I want to start with the sentence I said on that stage, because it is the whole argument and I said it almost by accident.
I said there are certain communities that is always already viewed as being classless.
Sit with that. Not poor. Not working class. Not lumpen. Classless. Outside the ledger entirely. Because a class analysis is a counting exercise before it is anything else, and if your state never counted us, then every program built on that count arrives at a house it does not have the address for. That is not a critique of the left. That is a critique of the arithmetic the left inherited and never audited.
Here is how I got there. I was on stage with a sister whose family is Nicaraguan, born and raised in Florida, and the whole time growing up she heard the word socialism land in her community like a slur and a wound at the same time. She named Venezuela. She named Cuba. She named Nicaragua. And then she said the thing that made the room get quiet: it was a bloody, bloody civil war, it was brother against brother, and it cracked our families open.
Then she said the part that a whole lot of y’all online need tattooed on the inside of your eyelids. She said when y’all playing y’all little fantasy, utopian games about socialism, there is real people. She said what y’all learned in theory, we lived.
Now, before I go one inch further, let me clear something up, because the framing of this conversation keeps getting geography wrong and precision is not a vibe, precision is a discipline. Nicaragua is in Central America. Cuba is in the Caribbean. Venezuela is in South America. When we say “the left in Latin America” we are collapsing three different colonial histories, three different racial regimes, and three different relationships to the United States into one word, and the collapsing is itself part of the problem I am about to describe. So I am going to say the Americas. Hemispheric. Because the border between what happened in Bluefields and what happened in South Central is thinner than your passport suggests.
And that is the second half of what I said on that stage. I told her: between us two, we got two communities that has been impacted by American imperialism. Iran Contra is the hinge. The United States government decided that Black people’s livelihood in this country was worth less than defeating a leftist government in Central America. That is not a metaphor. That is a budget line and a court docket, and I am going to walk you through both.
But I am not going to let the American receipts do all the work, because that would be too easy and it would let a whole lot of people off the hook. The harder question, the one that actually makes this piece worth your time, is this one. What happened to Black people inside the revolution?
Not before it. Not after the empire crushed it. Inside it.
Because here is what nobody wants to say out loud. Nicaragua has a Black population. It has had one for centuries. English speaking, Moravian, Caribbean facing, and concentrated on a coast that the Spanish speaking Pacific side of the country did not govern until 1894. And when the revolution came in 1979 with a program to redistribute land and teach the whole country to read, the Black and Indigenous coast experienced that program as an arrival, not a liberation. Not because they loved Somoza. Because a state that had annexed them in 1894 was now showing up in 1980 with a plan they had not been asked about.
Two things can be true. The revolution was real and the exclusion was real. Hold both. If you can only hold one you are not doing analysis, you are doing fandom.
BEFORE THERE WAS A REVOLUTION THERE WAS A FILIBUSTER
Let me give you the historical context, because most people come into the Nicaragua conversation at 1979 and that is like coming into a movie at the third act and arguing about the ending.
In 1855 a lawyer and newspaperman from Tennessee named William Walker sailed to Nicaragua with about sixty men. By 1856 he had made himself president of the country. The Franklin Pierce administration recognized his government. And on the twenty second of September, 1856, William Walker issued a decree reinstating slavery in Nicaragua.
Read that again. Slavery had been abolished across the Federal Republic of Central America in 1824, thirty two years earlier, four decades before the Thirteenth Amendment. An American went down there and brought it back. Not as an accident, as policy, because his project required a slaveholding Central America integrated into the American South.
So the first significant American intervention in Nicaragua was a slavery restoration project. That is not a footnote. That is the foundation. Every conversation about socialism in that country sits on top of a memory of a white American who showed up with an army and reinstalled the auction block. When the sister on that stage talked about political trauma, this is how deep the sediment goes.
Then came the Marines. The United States occupied Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933, with a brief interruption, and out of that occupation came Augusto César Sandino, who fought the occupation from 1927 until the Marines left. Out of that same occupation came the Guardia Nacional, a national police force trained and equipped by the United States and handed to a man named Anastasio Somoza García. On the twenty first of February, 1934, Sandino was assassinated after leaving a dinner. Somoza took the country and his family held it for more than four decades.
