participative and talkative, indeed, Katrin thinks that the network of promotoras is their most productive space. Indications of “empowerment” and progress are all linked to the knowledge, language, and therefore “participation” defined by the educator. In no sense is there space for a knowledge wrapped in silence or in a former paradigm that sounds like silence.

Ironically, the way in which the women view themselves in relation to the gender program is 1.One could use the metaphor of bilingual education to make the same point. If immigrant children are forced to speak English only in an American school, the validity of their former knowledge and resources from their native languages are not honored or completely negated.

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exactly what Freire criticized the banking system for reinforcing: “Students [...] accept their ignorance as justifying the teacher's existence [...] They never discover that they educate the teacher” (53).

Besides feeling that they needed to be trained, many women from Décimo equated participation and knowledge with the way in which men interact in meetings. Whether or not they are taught this directly, the idea of empowerment takes form as something similar to the way men perform their role in the community. María Andrea said that men have “more place,” more physical liberty. Other women felt that men had better ideas and better dispositions for working.

The problem of co-educational workshops further exemplifies how women have internalized men’s ownership of power. One of the most blatant contradictions between the words of the UCA staff and the words of the women in Décimo is their response to single-sex workshops. According to the campesinas, men should participate in workshops because they have more knowledge, are able to help the group as a whole, and because they will eventually be participating with women during the implementation of some of the projects. Alicia was the only woman that betrayed to me the fact that sometimes men think that what the women are learning is a lie, and therefore women feel that men must participate in order to prove the content of a meeting. Whatever the consequences of men disbelieving the words of their wives, there may be a relationship of power happening that forces women to feel that men must participate. The women from the UCA certainly think there is. According to them, the reason women want men to participate in meetings is because the information taught is challenging gender lines and men want to be there, too, or else they fear that the women are colluding against them and will disallow their wives from attending. Yadira and Katrin therefore include men, acknowledging that the benefit of inviting them is that men learn about women’s issues. Including men, however, does not directly challenge the power that men exert over their wives.

Part of what this contradiction illustrates is the very difficult problem of identifying when power relations need to be changed and who the actors for that change should be. One of the greatest challenges faced by building links across and between feminisms and women’s organizations is to identify and critique an abusive system while also understanding and taking into consideration cultural difference. The UCA gender program teaches a type of knowledge that stems from the work of many different types of feminisms and women’s organizations. They are attempting to answer to needs that are not necessarily articulated by the women in Décimo but

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rather needs which they see as important for the justice and peace of a community. They teach a knowledge that ideally will act as a liberatory tool to a group of women who otherwise might not recognize their situation. It is inherently difficult, however, to educate without imposing a new language. The needs that I heard articulated as “authentic” to the campesina’s knowledge were immediate economic needs. Few women voiced any concern about patriarchal relations in their community. Yet it is and should be possible to critique a situation of patriarchy in another culture, recognizing that it too is hegemonic within its own context, while also acknowledging the power relation that occurs through that critique. Thus, Katrin and Yadira attempt to inform women of their situation which is ultimately hegemonic and destructive, so that campesinas can learn to identify it and resist it, yet I would suggest that they should consider their own terming of that critique as “empowerment.” Freire writes that, “Education as the practice of freedom—as opposed to education as the practice of domination—denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people” (62). The education should be one of dialogue and not under the pretense of the empowerment of others.

If participation is circumscribed in knowledge, then the two cannot be divorced, one encourages the other. There are two relations going on: there are the imposed and interpreted needs from the outside and there are the needs articulated by the campesinas. The logic seems to be that once the women in Décimo sufficiently learn the language, perceived and “authentic” needs that they identify will begin to mirror those interpreted needs from the outside. But there are also the proposed solutions to those needs. Many women told me that the economic programs for women were designed by José Lopez, who told them about the projects rather than including women in the planning phase. These “economic empowerment” programs assume that women should empower themselves to break out of the cycle of poverty, and they closely mirror similar initiatives by other Nicaraguan women’s organizations. While there is some input from the women as to what the women’s workshops should be about, the gender program itself was not designed by the women I spoke with, it was started by the president of the UCA and carried out by a woman specifically hired because of her experience with gender studies. The lines between who acts and who receives become blurry at the annual promotora meetings that design the workshops for the year. On the one hand I think that some of the campesina women may come to the table with ideas for their own education in mind. On the other hand, some promotoras (i.e. Jessenia)

