AHA Session 278
Coordinating Council for Women in History 14
Sunday, January 10, 2027: 9:00 AM-10:30 AM
Napoleon Ballroom C3 (Sheraton New Orleans, 3rd Floor)
Chair:
Victoria González-Rivera, San Diego State University
Session Abstract
Over the last two decades, Nicaragua’s contemporary history has been marked by renewed authoritarianism. Since the Sandinistas’ return to power in 2007, a key element of their political consolidation has been the rewriting of history in a party-centric fashion and continuous official efforts to shape how Nicaraguans remember the recent past. Such initiatives have included restricting or denying access to historical records, appropriating public archives, and censoring dissenting voices, particularly those of activists, independent journalists, and academics. The repression unleashed since the 2018 civic demonstrations not only revealed the deep-rooted tradition of autocracy and political violence but also resulted in the seizure of universities and the persecution of scholars, including historians. Today, with the forced closure of more than twenty-three universities, it is practically impossible to conduct research in the country’s few remaining archives and libraries without government authorization. Yet, alongside a dictatorial tradition, Nicaragua also provides a relevant example of political mobilization, revolutionary tactics, and democratic aspirations. Over time, multiple groups have taken the lead in promoting social and political change.
This panel brings together four interdisciplinary presentations that examine how gender, memory, cultural practices, and historical narratives have shaped—and continue to shape—political life in Nicaragua from the early twentieth century to the present. Spanning the U.S. occupation, the revolutionary decade, and late–Cold War period, the neoliberal and Pink Tide eras, as well as contemporary authoritarianism, these papers explore how everyday actors, state institutions, and civil society initiatives have produced competing narratives of nation, citizenship, and belonging. By offering new insights into Nicaragua’s convoluted histories, this panel makes a historiographical move that complicates the traditional divide between private and public, and official and popular.
The panel’s overarching theme centers on the politics of history, gender, and memory in Nicaragua across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By tracing continuities and ruptures across different historical moments, the presentations collectively demonstrate how struggles over cultural representation, social reproduction, and historical interpretation have remained fundamental to broader contests over power, legitimacy, and democratic possibility in Nicaragua and the wider Central American region.