So when the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional took Managua on the nineteenth of July, 1979, they were not overthrowing a homegrown tyrant. They were overthrowing a dynasty that the United States built, trained, armed, and named. Just admit that part. You cannot understand why a generation of people in that country called themselves socialists without understanding that the alternative had an American return address on it.
BROTHER AGAINST BROTHER HAD A GEOGRAPHY
She said brother against brother. She said it cracked our families open. She is right and I want to give that sentence a map, because in the Nicaraguan case the crack ran along the coast.
The Sandinista government arrived on the Caribbean Coast with a nationalization program, a literacy program, and a theory of national unity. The coastal organizations, chiefly MISURASATA, which brought together Miskitu, Sumu, and Rama with the Sandinista front in its very acronym, wanted land and self government. The government read those demands as separatism. By 1981 leaders were being arrested. By December of 1981, in the aftermath of the operation the government called Navidad Roja, Red Christmas, the state decided to empty the Río Coco.
Between the first of January and the twentieth of February, 1982, roughly eight thousand five hundred people were marched or trucked out of forty two villages along that river to five settlements about sixty kilometers south, a resettlement zone the government named Tasba Pri, which means Free Land in Miskitu. Roughly half the region’s population crossed into Honduras instead. Homes were destroyed. Livestock was lost. The Inter American Commission on Human Rights documented all of it, including the killings at Leimus and San Carlos, in a country report that remains on the record.
Now here is where it gets uncomfortable for everybody. A significant number of Miskitu people took up arms with the contras. The same contras funded by the same Reagan administration that was, at that exact moment, presiding over the conditions that produced the crack economy in Black American neighborhoods. So the Indigenous people fleeing a socialist state’s forced relocation ended up in a coalition with an American proxy army, and the Black people in Los Angeles ended up on the receiving end of that same army’s financing network. American empire made both of those things happen and neither community chose the other as an enemy.
That is what she meant by respect. That is what she meant when she said people have historical legacies and we got to know how to navigate those things.
And the resolution matters, so I am going to give it to you. After the 1984 elections and two years of consultation, the National Assembly approved Law 28, the Autonomy Statute, on the seventh of September, 1987, published on the thirtieth of October. It created two autonomous regions on the Caribbean Coast, recognized communal land ownership, recognized Miskitu, Mayangna, Rama, Creole English, and Garífuna as official regional languages, and established elected regional councils. At the time it was among the most advanced legal frameworks for Indigenous and Afrodescendant rights anywhere in the hemisphere.
The revolution did that. Under war conditions, under embargo, under the pressure of a shooting insurgency, that government sat down and wrote a statute that gave up centralized power. Hold that alongside Tasba Pri. Both are true. That is the whole discipline.
THE CARTILLA CAME IN SPANISH AND THE COAST WAITED ITS TURN
In March of 1980, eight months after taking power, the Sandinista government launched the Cruzada Nacional de Alfabetización. Around sixty thousand young brigadistas, plus tens of thousands of adults, left the cities and lived in the countryside for five months teaching people to read. Women were roughly sixty percent of the brigadistas and about half the learners. The national illiteracy rate fell from a little over fifty percent to under thirteen percent. Roughly four hundred thousand new readers. UNESCO gave Nicaragua the Nadezhda Krupskaya prize in September of 1980, and the archive of the campaign now sits on the Memory of the World register.
I am not going to be cute about that. That is one of the most extraordinary educational mobilizations of the twentieth century and there is no honest way to describe it as anything less. Arnove documented it in real time and his account still holds up.
Now the second fact. That crusade was conducted in Spanish. It ended on the twenty third of August, 1980. The literacy campaign for the Caribbean Coast, in Creole English, Miskitu, and Sumu, began on the thirtieth of September, 1980, and ran into the spring of 1981, with a target of somewhere between twelve thousand and sixteen thousand five hundred people.
Four hundred thousand first. Twelve thousand second. In the language they actually think in, second.
I am not saying nobody cared. Somebody clearly cared, because the second campaign happened at all, and that is more than most states have ever done for a minority language population. A magazine in the United States covering the crusade at the time ran a piece on the coast under the title English: An Oppressed Language, and noted that Black and Indigenous Nicaraguans were receiving instruction in their own languages for the first time in their history. That is real. Credit where it is due.