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did not know what sex/gender or participative methodology meant before the workshops. In other words, they probably didn’t propose those themes. As Eva from Colectivo said, there are the ideas proposed by campesinas and then the technicality offered by women’s organizations. What seems to be occurring to some degree is a hegemonic decision-making structure wherein campesina women consent to a set of imposed solutions to perceived problems. However, the structure is not necessarily all negative. Rather, structural violence (both economic poverty and gender inequality) is being addressed at two different angles. This is the disjoint between what women ask for and what they receive.

The Gender Book, a guide to gender-focused programs for campesinas, addresses this two-angled approach to answering the problems of campesinas: “Women generally are more able to identify their immediate (practical) needs than their strategic needs. This indicates that part of their necessities is also a the growth of consciousness between women of their necessities.” In other words, the guide suggested that an outside force was necessary to inform campesinas of their long term needs, or as Freire seemed to advocate, to bring them into greater consciousness about their relation to the world. Many women’s organizations share this mentality, that they need to “tell campesinas what their needs are” (Jirón). Whether or not it is the responsibility of some women to tell other women what their needs are, there is a tenuous balance between imposing and answering, listening and educating. I would suggest that as opposed to informing and answering needs of seemingly less powerful women, a dialogue could occur that begins to break through systems of hegemony that “blind” any community or group of women, in this case both staff women and women in Décimo.

Efficacy of Meetings One of the initial ways in which I tried to evaluate the efficacy of communication between the UCA and the campesina women in Décimo was by asking the women themselves. During the first couple of interviews I asked whether or not the cooperative was hearing their needs. But, as a testament to communication difficulties, I think the concept of hearing was confusing, so I started asking simply if the UCA helped them. I did get a few positive answers: Several women mentioned the women’s projects and micro-loans as helpful, especially the titles on the new homes. Jessenia mentioned specifically that the UCA had made food donations of basic grains after the previous year’s hurricane, and that was a great help to her. Alicia even commented that she felt the gender workshops had made an impact, and that now men and women are beginning

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to do the same work. The irony in her statement is that no woman, not even Alicia, mentioned gender equity as a community need, even as a need specific to women. Overwhelmingly the needs were economic and their complaints about the UCA were that they couldn’t help them with those economic needs to the extent that they wished.

Many women felt that although the projects were a good idea, if they personally didn’t have a loan, then the UCA was basically ineffective as a resource. “The UCA hasn't given me any help,” complained María Andrea. But when I asked how they could improve she said, “Who knows!? They haven't done anything.” Abelina and her family, who were living in her mother's new house for a month, hadn't yet talked to José, the president of the cooperative, about helping them move out of their mother’s home and into their own new home. Abelina said the reason she hadn’t talked about it yet with José was, “We haven't gone up there and he hasn’t come down here.” The distance between their two houses, however, was literally about one eighth of a mile.

This anecdote merely illustrates the way in which communication is very difficult between campesinas and the UCA, even when a representative of the UCA lives right in their community.

On the other hand, Abelina and her family may have been in such a dire economic situation that even a loan for a new home was not feasible, therefore talking to the UCA would have been futile.

It is this very kind of frustration that seems to effect a lot of women and their families in the community. The reality is that even if campesinas get credit, it’s not going to guarantee even a dent in their economic situation. The hopelessness of it may change the way in which campesinas express their needs to the UCA, and the way in which the UCA answers those needs. Sílvia admitted that as vice president, women express their needs to her, but she usually can’t do anything to answer them: “Many times I won't go pay a visit [to someone in need] because I can do nothing [...] so it’s better not to go at all.”

Indisputably, the problems affecting campesinas, and Nicaragua as a whole, are structural.

