Claudia Rueda
In the 1970s, an increasing number of elite and middle-class young women in Nicaragua joined the Christian youth groups forming in universities, secondary schools and cities. Inspired by the 1968 Medellin Conference and the emerging theology of liberation, these groups, which united to form the Movimiento Cristiano Revolucionario (MCR) in 1973, organized “study circles” and established base communities in impoverished urban and rural barrios throughout the country. In these settings, young men and women worked side-by-side teaching literacy, analyzing Marx, leading Bible groups, and organizing workers and campesinos. These experiences radicalized the Movement’s members, many of whom eventually joined the Sandinistas in their efforts to overthrow the dictator, Anastasio Somoza Debayle. This paper analyzes oral histories to examine both the political and social experiences of the young women who participated in the MCR. It argues that the reading groups and base communities the MCR organized constituted a church-sanctioned and mixed-sex intellectual and social space where young women could begin to question not only religious and political structures but social ones as well. By looking at both the political and social implications of Liberation Theology in the lives of these women, this paper begins to illuminate what it meant to be young in Somoza-era Nicaragua and the processes of conscientization that led a generation of middle and upper class youth to embrace revolution and fight to overthrow a regime that many of their families had long supported.