But sequence is a curriculum. Sequence teaches. When a child on the coast learns that the nation’s greatest educational achievement happened in a language her grandmother does not speak, and that her grandmother’s turn came after, and smaller, she has learned exactly where she sits in the national imagination and no textbook had to say it out loud.
Apply Wynter here. Her lifelong argument is that Western knowledge organizes itself around a particular genre of the human, a specific overrepresented figure of Man that gets to stand in for humanity as such, and that our curricula do not merely reflect that figure, they manufacture it. Her intervention on textbooks, Do Not Call Us Negros, was aimed at exactly the well meaning multicultural curriculum, the one written by people who thought they had solved it, and her charge was that adding chapters does not fix a structure whose central category was built without you.
That is what a cartilla in Spanish is. It is not malice. It is a genre of the citizen. The revolutionary Nicaraguan was imagined as a Spanish speaker on the Pacific side, and every generous thing the state then did flowed outward from that imagined person, arriving on the coast late and translated.
Now bring it home, because this is not a foreign country problem.
The United States ran the same sequence. Lau v. Nichols in 1974 established that giving non English speaking students the same books and the same teachers as everybody else was not equality, because a curriculum delivered in a language a child cannot access is not a curriculum, it is a wall with a schedule. And we spent the following fifty years dismantling the remedy, through English only ballot initiatives, through the collapse of bilingual education funding, through the current wave of state laws restricting how race, gender, and history can be taught at all.
Florida, where the sister I was talking with was born and raised, is the live case. This is the state that rejected the Advanced Placement African American Studies pilot course in January of 2023. This is the state whose 2023 African American history standards included a middle school benchmark instructing that enslaved people developed skills that could be applied for their personal benefit. This is the state whose Stop WOKE Act was enjoined in part by a federal judge who called it positively dystopian.
Sequence is a curriculum. Nicaragua taught four hundred thousand people to read and put the coast second. Florida teaches millions of children and puts the truth about their ancestors somewhere between optional and illegal. One of those was a revolution under wartime pressure making a resource decision. One of those is the wealthiest country on earth making a choice. Only one of them has an excuse and it is not the one in the Everglades.
On the seventeenth of October, 1986, Congress approved one hundred million dollars for the contras, and Reagan signed it the next day. Seventy million of that was military. That is not covert. That is a line item, printed, voted, published. Two days before that, the same government did not have money for the schools in the neighborhoods that were about to absorb the cocaine. Ask yourself what one hundred million dollars in 1986 would have done for the elementary schools of South Central Los Angeles, and then ask yourself who decided.
AUTONOMY IS NOT A UTOPIA, IT IS A STATUTE WITH A NUMBER ON IT
Now let me close the loop on what I said on that stage, because I was hard on my own people and I meant it, but I do not want to leave you with only the demolition.
I said stop playing your little Marxist games. I said I am cool with Marx. I said the problem is the make believe Dungeons and Dragons utopianism that does not think about how there has to be blood spilled for these capitalists to give up anything. And I said there are communities always already viewed as classless.
Every one of those still stands. But Kelley gives me the correction I need for my own argument, and I would be a hypocrite to leave it out.
Kelley’s whole point in Freedom Dreams is that the Black radical tradition has never been able to afford a politics without imagination, because the conditions were never survivable on realism alone. People who are told the world cannot change are being told by the world that benefits from that belief. So the critique cannot be that people dream. The critique is what the dream is made of and who is standing in it.
And here is the thing that makes the Nicaraguan case worth all these words. The coast did not answer the revolution with a utopia. They answered it with a statute. Law 28 has a number, a publication date in La Gaceta, a list of official languages, an article recognizing communal land, and an elected council with seats you can count. That is what a dream looks like after it goes through a legislature. That is Freire’s word, praxis, doing the thing it actually means rather than the thing it means in a group chat.
So when I tell online leftists to get off the Dungeons and Dragons, I am not telling them to stop imagining. I am telling them that the Miskitu and the Creoles of Bluefields imagined harder than they do, under a war, and then went and got it written down with a number on it, and it still is not enough, and that is what real work costs.
And that is why the sister on that stage said what she said about how to talk to our folks. She said ask them, do you want clean water, do you want clean air, do you want your trash picked up on time, do you want your kids safe and healthy, do you want your home affordable, do you want to stay in the place that you call home. Then talk about those policies.