The UCA is limited since the Union is really just an extension of the cooperatives. Its budget comes straight out of the cooperatives’ profits, plus some funding from grants. And the gender department is limited because it has only two staff members. As one can see from the agendas of several women’s organizations, including the gender program at the UCA that conducts the women’s projects, there is a considerable effort to answer some of those economic needs. Yadira and Katrin related to me that they continually hear campesinas talking about their economic needs, and the UCA is working towards answering those very needs. No doubt the UCA has taken

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steps in the right direction. They do seem to be hearing the needs and are trying to help campesinas become more economically sustainable. They have granted property rights and loans to women who before were completely unincorporated into the cooperative structure, and there have been positive responses to the economic projects. Women have vocalized food as a need and the UCA has answered with loans, an indirect way of addressing that problem. But the reality of many of these economic programs for women is that it expects them to use the small loans they are given to completely change the system within which they live, rather than providing them with a long-term guarantee and a social safety net that they can count on.

Katrin’s impression, however, was that among campesinas she “hasn't seen that much initiative. The promotoras, yes, [they show some initiative]; but they are elected women. What surprised me a lot was that the women who sit (like this) in their houses and complain but don't try to get out to do something. And they can go get literacy training. They can go out and try to get credit. But they don't dare [...] So they just stay in their position.” Katrin’s critical statement implies that there is still a large gulf in communication between Katrin and the women she hopes to serve. Not only does it fail to acknowledge that economic hardship and restrictions from a woman’s husband might disallow a woman from leaving her community, it assumes that action on the part of the women in Décimo Aniversario alone will be able to change a cycle of poverty. It may also indicate that a more genuine understanding between the UCA staff and the women of Décimo requires a physical experience (i.e. living in the campo). It may be as simple as having more staff members in contact with the women on a regular basis. Still, the gender department is just getting on its feet. There is a lot of organizing to be done to incorporate all women living in the UCA cooperatives, which may just be a matter of developing trusting relationships that will, over time, produce cooperatives full of active, involved women. Given that the UCA’s program is innovative and they’re one of the few groups in Nicaragua to be working with campesinas at all on a regular basis, especially relative to some of the groups I spoke with outside of Matagalpa, what they attempt to do is very impressive.

Hazel Jirón of Puntos de Encuentro admitted that there might be room for improvement on the part of larger women’s organizations, those closer to the urban centers and more internationally networked. She pointed out that conferences like the 1998 World Women’s Conference in Cairo did try to answer to the needs of women: land rights, access to credit, health, and education. However she thinks that, “the national level has tried to answer to the needs of

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campesinas, but perhaps it has failed a little. There is a force to highlight the problematic of women in the campo, because they do live with a different type of discrimination than women in the city [...] They face gender discrimination of a different form, specific to their experience.

Right now we working too much on the latest issues, and sometimes they're not the immediate needs of peasants. We could reflect more, organize more, do better.�

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Silence

“There are reasons for our silences: the change in generation between mother and daughter, the language barriers between us, our sexual identity, the educational opportunities we had or missed, the specific cultural history of our race, the physical conditions of our bodies and our labor.”

—Cherríe Moraga

“I had supposed that I was practicing passive resistance while I was being stereotyped, but it was so passive no one noticed I was resisting; it was so much my expected role that it ultimately rendered me invisible.”

—Mitsuye Yamada

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Personal Observations and Analysis The language of the academy is uniformly the language of contemporary development policy, commonly theorizing an abstract image of the Third World Woman as the mute native or the silent other, evoking silence as descriptive of their status outside of subjectivity. This silence, in essence, has metaphorically become the basis for empowerment programs that teach women to “speak,” not literally, but in a way to vocalize their own oppression, as assessed by women on the outside of that “silence.” The concept of the silent other really is, then, a theoretical term that has no bearing on the fact or fiction of a literally silent woman or community of women. Although most of this paper has focused on this same theoretical definition of silence, in the following section I attempt to collect various interpretations on the power of literal silence, and to discuss my own interpretations of working in a space where the two definitions of silence become intertwined and difficult to distinguish. While the women from the UCA may conduct a Gender Program from the point of view of the academy that theorizes Décimo women as “silent,” in the sense that they are not heard, the staff have also had direct contact with Décimo women in a way that has led them to believe that the women there are innately or culturally silent.

