Staging Politics and Protest at Managua’s Estadio Nacional

Upon what public stages has the history of protest been performed? Along with the street, the stadium stands as one of the key stages for collective struggle. This paper, which examines the performative history of a single national stadium, examines the ways in which a sports facility became both a container for political meaning and a site of political mobilization. Erected in Managua in 1948 at the height of the Somoza regime, the Estadio Nacional stood for decades as an architectural embodiment of the U.S.-backed dictatorship. With the success of the Sandinistas in 1979, the stadium became a key symbolic site of revolutionary nationalism, most famously in the popular toppling of Somoza’s massive statue on the facility’s grounds. In the years following the 1990 defeat of the Sandinista government, the national stadium became home to new articulations of the Nicaraguan nation. In 1998 the stadium was re-named in honor of Dennis Martínez following the pitcher’s twenty-three year career in Major League Baseball, and now houses a national sports museum, the Salon de la Fama del Deporte Nicaragüense.  In the contemporary age of neoliberalism and its discontents, the stadium remains a site of competing claims to both national political projects and forms of street-level resistance. Drawing on a range of published sources, the paper examines the particular staging and framing effects of the Estadio Nacional on the performance of political protest in modern Nicaragua. In addition to locating a single structure as a key site of national performative protest, the paper poses larger historical and theoretical questions, with implications for other national and transnational contexts: What is the relationship of athletic space to national subject formation? How has spectator sport shaped political spectacle? How have global networks of athletic performance impacted the national discourses of political struggle?