“Juventud, Divino Tesoro”: The Chic Woman, Femininity, and Cultural Consumption in US-Occupied Nicaragua

During the prolonged years of U.S. occupation in Nicaragua (1912–1933), conservative politicians looked with alarm at the behavior of youngsters, particularly in urban settings. Perceiving pernicious external influences in these choices, they lamented emerging tastes in literature, cinema, theatre, and fashion as endangering the nation’s future. Overshadowed by a contemporary governmental politics of history that has reduced Nicaraguan women’s experiences under occupation to being either anti-imperialist heroines or accomplices, this paper discusses local patterns of cultural consumption at the end of U.S. imperial rule. In the context of state-sponsored moralizing campaigns, and drawing on previously overlooked visual records, this study argues for the centrality of gender in popular debates about youth culture in the early 1930s. Through an analysis of the concepts of the “chic woman” and female decency, it highlights the ways urbanites, including feminists, participated in defining standards of public femininity through cultural consumption. The paper concludes that official reactionary discourses attempting to revive old debates around female public behavior and sexuality failed to acknowledge both the prolonged influence of the United States and the internal social transformations Nicaraguan society had undergone.