Much of the time I spent in the campo was in silence, whether with myself or with the women I stayed with. Kitchens were meeting places for women, but they did not guarantee conversation. My “formal” interviews were clearly a big event, and an intrusion. Even within our conversations, I knew there was more I couldn’t hear because there was so much silence in the disjunctures of communication, so many misunderstandings. I looked for clues in the silence itself that seemed to permeate each day. I can be silent for a very long time, I wrote in my work journal, We walked to church. It took over an hour. I walked silently and enjoyed the silence. The women I went with were silent among themselves and I wonder why, or if they are mostly that way. Sitting waiting for the church service to start they were mostly silent as well, even though they sat altogether on the bench ahead of me. I wonder what they think about. Most of the time we were silent together because it felt comfortable that way. I didn’t feel that I could extract some “inner truth” about the women from their silence. Rather, we seemed to relate best in that silence and intuition.

Along with all the comfortable silences, I spent a terrifying silence in the Décimo community. Minutes after the assault on Good Friday occurred, one boy came running back, with his mouth brutally beaten out, shouting that the eldest son of the family had been killed. As I sat in

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Sílvia’s house thinking that her eldest son had just been killed, I felt the knowledge she’s intimate with there in that silence - violence, sacrifice. Her family had no option but to wait, because there was no phone, no police, no ambulance, no doctor. I didn’t know how to remotely meet them in the depths of such despair. We waited, silently, until their eldest son miraculously came back and we knew everything was going to be ok.

In a conversation with María Heriberta, she revealed to me that she was not talkative because, “It’s like a custom [...] Some things we talk about, other things we don’t.” What do you talk about? I asked. “Things as we pass by the kitchens,” she answered. So I sat in the kitchen, and waited. And there was a clue in the waiting. I wrote on another occasion, The silence. The waiting. The dueños [owners] of the ranch tell me its boring here, how can I stand it. We are all waiting. Waiting for what? Waiting to get a break. Waiting for the rains to start. Waiting until the next harvest. Waiting. On cement. Waiting. Chickens pecking. Playing with your kids. Hmmm.

Clean the water filter. I’ve never experienced poverty like this first hand before. You sit in the same kitchen with the same people everyday. Is this a reproduction of sameness? I think not. It’s a deeper level knowledge of a pin-point locality. To me, the level of knowledge at a pin-point locality is the infinite knowledge of poverty within the very finite confines of a Décimo Aniversario kitchen. Most conversation topics among women got back to the fact that their community didn’t have money. I observed a conversation between Eleadora and Amparo in which they talked about wanting to make a coconut bread. Eleadora said she would love to make some, but you need sugar, and there aren’t any reales for sugar. A man passed and they commented on something he was carrying and how much it must cost. They continually asked me how much things cost that I owned.

I knew these were the questions relevant to many women I interviewed; they were not like the questions that Yadira and Katrin had taught them to see as relevant. I tried to think of a metaphor for what it must be like for the women in Décimo to learn in a workshop what questions should be relevant. Imagine conducting an empowerment campaign for North-American women that taught the following: Standing by passively and keeping a clean radius of space between yourself and strangers on a bus is no longer necessary. Ladies should take their space, touch their neighbors, and empower themselves to feel free enough to have physical contact with perfect strangers. To many women unfamiliar with the overly crowded bus system in Nicaragua, the idea that this type of behavior should be “more correct” than their own would seem irrelevant, and

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certainly not empowering.

I found that not only values, but actual words and concepts differed between the campesinas and more urban women. This disjoint in discourses and knowledges lay in the fact that Eleadora does not use the word violencia [violence], only pelearse [to fight]; Amparo does not know what it means to expresarse [express oneself]; and Bernarda does not know what it means to be a líder de su comunidad [leader of her community]. I, on the other hand, didn’t know how to cure the pain of a woman in labor with a concoction of plants and bark, or how to pat a tortilla just right. I wanted to find something more about what these disjoints meant, more about what the silences contained, yet I couldn’t ask questions that were beyond my own paradigm, so I asked women about silence itself. Asking them about silence and silence as power was extremely difficult, so I only attempted to do so with a few women that I had built up some trust with. First I asked Can silence ever be powerful? This question registered no responses. So, I asked if it were possible for a person to express an idea if they are silent. Most women agreed that silence cannot send a message. Sílvia was adamant that silence doesn’t express anything: “If you want to express something you have to talk.” Paula felt that not talking was arrogant, because it was stand-offish.