That is not anti theory. That is theory that has been to somebody’s house. That is the difference between a program and a personality.
Because two things can be true. American imperialism has done everything she and I described, and the crack in our neighborhoods and the crack in her family’s history come out of the same office in Washington. And also, the states that called themselves the alternative built categories that Black people fell out of, and then told Black people that noticing was a distraction. Neither one of those cancels the other. Both of them cost real people real years.
So here is where I land. If you are on the left and you cannot tell me what happens to Black people inside your program, then you do not have a program, you have an aesthetic. If your redistribution runs on a census that never counted us, you are not redistributing to us. If your literacy campaign arrives in a language we do not think in, we learned something from that campaign, but it was not reading.
See, Hooker reminds us that the state’s category is the door, and that a people with no category has no door, only a wall with a nice mural on it. And Gonzalez teaches us that the ones standing longest at that wall are Black women, holding the household, the land, and the campaign, and getting counted in none of the three.
Not every Nika thinks the same way. Not every Nika has the same experience.
And I will let her have the last word, exactly as she said it, because she earned it:
“So all is to say, y’all, that we need to have real change in our communities. Our communities needs to have their material needs met. And that includes going ahead, having affordable housing, making sure that our air is clean, making sure that our water is clean. I live here in Florida, making sure that the Everglades remains the Everglades and not another place for alligator Alcatraz. So we need each other. We need to talk to each other. We need to understand each other. And there is a way to do that and build bridges.”
Education Is Elevation.
5 KEY TAKEAWAYS
A class analysis is a counting exercise first. If the state has no category for you, no redistribution program can reach you. Hooker’s finding that Latin American multicultural reform granted Indigenous peoples territorial and collective rights while offering Afrodescendants recognition without land is the mechanism behind the phrase always already classless.
The first major American intervention in Nicaragua was a slavery restoration project. William Walker made himself president in 1856 and decreed the reinstatement of slavery on the twenty second of September of that year, thirty two years after Central America had abolished it. Every later conversation about American intentions in that country sits on top of that memory.
Sequence is a curriculum. The 1980 Literacy Crusade cut illiteracy from over fifty percent to under thirteen percent and created roughly four hundred thousand new readers, in Spanish. The Creole English, Miskitu, and Sumu campaign began the following month and targeted between twelve and sixteen thousand people. Both facts are true and the order of them taught the coast exactly where it stood.
Two things can be true at once, and holding both is the discipline. The Sandinista state emptied forty two Río Coco villages and relocated roughly eight thousand five hundred people to Tasba Pri in early 1982. The same state passed Law 28 in 1987, one of the strongest Indigenous and Afrodescendant autonomy frameworks in the hemisphere. Neither fact cancels the other.
The empire and the sentencing machine shared a calendar. Reagan signed the one hundred million dollar contra package on the eighteenth of October, 1986, and the Anti Drug Abuse Act with its hundred to one crack ratio nine days later. The CIA’s own inspector general later documented that the agency knew of contra linked drug trafficking and withheld it from the Justice Department because the war took priority.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY AND RELATED READINGS
Hooker, Juliet. Race and the Politics of Solidarity. Oxford University Press, 2009. See especially the chapter on multiculturalism and solidarity in Nicaragua.
Hooker, Juliet. “Indigenous Inclusion/Black Exclusion: Race, Ethnicity and Multicultural Citizenship in Latin America.” Journal of Latin American Studies, 2005.
Hooker, Juliet. Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos. Oxford University Press, 2017.
Hooker, Juliet, ed. Black and Indigenous Resistance in the Americas: From Multiculturalism to Racist Backlash. Lexington Books, 2020.
Gordon, Edmund T. Disparate Diasporas: Identity and Politics in an African Nicaraguan Community. University of Texas Press, 1998.
Hale, Charles R. Resistance and Contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan State, 1894 to 1987. Stanford University Press, 1994.
Goett, Jennifer. Black Autonomy: Race, Gender, and Afro Nicaraguan Activism. Stanford University Press, 2016.
Inter American Commission on Human Rights. Report on the Situation of Human Rights of a Segment of the Nicaraguan Population of Miskito Origin. OAS, 1983.
Law 28, Estatuto de Autonomía de las Regiones de la Costa Caribe de Nicaragua. Approved 7 September 1987, published in La Gaceta 30 October 1987.