However, she said, “if I don’t like something, I stay silent,” she said. In that there’s a definite message. From what many women said about community participation, they didn’t seem to consider themselves overwhelmingly talkative or not talkative, which contributes to the idea that if I was hearing silence, I had a lot more to hear - perhaps subtleties which sound like “things as we pass by the kitchens.”

Many of the women’s organizations I spoke with, however, hope to have as few silences as possible at their meetings and workshops. In fact, this is the main objective of participatory methodology. While the women’s organizations I spoke with agreed that silence cannot be used as an offensive tactic, Eduvijes from Grupo Venancia told me she thinks “silence is an indicator, possibly that they [those who are silent] don’t agree. We always note the silence. We try to work with that. We try to have as few silences as possible. We want to know if the silence indicates that they’re not interested, don’t want to talk, or something else.” I would suggest that as opposed to the silence indicating something else, the silence itself may be the paradigm disjoint.

Yadira views silence as time for reflection: “I think many times they are quiet but they understand. And they process in their head. The space they have to speak is very small. And so they listen. At the same time they are scared to speak.” In Katrin’s mind, “Silence says something

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only if it is in combination with body language. I think silence is something a little more negative.

I have the impression that a lot of people are silent because they are afraid … Individual opinions are not encouraged in schools here and therefore kids don’t have their own opinions, nor do they take their own initiative [...] I think here there really is a culture of silence.” Yadira and Katrin’s observations suggest two questions: Why is the space for speaking so small, and where would the fear of talking come from specifically for the women I interviewed? It is likely that women are so bombarded with new information that they don’t know where to draw connections to their own lives, and this is intimidating. But is it possible to conduct a workshop that doesn’t create these reactions and that also draws from the lives of women even while attempting to completely rework the framework within which they view the power relations in their communities?

What Katrin’s observation implies is that the communities themselves are to blame, because of their “culture of silence,” rather than the structure or content of the meetings. I’m not sure what a culture of silence is, exactly, and I don’t know that I found that culture in the campo or anywhere in Nicaragua. I found that I spent a lot of time in the campo in silence, and that there was a familiarity and timelessness among people that allowed for silence in their lives. I found that there were things I couldn’t hear, or understand, a clashing of knowledge; all of these things sound like silence. There were also spaces for resistance in the silence that I heard, perhaps daily acts of resistances to my very presence. I continued to feel, as I stated in my introduction, that it was my presence in the community which inhibited my ability to go deeper. The women I visited had never had anyone living in their community doing a project like the one I was doing. Women refused to always answer my questions and at times there were misunderstandings that to me signaled discomfort or annoyance rather than a language barrier. Of course, I can’t be sure what I missed in the silence, or what other women’s groups miss when they spend time with campesinas, but I can see how my interviews were an intrusion into their lives and that silence may have been a convenient tactic for telling me to leave them alone. While women denied that they “spoke” with silence, Paula indicated that a type of resistance to others’ ideas might be hidden there, and from my own experience, I felt that in their silence they might be resisting my questioning, just as they might resist the questioning and workshops of the women in the UCA. I deny the idea that theirs is one that is uniquely a “culture of silence” and that rather, the women in Décimo use silence consciously and unconsciously to express their opinions, and that their very words, in the disjoints between their discourse and those on the outside, might sound

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like silence. The only response, it seems, should be for others to strive for more contact, new knowledges.

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Conclusion

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“There are reasons for our silences: the change in generation between mother and daughter, the language barriers between us, our sexual identity, the educational opportunities we had or missed, the specific cultural history of our race, the physical conditions of our bodies and our labor.” As Cherríe Moraga explains, there is so much to be found in between and around silences, and even words, spoken outside of intelligible discourses, sound like silence. In my research, I wanted to challenge the rhetoric of empowerment, a notion that effectively asks socalled powerless women to “break the silence” of their oppression, not by learning how to speak, but by learning how to speak the language of the powerful. I have attempted to show the link between knowledge and communication, and using the terms synonymously as a tool, I argue that so-called powerless women already know how to speak; they speak in tongues that reflect their different paradigms of knowledge. In order to ground some of the theory, I spent time with the women in Décimo Aniversario, but I came with my own assumptions about silence. I assumed that the group of women in Décimo Aniversario were viewed as particularly silent and that their needs were not widely represented. I looked at these women as having a very different knowledge than the one I have, and that in that disjuncture lay the silence I was attempting to explore. What I found is that whether or not the women I worked with are silent, they were drawn into activities and into various feminist projects as if they were so.

In the forward to Pedagogy Of the Oppressed, Richard Shaull describes Paulo Freire’s work in the following way: “His early sharing of the life of the poor also led him to the discovery of what he describes as the ‘culture of silence’ of the dispossessed. He came to realize that their ignorance and lethargy were the direct product of the whole situation of economic, social, and political domination-and of the paternalism-of which they were victims.” I mention this description because I see it representative of the ways in which some Nicaraguan women’s organizations view campesinas. Many programs rely on the assumption that women are ignorant or “lethargic,” lacking of self-esteem, and/or unempowered. In fact, women’s organizations mentioned specifically that Freire’s thought formed the backbone of their methodology. Using that methodology to bridge the gaps between them and the women they hoped to serve, many different women’s organizations in Nicaragua have attempted to use participative methodology in workshops as a way to get women to start speaking. What I have found is that this empowerment is a metaphor for speaking and participation on a large scale, a participation that encourages women to exercise agency in a global sphere of community and world, in all the ways in which

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agency is recognized by those that control the world. It is a type of interpellation that calls women into subjectivity, a subjectivity where speaking and academic discourse, capitalism and specific views of sexual relations are all deemed legitimate forms of action and power. Instead of two groups meeting to form some kind of agreement that bridges two different paradigms, so-called “powerless” women are asked to transfer out of those paradigms and espouse new forms of knowledges. In order to build peace, through the eradication of both structural and direct violence, emphasis is placed largely on capacity building of the campesina herself, explained below by John Paul Lederach: “Capacity Building implies that we are oriented toward expanding on what is already in place and available. It reflects an emphasis on the intrinsic value of people's abilities and knowledge, and, at the same time, a recognition that increased insight, learning, and growth is necessary and possible. At a deeper level, the roots of the word “capacity” provide us with an important philosophical orientation. It is built from “capable”-to be able, or to have the power to effect something. In Spanish, I am able, I can, and power all derive from the word poder. The word “capacity,” as I would propose to use it here, is linked to a concept of empowerment, a term too often misused to cover much and mean little. In my mind, empowerment is related to a fundamental challenge of peacebuilding: How to create and sustain within individuals and communities the movement from I/we cannot effect desired change to I/we can. From the perspective of our framework, capacity building therefore refers to the process of reinforcing the inherent capabilities and understandings of people related to the challenge of conflict in their context, and to a philosophy oriented toward the generation of new, proactive, empowered action for desired change in those settings” (109).

Capacity building is one of the major goals of contemporary development theory, and while it implies grass-roots action implemented by communities in need, it also implies that communities in need are the main perpetrators of the structural violence they face, and therefore it excuses others from fault. Real change, however, is effected when we move from I/we can affect change for ourselves to I/we includes everyone and we effect change for all of us as a community at large, even if we are not living in the same situations that require the same types of change.

As opposed to critiquing whether the groups working with women have so-called “legitimate” aims, I showed that many of the programs were addressing underlying oppression and inequities either voiced by the women themselves, or criticized by outside groups and statistics, but that reflected the overall project of peacebuilding. I looked at the underlying assumption of empowerment made by the women’s organizations to explore ways in which women working with other women in Décimo Aniversario could begin to go about asking new questions and engage in critical dialogue that forces their own education and takes into

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consideration the ways in which the women in Décimo might look differently at the various goals of their projects. At the same time, I am not making the argument that the “authentic” words of the impoverished women in Décimo are more legitimate than the words of outside groups simply because they originate from the mouths of the “oppressed.” Many of the feminist aims of the women’s groups I spoke with that encouraged the “empowerment of women” recognized that part of that empowerment was developing a type of sociological imagination that would allow women to look outside the hegemonic system that they too were blinded by. At some juncture, it must be legitimate for “powerful” women to voice a critique of the oppression faced by the “powerless,” without somehow having to always take culture as a limitation for judgement. Whether or not each and every one of the issues of women's organizations is a critical problem in the particular area of Décimo Aniversario does not mean that the goals of the women’s organizations I outlined in this project aren’t beneficial to many women. This project has not sought to prove the irrelevance of the fight against violence or sexual abuse or gender inequality. Participative Methodology, so long as it gets women to participate, appears to be a positive way of engaging with other women. Eduviges said that Grupo Venancia influences women who are unorganized indirectly by having organized women reproduce what they learn. And they are changing slowly, indirectly, towards a consciousness of alternative power relations between men and women. What this project has sought to do is to suggest that the idea of levels of consciousness is inherently classist, since those who have adopted mainstream ideas or who occupy subject positions powerful on a global scale, have had access to a particular type of homogenizing education.

Whether or not campesinas get served, where do they play a role in the creation of a women’s agenda if they are not educated urbanites?

Feminist Maria Teresa Blandón encouraged me to look deeper at the histories of Nicaraguan women’s movements. According to her, “the women's movement actually did start in the campo.” I looked further at the history and found that campesinas were some of the first organizers of rights for women in Nicaragua. The first women’s group to gain national attention, AMRONAC, started organizing around the simultaneous struggle of the Sandinistas and the political complaints of many campesinos (Randall, Sandino’s Daughter’s) having to do with the oppression they endured under the Somoza dictatorship. In other words, the party’s women’s group was attempting to answer the very needs that most of the campesinas I talked to were vocalizing, plus their needs as women for equal political status. For the women of AMRONAC,

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the FSLN could answer to both long term and short term goals. However, the FSLN failed to meet the needs of these women. To begin, they failed to bring the economic answer through socialism that women needed—although Décimo Aniversario did gain their land, they were not lifted out of poverty. In fact they may be economically worse off today than they were as semi-feudal workers.

Secondly, the FSLN did not succeed in challenging patriarchy. It stayed the sexist, male dominated structure that “promoted only nominal formal equality between men and women.

Through the transformation of the economic structures of production, the political system, and social organization, gender relations that linked women’s reproductive functions to domestic subordination, and the symbolism that legitimated that connection, remained effectively intact.

Changes in gender relations in the public sphere were peripheral and insignificant, limited in depth and extent, and often reversible” (Fernandez Poncela 48). Women who affiliated with the party, such as the women in Décimo, and/or who participated in AMNLAE, were primarily interested in the destruction of a dictatorship under which they, along with men, had suffered.

They were encouraged as women by the party because they supported the revolution without challenging male figureheads. The women who split from AMNLAE were more radical feminists who strengthened the mostly urban growth of women’s organizations in the late 1980s. As feminist struggles became overshadowed by the needs of the Contra War and further neglected by official and unofficial party line, the needs of the women of Décimo Aniversario got lost and their voices silenced again. As neither radical feminists nor male party members, there was no legitimate space from which they could speak or be heard.

In a series of interviews, Revolutionary Doris Tijerno spoke with Magaret Randall about the FSLN’s relationship with peasant women: Women did benefit under our revolutionary program. Peasant women, for example, got titles to the land along with peasant men-although it’s true there were problems with the application of agrarian reform; it never really worked as it was supposed to, as it was conceived. I remember we frequently had to protest the fact that women weren’t benefiting as they should have from the land reform.

Nevertheless, I don’t think sexism alone is to blame, on the part of the institutions, the policies, or the men themselves. The problem is, the women who complained or protested were always part of a small minority: leadership women, or some small group of women who saw things more clearly, who were more ideologically advanced than the majority of the female population. A minority of women were organized here. And this is where I believe our greatest political failure lies. We never did the ideological work we should have done.

While on the one hand Tijerno espouses a feminism that benefits or “speaks for” all

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women, she still clearly believed that the leadership came from more educated and more enlightened (urban) women. According to feminist Sofia Montenegro, the two distinct women’s movements in Nicaragua, urban and rural, each work on their specific needs. This was part of her justification for a less vocal rural movement. When it comes to who is in the position to lead and take control, Montenegro agreed, urban educated women are in a better position to do so.

“Progressive ideas are concentrated in urban centers in Nicaragua just like they are in Pakistan”— this phenomenon happens everywhere around the world. “Urban leaders are needed as translators between such leaders as the president of the World Bank and a campesina woman” (Montenegro).

Certainly the women’s organizations are diverse, and the needs of rural women differ from those of women living in the city, and it is true that the women in urban centers have been educated, interpellated, empowered, to speak with those who speak in specialized discourses. However, this in itself is the injustice. Why should leadership and power, in its multiple subject positions relative to the so-called margins, be speaking and hearing homogenous languages? Why shouldn’t campesina women be able to speak to the highest levels, or even to women who simply occupy power within the tiny sphere of Décimo Aniversario? If we believe that the oppressed must learn the languages of the powerful in order to be powerful, empowerment will absolve those who occupy subject positions of power their responsibility to meet campesinas, the “marginalized,” half-way. Without challenging this notion, the listeners (all of us) never have to take agency to listen to everyone outside of ourselves.

What does it mean to empower ourselves in order to meet campesinas half-way? I think it means acknowledging the ways in which campesinas might be able to inform powerful women, deconstructing the assumptions of levels of consciousness and beginning dialogues that ask some of the questions that get at how the agendas of particular women’s organizations may uniquely affect campesinas women. There is so much for the listener to hear, an infinite knowledge of a pin-point finite space. The family, the kitchen, Décimo Aniversario, Nicaragua. Part of this knowledge is a deep, deep knowledge of poverty—knowledge of which I’ve only glimpsed in the campo. For me, it was hard to even begin to understand: “‘If you are not caught in the maze that [we] are in, its very difficult to explain to you the hours in the day we do not have. And the hours that we do not have are hours that are translated into survival skills and money. And when one of those hours is taken away it means an hour that we don't have to talk to a friend. For me it's a loaf of bread’” (Moraga 168). It requires a knowledge of the silence which listeners hear when they

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don't know how to listen, when they expect leadership and communication to come in the forms that it always has come in order to be heard. I believe that the only way to really break down silences is to start understanding what is in those silence by beginning to speak new languages, those of the people that one attempts to empower. An advocate should be a person bilingual in multiple languages and multiple knowledges, anyone attempting to be an advocate should not do so with the sole intention of teaching the “other” how to speak the language of the powerful.

How might one gain that knowledge? I suggest that it takes living there, a physical knowledge of the place, and my 16 days were not nearly enough to even scratch the surface. It takes women's organization having leaders who are willing to set up centers in rural communities and live in them. If the cooperative wanted to improve its relations with campesinas, I would suggest that it could begin by having its staff live in the campo, to begin to know it. Freire is in fact an advocate of this kind of relationship: “Solidarity requires that one enter into the situation of those with whom one is solidarity; it is a radical posture” (31). Colectivo seems to be doing the best at really training local women to be resources to other women. Theoretically, their idea that Casas de Mujeres become community centers for women could lead to the kind of social contact where real listening occurs. But it will take more than women within communities organizing themselves and organizing each other. A “radical posture” asks that those background voices come inside, because to answer to what the campesinas have articulated as their chief needs is within our power as a world community. What it requires is an understanding on the part of the most powerful leaders through conversations with the most silent and least powerful—many of them campesina women.

Part of what I’ve hoped to do is raise questions about the ways in which outside groups are speaking with and listening to the voices from Décimo Aniversario, especially with the assumption of empowerment. Groups should look further at ways in which they can learn from campesinas and begin to take into account how paradigm differences create silences which are worth being explored, not eradicated. That requires that groups challenge what they consider to be power, including standards of education and knowledge. It also requires the acknowledgement of conflicting types of hegemonic systems, within which we all function. While inequities and oppression can be brought to light in the community of Décimo Aniversario, any community outside of Décimo can also be critiqued. The destruction of structural violence can only occur with an intimate knowledge of others’ lives, and while the eradication of poverty will not result in

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the destruction of patriarchy, neither can happen without the other also occurring. In essence, a real understanding and listening requires that we embody a new identity in order to form a new identity politic for ourselves. And ideally we would no longer be driven by identity politics but begin to ask; “Part of the dialectic is missing. What about what I do not identify as?� (Yamada). If we can't hear someone or some group, we need to empower ourselves to go and listen.

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Appendix

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